As a schoolgirl, Adele Bernstein once gave a speech to Civil War veterans at the Chicago public library.
Mrs. Bernstein attended Ulysses S. Grant grade school, where her essay on the Battle of Shiloh was so well-regarded that a teacher invited her to present it to stooped and graying former members of the Grand Army of the Republic at the Chicago Cultural Center, then the city’s main library.
After its opening in 1897, the building — which still features a Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall — was often used as a Chicago gathering place for union soldiers. It was built on the site of a park dedicated to union veterans, said Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s official historian.
The library hosted regular commemorations with the vets, some of whom told stories about meeting their commander-in-chief: President Abraham Lincoln.
Mrs. Bernstein grew up to be a mother figure and bubbe figure for not only her two children, Chuck and Barbara Ann Low, but an extended group of younger friends. “She was the kind of person who made a habit of calling everybody she knew, just to keep up with people,” said her daughter-in-law Roberta Bernstein. “When she worked her way down the list, she’d start again.”
Even at her retirement community, “She had her address book at her fingertips.”
Mrs. Bernstein, 103, died of age-related complications on Aug. 16 at the SelfHelp Home, 908 W. Argyle. She drove for 81 years, until the age of 97. At 100, she got on a plane to attend a grandson’s bar mitzvah. And eight weeks before she died, she was the honorary host of a great-grandson’s bris in the party room of the SelfHelp Home.
She was born in Philadelphia to Oscar and Bella Shore, Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine. Yiddish was used in the Shore home, and Mrs. Bernstein always spiced her speech with the mama-loshen, (mother tongue).
Her parents settled in Chicago, but when she was 5, her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father, who sold produce and chickens and ran a gas station, raised her in Chicago and with relatives in Pennsylvania.
She “grew up into a polished and elegant woman,” said her son Chuck.
At one point, Adele and her father boarded at 53rd and Prairie with Sarah and Harry Orman, the grandparents of financial expert Suze Orman and parents of Morry Orman, founder of Morry’s Deli in Hyde Park.
For a time, she attended a high school in Pennsylvania where girls and boys had to take classes in shop and home economics. Mrs. Bernstein learned to splice a wire and fix a lock, her son said. She wound up doing many of her own electrical and plumbing repairs.
Throughout her life, she volunteered to help people with vision problems, first at Chicago’s Marshall High School, where she assisted blind students, and later, by typing books into a machine that converted them to larger print. She also did the driving for her husband Norman, who was visually impaired when they met. Eventually, he became legally blind, their son said.
In 1939, she met her future husband, a salesman, through a friend. When Norman hesitated to call her, relatives said his mother told him: “You’ll like her! She’s a shayna and a kleine!” (Cute and petite.)
Their first date was a movie at the Southtown theater near 63rd and Lowe. The live entertainment included comedian Bob Hope. They were married 51 years until his death in 1991.
After graduating from Marshall High in 1932, young Adele landed a bookkeeping job with Sack Realty. Though she left to be a stay-at-home mom when her children were young, she stayed with the firm almost 46 years, rising to become head of its insurance department.
Her insurance expertise led Adele to offer some advice to a grandson, Rabbi Edward Bernstein. After visiting his home and seeing a playground he’d built, she “admonished us to purchase an umbrella policy in case anyone is ever, God forbid, injured on our property,” he said in her eulogy.
At the time, she was 89.
During the 37 years the Bernsteins lived in Hyde Park, she volunteered as a corresponding secretary for Congregation Rodfei Zedek Sisterhood.
Mrs. Bernstein loved dark chocolate and Frango mints. She stressed the importance of thank-you notes. And she told relatives they should always pick up their cast-off garments in fitting rooms, because store clerks “were there to help us,” her grandson said, “not to be our maids.”
In addition to her children, Mrs. Bernstein is survived by six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Services have been held.
