By Diana Brement,
Tahoma National Cemetery’s chief bugler, Bernie Moskowitz. (Courtesy Bernie Moskowitz)
It wasn’t too hard to track down Bernie Moskowitz. The Tahoma National Cemetery gladly gave me the number of their Chief Bugler and Bernie was home when I called.
After a discussion about getting a decent bagel in the Seattle area (he’s even made his own), we turned to bugling. Bernie started bugling as a Boy Scout, and did it for a few years before being “lured away around 15-and-a-half by girls and cars.”
After running a gas station for a while and then a long career teaching automotive arts, he was asked to bugle at a scout reunion at Camp Parsons on Hood Canal.
“I started practicing again,” he says.
A few months later he read that the newly opened Tahoma National Cemetery needed buglers. He sounded TAPS there for the first time around March of 1999. Naïvely estimating he’d be there one or two days a month, he found “there were many times in those early days that I was out there every day.” A backlog of 4,000 veterans’ remains was waiting to be interred, reburied with military honors.
After Bernie helped create a service that allowed multiple remains to be buried respectfully, “I guess I segued myself into becoming chief bugler.”
He’s also a Civil War reenactment bugler, sounding orders at mock battles. He often wears his Civil War uniform when he plays at Tahoma, and when he marches in the Auburn veterans’ parade alongside the fife and drum.
Brooklyn born, Bernie moved to Seattle as a young boy when his father got a job at the Bremerton shipyards. The family lived first on 26th Avenue where “there was a little shul to our left,” (Machzikay Hadath) and then on Beacon Hill before moving to Renton, where Bernie still lives. He played football for Cleveland High School and graduated in 1957.
Originally planning to become a school counselor, he started teaching auto shop to fulfill teaching requirements at the time.
“With 90 percent of the kids I was doing more counseling hanging over a fender than I would have” in an office, he says. He taught at Renton High School for almost 30 years and laments the trend away from vocational education in schools.
And then there’s his horn. Despite recruiting efforts, he only has a handful of musicians to call upon for funerals and would like 20 or more buglers, trumpeters and coronet players.
“I need buglers out there desperately,” he says.
All ages are welcome, but most funerals are on weekdays, which limits the participation of school-age kids. If you’re willing and able, call Bernie at 206-772-6285.
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It’s all about the weddings.
At least that’s what led Seattle native Leta Goldberg to her new business venture, My Divine Chocolates, fine confections she makes by hand for special events and now for retail.
Leta used to be a wedding pianist, something she started doing when her son, Alex, was young. Because she was known in her family for her desserts, her mother, Violette Bienn, came up with the idea of offering music and dessert to clients.
“I quickly went away from dessert and decided to work on chocolates,” she says. “I went from handing out samples to special orders,” and with last month’s holiday orders, “it grew just like that,” she snaps her fingers.
Leta grew up in Seward Park and attended Herzl (now Congregation Herzl-Ner Tamid). “My whole life was there,” she says. “That’s where my roots are.”
Her grandfather, Jacob Bienn, was very active in the synagogue, as were her father and brother. Pictures of the family still hang on the walls of the Mercer Island shul.
Interested in cooking and baking from an early age, she “started making candy with my girlfriend after school each day,” and made all the desserts for her Bat Mitzvah celebration.
“I get a lot of joy out of making things really pretty…I like the detail in dessert,” she says.
Her grandmother, Pearl Benezra, ran a food stall in the Pike Place Market for many years and “was always cooking. You grow up around that, it’s contagious.”
My Divine Chocolates are now available through Fresh gift shop in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood (JTNews, Sept. 21, 2007), where owners Wendy Schwartz and Julia Marconi have “been instrumental” in encouraging her, says Leta. The chocolates are also at Black Bird in Ballard. You’ll find her there in person on Valentine’s Day, at this weekend’s wedding show, and other local events. She still does custom orders for weddings and events.
Leta is passionate about the 15 flavors of filled chocolates and truffles she makes herself from what she says are “absolutely the freshest, highest quality ingredients.” She described for me in scrumptious detail a reduced blackberry filling hand-pumped into a white chocolate mold.
“It tastes like blackberries and cream, something I would eat myself,” she tells me.
Food continues to be important in Leta’s family today. She describes her husband David, and her now-grown son as serious “foodies…I think all three of us have a great passion for food.”
You can order from the Web site,
www.mydivinechocolates.com, or call or e-mail Leta directly at 206-453-3888 or 206-769-5114 or leta@mydivinechocolates.com.