Biography
Bernson was born in South Gate, California, on November 19, 1930, to Jewish parents, his father from Romania and his mother from Poland. He grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. where he became a Bar Mitzvah at the historic Breed Street Shul. He recalled that at the age of ten he attended services at the synagogue three times a day to recite a mourner's prayer for his father. As a young man, he served in the Navy and afterward ran a clothing store in Bakersfield. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1956 and to the San Fernando Valley in 1958.
He and his wife, Robyn, had three daughters, Nicole, Holly and Sarah. They lived in Northridge, California. Holleigh Bernson, an "aspiring film director," was killed in a one-car traffic accident in October 1995 when she lost control of her car in a night drive through Griffith Park and it went off the road. Named in tribute to Holly Golightly, the Audrey Hepburn character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," she had changed her name to Holleigh Rox-Anne Bernson. A city park in the Porter Ranch area of the San Fernando Valley was named in her honor, and Bernson gave $70,000 from his City Council discretionary fund to the American Film Institute to fund a scholarship named for her.
Bernson was known as "a man with a volatile temper, a tenacious politician with little tolerance for bureaucratic delays and council members who question his efforts." He was also said to be "often gruff" and "impatient with schmoozing."
In 2008 he was consulting on land use, transportation, environmental and government affairs.
Read more about this topic: Hal Bernson
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)