Bernice Hauptman always had one thing to say to anyone who knocked on her door, say her friends: "Sit, have some tea."
She was a caring person, says Pat, her daughter-in-law, who, like any good Polish lady, would always have some tea and garlic sausage ready for anyone who dropped by to visit.
"She loved having her friends and family around her, and always wanted to ensure they were fed and had a good conversation."
Hauptman, 91, was laid to rest Tuesday in a service at St. Albert Catholic Church. She died in her home on Feb. 2.
Many St. Albert residents knew Hauptman as the cook in the coffee shop at the old Bruin Inn, where she worked from 1951 to 1984. She lived for many years at 15 Madonna Dr. — thought to be the second oldest house in the city.
Historian Pauline Vaugeois, Hauptman's neighbour for 50 years, described her as a soft-spoken woman with a heart of gold. "If you went over, you always had a cup of coffee and a treat," she says. "In all the years I knew her, I never heard anything negative about her."
Long journey
Hauptman's son, Adam, says his mother was born in Poland in 1919, and married her husband Joseph around 1935. When the Russian army seized her home in 1939, she and her family were shipped to Siberia for a year.
"We had no country to go to," recalls Adam, who was a child at the time.
He and Hauptman shuttled from camp to camp, passing through Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Kenya before landing in Uganda at the Polish refugee camp near Lake Victoria. They lived in straw huts with dirt floors, and got about a quarter-stick of butter from the canteen each week. Hauptman would often sneak out at night to buy chicken and eggs from the locals, he says.
In 1948, after yet more travel, they arrived by Greyhound bus in Edmonton, there to join their family in St. Albert.
"She was the most wonderful mom you could ever have," Adam says. She only scolded him once, he says, and that was when he went swimming with crocodiles in Lake Victoria. You could never leave her house without her offering you some chicken soup, borscht, or tea.
"I am a lady," she would often say, "and I act like a lady."
The lady of the Bruin
Hauptman got a job as a cook at the Bruin Inn, which was owned by her relatives. "All kinds of people came in there," she told the Gazette in 2000. "They ordered pizza, they ordered hamburgers, they ordered French fries. We made stew. It's like, what should I say, home made. All kinds of soup and roast beef and roast pork and chicken and fish and chips … It was hard work and it was so busy all the time."
Pat, then 16, says she worked across the street in the drugstore and would often pop over for lunch. (St. Albert still had wooden sidewalks at the time, she notes.) Hauptman would be there in her white blouse, black skirt and red apron, cooking, waiting tables, and greeting everyone by their first name.
"She very seldom had to wait for their order," she notes, and often had their food ready before they came in. She often snuck extra food onto the plates of those who needed it.
That was Hauptman's way of helping out, Vaugeois says. "Bernice was always in the background," she says, often giving families food without even identifying herself. "She didn't want public acknowledgment. She just wanted to do her thing her way."
In later years, Pat says, Hauptman was usually seen walking around outside or tending her flower garden. "Her family was everything," she says, and she would host big parties for them at Christmas. She and her husband built and moved into a new home next to their first one in the 1960s, where she lived for the rest of her days.
Hauptman is survived by her son, Adam, three grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. Condolences can be sent to [email protected].
