Calvin Beale is a Senior Demographer--or, as he likes to think of it, a "Demographic Geographer"--in the Economic Research Service. In that capacity he focuses on demographic studies of rural small-town populations, including farmers, looking for patterns and trends in growth, decline, and/or migration of rural residents.
Beale has authored a whole lot of demographic studies over the years--because he's been with USDA and the federal government for a whole lot of years. In fact, since his federal service computation date is November 1946, he has over 61 years of federal service. Therefore, he is thought to be the USDA employee with the longest years of full-time federal service currently employed at the Department. Harold "Bruno" Mangum, who was a Farm Service Agency communications coordinator in Raleigh, NC, previously held that distinction until he passed away from an extended illness, while on Sick Leave status, in October 2007. Mangum was 90.
Beale, who is 85, was born on June 6, 1923, "in the front bedroom of 629 14th Street, Northeast, in Washington, DC," he recounted. "My older brother was told to go outside and watch the Shriner's parade that was in town at the time, to get him out from underfoot while I was being born." Beale contracted tuberculosis as a teenager, so wasn't eligible for military service during World War II. Instead, he began working at the Veterans Administration in 1942 as a GS-1 'under file clerk.' In 1943 he moved to the Office of Strategic Services--the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency--as a map clerk. "I'd catalog maps from all over the world, and then I'd fetch them when some military official would request a particular map," he recalled. "What I remember is the paper cuts I'd keep getting on my fingers, doing all that fetching." He was also going to college at the time, so his federal employment was often part-time.
In 1945 he graduated from [then] Wilson Teachers College in Washington, DC with a B.S. degree in geography and history. Periods of graduate school followed, in Maryland and Wisconsin, until he decided he wanted to work on the 1950 U.S. Census. So he joined the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington, DC, working on and off until 1953, while also attending graduate school--ultimately receiving an M.S. degree in sociology in 1981.
"During 1953, work on the 1950 U.S. Census officially ended," he advised, "and suddenly a lot of us lost our jobs." But he knew some employees at USDA, specifically Margaret Hagood with the Department's [then] Bureau of Agricultural Economics. "I knew her through what the modern generation would call 'networking'," he quipped. He was hired as a demographer in 1953, "and I've been doing that work for the Department ever since."
When asked for anecdotes from his USDA career he related that USDA publishes periodic reports which include estimates of the number of people living on farms and what the trends of farm life are. "So one year, during the mid-1950s, our office invited the farmers, that I was helping to survey, to provide their own comments about trends. During that particular period a number of farmers were leaving the farm to go into what was called 'public work'--in other words, work off the farm. So that meant the number of farms was dwindling. Well, I dutifully included that information in our report, the report went through all the normal clearance steps, and we printed copies of it. But then a senior official at the Department apparently figured that no administration, and no secretary of agriculture--no matter who is in office--wants to hear that the number of farms is dwindling. So he decided we should quash the report by destroying all the copies. And then someone else decided to destroy all those copies by actually burning them all. A reporter from the 'Madison [Wisconsin] Capital Times' newspaper got wind of that, the incident became known as 'The Burning Of The Farm Population Estimates,' and I was among several at USDA called to Congress to testify about this incident."
"I guess that was the one big imbroglio in my career," he said. "But it all worked out all right, there wasn't any retribution, and I just went back to my office and kept doing my job. But you might say that, once again, history showed that the coverup can be worse than the original event."
Last Book Read:"Up In Honey's Room" by Elmore Leonard. "I like Elmore Leonard's writing--but not this one. So I didn't finish it."
Last Movie Seen:"Charlie Wilson's War."
Hobbies: "I like traveling the U.S., and I've been trying to visit every county seat across the country. I've gotten to 2,500 out of the 3,100 so far. And when I'm there, I photograph the county courthouses." Those images can be found at www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/population/photos/thumbnails.asp
Something I Don't Want People To Know About Me: "For the last 55 years I've lived in a pre-World War I house in DC--first by renting an apartment in it, and then in 1974 I bought the house. I've dreaded anyone seeing it after over 50 years of accumulated clutter."
Priorities In The Months Ahead: "Surviving as gracefully as possible the cancer I've been treated for."
