LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 43 I had long been intrigued by an old black-and-white photo of Rickety Pinnacle in the Adirondack Rock guidebook. Taken in 1952, it shows a young woman, Evelyn Comstock, sitting on a slender rock tower, staring at the camera, a rope draped across her thigh. You can see a piece of Chapel Pond in the background, far below. It's impossible to gauge the height of the pinnacle, but I sure wanted to climb it. I got my chance on a warm March day when Don Mellor suggested we do some early-season climbing in the Lower Washbowl area. We trudged up snow-cov- ered talus with plans to ascend three or four small towers. The hardest was Lost Arrow, named after the much larger formation in Yosemite. Rickety Pinnacle proved to be the easiest: once at the base, you need to make just a few moves to reach the top. Neverthe- less, because the pinnacle sits on the edge of a cliff, it rewards you (if that's the word) with a heady dose of exposure. Since there is room on Rickety Pinnacle for only one person, Don and I took turns going for the summit. For laughs, I photographed him in the same pose as Evelyn Comstock. Stanley Smith had taken the original photo. Three years earlier, in 1949, he had been on the first ascent of Rickety Pinnacle with a fellow named Dave Bernays. Born in 1932, Bernays grew up in Saranac Lake, at- tended North Country School, earned an engineering degree from MIT, and became a serious mountaineer. After my outing with Don, I dug deeper into Bernays's history and ended up following threads that led to Sig- mund Freud, Vladimir Nabokov, the Nuremberg Trials, and one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Not your typical Adirondack biography. His father, born Maurice Cohen in Russia, made headlines in 1917 when he married Hella Bernays, the niece of Freud, in downstate New York and took her last name. The New York Times reported that Cohen did so to keep the Bernays name alive since the family's only son, Edward, had no intention of marrying. As it turned out, Edward Bernays eventu- ally did wed. He is remembered today as a pioneer in the field of public relations. Maurice, a Manhattan lawyer, divorced Hella in 1923 but kept his adoptive surname. The following year he wed Hertha Pfammenberg, who gave birth to David Bernays in New York City on November 4, 1932. Maurice (who went by "Murray") and Hertha separated in 1934, when David was just 2, but they did not get formally divorced until 10 years lat- er. Meanwhile, Hertha moved to Saranac Lake for treatment of tuberculosis and took David with her. She died in 1970 in Ray Brook Hospital, a sanatorium where she had been a patient for seven years. Murray would die later that year. His death war- ranted an obituary in the Times, owing largely to his role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany. As a colonel in the Army, he developed the legal framework for the trials. He argued that the Nazis were guilty of crimes against humanity and should be publicly tried, not court-mar- tialed or summarily executed. "It is a tribute to the vi- tality of democratic traditions that even in the case of an enemy as brutal as the German, and in the face of provocations whose obscene cruelty has rarely been equaled, our Government had to be satisfied that we should be doing true justice," he wrote at the time in Reader's Digest. The papers of Murray Bernays are stored at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wy- oming in Laramie. On a western road trip in 2021, I stopped in Laramie to review the files and discovered that Murray also was a poet. One his poems, "Thanks- giving Day, 1933," evidently describes a holiday with his soon-to-be-estranged wife and his baby boy: Lord, have my thanks for the grace of life, United and unremarked as to each other The child's familiar pottering about, Intent and busy with its grimy worn toys, And the mother's inattentive presence, preoccupied With other things, each yet vigilant holding And encompassing the other with mutual Interflowing love, life's unemphatic ultimate Breath and substance; and for the seasons and the years, And all they harbor, bring and take, the intricate Detail and the lovely simple pattern of the whole.

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