Brent
Beebe; taught at UMass
Saturday, March 22, 2008
AMHERST - Brent Beebe, 57, died peacefully and surrounded by family on March 15, (note: 2008) after complications following heart surgery. He was a loving husband to Penny Beebe, a giving father to Casey and Sam Beebe, and an inspiring writing professor at UMass.
Brent was born on Sept. 29, 1950, in Ithaca, N.Y. to Maurice Beebe and Dorothy Playford Beebe. The oldest of three boys, he was raised in West Lafayette, Ind., with brothers Paul and Mark. He forever identified with his Hoosier roots. In the summers, the family would regularly visit grandparents Cecil and Eleanor Beebe at their cottage in Anacortes, Wash., where Brent began to cultivate a love for the Pacific Northwest that would later call him back.
In 1968, he graduated as a beloved member of his West Lafayette High School class. He went on to Colgate University, from which he earned his B.A. in 1972. Brent then moved to Seattle, honing his creativity as a carpenter of everything from fences to houseboats to totem poles. On a camping trip to the Olympic Peninsula in 1976, he met Penny Proctor of Winter Park, Fla., and the two swiftly fell for each other. Though he loved Seattle, Brent was always more of a country mouse than a city mouse, and in 1977, he and Penny moved to the rural area west of Madison, Wis. After they married later that year, they bought a beautiful piece of land where Brent and friends built the first family home just in time for the birth of Casey in 1978. Sam's arrival in 1982 rounded out the pack.
In 1988, the Beebes moved to Amherst, where Brent was able to pursue a deep-seated passion for writing, earning his MFA in Fiction at UMass. Since then, he has been teaching writing at UMass, drafting architectural plans for New England Fine Homebuilding, and has written two novels. In his almost 20 years as a writing professor, he has opened and encouraged the minds of countless students. Brent loved home and was a man of routine. On any given day, he would be found walking his dog, Maddy, enjoying a crossword puzzle, taking his daily nap, or immersed in some inventive project, which most recently was building a house in Montague for daughter Casey and son-in-law Chad Odwazny. Brent was known for his creative spark, his playful sense of humor, and his kind heart. He found great joy in family, writing, reading, golfing and his ever-growing collection of small, colorful things. He will be dearly missed.
A memorial service celebrating Brent's life will be held on Saturday, March 29, at 1 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 165 Main St., Amherst, with a reception to follow at the church. There will be a private burial at Wildwood Cemetery. The Pease and Gay Funeral service of Northampton has been entrusted with Brent's arrangements. Donations may be made in his memory to the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 525 S. Pleasant St., Amherst, MA 01002.
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It’s silly really to try to capture Brent on paper, but it’s the kind of silly project he would have reveled in, writer that he was. So, I’ll give it a shot. First of all, however, I have to say that writing about him in the third person and the past tense is very weird. In my denial he’s still out there somewhere and I’m talking to him and he’s talking to me. But I can hear what he’s saying. He’s saying, “Don’t address it to me, Ned. That’s too damn sappy, which is not to say I don’t miss you, buddy. I do, but I think you’d do better to just stick with what this eulogy genre calls for—straight forward reminiscence and celebration of the deceased. Of course, on the other hand, maybe you ought to mess with conventions and get a little meta with it, which is always fun and which I guess is what you’re doing already, right? Letting my voice infect yours, as it’s presently doing, letting me tell you how to write my eulogy. Nah, don’t let me tell you what to do, Ned. Just let her fly. Do your own thing. Don’t worry about me. Anyway, I’m curious. Let me see what you can come up with.”
ReplyDeleteAnd so I’ll just write it to myself, and to you, Penny and Casey and Sam and any of Brent’s friends who might be interested.
I have been thinking about Brent a lot lately, as I know we all have. Most every morning since he died, I’ve been waking up at 4:30 or 5, my head filled with memories. They jump from Evergreen Street to Serpentine Lane, from Barneveld to Colgate, and back again. Then, when I get out of bed, I try to organize them in some way, but they just keep flooding in. There’s just too much Brent, which is good in a way, but if you’re going to write something like this you need an organizing principle, and here’s what I’ve come up with: enthusiasms. Brent lived by enthusiasms and I think we were all lucky to have shared in them with him. Doubtless others of you shared in other enthusiasms with Brent, but here’s what I have been thinking about.
First, reading and writing. Brent loved to do both and so did I so it was a big part of why we hit it off right away, and a big part of why we both ended up teaching college students to write. We always read. In eighth grade, for some reason I can’t remember now, Brent, Tom Finnegan, Louis Klatch and I decided to read historical thrillers together. The two titles I remember are Seven Days in May, which was about an attempted military takeover of the U. S., and Fail-Safe, which was about some American bombers that were accidentally launched against Russia. We were reading Fail-Safe when John F. Kennedy was shot.
In high school I wrote a few sports stories for the paper and poems for the literary magazine, but Beeb was a driving force behind both those publications. He co-edited the literary magazine, The Purple Aardvark, senior year and was feature editor of the school paper for which he wrote a column called “The Wholly Beeble.” And his column was all Brent—funny, dry, and illustrated with a comic strip. As our friend Rick Perloff put it recently, Brent knew “irony before it was Irony.”
Brent’s dad, Morrie, was an English professor—a Joyce scholar and the founder of two important scholarly journals—and when we were in high school, Brent and I started to go to Morrie for ideas of stuff to read. I had got into D. H. Lawrence on my own, and I remember Brent telling me he’d told his dad about that and Morrie’s reply was “I know why teenage boys read Lawrence.” I got defensive and said it wasn’t the sex scenes, really it wasn’t, it was about those long beautiful sentences and Lawrence’s use of repetition and the nature imagery and…and… Brent laughed. He knew his dad was right. I’d already showed him the good parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
I said, “Well, who should we read then? Who’s good?” And Brent told me his dad said that some people said the best writer in America was teaching at Purdue, and that was my introduction to William H. Gass, whom I then read and re-read and on whom I finally published a piece in Modern Fiction Studies, one of the magazines Morrie founded.
Whenever Brent and I got together over the years, I’d ask him what he was reading, because he was ALWAYS reading something and he was always excited about it. He would ask me to, but I’m sure he sent more books my way than I sent his. He loved to read and he loved to recommend books. Authors he introduced me to over the years (besides Gass) include Frederick Busch, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ted Hughes, Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Colin Wilson and Tom Robbins. Those are the ones I remember right now, but I’m sure there are others.
ReplyDeleteWe also shared things we wrote. I remember Brent showing me a lovely story of his about a boy, a girlfriend and a luna mouth; and then one about an imaginary round of golf with William Faulkner; and finally, a sad one about hurrying to say good-bye to a dying father, but getting there too late. This last was based on Brent’s own experience with Morrie’s death and I felt all that much more connected to them both when Brent published it in The Sycamore Review, Purdue’s literary magazine that my wife Elizabeth and I helped found.
Brent was the same way with music. Every time I’d get together with him, he’d say, “Have you heard so and so?” and when I’d admit I hadn’t, he pop the tape in and I’d learn about Van Morrison or Dave Mason or Tracy Chapman or somebody. These music recommendation go all the way back to the Beatles in fact, because Morrie brought the English release of “Meet the Beatles” back from a Joyce conference in London. Brent and I weren’t so sure about Paul singing “Till There Was You.” It seemed pretty sappy, but we weren’t so tone-deaf that we didn’t realize something special was going on, and we quickly got so into it that even Brent put his legendary shyness aside to perform as a member of the Frenchmen at the eighth grade talent show. Sporting ascots and berets we lip-synced “All My Lovin’” and the Dave Clark Five’s hit “Bits and Pieces.” Girls threw jellybeans at us and screamed. It was pretty heady and it doesn’t surprise me at all to find out that Brent’s son Sam has become a musician.
Brent also loved games and sports—the Purdue Boilermakers, of course, but all sports really. Morrie had the basement on Evergreen Street set up like a barroom. Well, it wasn’t like a barroom; it actually was a barroom. The bar itself had a glass top with labels from imported beers underneath, and above which, mounted on a ceiling bracket, was a tv, tuned whenever possible to sports—ABC’s Wide World of Sports, golf and AFL football (Morrie liked the Kansas City Chiefs because their quarterback and coach, Len Dawson and Hank Stram, both had Purdue connections). On the other side of the basement was the pool table. This was heaven for a bunch of teenage boys and the place was constantly crawling with them.
Brent and I played lots of organized sports together—football especially, Brent the outside linebacker on one side, me on the other. Our team had a 16-game unbeaten string and for years afterward, Brent and I would mull over what could have gone differently in that damn Frankfort game that broke the string. He also loved touch football. In West Lafayette, we played it in the vacant lot next to Joe Brady’s and up at Burtsfield School too, but we also played in a meadow on a bluff overlooking the Mohawk River Valley behind a farmhouse Brent and some friends were renting outside Hamilton. It was an odd place, for the landlord had left a dozen or more Edsels to rust in the barn and front pasture.
Then, of course, there was golf. We’re going to miss him this summer at the golf outing during our 40th high school reunion, but I know we’ll have a moment of silence at the 7th tee of the Purdue South because that’s the hole we all associate with the Beeb. We do this, first, because of the story he told about how his dad drove the green on this par four one August when the fairway was dry and hard, and then rolled in a 30-footer for eagle. That’s the story anyway, Beeb did tell some stretchers from time to time. But, mainly we think of Brent on the 7th hole because of what happened one time during the summer after eighth grade. Puberty was in high gear and Beeb didn’t know his own strength, which was considerable. He laced a drive that just kept going and rising and going. We were so in shock we didn’t even yell fore until it was too late. Way down the fairway Brent’s ball hit a guy playing in front of us directly in the back of the head. A sickening crack sounded across the course and the guy dropped to the ground like he’d fallen off a table. He lay there perfectly still right from the start, apparently out cold. His playing partner came running from the other side of the fairway and still the guy didn’t move. Brent was pale and silent, obviously scared shitless. Finally, after an eternity, the guy started to move a bit. Then, he sat up and rubbed the back of his head. His friend helped him to his feet and he started shaking his fist at us and cussing a blue streak. Finally, he teed Brent’s ball up and drove it across Stadium Avenue into the Purdue apple orchard. We felt relieved, but let the next three foursomes play through so we wouldn’t end up anywhere near the guy.
ReplyDeleteBrent loved organized sports, but I think he loved unorganized ones even more. His imagination was always at work and he loved to make games up. I remember walking back from the neighborhood pub with him in Seattle one time when suddenly he said, “Think you can you jump up and touch that awning? Rich did it when he was here.” He knew how to get my goat. After I’d tried a few times and the beers (or, more likely, my vertical leap) kept leaving me six inches short, Brent admitted that he’d just made up that stuff about Rich doing it and we walked on home. I was never sure if he was just sparing me my feelings, or not.
He could make a game out of anything. At the house he and Penny built outside Barneveld, we used to drive golf balls over the cornfield into the woods on the other side just for the fun of it. And, of course, there was Tip, the jumping game we invented in high school that involved rebounding a basketball off the overhang over the doors outside the high school gym and then sending it back up onto the overhang before landing on the ground again. I know Beeb had to have been there when we first invented Tip and I suspect it was his idea.
It wasn’t just physical sports; he also loved board games, card games and mind games of any sort. He loved poker, for instance, which we played at his house between double sessions of football practice. I can still hear Cream blasting “I’m So Glad” on the stereo. During the fateful spring of senior year, the spring of ’68, when we were trying to act grown up but afraid of what the world had in store for us, Brent, Louie Klatch, Mary Worth and I even gave bridge a try. We were playing it that night in April when Martin Luther King, Jr. got shot.
I remember playing drawing games with him too. We’d each take a few sheets of paper and design weird and incredibly difficult golf holes with waterfalls and cliffs. Once in Wisconsin, Brent introduced some of us to a game where someone who was It put the same basic squiggle on several sheets of paper, gave one to everyone, and then told everyone to use that squiggle as the basis for a drawing of some particular thing—a car, a ship, an elephant, whatever. I wish we could all go home tonight and play some game that Brent has just cooked up. It would be fun.
In fact, life was always fun with Beeb. He just flat enjoyed things. Gadgets, for instance. I remember him showing me his first Mac, a primitive little thing. This was maybe 1983 or so. Brent had one of the first. Little bitty screen, no color, but damn, Beeb was excited about it. “I haven’t been bored one minute since I got this,” he said. And I believed him. We played games (probably Pong). He showed me his files of stories and how you could kind of draw with the mouse, and there were different screen savers they gave you and all sorts of stuff that seemed miraculous back then.
ReplyDeleteBrent always had a new gadget, or some thing or another that he’d built or acquired: a telescope or sauna, an outdoor shower or even just some little something he’d carved or picked up or assembled—bits of wood, an animal skull, beach rocks, the totem pole at his grandpa’s place in Anacortes. Brent was an artist, but he wasn’t showy about it. He just liked to have beautiful and interesting things around to touch or look at. He appreciated the world, especially the natural world.
All those little artifacts around the house didn’t mean, however, that Brent was a strictly art-for-art’s-sake kind of guy. He also had a strong entrepreneurial streak. He liked to work for himself, not for somebody else, and sometimes he had dreams of making it big. This probably started way back when he was a little kid. He and other kids on the street, with the help of Brent’s mother, put out a neighborhood newspaper called The Rose Street News. This was before I knew Brent, but I’ve heard about it—stories, drawings and contests. It sounded like fun and very Brent. I don’t know how much they sold The Rose Street News for, but I’m sure Brent charged something. Brent liked to make a little money. In junior high I took over his paper route when Morrie took the family out to Anacortes in the summer. Brent ran a good route. He told me where people wanted their paper—mailbox, porch, front walk, side door, driveway, whatever. He’d charmed all the little old ladies on the route and when I collected, they wanted to know when he would be back. I got a few tips, but I think others saved them back for Brent. It was Brent they liked.
In grade school, Brent and Scott Allman (and maybe some other guys) had a fossil club and later a pencil sharpening business. They would sell you a bit of fossilized fern or maybe a trilobite, or at a lunch, they’d use a razor blade to sculpt a weird and interesting tip on your #2 pencil. It was little wonder that Brent later set up Wodwo Productions out in Seattle and Heartland Builders in Wisconsin, where he designed and built decks, cabinets, fences, saunas, studios and houses. He also did a lot to help rebuild Barneveld after the F5 tornado flattened it in 1984.
Though Brent was willing to take a risk and come up with some way to make a living on his own, I always liked the security of a paycheck, so it was kind of ironic that when I dropped out of graduate school back in 1976 to become a communist and a trade union organizer I had to call on Brent for help. To get a job as a janitor at a big Boston hospital (where we were going to organize the unorganized) I needed to lie about my Ivy League education and fill in those years somehow. I asked Brent if I could put Wodwo Productions down on the job application, and he said sure. Later, in Wisconsin, when he was batting around the idea of a better golf bag as a way to make money, I started to get into it with him—more Velcro here, a better padded shoulder strap, maybe some DayGlo colored nylon to add highlights, an extra pocket so you wouldn’t lose your wallet and keys under all those old score cards and tees, maybe market it with one of those little The New Yorker ads, and so on and so on. Finally, Brent smiled, looked over at me and said, “You know, for a communist, you sure know how to think like a capitalist.”
I laughed and said, “Well, you gotta know the enemy, and anyway, unless this really takes off, you and I are just as petit bourgeois as we ever were.”
ReplyDeleteThat was the thing, Brent just always accepted me as me, even when I was got pretty dogmatic and ultra-left, even when I was still very much on my own and would show up on his doorstep and impose myself on him and his young family. I’ve got to say Penny was awfully patient during this period too, because Brent and Paul and I would invariably stay up all night drinking and listening to the Talking Heads and arguing and laughing and carrying on. She had to get the kids up in the morning and we were acting like were still a bunch of teenagers in the Morrie’s basement barroom.
Brent liked people. Whenever I’d drop myself back into his life, I’d meet some new people—people I would like: roommates at Colgate, new golfing buddies, his soccer team in Wisconsin, lots of people, but finally, of course, Penny. Theirs was a classic love story and I feel honored to have been there when it started. It was the summer of 1976. I was trying to escape the end of a love affair and the on-going nonsense that was the Bicentennial in Boston. I’d gone up to the Olympic Games in Montreal and then taken the train across Canada. I got off in Vancouver and took the ferry down to Seattle, to meet up with Brent and Jake Ehlers. Jake and I helped Brent finish a carpentry job, then took off in Jake’s VW bus for the Olympic Peninsula to hit the hot springs and hike the rain forest. And it was rainy, so for a couple of days we spent most of our time in the bus, drinking tea, playing cards and hanging out with this pretty woman named Penny we’d met at the hot spring. She was driving across the country by herself, trying to figure out what to do next with her life.
Then the rain stopped, for a while at least, and Brent, Jake and I hiked up into the mountains where we went glissading on an ice field and saw some elk. When we came back down, Penny was still there and it was starting to rain again, so the four of us decided to head over to the beach at La Push, where it would maybe be drier and more fun. We hiked into this beautiful spot, set up our tents, and spent the next few days smoking dope, talking around a campfire and swimming in the Pacific. Then, Brent had to get back to work and Jake needed to start driving back east, so the four of us hiked back out and we parted ways with Penny, who was, I thought, going to do some more camping and thinking about her life and probably never be somebody I’d see again. Brent and I were going to spend a few days back in Seattle before I began hitching down the Coast to see my brother in Portland and my sister in Berkeley. For those few days, Brent kept talking about Penny and “what a fine woman she was.” I agreed but I was dense. I didn’t get it. Then, I hitched south and eventually back east to begin my career as a communist. When I got to Boston a month or two later, I called Brent and found out that Penny had showed up in Seattle soon after I left and was still there. Then, the next year, I got a card from Wisconsin and there they were about to get married. Brent could be shy, but clearly, he hadn’t been shy with Penny. He was in love and so was she and there was no looking back. What a good thing their love has been. It has given us Casey and Sam and a wonderful example of family. And what a privilege it was to know Brent and share life with him. I miss him and I wish I could be there with you this weekend as you remember him.
THE ABOVE ARE BY NED STUCKEY-FRENCH
While perusing some WLHS sites and memorial pages, I came upon this sad news. I spent a couple days with Brent and Penny in the fall of 1978 during a trip up north with Ed Ragsdale to canoe the Canadian boundary waters. Their home was just what you would imagine in lovely rural Madison....so warm and inviting. We had a wonderful day hiking in the glorious fall colors, and I remember making dinner with nature's bounty from their huge vegetable garden. I can still see it clearly as the area looked like a painting...rolling green hills, a winding road with a red barn, black and white cows and puffy clouds in a blue bonnet sky....I am so sorry for your loss, Penny, and hope you are well. It was great meeting you then.
ReplyDelete