Remembering Jack Beisner
I never knew my father. He was a very gentle man.
He was there when I was born at 5 lbs. 4 oz. and 24 inches long and the doctor held me up and said, “Jack, you better look down on him now. You won’t for long.”
He was there when in 1956 my mother and my three older sisters and I moved from quiet, semiagrarian Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he’d taught journalism at the University of Alabama while managing the Alabama Press Association, to crowded, filthy, smelly, desperately poor Calcutta, India, where, working for the United States Information Service, a division of the State Department, he wholeheartedly served two purposes simultaneously—arranging vast shipments of grain to feed millions of starving Indians, and spreading the information about America and her ideals of freedom, constitutional republican democracy, and justice that he hoped would lead the 420 million Indians and their leaders to line up with her instead of with Soviet Russia and its communism and one-party dictatorship.
He was there when my mother contracted a tropical virus that attacked her spinal cord and paralyzed her, and he prayed, “God, you can take my son, just please give me back my wife.”
He was there when, early each morning, my aia (nurse, in Hindustani) arrived to take me by the hand to the Indian family where I spent the day, passing along the way a beautiful green tree with a red-flowering vine hanging from it in the courtyard of our apartment building (giving me a love for natural beauty) and then, on the streets outside, the bodies of those who had died overnight of starvation and disease (giving me hatred of poverty and a desire to protect the poor), and he was there again at night when my aia returned me home to his care after he’d worked all day at the USIS offices or meeting with Indian government officials.
And he was there when, to everyone’s surprise, my mother recovered fully before—to his sorrow for leaving a mission to which he was unreservedly committed—we had to return to America at the end of 1957 with no income and no savings and nowhere to go but the humble home in quiet Sparta, Illinois (home at the time of the world’s largest comic-book publishing plant), where his father the butcher (and faithful member of the Lions Club, collecting used eyeglasses to give to the poor around the world) and his mother the housewife had raised him and his uncle had taught him how to hunt for squirrels, rabbits, deer, and more to help feed his family through the Great Depression.
When we moved to a tiny, tar-paper-covered shack of a house on the wrong side of the tracks in small but historic Owego, New York, on the Susquehanna River, he was there to edit, simultaneously, two newspapers owned by business partners, one a liberal Democrat and the other (like my father) a conservative Republican, and to provide for his family.
There in Owego, the first place we stayed long enough for me to learn what “home” meant, my father (and mother) taught me English to replace the Hindustani that was my first language. And he taught me to play in the sprinkler from the hose in our side yard, how to ride a tricycle, and how to hide behind a bush by the side of the house to pee outside like any good little boy without anyone knowing. (Though he didn’t warn me not to pee into the wind!) And there, without my figuring it out until decades later, he taught me how a father provides for his family when, by his diligent work day and night, he earned enough to move us to a big new house in a new neighborhood high atop Bodle Hill outside Owego (past the IBM plant), where he taught me to play catch and hit a baseball, to climb trees and follow trails through the woods, to make spears and bows and arrows and play Daniel Boone and Mingo opening the frontier for early Americans to spread west across the Appalachians into mysterious Kentucky and Tennessee.
He taught me how to be a father to daughters when he cheered them on in everything they did at school.
Editor’s note: This column is the first in a series by E. Calvin Beisner, son of Jack and Mary-Lou Beisner, who owned and published The Times of Northeast Benton County from 1978-1989. He served at various times as reporter, editor and assistant publisher as well as in other capacities. He is now Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation www.CornwallAlliance.org. He and his wife, Deborah, an artist, live in south Florida.