“Ace” grew up in a modest home on 16^th Avenue as one of the four Behrmann boys, sons of a hard working craftsman immigrant from Germany and a Pennsylvania mother.  Al excelled at math and enjoyed his shop classes with Mr. Driscoll.  An intense perfectionist at everything, his younger brother Doug recalls that Al would wash dishes, then lay them in rinse water so hot that Doug and brother Ron had to fish them out with wooden spoons. 

He left Sea Cliff to major in engineering at Fordham University.   A runner in high school, Al became a rower at Fordham, putting in many hours on the East River with his eight man team on the East River even in mid winter.  After two years at Fordham Al left to join the Carpenter’s Union as his brothers had done. 

One evening in 1961 Al’s cousin Francie Blum brought her friend Barbara Ann Sleva to Long Island for a blind date with Al that led to marriage.  Barbara gave birth to their daughter Beverly Ann in 1963 and to Michael Albert in 1966.  Al had already started work on the New York Pavilion and its 250 ft high towers for the 1964 World’s Fair.  When the Fair was opened in 1964 Al and Barbara used his free pass to wander around the Fair soaking up the world’s sights and sounds that so much interested him throughout his life. 

In 1966, the year his son Michael Albert was born, AT&T (NY Bell) recruited Al.  He became a systems analyst and troubleshooter in the field, often working under high stress conditions to analyze and fix difficult problems. Al remained active throughout his career in the Communications Workers of America labor union and rose to be a shop steward.  When the union staged a long strike against the phone company in the 1970s, Al went to North Shore Country Club and supported the family by caddying.

He and Barbara had taken up residence first in Sea Cliff, then moved to Port Washington, and finally East Northport.  Al loved being outdoors, especially with his kids and played baseball and football and kickball with them and other kids in the street or took them to Gilgo Park on the south shore in the summers.  Although he was a quiet man, he and Barbara became known and appreciated for their annual Christmas Eve open house attended by many old friends and neighbors.  Although Al did not drink or smoke, his daughter Beverly remembers the abundance of food, drink and smokers, and says that she looked forward to the visits from “Uncle Larry” and “Uncle Richie,” the latter being our classmate Richard Stack. 

He practiced the carpentry his father taught him on his own house and passed on his skills to son Michael and daughter Beverly, building furniture with her. As everyone who worked with Al had learned, she too learned that he “was such a perfectionist.”   Beverly too would become a professional carpenter for a while before she went on to administrative work in Marlboro College in Vermont.  Michael, who resembles Al and has his perfectionist bent, would earn a degree in geology but turn his talent to custom framing for artworks.

When Al and Barbara divorced in 1982 Beverly was already 19, but son Michael stayed with Al.  When his mother became seriously ill and homebound with diabetes, Al and his brother Doug would spend long hours playing cards and talking to her.  He also remarried in 1991 and moved to Pennsylvania with his wife Diane.  In April of that year after a seizure doctors found a brain tumor.  Diane and Beverly took care of him in the following months.  Despite the efforts of Harmon University Cancer Research Hospital, the tumor advanced steadily before Al died on February 15, 1992 at age 53.  His mother, 93, survives him and continues her own struggles.

In death Al returned to Long Island and Sea Cliff where the Whitting twins conducted his funeral and his many friends and family came to say good-bye to the man who throughout life they knew by no better name than Ace.