By Douglas Burns
The Republican Party’s real Mr. Beck
One of my great misfortunes is that I never got to know my grandfather, the late publisher of The Carroll Daily Times Herald, James W. Wilson.
Either he died too soon, or I was born too late. I was 7, and Grandpa Wilson was 77 when he passed in 1977.
Nothing can make up for the conversations that never occurred.
But, in one of life’s rich paybacks, I did have the opportunity to learn about my grandfather, a stalwart conservative and state leader for the campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, through a spectacularly kind and wise surrogate: Bob Beck.
In the late 1980s, while I was a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and working for The Palm Beach Post in southern Florida, I got to know Mr. Beck, a long-time family friend and professional confidant of both my grandfather and uncle, James B. Wilson, the current publisher of our family paper.
Mr. Beck, the long-time publisher of Centerville’s Daily Iowegian, a significant figure in Iowa journalism and Republican politics for decades, spent a lot of time with me in Florida, taking me to dinners, having me over for drinks with his wife, Charlotte, and their friends.
Beck was easy-going with a sort of honest, cagey amiability. And he was as accomplished as he was humble. Unlike so many people, Beck, a journalist to his final day at age 88 in 2004, preferred to listen rather than talk.
To say that Bob Beck was a brilliant listener isn’t to imply that he had nothing to say himself.
No, Mr. Beck was an extraordinarily interesting man who just found other people more compelling than himself. You could see it in his columns, and it’s no doubt what made Mr. Beck a formidable candidate for governor in the 1960s. Beck lost a GOP primary to Robert Ray who went on to serve as Iowa’s governor for 14 years.
“I lost to a good man,” Beck told Iowa journalist Chuck Offenburger. Mr. Beck said the same thing to me more than once in different ways, but I wasn’t quoting him at the time.
After losing Beck didn’t seek to hold the stage, a la Bob Vander Plaats. He went back to Centerville and busied himself with driving economic development there, including his crucial involvement with Lake Rathbun.
A decade ago, Offenburger and I had ringside seats for a rare and fascinating journalistic forum: the now late George “Lefty” Mills, the legendary Des Moines Register reporter, Beck and my uncle sat around a table at Noah’s Restaurant in Des Moines and talked for nearly two hours about newspapers, politics and Iowa.
Offenburger recorded the notes, and I took the photos and listened.
Beck, according to Offenburger’s story, grew up in Centerville where his father, Jesse M. Beck, was at the Iowegian from 1903 until 1965.
Bob Beck joined the paper after he graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College, and served as its publisher from 1945 to 1983.
In the years of our friendship, Mr. Beck gave me first-hand accounts of the generations of community journalists who ran so many of the colorful newspapers now owned by bottom-line-only minded chains.
Beck’s father Jesse “was a gentleman, but one tough guy,” Mills told Offenburger, explaining how the Ku Klux Klan “tried to push your dad around, and he wouldn’t budge.”
Remember that Missouri, only miles to the south, was slave state. Think about that the next time you cross the Des Moines River on the Avenue of the Saints and roll into St. Francisville, Mo.
Bob Beck told us the Klan “was very active across southern Iowa back then, about 1923 to ’25. They’d have meetings in Appanoose County and 5,000 to 6,000 people would be there.” As he went on with Offenburger, Beck said the Klan insisted his father join them and put the power of the newspaper behind the racist organization, but Jesse refused.
“And he wouldn’t run their propaganda in the newspaper,” Mills said.
So the Klan started up another daily newspaper in Centerville, the Southern Iowa American, “but it didn’t go,” Beck said. “Dad campaigned against them editorially. I remember him being a little fearful about it, but he said with the Klan, you were either for them or against them — you couldn’t be neutral — and he took a strong stand against them.”
Just this past weekend, another man named Beck made a bunch of fuss and ridiculous connections to Martin Luther King, Jr. that don’t deserve to be repeated.
You see, I’m an Iowan. I knew a conservative named Beck. His newspaper stood down the Klan. His newspaper championed a region in need of one. And his politics were reasoned, well-read — and decent.
He’s one of the greatest Iowans I’ve known.
They just don’t make Becks like they used to. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
