It is sometimes interesting, in having reviewed a man’s
life, to go back and take a look at it in retrospect—from the eyes of the
subject, himself.
In the case of
Samuel Bean, the
Oakland Tribune feature gives us that opportunity. Written in 1948, when Sam had turned fifty
two, the Hayes article provides a glimpse into Sam’s life as a review. Keeping
in mind—as we’ve seen countless times in the case of other newspapers—that the
reporter might have gotten the story wrong, we could just chalk up any errors
or revisions to editorial negligence. However, in this case, I think some of
the discrepancies we are about to review are more telling about Sam’s stage in
life than the reporter’s prowess in getting the story right.
Like rehearsing a litany, Sam got the tale of his injury
down pat—though we’ve certainly read different versions over the last several
years of newspaper records.
“I was watching some
boys on a Palo Alto
playground when I was 13. One of the boys picked up a rock and threw it, only
playing. It hit me in the head, caused intense inflammation and destroyed the
optic and auditory nerves.”
Likewise, Sam’s take on his early years after the injury was
straightforward:
Bean is the son of a
former Palo Alto
contractor and builder. After his accident his mother brought him to Alameda
and he became a student at the California School for the Blind in Berkeley.
After that section of the article, Sam seems to stray from
what we’ve already learned as the orthodoxy of his personal history. I can’t
help but wonder what those discrepancies might be attributed to. What was he
thinking? What caused him to remember some details so clearly, while others
only incompletely?
Take Sam’s teacher at the California School
for the Deaf and Blind. Her philosophy evidently was firmly imprinted on Sam’s
mind—he was a dutiful disciple of her progressive views on the handicapped in
society. One could almost say she made the man.
And yet, he couldn’t fully remember her name. Admittedly,
the reporter inadvertently could have slipped the last portion of her name from
the final copy. I wonder, though: could it have been Sam who didn’t fully
remember
Mary White Eastman?
“I had a wonderful
teacher, Miss Mary White. She was blind herself,” Bean said. “She taught me
that a handicap is a handicap only in the degree in which you allow it to
master you.”
It was from this article that I first found mention of what
had become of Sam’s wife,
Maud Woodworth Bean. If you recall, I had had
trouble locating any records online of her passing. While I tend to doubt the accuracy
of the diagnosis Sam gave as the cause of her death—a case of rheumatic fever—if
she had prematurely lost her life owing to Marfan syndrome,
as I suspect, there
would have been little chance that anyone would have known that in 1933.
And yet, having been married to Sam for twelve years—not to
mention, being the mother of his two sons—one would think she’d merit at least
a mention by name. Though the narrative rehearsed the usual—that he met her
while she was serving as a teacher at the school Sam was attending, and that
their marriage was a happy one—all Sam said about her was, “I had a swell wife.”
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Sam at this point. Maybe it
was the newspaper that was getting it wrong. After all, Sam was already
misrepresented as having “had two years of study at the University
of California” instead of the California School
for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley.
Despite the article’s flaws, it was here that I also found
more details on the evolution of Sam’s business life. According to the Tribune, Sam had “expected to be a
cabinet maker but the lure of living among people led him to become a salesman.”
The article also included a photograph of Sam with his “business
companion,” Fred Schieff. The two worked in tandem for the Industrial Home for
the Blind, where Sam was billed as star salesman of their products.
The Tribune
article also confirmed other reports about Sam’s earlier business travels with
his wife—those many times in which the two had toured, promoting his writings.
The article closed with a taste of the simple sayings Sam used to remind
himself to focus on the can-do, positive side of life.
He and his wife traveled from coast
to coast, Mexico to Canada, giving
wide circulation among other things, to his philosophy:
“The time to be happy is now; the
place to be happy is here; the way to be happy is to make others so.”
He presented to customers a little
booklet, “Light in Darkness,” of his own poems. One states his theory:
“Let grouch and pessimist depart—
I want a happy cheerful heart.
No matter if things go dead wrong,
I’ll smile, or whistle, sing a song.
I’ll rise in joy to greet the morn.
And bless the day that I was born.”