Lance Reynolds is ASEB’s Board President and a volunteer in our Berkeley program every Wednesday. You can read his full bio here.
The Monuments Men opened in theaters on February 7. While you won’t get to see Bernard Taper, the last living “Momuments Man,” in the movie, you can see him interviewed in the 2007 documentary The Rape of Europa available for rental or purchase from Amazon.
I got to know Bernard, 96, on January 26, when he and his wife, poet Gwen Head, started attending our memory care center in Berkeley last year. He immediately recognized my English accent. He has retained his since coming to the US seventy-four years ago. Since then we have spent many hours in conversation about his work for the New Yorker, how easy he found it to persuade even the most reprehensible characters to talk, and how he got Balanchine to open up to him for Balanchine: A Biography. You should buy the book to find out! It is a great read and has a wonderful photograph of Balanchine’s cat making a ballet leap. Bernard told me that Balanchine tossed a treat over his back in a particular way to achieve this.
Amazon and other booksellers offer Bernard’s many books that show his wide interests. They include Cellist in Exile, a biography of Pablo Casals, Gomillion versus Lightfoot, on the struggle for civil rights in Alabama in 1962, and Mark Twain’s San Francisco. I was fortunate also to find four volumes of Gwen’s powerful poetry that I enjoy reading to them. I doubt that I will ever meet a more loving couple. We at ASEB feel fortunate to have them in our family.
Read more about Bernard in the article that appeared recently in the San Francisco Chronicle.
And from a 2007 article, with a few more photographs.