News

By Steven J. Smith

    BOCA RATON — Bernell Stein lived a remarkably self-sufficient life marked by successful forays into retail sales, the founding of several businesses and ultimately a devotion to community service, according to her daughter, Elodie F. McAllister.
    “She was fiercely independent and really lived life on her own terms,” McAllister said. “Some might say she wasn’t exactly a people person. She went down a lot of different roads, but she always looked out for my brother Arlen and me.”
Ms. Stein died in her Boca Raton home May 17 following several years of declining health. She was 82.
    McAllister said her mother always embraced life, asserting, “it was never dull.”
    Born in St. Louis on June 23, 1934, Ms. Stein excelled at U-City High as a senior year delegate for Junior Achievement. Although she attended Washington University for only one semester before opting to get married at 18 to start a family, her daughter said she found her calling in retail sales after her 1969 divorce and later in developing her own businesses.
    “She worked at a department store in St. Louis and later founded the dating service Zodiac Introductions,” McAllister said. “She was always interested in astrology and felt it was relevant in matching people romantically by their birth signs.”
    McAllister said her mother founded another business, Creative Professional Marketing, before moving the family from Creve Coeur, Mo., to South Florida in 1971. It was here that she got into real estate and joined the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce.
    “She loved the sand, the water and the warm weather,” McAllister said. “She hated the cold and the snow. Florida was paradise to her with the palm trees, banana trees, orchids and roses she surrounded herself with.”
    In the last 20 years of her life, Ms. Stein enjoyed donating her time to the Boca Raton Library, the Children’s Museum and the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, to name a few.
    “That was when she was in her 60s and 70s and was retired,” McAllister said. “She always wanted to stay involved with the community.”
    Ms. Stein also liked to travel alone, visiting such places as China, Bali, French Polynesia, Europe, the Galapagos Islands, South America and Canada’s Yukon Territory, to name a few.
    McAllister said for many years she and her mother were very different people, but in the end she realized how alike — and connected — they were.
    “That was actually the theme of my eulogy,” she said. “We didn’t always understand or appreciate each other when I was young, but as I got older I realized that in my own way I was a lot like her — bucking trends, not caring so much what others think, shunning popular fashions. She was very independent minded, which takes courage in our society.”
    In addition to her daughter, Ms. Stein is survived by her sister, Marilyn (Lou) Salini, of St. Louis; son, Arlen (Patti) Fischlowitz; grandchildren, Elyssa (Ben) Holzer, Andrea Fischlowitz (Brandon Weiss) and Ross B. McAllister; and great-grandchildren, Jude William Holzer and Mika Priscilla Weiss.  In lieu of flowers, the family requested donations to Trustbridge hospice in West Palm Beach or M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.