Calvin Beale New York Times Obituary

Calvin L. Beale, Demographer With

A Feel for Rural America, Dies at 85

By Felicity Barringer
New York Times
September 3, 2008

Calvin L. Beale, a government demographer who was among the first to recognize the transformation of America’s rural landscape from farms to a mixture of farms, industry and vacation homes, died on Monday in Washington. He was 85.

A niece, Carol Rudolph, said the cause was colon cancer.

Mr. Beale had worked at the federal Agriculture Department for more than half a century, becoming a senior demographer there.

An unpretentious man in a profession not noted for its glamour, Mr. Beale — his highest academic degree was a master’s in sociology from the University of Wisconsin — still developed a cult following among his peers. They marveled not just at his mastery of the theoretical tools, but also his first-hand feel for rural America.

He traveled to 2,500 counties (of 3,140) around the country and knew everything from the most common surnames in a given place to the kind of leaves carved above the courthouse steps. Kenneth M. Johnson, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, called Mr. Beale “the Michael Jordan of rural research.”

Mr. Beale’s greatest single professional contribution, Professor Johnson said, was figuring out in the 1960s that decades of decline in rural population were being reversed in some areas. Mr. Beale saw that hydroelectric dams in the Ozarks created reservoirs that in turn drew vacationers, some of whom stayed; he noticed industries like textiles, meatpacking and chemicals moving into areas that had been entirely agricultural.

When confronted with Mr. Beale’s reports of a population rebound, Professor Johnson said: “People didn’t believe it. It was so contrary to 150 years of American history.” When the first of the new data came out from the 1970 census, Mr. Beale was vindicated.

Mr. Beale, who is survived by three nephews in addition to his niece, was often a mentor to younger colleagues, like John Cromartie, who eventually worked with him at the Agriculture Department.

Mr. Cromartie, a geographer with the department’s resource and rural economics division, said Mr. Beale’s development of population theories came from his travels as much as from any computer model. Most demographers, Mr. Cromartie said, “start with the theories and test them.” But, he added, Mr. Beale’s on-the-ground knowledge of the overlooked byways of the country allowed him to “start from the bottom and show everyone the big picture from that perspective.”

Often it was the quirky or forgotten people that drew the demographer’s eye. Sprinkled throughout “A Taste of the Country,” a collection of Mr. Beale’s writings published by the Rand Corporation in 1990, are glimpses of little-noticed history.

He wrote, for example, of a mixed-race people called Melungeons, reputedly of white, black and Indian descent. They are found from the Tidewater areas to the Piedmont and the Allegheny-Cumberland Plateaus. “Some are landless, some landed,” he wrote. “But they are all marginal men — wary until recently of being black, aspiring where possible to be white and subject to rejection and scorn on either hand.”

Another chapter is devoted entirely to a Creole fire company in Mobile City, Ala., founded in 1819 and still operating when Mr. Beale visited in 1963.

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