Louise Wingate Beard
April 1, 1910 – March 16, 1994
Louise Beard was born on April Fool's day in the year of our Lord 1910. She had a twin sister, Lucile, who died shortly after birth. Louise went with Laverne to live with Emmett and Jessie Beard when their father, Gilliam, passed away. Laverne was 5 years old at the time. Louise was younger.
I remember a story told by Eva, wife of Johnny Cain, brother of Frank Cain whose wife Pearl was the oldest daughter of Robert William and Adeline McLaurin Bullard. Pearl was sister of Kathleen Adeline, wife of LaVerne Beard.
Any way, the story Eva told was that 5-year-old LaVerne was lying on the floor when she tried to step over him. She accidentally stepped on the child and apologized. LaVerne replied, "That's OK. I'm going to die soon, anyway." Losing an older brother (Jack, who fell into a hearth fire at the age of 12), a mother, and a father, was taking its toll on the child.
We don't know much about Louise's childhood. However, as soon as she graduated from Eastover High School, she moved to Tampa, Florida, found work there, and married. Her husband, according to her, was a heavy drinker. She abandoned him and returned to Emmett's and Jessie's, where she lived until both of them died and their offspring wanted to sell the house. She had no children.
Moving out of Emmett's house, she moved into a house trailer on the property of Earl Monroe, her brother, down the Beard Road a piece. She never remarried, but lived alone for the rest of her life.
She worked a while at Carolina News Service, which distributed newspapers and magazines to local newsstands. During this period of her life she brought great delight to her nephew, Robert Earl, son of her brother, LaVerne and Kathleen Bullard Beard. She would periodically come over for dinner and bring Robert Earl a stack of comic books.
Carolina News would pick up the unsold magazines and the end of each month to destroy them. All Louise had to do was cut off the title of the comic book, and she was free to 'redistribute' them. The content of each comic book was obvious from the illustration on the cover, so Robert Earl was the beneficiary of much reading material via Aunt Louise.
When Carolina News went out of business, Aunt Louise found work at the Cumberland County Social Services Department. LaVerne, Kathleen, and their family would visit her when they visited LaVerne's brother, Earl Monroe and his wife, Ruth McLaurin Beard. Nothing of any moment occurred in her life until Robert Earl moved to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
She came on the visit to Robert Earl and Helen Faye Beard after Robert Earl accepted a position at Bucknell University. They moved into a house at 2459 Smoketown Road in Linntown, a suburb of Lewisburg.
In the course of that visit, Louise fell down the basement stair and suffered a broken elbow with multiple fractures. It required a stay of about two weeks in the Evangelical Hospital in Lewisburg. Faye and Robert visited her every day.
When Earl and Ruth died, Louise went to stay in a private nursing home in Stedman, North Carolina. There she met Louis Gaines, retired minister of the First Baptist Church in Fayetteville, who had married Robert and Faye. Robert and Faye visited her every time they came to Fayetteville, which was twice a year in the summer and for Christmas. (Kathleen and LaVerne, the parents of Robert, came to Lewisburg in the spring and fall.)
When the nursing home she was at went under, Louise moved to a rest home in Eastover, about a half mile up the old Dunn Road (US 301) from Kathleen and LaVerne. She passed away there March 16, 1994.
