Charles T. Beaird

Charles Thomas Beaird (July 17, 1922 - April 18, 2006) was an industrialist, newspaper publisher, philanthropist, and civic leader from Shreveport, Louisiana. A self-identified "liberal Republican", Beaird was an early champion of civil rights legislation.

Born to James Benjamin Beaird and the former Mattie Connell Fort, his mother died six weeks after his birth, and his father succumbed when he was sixteen. According to his obituary, Beaird had to grow up quickly but developed a fierce intellectual independence.

Military service
On February 5, 1943, he was commissioned into the United States Marine Corps in Corpus Christi, Texas. He married the former Carolyn Williams (August 8, 1923 – January 27, 2006) in Shreveport the next day and reported for duty in Fort Worth, 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 B-25s and the OS 2U torpedo bomber. He attained the rank of captain and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Decorated Air Medal.

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 his older brother, J. Pat Beaird, Sr., as president. Charles Beaird worked there as a youth sweeping floors, so he knew the business, 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. Beard built the company into the fourth largest maker of chainsaws in the world. When it was purchased by Emerson Electric in 1973, Beaird became chairman of the Beaird-Poulan Division of Emerson, known for its WeedEater products.

Political career
In 1952, Beaird joined childhood friends in an effort to create a viable GOP 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). He was one of the first Republicans elected to public office in Louisiana since Reconstruction. He was elected at the local level as there was no Republican gubernatorial candidate running in the 1956 general election. Later that year, he managed the unsuccessful campaign of then Republican Littleberry Calhoun Allen, Jr., who challenged incumbent Overton Brooks of Louisiana's 4th congressional district. After switching to Democrat, Allen won election as Shreveport's public utilities commissioner (1962–1970) and mayor (1970–1978).

Beaird attracted national attention in 1956, when he gave a seconding speech for the renomination of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, California. In 1960, he was one of the ten elector candidates in Louisiana for the unsuccessful Nixon/Lodge ticket. Though he entered politics as a conservative, his wife and children and 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 more conservative Louisiana GOP.

Education
He graduated from C. E. Byrd High School in Shreveport and attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, where he joined the Black Horse Troop. He enrolled at the University of Michigan and joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and transferred to the University of Texas. With the outbreak of World War II, Beaird returned to Shreveport and enrolled at Centenary College. He met Carolyn there while waiting to enlist in the Naval Air training program.

Fascinated with philosophy, he re-enrolled at Centenary College, where he was already a trustee, earning his B.A. in 1966. He became a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and was accepted in Columbia University where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972 at the age of 50. He returned as assistant professor of philosophy at Centenary College, where he taught for seven years and was inducted into the Centenary Alumni Hall of Fame.

Civic leadership
Beaird was 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 Centenary College Committee of 100; chair of the Citizens Committee on Desegregation for the Caddo Parish Schools; chair of the United Fund Campaign; vice president of the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce, and co-chair of Shreveport's Biracial Commission.

The Shreveport Journal
A trustee for the American Rose Foundation, his affection for the rose figured prominently in his next enterprise, the now defunct Shreveport Journal which he bought in 1976 from Douglas F. Attaway. He changed it from a conservative paper, which, under former editor George W. Shannon endorsed conservative Democratic and Republican candidates, into a liberal one, edited by Stanley R. Tiner and rarely endorsing Republicans for office. The Journal's symbol, the rose, adorned the brief, complimentary verbal "roses" that the publication awarded on its editorial page. Beaird usually wore a rose on his lapel.

Under his leadership, the Journal crusaded for the fluoridation of Shreveport's water supply, accomplished through the efforts of the Republican Utilities Commissioner Billy J. Guin, who served from 1977 to 1978. Unlike other Louisiana newspaper publishers, Beaird championed organized labor, a rare phenomenon in the South.

When the Shreveport Journal, an afternoon paper, ceased daily publication in 1991, Beaird won a unique agreement with Gannett Co., owner of the morning Shreveport Times with which the Journal had a joint operating agreement, to run "Journal Page" an editorial opinion page six days a week in The Times. "Journal Page" was a 1994 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for a series on decriminalization of narcotics. The "Journal Page" was edited by Jim Montgomery (1945-2013), former managing editor of the Shreveport Times. The Journal Page ended its run on December 31, 1999.

Philanthropy


Beaird's last career was in real estate, including the downtown Shreveport Beaird Tower, with one of his symbolic roses at its top.

He and Carolyn were philanthropists], but the extent of their personal giving may never be fully known because much was done anonymously. They endowed two chairs at Centenary College and one at Union Theological Seminary in New York. They helped to restore the historic Strand Theatre in downtown Shreveport and 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 leaders in the American Rose Center endowment trust. He served on the board of the D. L. Dykes, Jr., Foundation (in memory of the pastor of the First United Methodist Church, who was Beaird's friend). He fought to improve housing and living conditions in Ledbetter Heights, one of Shreveport's most impoverished neighborhoods.

The nonprofit Charles T. Beaird Foundation, created in 1960, is guided by a board drawn from the Beaird family, has donated millions to local nonprofit organizations. Beaird received:
 * Liberty Bell Award from the Shreveport Bar Association
 * Philanthropist of the Year Award from the Association of Fund Raising Professionals
 * Jacques Napier Steinau Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson Award given by All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church.

While Carolyn was a devoted Presbyterian, Beaird was an atheist, or as he call himself, "a nontheist," meaning that the concept of God was not among the ideas on which he based his beliefs.

Beaird died from an infection that resulted after months of declining health. His death came fewer than three months after that of Carolyn, who died ten days before their 63rd anniversary.

Beaird's survivors included three children: Susan Lynn Beaird (born 1943) of Shreveport; Marjorie Beaird Seawell (born 1947) of Denver, and John Benjamin Beaird (born 1950).

The Beairds are interred at Shreveport's Forest Park Cemetery off St. Vincent Avenue.