Can Berney Seal Save Corpus Christi?
A Hard-hitting investigative look at my dad.
(Page 3 of 4)
Driving across the Harbor Bridge, the soaring span that connects downtown with the dingy strip-centers of Portland and Gregory, Berney recalls the day he arrived in Corpus in a silver Corvette convertible. He was fleeing a family retailing business in Alabama, heading to Hollywood to become a comedian. But then he saw Corpus Christi. “I came to Corpus in 1962 and thought I was in Miami!” he says. I came across this bridge and saw this bay, and I knew. I felt like Christopher Columbus discovering America. I felt, at thirty-three, like Ponce de Leon when he found the Fountain of Youth. The minute I crossed that bridge, I was starting a whole new life. I knew nobody, and nobody knew me. And I could become whatever I wanted to be.”
He sent for his family a few months later. A couple of plane rides and we were there, trundling into town in our matching blue blazers—three baby bumpkins staring wide-eyed at our flat, arid, new homeland. Only hours before, we had been celebrated scions of Alabama’s leading merchant family. Now we were nothing but the newest immigrants off the highway. I was appalled at what I saw. Where were the cowboys? The saloons? I saw nothing but taco stands, strip centers, and strangers. During our “Welcome Home!” lunch at Luby’s cafeteria, I cried in my strawberry shortcake until it tasted salty. Who were we, and what were we about to become? We went from living in a three-bedroom home in an Alabama pine forest on McBerney Drive, filled with maids, friends, and relatives, to a cramped, one-bedroom efficiency apartment on Lazy Lane, where the salt air cracked like a bullwhip against the thin walls. I can still smell the musty air of loneliness in Sam Houston Elementary, my first Corpus Christi school, but I can’t remember a single classmate. Like my daddy, I knew nobody and nobody knew me.
That was about to change. Upon taking a sales job at KEYS radio and selling his first ad, Berney Seal realized he was born for street selling. Two months and two school changes after leaving Alabama, we moved into our second Corpus Christi home, a two-bedroom rent house at 941 Shephard Drive.
“And here it is,” says Berney, pulling up to a house that today seems no bigger than a cracker box. It is fitting that there is a Berney Seal sign in its front yard, for this is where fate made my father a realtor. One Sunday morning 28 years ago, trying to raise cash, Berney parked his mother’s 1962 Buick Wildcat on this same lawn with a For Sale sign in its windshield. He had quit the radio station. And although he had passed a real estate course, without a broker to sponsor him he was, for all purposes, unemployed.
But then he found his first prospect. A man came to buy the Wildcat and casually mentioned that his recently widowed niece needed a new house fast. Berney took the Wildcat-buyer’s niece and his new license to the instructor of his real estate course, a broker named Vaugh Bowen. The woman bought a $17,500 house; Berney received a $500 commission and a job with Vaugh Bowen Sales. He says, “I came home and told Evelyn, ‘Honey, I’m in the real estate business. I just made more money in one day than I used to make in a month!’”
Berney Seal quickly reinvented Corpus real estate. “I sold six houses straight!” he exclaims. “I made so much money, I went out and bough myself a Lincoln Continental. Oh, man. White, with those doors that opened backwards. Like LBJ’s Lincoln. And someone said, “Berney, you shouldn’t be driving a car like that! You ought to be driving a Chevrolet, so you look like you need the business.’ And I said, ‘Bullshit. I need the biggest goddam Lincoln I can find, and people will remember me because I look successful. Because if you look successful, you are.”
As the Suburban slices through the city where everything is for sale, I have a vision of a moving van, the predominant vehicle of our vagabond life. With Berney’s first sale, we became real estate children, forever in transit. We discovered the city by Mayflower, moving up in status and square footage every time a new contract was signed. Our father was our Moses. With a Berney Seal Company Realtors sign slung across his should and “Thou shalt sell” as his chief commandment, he led us across the desert, always promising that a land of milk and honey lay on the other side of the For Sale sign. Someday, he swore, he’d move us all the way to Hollywood, a vow I desperately wanted to believe. Why? Berneymania, I guess. He was just so damned funny. “What are the three biggest lies of real estate?” he loved to ask us. “My momma’s gonna give me the down payment. The escrow check’s in the mail. And I’ve never done this in an empty house before.”
He parks before our third Corpus Christi home, a brick ranch-style at 509 Fairfield. “I moved my payments up from $100 to $157 a month,” he says. “But I was always looking over there.” He motions to a low-slung pink wall across Alameda Street, the wall enclosing what was once Corpus’s most privileged enclave: South Shores Estates. “I was always saying, ‘We gotta get HTW! ‘Hind the wall!” In those days, when you were ‘hind the way, where else was there to go? Four years after moving to Corpus Christi, we were there.”
Oh, how I remember the move, the grab for greatness. In typical Hollywood-in-South-Texas style, Mr. and Mrs. Berney Seal and sons arrived ‘hind the wall, a moving van trailing Berney’s great Lyndon-esque Lincoln. But the white Lincoln wasn’t Berney’s only LBJ-style accoutrement. He soon sported an 18-carat-gold Rolex Presidential watch, “just like Lyndon’s.” He monogrammed his shirts “just like Lyndon.” And, yes, Berney had a mistress, just like Lyndon, too.
Driving behind the now-crumbling wall toward our fourth Corpus home, Berney passes a white brick adobe, where the woman who sparked the breakup of his marriage to my mother once lived. “She was twenty-eight, I was thirty-eight,” he sighs. “She was what I always liked: spicy, hard-charging. But she had two children, and every time I looked at her two, I realized what I ‘d done to you three, and every time she looked at my three…Oh hell, the marriage lasted seventeen months, and I must have left her seventeen times.”
This is the end of our tour because that was the end of our life as a traditional family. After all, when you were HTW, where else could you go? In our case, it was DIVORCE. My mother, brothers, and I moved to Memphis, Tennessee. But the distance didn’t divorce us from our Dad. Visiting Corpus Christi every Christmas and summer, my brothers and I dined on the abundant fruits of Berney Seal’s success. By the early seventies, he drove a white convertible Cadillac Eldorado, ravaged the streets on a Harley, owned Berney’s nightclub, and had lived in more than fifteen houses.
During those heady years my father’s club was frequented by Mr. Louie, the proprietor of Mr. Louie’s Wig city. Working as a teenage dishwasher at Berney’s one summer, I confided to Louie my interest in a certain waitress. Oh hell, not just any waitress. She was the queen: luxurious black hair, saucy personality, and a wondrous body that the bartenders swore once graced the pages of Playboy. One day, Dad and I were kibitzing in Mr. Louie’s Wig City (“If your hair is not becoming to you, you should be coming to us!” Louie proclaimed on his own TV commercials), when she walked in, white go-go boots clicking as fast as my wildly palpitating heart.
“Want a free wig?” Louie asked her.
“Sure!” she said.
“Then give the boy a taste.”
That night in her bedroom, where Mr. Louie’s wigs lined the walls, I reveled in a wonderland of lava lamps, black lights, and X-rated ceiling posters. The next night at Berney’s, my daddy rigged the dance contest and let me win. Drunk on myself, I roared out of the parking lot with my dance partner in the Formula 400 Firebird that Berney had bought me and promptly got run off the road and beaten up by a carload of cowboys on McArdle Road. When I returned to Berney’s, bloodied, my dad and his cronies celebrated me as if I were Michael Corleone after getting punched by the corrupt police captain in The Godfather. In two days, I had passed the tests of sex and violence. I was Berney Seal’s oldest son, a Texan in the proud Bonanza tradition.
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