Bernie Mille is enjoying retirement after 45 years in the insurance business
Published in the July 20 – Aug. 2, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Robert Airoldi
Photo by Robert Airoldi
Bernie Mille relaxes in the backyard of his Jackson Oaks home he had built 40 years ago.
In Belgium during World War II, a German rocket hit a neighborhood block, wiping out all the houses except one. The window glass was blasted out, the roof was blown off, but the rest of the structure remained intact. During this war-torn conflict, Bernie Mille came into the world when his pregnant mother was now forced to walk to a relative’s farm about three miles away to get food.
“One day, as she was returning home, she went into labor,” Millie said. “A German truck loaded with soldiers stopped and offered to help.”
The soldiers took the woman to a nearby hospital and soon the baby Bernie Mille was born in April 1944.
Despite living in a row house that had no hot water, no heating other than a stove and the family used an outhouse, Mille considered his family fortunate. “We had relatives nearby who had a farm and grew food. Not everyone was that lucky.”
In Belgium, the young Bernie went to school from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and half days on Saturday. At 14, he was just getting ready to start a college prep school. But his life took a turn when a friend of his father’s convinced the family to immigrate. His father was in the tool and die business and was recruited by a Palo Alto company and came to California in 1958. Bernie, his mother and brother soon followed.
“It was funny,” he said. “We landed in New York and none of us spoke a word of English.”
Somehow, the family made it to Palo Alto. Mille and his brother were put in the same grade in high school despite the fact Mille was three years younger and should have been in eighth grade.
“We were stunned when we got here,” Mille said. “The kids all had cars and there were girls in the school. It was a shock really. Our image of the United States at that time was cowboys and Indians and wide open spaces.”
Because of the credits earned back in Belgium, Mille could have graduated at 16, but a counselor convinced him to stay another year.
During his high school years, he got a job running a lathe after school as well as a job delivering flowers. This was followed by a third job in a precision sheet metal shop. He graduated from high school in 1961 and attended Foothill Community College, all the while working at the sheet metal shop.
One day while at home, there was a knock at the door. The man identified himself as an FBI agent looking for his brother because he neglected to register for the draft. “I asked him, ‘what’s the draft?’” Mille said. “Eventually we both joined and I was in the Army Reserve for six years.” He was discharged as an E6 Staff Sergeant.
He eventually graduated from Foothill and went to San Jose State University where he graduated with a degree in history and a minor in education. But when he went for his teaching credential, the woman in the admissions office asked him about his “speech impediment.” He told her, “It’s not an impediment, it’s an accent,” and walked out.
He decided he was good at the sheet metal work and was going to start his own shop when a friend who was working at Allstate Insurance asked him to join. He thought it’d be for six months or so and would be a chance to earn some money before he began his business. He started in 1971 in a Mountain View office and found he enjoyed selling insurance and was good at it. Five years later transferred to an office in San Jose.
In 1995, he and other agents were terminated from Allstate and became independent contractors, which he said was the best thing to happen. “That made us owners and invested,” he said. Finally, after 45 years he retired this March.
Mille arrived in Morgan Hill in 1976 when he bought a lot in Jackson Oaks and built a home there. Married at 17, divorced at 38, he was single for 30 years before he married his current wife, Julia, when he was 69. Now 72, Mille and Julia travel the world and enjoy Morgan Hill when they’re home.
So far this year they’ve traveled to Telluride, Colo., Maui where they have a condo in Hawaii, Cancun and Huntington Beach, where one of Julia’s sons lives. They have plans to visit Maui again this summer, England in September and Florida in November.
“I love it here. Even though it’s grown, I still love the small town atmosphere,” he said. “I know a ton of people and we get out seven days a week.”
