Bernie Keeler remembers what made him turn away from the Baptist church of his childhood in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

“The ushers at the door to the church occasionally had a Negro show up. And they said, ‘No, this isn’t your church, you’re up the hill’.”  Up the hill, in the mixed-race town, was the black Baptist church, quite separate from the white Baptist church.

“This business of turning them away really bothered me,” Bernie recalls. He was also troubled when a favourite aunt who married a divorced man was told not to come to church any more.

Bernie found an alternative church quite quickly. Through his older sister Vivian he discovered the Unitarians. 

The Unitarian church – now the Unitarian Universalist church – has been his home ever since. He and wife Dorothy were married in the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto in 1956, where Dorothy’s parents were stalwart members. When Bernie and Dorothy joined the Unitarian Church of Edmonton in 1961, they quickly became a power couple in the church, not just locally but far beyond Edmonton’s borders.

Bernie was born in Dartmouth in 1930. His father died when he was six, so his mother raised him and his sister. He got his undergraduate degree in Arts at Dalhousie University, then spent a year in France teaching English. Back in Nova Scotia, he went to Acadia University to get his teaching degree, and became a high school teacher in Oxford, N.S. For four summers he attended Laval University – his French was pretty good – to get his Master’s degree.

He met Dorothy thanks to a broken wrist. In 1948 Bernie was an 18-year-old just out of high school, working on a farm near Ottawa, when he fell out of a hayloft and broke his wrist. That ended his farming career, so he headed to Toronto to visit with his sister Vivian, then a young married woman living in a basement suite in the home of Dorothy’s parents, the McCurdys.

“To get me out of her hair, my sister said, ‘why don’t you go up and take the girl who lives upstairs to the movies?  So I did.” Dorothy was 14. They never lost touch after that, maintaining a long-distance friendship and, six years later, a romance while each pursued their education.

Upon marriage in 1956, Dorothy moved to Nova Scotia where she also taught, and where baby Heidi was born. In 1958 the couple moved to Edmonton so Bernie could do his PhD. in educational administration at the University of Alberta. That degree took three years – as part of it, Bernie was required teach one year at a big-city school, so the Keelers moved to Toronto while Bernie taught in Etobicoke. Their second child, Glenn, was born there.

In 1961 they finally were settled in Edmonton and Bernie got a great job: principal of the brand-new high school, Jasper Place Composite High School. (There is still a Dr. B.T. Keeler Trophy presented each year at Jasper Place High School.) A second son, Scott, was born in 1964. The Keelers’ youngest child, Megan, was adopted in 1967.

While in Nova Scotia Bernie had served on the provincial executive of the teachers’ union, and in Alberta he soon became involved as well. In 1967-68 he was Alberta Teachers’ Association president, and helped pick the association’s new executive secretary. When that man unexpectedly died, Bernie decided to put his own name forward.

He became ATA executive secretary in 1968, a job he held until retirement 20 years later. The year he retired, he received an honorary degree from Athabasca University. Bernie remains an honorary member of the ATA, which has a B.T. Keeler Fellowship it awards to teachers.

In the 1980s, while still at the ATA, Bernie studied to become a Certified Management Accountant. The new skills provided him with retirement income from doing people’s taxes, but the main reason, Bernie says, is because he found it fun. He also trained to be a mediator. And in retirement he served on the U of A Senate.

He and Dorothy have been staunch supporters of the New Democratic Party over the years. Bernie stood as the NDP candidate in Edmonton Southwest in the 2000 federal election.

While he was doing all this, and raising four children with Dorothy, Bernie was also doing huge amounts of work for the Unitarian Church.

As young parents in the 1960s and 1970s, the Keelers put a lot of hours into the children’s program at UCE. But almost from the start, Bernie took on special duties.

He headed the committee that recruited Bob Wrigley to be UCE minister in 1965. Since then there’s never been a UCE minister recruitment that didn’t involve Bernie. When he attended the annual conventions of the U.S.-based Unitarian Universalist Association, he would go “shopping” for ministers. (Canadian UU churches were part of the UUA until a formal split in 2002).

In the mid-1960s he took on the job of UCE treasurer. After several years he decided the church needed to split the job of treasurer into two, creating a separate job of church bookkeeper. He also felt the bookkeeper should get paid: not to do so would be exploiting someone.

So, Bernie became UCE’s first bookkeeper in 1970.  He received a modest salary, and the Keelers increased their annual pledge to the church by the amount of the salary. The point was to set the precedent that the job be paid. When Bernie finally stepped down from the bookkeeper’s job in 2006, he recruited his own successor.

Bernie Keeler has been a one-man financial brain trust not just for UCE, but for the national UU church and for the UUA.

He has rarely held prominent board positions, except for serving as treasurer for the Western Canada District. But for years he was the expert advisor to western Canadian UU churches, and often other UU churches, on compensation issues for their staff. He served for years on the UUA’s compensation committee and on its important resolutions committee. His UUA work took him to Boston several times a year for meetings that would last several days.

His huge presence in the UU church has not gone unnoticed. He received the UCE’s W.H. Alexander Award in 1980, 30 years ago. He and Dorothy jointly received the Jennie McCaine award for their work in the Western Canada district of the church. And in 2002 Bernie received the CUC’s highest honour, the Knight Award, for a lifetime of service to Unitarianism.

Even now, at age 80, Bernie continues to serve the church in many ways.

“I guess I have this terrible disease of wanting to make things run properly,” he says.  

Interviewed 4 Aug. 2010