Hattieville woman to be honored by Friends of Conway County Library

— To get an inkling of 84-year-old retired Hattieville school teacher Bernie Beeson’s personality, all anyone has to do is look at the Christmas card she sent last year to friends and family.

It has a photo of her taken about 65 years ago as a young student at what is now Arkansas Tech University, sunbathing on top of a building - in a two-piece swimsuit.

Beeson had printed on the card: “I have two wishes for Christmas - I wish you a Merry Christmas, and I wish I still looked like this!”

“My great-granddaughter said, ‘Ma Maw, I didn’t know y’all had bikinis back then.’ I said, ‘Honey, we didn’t, I made my own!’”

Beeson laughed, a frequent occurrence, often preceded by, “This is so funny ... .”

Her sense of humor will come in handy when she’s honored March 31 at a Roast and Toast sponsored by the Friends of Conway County Library. The event, which includes a silent auction, is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Rialto Theater and Gallery in downtown Morrilton. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at the library or the Morrilton Area Chamber of Commerce.

Pam Brownlee of Morrilton, president of the Friends of the Conway County Library, said Beeson is a beloved former teacher.

“We had lunch the other day at the (UACCM) college cafeteria, and three or four older students had to come hug her neck. When telling peopleabout the person we are roasting, we will invariably hear, ‘Oh, my gosh, she is so wonderful and funny.’”

Brownlee said Beeson, a member of the Friends group, has been a great supporter of the library and of reading.

The Friends group got two honorees in one by picking Beeson.

Beeson has performed for at least 50 years, she said, as comedian Minnie Pearl, a longtime performer at the Grand Ole Opry and on the television show Hee-Haw.

“I’ve done it so long, when I listen to my voice it sounds like I’m talking like her,” Beeson said, laughing.

Without her prop - a straw hat with a price tag dangling from it - Beeson sat up straight in the wing-back chair in the living room of her home in Hattieville and put on the persona to give a taste of her upcoming routine for the Roast and Toast.

It involved a joke about Minnie Pearl getting a new outfit. Another woman tells Minnie Pearl she looks like “a million dollars.”

Minnie Pearl tells the woman, “You ain’t never seen a million dollars.”

The woman says, “That’s what I mean - you look like something I ain’t never seen!”

Beeson said she first performed as Minnie Pearl half a century ago for a skit to raisemoney during a competition for the Rural Communities Improvement Program “to see which was the best community.”

Beeson also sang in a quartet and danced the Charleston.

“I would win prizes, and the community would get the money,” she said.

Beeson is known for her Minnie Pearl impersonation, and she gets invited to all kinds of shindigs to perform. Each year, she does a skit for a Christmas party at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Russellville.

Beeson, a Little Rock native, had to get used to smalltown life after she married her husband, the late O.V. Beeson,whose family had the only grocery store in Hattieville. It’s still there, with the same slamming screen door and creaky wooden floors, two doors down from her home. Beeson’s daughter, Nicki Jean Mourot, runs the store now, along with one of Beeson’s former students, Jaymy Williams, 34.

“Did she tell you the potato story?” Williams asked.

When Beeson first came to Hattieville, her father-in-law mentioned they were going to the garden to “get” potatoes.

“She was from the big city,” Williams said. “She went in to put on her bathing suit to kill two birds with one stone. She said, ‘I’ve looked on every plant out there, and I’ve looked on trees, and, Mr. Beeson, there are no potatoes.”

When she found out potatoes needed to be dug, she wasn’t quite as excited, he said.

Williams was in Beeson’s third-grade class when she taught at the Wonderview school.

“It was wonderful - she was always a ball of energy,” he said.

“This is something that has stuck with me through life - she was always consistent,” he said.

Beeson would start the day with a Bible verse, the class would recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and she would lead the children in singing “Home on the Range.”

“She would begin everything, ‘Now, children,’ whatever it was. ‘Now children, get out your readers,’” he said.

Beeson said she always wanted to be a teacher. She went to Arkansas Tech, which was a two-year agricultural school atthat time, and met her future husband.

“I said, ‘There’s my man, right there.’ He didn’t like me. I was from Little Rock and I was stuck up - that’s what he thought,” she said. “I snagged him.”

He didn’t stand a chance against the girl named Most Popular her sophomore year.

Beeson, who graduated from Tech in 1946, was 19 when she got her first teaching job - second grade at David O. Dodd Elementary School in Pulaski County.

“I loved it. We did a lot of things in Little Rock,” she said, including performing an operetta at the courthouse.

She and her husband, a Marine, were married on Dec. 22, 1946, when she was on Christmas break from teaching.

He moved to Hattieville to run the store after his father had a heart attack, but she continued teaching in Little Rock andcame to see her husband in Hattieville on weekends.

Beeson was taking summer classes at Arkansas State Teachers College, now the University of Central Arkansas, to get her teaching license, and she got sick. She was pregnant with their daughter, and her husband had their home built, where Beeson still lives.

She stopped teaching when she moved to Hattieville (she also forfeited her weekly hair and nail appointments). When Nicki Jean was 3, Beeson went to work as a caseworker for the welfare office in Morrilton.

When Hattieville needed a teacher two years later, Beeson stepped in.

She taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade, all in the same classroom.

“I tell people I did my best teaching when I did all three,” she said. “I had to be on my toes.”

When she had her son, Terry, who now lives in Springfield, Mo., she took another break from teaching, but not from work. Beesons Grocery was just steps from their home, and she worked there. The family also had cattle, and her husband was a rural mail carrier.

One day when she was working in the back of the store, she got a call from the Center Ridge School superintendent, T.O. Adams, who said he needed to talk to her.

“He walked in the door of the store, and I said, ‘Uh-uh. Uh-uh,” she recalled, shaking her head. “He said, ‘Bernice, I gotta have a teacher.’”

She agreed to teach first grade for three months and ended up staying seven years, until 1970.

“I loved every minute of it over there,” she said.

Her son was active in sports, and she said they would have to practically close the grocerystore door in people’s faces to leave to take him to a game, so she left Center Ridge and started teaching in the Wonderview School District in Hattieville, and stayed there until she retired in 1986.

She couldn’t get away from teaching, though. Her reputation kept her in business as a tutor until last year.

Her stories about former students would fill a book - it’s been suggested more than once that she write one.

Stories like this: Every morning, she would check her students’ fingernails, ears and teeth to see if they were clean.

She told one little boy repeatedly that he needed to brush his teeth, and one day he told her: “My momma told me to tell you to kiss her [behind],” although the word he used is a synonym for donkey.

“Dumb me. I said ‘Whathoney?’ And he repeated it,’” Beeson said, covering her eyes with her hands and laughing at the memory.

She’s expecting some stories to be told about her at the Friends of Conway County Library Roast and Toast on March 31. Roasters will include her son; Bill Plummer, with whom she attends Plummerville First United Methodist Church; and Ray Fullerton of Morrilton, a retired superintendent.

“I think the library is very important in any community, and we have a wonderful librarian, and he has a wonderful staff,” she said.

“It would just tickle me todeath if we made a lot of money.”

The library isn’t Beeson’s only civic involvement. She’s a member of the National Association of Retired Federal Employees in Conway, because of her husband’s job with the U.S. Postal Service; the Morrilton Pathfinder Club; and she volunteers at the Conway County Christian Clinic in Morrilton.

“My philosophy is, if I’ve helped one person in my life, then my life has been a good one,” she said.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 140 on 03/25/2012

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