Can Berney Seal Save Corpus Christi?
A Hard-hitting investigative look at my dad.
(Page 4 of 4)
But then I ran. I ran from what I knew awaited me in Corpus Christi. I ran from Texas. I ran from my father and what he expected me to become. I joined what he considered to be the wimpiest profession imaginable. “A writer?” he gasped. Who was I going to emulate? Truman Capote? For years, he shadowed me like a bounty hunter, valiantly striving to bring me back alive to join my brothers in real estate. And in Corpus Christi.
A few years later, I had to return. I was the spring of 1975, and Berney Seal was close to death. His high-stress Hollywood lifestyle, combined with a severe case of gluttony, had ballooned his weight beyond three hundred pounds. Plagued for years with bleeding ulcers, his belly finally cried uncle. I found him in the intensive-care ward, three-quarters of his stomach removed, his mammoth body still, his raging voice silent. He was 46—the same age his father had been when he died—and for the first time, I felt his tempestuous blood stampeding through my veins. We Seals are a family of wheelers and dealers, an immigrant tribe forever wandering in a wilderness we have to sell our way out of. Although our voices serve as our survival weapons, intimate chats have never been our style. But as the loudest link in this crazy heritage drifted in and out of consciousness, Berney and I talked as we had never talked before, like a father and a son. That night I realized how much I loved him. And when he rose from his hospital bed a couple of weeks later, he realized something too: After seventeen years of taking from Corpus Christi, Berney decided the time had now come to give.
In early evening Berney marches onto the lawn of a house he has sold three times over the last 29 years, ready to brand it with yet another For Sale sign. “Another repo,” he says. “Another heartbreak.” He sticks the signpost into the black ground and hits it with a ten-pound mallet. “You know, sometimes I wonder: At eighty years old, am I still gonna be pounding these signs into the ground?” he asks, considering the specter and liking it.
Back at his office, he shows me a final totem, his portrait on a mid-seventies Corpus Christi Board of Realtors poster, complete with the bio line “Community Service: none.” “I had done no community service!” he says. “And I told Gail, ‘I’m tired of being known as a person who only has something to sell and nothing to give. I’m gonna change my image in this community.’ And I worked at it. I volunteered for charities. I volunteered for economic development groups.”
And community service led him into a new spotlight: politics. He worked his first Corpus campaign from the sidelines, backing an ex-cop’s run for sheriff. “I figured if he was sheriff, he’d put me on the posse,” he explains. But when his candidate lost, Berney’s political future stalled. Then he stepped into the arena himself. In 1980 the salesman who came to Corpus knowing no one ran for mayor. “It’s time to give back to Corpus Christi some of what she has given me,” he vowed in his campaign brochures. His platform? Reduce taxes, attract clean industry, sell unsold bonds, promote tourism, and live up to the city’s own exaggerated hype as the Texas Riviera.
His political style was Hollywood flash. His handlers urged him to surrender his extra-spicy white Rover sports car and Rolex for the campaign. But the candidate refused to temper his Hollywood fire. “They said, ‘Get rid of it and get a pickup truck. You look like Batman,’” Berney remembers. “And I said, ‘I am what I am. I’ll never be a pickup truck and a leisure suit.’”
But the flash killed him at the polls. Furor swirled around his campaign war chest—a Corpus record $187,000 in donations. When Berney lost by equally inflated numbers and was later trounced in two city council races, the message was clear: The town comedian ain’t gonna be king.
“They’ll never know what they missed,” he says, as his long real estate day settles into an equally rambunctious night. “But lemme tell you something. Losing matured me. I may not be the most popular boy in the senior class, but I’m certainly in the top three or four; I have ninety-six-point-five percent name recognition in Corpus Christi. You know what I had before I ran for office? Eight percent! Hey, if fifteen thousand people voted for me, that’s an army.” And soon he discovered a way to call his army to war.
Now Berney not only has taken his let’s-get-growing cause to TV but he has personally hit the road. As the most vocal board member of the Corpus Christi Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, he travels across America and Mexico, selling groups on bringing Corpus their industries, conventions, meetings, and services.
Several months after our Corpus visit, my dad has come to Dallas, accompanied by two women associates, determined to win for Corpus Christi the 1993 convention of the Republican women, an affluent crowd of 1,600, capable of bringing $7 million into the city. Having narrowed down their list from a long field of candidate cities, the Republican women would now vote on a winner from two finalists. Corpus’ opponent? Arlington, the Texas tourism giant, home of Six Flags, a city whose motto is “Deep in the heart of everything.”
When the man from the middle of nowhere steps into the Radisson Hotel ballroom, the fight for the Republicans is raging. Arlington is going all-out to woo votes. The city’s reps throw a cocktail party. The place long-stemmed roses on each delegate’s pillow. The toss a Coke and cookie buffet before the two cities make their back-to-back thirty-minute pitches. Corpus Christi is armed with only two weapons: a ten-minute video and the nonstop mouth of Bernie Seal.
While the Arlington group makes its pitch, we stand outside the ballroom and eavesdrop. “They’re pushing kids’ stuff! Wet n’ Wild and Texas Ranger baseball and Six Flags,” Berney whispers incredulously, listening to the speaker. “Duuuuull. How can you pitch Six Flags to a mature group of Republican women? I’m gonna get up there and ask, ‘Do y’all wanna shoot dice and bet on the dogs? Or ride down a log flume?”
“No Berney!” admonishes one of his associates. “Don’t trash ‘em.”
“Don’t trash ‘em,” he asks, wild-eyed. “When I get through making my speech, I’m gonna own ‘em. What should I open with? How about the bit about our airlines? If they ask me if Corpus has enough air transportation, I’ll say, ‘Well, I just flew in from Corpus Christi, and boy, are my arms tired.’”
His associates are nervous. But when Berney struts into the ballroom, to the strains of the video’s Rocky-styled theme song, the crowd switches moods, from somber to celebratory. First comes the video. “Put the wind back in your sales!” it exclaims, depicting a city on the move. Amenities unlimited! The most beautiful ocean drive in Texas! Sixty varieties of sports fishing! Forty-five-mile-per-hour dogs! Ranches as big as Rhode Island! A wonderland of palm trees, seafood, cavorting dolphins, hard bodies, and endless summer. “Look how sunny!” a Republican woman squeals.
Berney watches the video as if saluting a flag, then takes to the podium with passion. “I came to Corpus in 1962 and thought I was in Miami,” he says. “When I drove across that Harbor Bridge and saw the palm trees and the bay front, it was everything I’d ever seen in a postcard. I should also say that I’m a realtor. So if you ever need a house…
Mild laughter revs up Berney’s stage persona. “We’ve got dog racing!” he shouts. “We’re getting cruise ship gambling! On the cruise ship I went on, I watched a guy win $31,000! And you know what? I tried to marry him!”
Now the laughs are sprinkled with sporadic applause. “What about air transportation?” one of the women asks.
Berney can’t resist. “Well, I just flew in from Corpus today, and boy, are my arms tired.”
Clap-laughs!
Later in the day, Berney is rejoicing. “We got it!” he exclaims. “The Arlington group died. The women said we were just more presentable, more exciting. We covered ‘em in spice!” Back home, real estate prices are falling, more Aginners are coming to power, and his youngest son, B. J. Seal Jr., is fleeing Corpus Christi for Dallas. But Berney Seal is one sale closer to revitalizing Corpus, and, thus, himself. “Now,” he tells his associates in the flush of his Dallas victory. “Get me some bigger crowds.”
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