news-record.com

Everyone knows the calm voice of an airline pilot with an airplane in distress.

Bill Beerman had that coolness under fire.

A reporter called him a month ago to ask him about old Lindley Field, now Piedmont Triad International Airport, where Beerman learned to fly in the early 1940s.

It turned out that Beerman had been transferred from his independent living quarters at Well Spring retirement community to the rehabilitation section.

Beerman was taken there to die. He had cancer. He died Sept. 9 at 89.

He would not have been blamed as a dying man for lacking the energy to talk about old times at Lindley Field. But his voice sounded strong, his mind alert.

He had an immediate answer to whether Lindley Field had a rifle range when the Army Air Corps opened an installation there in 1942.

Absolutely not, Beerman said.

He was usually at the airport when he wasn’t working as a reporter for what’s now the News & Record. He learned to fly under an Army program for civilians at Lindley Field.

Soon afterward, Beerman joined the Marine Corps, where he became an aviator in the South Pacific. He shot down two Japanese fighter planes and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He then came home, resuming his newspaper reporting before leaving in the late 1940s to become a public relations man for Burlington Industries, retiring in 1982.

Once a Marine always a Marine, and Beerman was always “Semper Fi.” He joined the Black Cap Club, veterans who meet occasionally to swap war stories.

Just as he couldn’t let go of the Marines, Beerman couldn’t kick the newspaper writing habit. He or the late Chub Seawall might hold the record for the most letters to the editor.

Once a month, readers could count on a Beerman letter. He would have written more but the newspaper limits a person to one letter a month. He would have written longer but there’s a limitation on length, too.

You could hear his sigh when he wrote in 2008: “So much to say, so little space.”

He was a conservative but liked to call himself a man with an “objective bias.”

In a letter on illegal immigration, he said, “Do it legally or go to jail’’ and, with tongue in check, he called for a “co-presidency’’ of Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, who Beerman said “would lead the nation out of the wilderness.”

Yet, in several letters he was nice to Barack Obama. Beerman praised Obama’s efficient campaign and he liked the way Obama handled the controversy over the inflammatory remarks by his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

His approach was to give a personal statement that transcended the politics, race, religion and divisiveness that separate us today, Beerman said of Obama.

Realizing he had a style that could cut through current affairs and public habits with sarcasm as sharp as scissors, Beerman wrote a New Year’s letter pledging to tone down the “bah humbug attitude at looking at things.”

But he couldn’t. In one letter about pet peeves, he made them sound as if it they really didn’t irritate him.

“It’s OK. Pass me going full speed ahead, cell phone in hand, no turn signal.”

It’s a cliche to call World War II veterans “the greatest generation.” But Beerman was who Tom Brokaw had in mind in his book, “The Greatest Generation.” Beerman endured the Depression, fought a war and afterward resumed his life as if nothing happened.

He gave up tennis and golf two years ago, but remained active in the community until he suffered a stroke in January. His cancer was diagnosed in May.

With that calmness of a pilot, a week before his death he telephoned family members and asked those close by to come to his room.

“He said goodbye to all of us,” says son Bob Beerman. “He was very strong until the end.”

Less than a week after the 2008 election, Beerman wrote in one of his final letters, “Congratulations to the winner. You campaigned well. It remains to be see if you can govern. We conservatives will continue to make our voices heard.”

Wanted: an objectively biased conservative writer to replace Bill Beerman.

A Marine Corps veteran preferred.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net