Jean Gies Beaulieu
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Jaan and her husband Richard on a Panama Canal cruise
Biography of Jean Gies Beaulieu
After St. Paul's High School, I went to college at Mary Manse in Toledo where my dorm-mates included Carolyn Hay, Paul Roth's wife Jeanie, and Steve Schumm's wife Ann. Had to take a little bit of Norwalk with me. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I just took courses I liked and ended up with a major in English Lit. and minors in Art and French.
So there I was with a B.A from MMC, the academic powerhouse which was so desolate at my departure that it ceased to exist when I was no longer a student. My, my, what is this graduate to do? Well, she can postpone entrance into the serious work force by entering graduate school. Sounded good to me! I chose St. Louis University partly because it had a good English department and partly because it had a very compact campus that I could navigate pretty well. After two years I had an M.A. in English, a pretty good knowledge of St. Louis and the best college hang-outs, my own apartment, and a crew of terrific friends who remain close to this day.
So there I was with a M.A. from SLU--Now what to do! Well, I could postpone entrance into the serious work force by staying in graduate school and going for a PhD. Sounded good to me! So I took some more classes and taught other classes at SLU for another couple of years. During this period, I got to know Richard, my future husband. His office was in the Philosophy Department, one floor up from mine; and they always had donuts up there, so I'd scoot up there regularly for a free breakfast and some interesting conversation. Not many couples can say they were brought together by donuts and Descartes.
I finished the course work but never got that last degree. I have one of those amorphous PhD.ABDs (a PhD -- All But the Dissertation). I was offered a full-time teaching job at a local Community College, and I couldn't turn down the gigantic $20,000/year paycheck that went with this entrance into the serious work force. Richard, the philosophy teacher, and I married in '71; and I settled down into what I thought would be a long life in academia--you know, leather elbow patches, tweed jackets, briar pipes, sherry in the library amid the smell of old books, the aggravatingly elitist certainty that the teacher is much more intelligent than anyone else.
But noooooooo.......... Richard chose to take an entry-level job as a Dock Supervisor with ABF Trucking, a job with good promotion and transfer possibilities. Suddenly here we were in the REALLY serious work force, complete with heavy equipment and Teamsters. When the company started transferring us, I quit teaching; and I never really had the desire to get back into it. After St. Louis we were moved to Cleveland and then to Harrisburg, PA. We lived in Atlanta through the 90s and here in Fort Smith since 2000. Richard is now retired from the General Office of the company, and we’ve decided to continue living here in Arkansas for the foreseeable future.
