Charles T. Beaird

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Charles Thomas Beaird (July 27, 1922–April 18, 2006) of Shreveport, Louisiana, was an industrialist, investor, newspaper publisher, philanthropist, philosopher, college professor, world traveler, and civic leader. He was a self-identified "liberal Republican" and champion of civil rights.

Beaird died from an infection that resulted after months of declining health. His death came fewer than three months after that of his wife, Carolyn Williams Beaird (August 8, 1923 – January 27, 2006). Mrs. Beaird died ten days before their 63rd anniversary.

Beaird was born in Shreveport to James Benjamin Beaird and Mattie Connell Fort Beaird. His mother died only six weeks after his birth, and his father died when he was only 16. According to his obituary, Beaird had to grow up quickly but developed a fierce intellectual independence.

He completed C. E. Byrd High School in Shreveport in three years and then attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, where he joined the Black Horse Troop. From there, he enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. He left Michigan and transferred to the University of Texas at Austin.

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[edit] Military service

With the outbreak of World War II, Beaird returned to Shreveport and enrolled at Centenary College. He met Carolyn there while he was waiting to enlist in the Naval Air training program. On February 5, 1943, he was commissioned into the U.S. Marine Corps in Corpus Christi, Texas. He married Carolyn in Shreveport the next day and reported for duty in Fort Worth, Texas, on February 8. He served first as a pilot instructor and then led a fighting squadron assigned to the recapture and holding of the Philippine Islands flying, among other planes, B-25s and the OS 2U torpedo bomber. By the end of the war, he had attained the rank of captain and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Decorated Air Medal.

[edit] Early business ventures

In 1946, Beaird returned to Shreveport, where he became vice president of the J. B. Beaird Company, which his father had begun as a welding service in 1918. During the war, the company had grown to be a major manufacturer of metal products, with Charles Beaird's older brother, J. Pat Beaird, Sr., as president. Charles Beaird had worked there as a youth sweeping floors, so he knew the business literally from the ground up, a process that he would duplicate in his future enterprises.

Following the sale of that company, Beaird purchased a small chainsaw company founded by Claude Poulan and his brothers and renamed it Beaird-Poulan. According to his obituary, Beard built the company into the fourth largest maker of chainsaws in the world. The company was purchased by Emerson Electric in 1973, and Beaird became chairman of the Beaird-Poulan Division of Emerson. The company is particularly known for its WeedEater products.

[edit] Political career

In 1952, Beaird joined numerous childhood friends in an effort to create a viable Republican Party in Shreveport, which had been an all-Democratic city since Reconstruction. Beaird became chairman of the Caddo Parish Republican Executive Committee in 1952. In 1956, he was elected to the Caddo Parish Police Jury (equivalent of county commission in other states). He was one of the first Republicans elected to any public office in Louisiana since Reconstruction. He was elected strictly at the local level of participation, for there was no Republican gubernatorial candidate even running in the general election held in the spring of 1956. Later that same year, Beaird managed the unsuccessful Fourth District congressional campaign of then Republican Littleberry Calhoun Allen, Jr. (1921-1991), who challenged the popular incumbent Overton Brooks. After switching to Democratic allegiance, Allen would later win election as Shreveport's public utilities commissioner (1962-1970) and as mayor (1970-1978).

Beaird attracted national attention in 1956. He gave a seconding speech for the renomination of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the Republican National Convention, which met at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Though he entered politics as a conservative Republican, the influence of his wife, his three children, and other life experiences gradually changed him into a liberal. However, unlike Calhoun Allen, he did not join the Democratic Party — he remained a liberal voice in the largely conservative GOP.

[edit] Ph.D. in philosophy

Beaird did not graduate from the University of Texas. Fascinated with philosophy, he re-enrolled at Centenary College, where he was already a trustee. He received the B.A. in 1966. He then became a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and was accepted into the graduate program at Columbia University in New York City, where he achieved, according to his obituary, what he often said was "the most difficult thing I've ever done," earning the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972 at the age of 50. With what he called his "academic union card," he returned as assistant professor of philosophy at Centenary College, where he taught for seven years.

[edit] Civic leadership

Beaird was also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas; a director of Winthrop Rockefeller's Winrock Enterprises in Arkansas, a member of the Young Presidents Organization; a partner in Westport Real Estate; a founder of the Committee of 100; chairman of the Citizens Committee on Desegregation for the Caddo Parish Schools; chairman of the United Fund Campaign; vice president of the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce, and co-chair of Shreveport's Biracial Commission.

[edit] The Shreveport Journal

Beaird was a trustee and treasurer of the American Rose Foundation — for which he was an early and constant advocate. His affection for the rose and its worth as a symbol figured prominently in his next enterprise, when he bought the now defunct Shreveport Journal in 1976 from the Douglas F. Attaway (1910–1994) family and changed it overnight from a fiercely conservative newspaper, which had frequently endorsed conservative Republican candidates in the heavily Democratic circulation area, into an aggressively liberal one, which rarely thereafter endorsed Republicans for office. Its symbol, on Page One, was the rose — which also adorned the brief, complimentary verbal "roses" the Journal awarded frequently on its editorial page, just as a real rose was always pinned to his own coat lapel.

Under his leadership, the Journal crusaded thefluoridation of Shreveport's water supply. According to his obituary, unlike most other Louisiana newspaper publishers, Beaird championed labor unions, a rare phenomenon in the South.

When the Shreveport Journal, an afternoon paper, ceased daily publication in 1991, Beaird won an agreement with Gannett Co., owner of the Shreveport Times, a morning paper -- with which the Journal had a joint operating agreement -- to continue to own a separate page of editorial opinion in The Times, published six days a week as the "Journalpage." This arrangement was unique in the world of journalism, in which the host paper had no control over the content of the separately owned page. Beaird's "Journalpage" won many awards. It was nominated as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for 1994 — for a series on the proposed legalization or decriminalization of drugs, one of many unorthodox topics he chose for his writers to explore.

Beaird's first Journal editor, Stanley Ray Tiner (born 1942), who had originally been hired by the Attaways, left the paper to enter the political arena. He ran for Congress as a Democrat in the special election of 1988 to fill the seat vacated by newly-elected Governor Buddy Roemer. Tiner finished third in the primary and was eliminated from the general election. He received 19,567 votes (16 percent). The seat went to the Republican candidate, Jim McCrery, who still holds it. Tiner later became the publisher of the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald. On the day that his former boss, Beaird, died, Tiner's paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tiner told a wire service that Beaird was "a brilliant man, a Renaissance man in a lot of ways [who] became an expert in whatever he took an interest."

By contract, the "Journalpage" continued until December 31, 1999, or Beaird's death, whichever came first. The date was significant to Beaird, for, according to his obituary, he considered himself a child of the 20th Century, and he had long prepared for a spectacular Millennium's Eve party. At that gathering, he served a selection of the world's finest wines, collected after he became a student of winemaking.

[edit] Philanthropy

Beaird's last career was managing investments and real estate, including the downtown Shreveport Beaird Tower, which has one of his symbolic roses at its top.

Another interest which he and Carolyn shared was philanthropy, but the obituary explains that the extent of their personal giving may never be fully known because much of it was done anonymously. They endowed two chairs at Centenary College and one at Union Theological Seminary in New York. They were among the donors who helped to restore the historic Strand Theater in downtown Shreveport. They supported the McAdoo Hotel, serving the homeless, and the Buckhalter Hotel, for recovering alcoholics. They endowed the educational building at Galilee Baptist Church. They were contributors and leaders in the American Rose Center endowment trust. Beaird also fought to improve housing and living conditions in Ledbetter Heights, one of Shreveport's most impoverished neighborhoods.

According to the obituary, Beaird formed the nonprofit Charles T. Beaird Foundation in 1960. The foundation, guided by a board of directors drawn from the Beaird family, has donated millions to local nonprofit organizations.

Beaird won the Liberty Bell Award from the Shreveport Bar Association, the Philanthropist of the Year Award from the Association of Fund Raising Professionals, the Jacques Napier Steinau Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award given by All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church. He served on the board of the D. L. Dykes, Jr., Foundation, created in memory of the legendary Methodist minister, who was his friend.

While Carolyn was a devoted Presbyterian, the obituary explains that Beaird was a "nontheist," meaning that the concept of God was not among the ideas on which he based his beliefs.

Beaird's survivors include three children: Susan Lynn Beaird of Shreveport; Marjorie Beaird Seawell of Denver, Colorado, and John B. Beaird and wife, Elizabeth "Candy" Beaird, of Shreveport. He had 20 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

[edit] References

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