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A picture from out of the past

In 87 years, Gerard Bernhardt has survived a bullet to the lung in France while serving under Gen. George Patton, raised an East Falls family big enough to field a baseball team, and put nine children through college. For a man like him, Christmas morning should have held few, if any, surprises.

In 87 years, Gerard Bernhardt has survived a bullet to the lung in France while serving under Gen. George Patton, raised an East Falls family big enough to field a baseball team, and put nine children through college. For a man like him, Christmas morning should have held few, if any, surprises.

But life is full of them, even for those who've seen almost everything. And Jerry got the surprise of all holiday surprises on Christmas Day.

He had returned home from Mass, made bacon for daughter Jane Joyce's family, and helped them polish it off for breakfast. It was all rather routine for an octogenarian who is anything but the sort to get stuck in a rut. He has mastered a MacBook, cellphone, Skype, Facebook, and e-mail.

But when it's time to relax, he reads The Inquirer. And that's what brought a thunderbolt out of the sky.

Within minutes of taking a seat in his cushioned rocking chair, the love of his life - a woman he had not seen in nearly 13 years - appeared in his arms.

Jerry's eyes froze on a small black-and-white photo on Page A15 showing an elegant young woman standing next to the historic eagle statue in the Grand Court of the John Wanamaker department store in Center City. It accompanied a story I'd written about the building's 100th anniversary.

"My God," he thought, "that's my wife."

There before him was Eileen Marie Lawler, in the white coat she had bought before Jerry shipped off to war, standing at the very spot where, in early 1943, she waited every day for him to swing by for lunch.

She has been gone nearly 13 years now. But how could he ever mistake that face - "the cute little nose," as he put it. He shared the news throughout the house and in cyberspace, in a whisper down the lane that eventually reached even strangers on Facebook.

"That profile, that coat, that hat, that's her," he said. "I would bet my life on it."

The photo of Eileen chatting with a man - Jerry can't tell whether it's him or someone else - was snapped before Jerry had persuaded her to become his wife. But she had already become the woman who would stay in his heart forever. And for whom, just about every day after her death, he has prayed and pined, enraptured still by memories of the prettiest woman he ever met.

Could it be, he wondered, she was sending him a message?

A romance blooms

The way they met could make for a great movie script.

Jerry and Eileen were working at Exide Battery Co.'s factory at Allegheny Avenue near Connie Mack Stadium. He ran paperwork from the factory floor to the office, where she worked. It was 1941; they were 17. The world was at war.

He was a dashing young man from Kensington; she was a slender stunner from East Falls, a neighborhood so far from his working-class part of town that Jerry pegged it, "around where Grace Kelly lived."

The first time he spotted Eileen, he was hooked.

"My God," he thought. "What a face."

Through a bit of detective work, he learned she also worked as a cashier at a movie theater in Mayfair. He tooled up there in his brother's 1941 Hudson, and for two hours in between customers, he sweet-talked his way into giving his crush a ride home.

They dated for the next 18 months. When she got a job at Wanamakers at 13th and Market Streets and he got one at the United War Chest at Broad and Spruce, a daily lunch date was born.

But in April 1943, Jerry shipped off to war. There was no way, he figured, a woman that pretty would wait around, so they agreed not to go steady. With him overseas, she found another boyfriend. But that soldier lost his life in battle.

Jerry almost died, too, when he was shot in the left lung at Normandy in July 1944. He needed medical care when he was shipped back to New York. But the only thing on his mind as he hit these shores was Eileen.

"When I got off the boat, we got $10 in an envelope . . . every G.I. returning got that," he said. "Plus a free phone call. So I called her."

He ignored orders to report to Fort Indiantown Gap.

"I went AWOL," he said. "I got a train out of New York to Philadelphia, met my girlfriend - or my future wife - and brought her down to my mother's house, and we spent the night together there."

They were married a few months later, after the Army sent him for rehab far away (as punishment, he says).

Jerry became an optician, making lenses at 12th and Race Streets before opening his own shop on Conrad Street in East Falls, near where he and his wife raised eight girls and three boys.

He retired in 1995. Four years later, his Eileen died.

"It was a real blow to me," Jerry said. "It took me quite a while to get over it.

"But my children have been fantastic. And that's what's keeping me alive."

The holiday tidings

It did not take long for Jerry's 11 children, 24 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren to hear about his Christmas bombshell: "I found Mom in The Inquirer!"

Jerry sent an e-mail to his brood: "Dear Family. I am writing about an unusual occurrence that I had today."

Word soon spread to Facebook, where it was discovered even by virtual strangers like Sean Baedke, 44, who had worked years ago with the spouse of one of Jerry's grandchildren.

"I just thought it was pretty cool that this guy is just thumbing through the paper, like he's probably done every day of his life, and stumbled upon a picture of him and his eventual wife from 60 years ago," said Baedke, a father of three from North Wales who sells digital advertising. "That's kind of cool."

All granddaughter Lee Collings had to do when she put a digital version of the photo up on her Facebook page was write "Grandmom and Grandpop" to draw nearly a dozen posts and inspire others to repost it.

"I was happy for him," said Collings, 47, who works in a hospital microbiology lab in South Jersey but who isn't too far away to know how much her grandfather still misses his wife. "You made his day; thank you."

It's hard to know whether the woman in the snapshot is, beyond all doubt, the woman of Jerry's heart.

Staff photographer Laurence Kesterson snapped the image off a poster-sized version that hangs in the management offices of the Wanamaker Building. Amerimar Enterprises Inc. said it acquired the wall hanging when it bought the building in 1997 and does not know its provenance.

Family members swear it's her, especially daughter Dee Bernhardt, 52, who bears a striking resemblance to images of Eileen in old framed photos that hang in Jerry's room.

"That's totally my profile," Dee insisted.

"If she's got a double around," Jerry added with a naughty chuckle, "I'll take her!"

"It's still a great story," Dee retorted, "whether it's her or not."

Jerry, a spiritual man, would like to believe his wife was reaching into his soul.

"I thought, 'I wonder what significance that is. Is she trying to tell me something? Am I going soon?' "

Unknowable, of course. But Jerry won't get mired in such musings.

"You know, somehow, it gives me a direct link to her even though she's not here," he said. "I have a feeling that, somehow, she knows about me. I know that sounds a little" - his voice trailed off - "but nevertheless, I really believe that."

It

Hear Gerard Bernhardt talk about the woman in the photo who became his wife, read the Wanamaker article that started it all, and more at www.philly.com/jwEndText