Son recalls father's lessons

Jack Beisner
Jack Beisner

Editor's note: This is the second part to a column in honor of former TIMES publisher and editor, Jack Beisner, by his son, E. Calvin Beisner.

He taught me how to be a father to daughters when he cheered them on in everything they did at school -- two of them 13 and 11 years ahead of me, grownups, they seemed, and both so beautiful and talented and sophisticated and so active in community affairs like American Field Service, through which he taught me to embrace people of many nationalities without prejudice.

He helped my mother teach me to read, and he taught me to type -- on a Linotype in his newspaper office (like the one below, though that's not he at the keyboard), the same one that once split the tip of his finger back to the knuckle and from time to time splashed drops of hot lead that made scars on his hands and forearms.

He taught me to fish -- first with a cane pole and simple hook and worms, then with a spinning rod using Jitterbugs and Lucky 13s and other lures, and then with a fly rod using poppers and flies. Once or twice a week in season, he took me to Mr. Ostrander's pond, where Jake and Kate, the two beavers, made their home and big bass and bluegills lurked among the cattails and lily pads ready to strike suddenly and give a little boy the fight of his life and then become his dinner. He taught me proper knots to tie with fishing line so the line wouldn't cut itself, and how to choose the right pound test line for the fish we were after, and how to tell from the kinds of insects buzzing around us and scooting across the surface of the water, or whether there were frogs or minnows around, what kinds of lures or flies to choose. He taught me patience when he unsnarled my "birds' nests" of tangled fishing line that resulted from my impatience, and he taught me good humor when my fly hooked him in the back of the neck because I wasn't watching carefully where he was when I did my back cast. (That happened several times -- and once he hooked me instead!) He taught me to let the little fish go back to grow big, and how to clean the big ones for eating. And from time to time he took me to Mr. Ostrander's home, where I got to see, even before they went into service, photos of the C-5 A Galaxies Mr. Ostrander had helped design to help American forces do their jobs preserving freedom around the world.

Sometimes he took our whole family to the Teeleys' farm, where instead of bass we caught catfish and bluegills and he and Mr. Teeley cleaned them all and my mother and Kitty Teeley coated them in cornmeal or flour batter and fried them up to serve with hushpuppies and fresh sweet corn and big, vine-ripened tomatoes and squash, finishing off with watermelon and homemade ice cream.

He taught me to hunt in the winters -- to be quiet so I didn't scare the game, to follow in the tracks he broke through the snow so my little legs could get through, to shoot little stones from my slingshot at the squirrels' nests high in trees to scare some out for him to shoot with his 12-gauge shotgun loaded with birdshot, or to notice the footprints of rabbits and where they led so they, too, could help feed our family. He taught me that the little ones should be left alone, and the mother squirrels, too, to care for the little ones -- only the big, fat, lone ones were fair game.

He taught me respect for guns, and one day, finally giving in to my pleas, he taught me, at about age 7, to shoot his great big 12-gauge. He took me into a ravine, sat me down on the stump of a tree, helped me position the gun at my shoulder and point it at the opposite side of the ravine so we knew no stray birdshot could harm anyone, and then, slowly, slowly, squeeze, not yank, no, don't pull, slowly, slowly, squeeze the trigger, little by little, until--my ears were ringing and I was flat on my back behind the stump and the branches and sky were swirling above me and my shoulder felt like it'd been run over by a truck. He taught me respect for guns, and for people, and for animals, and for how nature works.

He taught me the wonder of watching airplanes land and take off at Broome County Airport, built partly because of the public pressure he helped generate, over near Binghamton, NY, and how to daydream about where those planes might come from or go to.

He taught me to ice skate on the pond at the IBM plant at the bottom of Bodle Hill, where friends of his worked on top-secret defense-related research. He taught me how close I could come to the bonfire without getting burned, and how to cook s'mores and roast marshmallows over it on the end of long stick plucked from the side of the pond. He taught me that salt melts ice so cars can move despite heavy snow, and how to shovel a driveway so our car could get out, and how to install chains on tires, and how to build an igloo with blocks of dense snow after a blizzard that piled snow as high as our second-story windows, and how to dig tunnels my friends and I could crawl through, when we became Eskimos.

•••

Editor's note: This column is the second in a series by E. Calvin Beisner, son of Jack and Mary-Lou Beisner, who owned and published The Times of Northeast Benton County from 1978-1989. He served at various times as reporter, editor and assistant publisher as well as in other capacities. He is now Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation www.CornwallAlliance.org. He and his wife, Deborah, an artist, live in south Florida.

Editorial on 07/05/2017