Sanders County Ledger - Your Best Source For Sanders County News

40 YEARS AGO • DECEMBER 13, 1979

RELAXING IS FULL-TIME JOB

FOR EX-TEACHER

Lillian Beamish is the only woman mayor that Plains has ever had. Retired from school teaching in 1971, Lillian lives in Thompson Falls, where she moved in 1958. She says her two-year stint at mayor in the mid-50s was largely uneventful, except that she nearly got thrown in jail for trying to save some property.

The Clark Fork River was attempting to consume a residential area directly opposite the fairgrounds. The fairgrounds side had already been rip rapped by the county, but the county attorney determined that for the City of Plains to take action against the river would be illegal.

Lillian said, “Okay, I’ll go to jail.”

She conferred with the City Council, local businessmen and bankers, then went ahead with the rip rapping, buttressing the bank with old cars, rocks, anything with weight. She says the job was somewhat unprofessional, but it worked and is still working. And no one got locked up over the matter.

Lillian grew up in Butte. She was to be a teacher; that was already decided. But college was made impossible by the death of her mother. There were younger children to care for and Lillian was the only one able to do it. So she took the fifth year “normal” course offered at the high school and cleaned house for $13 a month.

A little school at Rock Creek in Granite County was the first place Lillian taught. It was a remote area, 30 miles of difficult traveling to the nearest town, and the children were very shy.

That schoolhouse is gone now, and so is the Lynch Creek School above Plains, where Lillian came to teach in 1925. A couple of years later she married a Lynch Creek farmer, Robert Beamish, and retired from teaching for the first time. She and Robert raised three children and a large orchard that had “every kind of apple made.” One daughter, Joyce Bybee, now lives next door to her mother in Thompson Falls.

When World War II began in 1941, Lillian took up teaching again, this time in Paradise. While her husband was in Alaska building military installations, Lillian taught the fourth, fifth and sixth graders, all at once.

There are certain advantages in going to school in the same room with other grades, Lillian says. Kids who come from such a situation are “smarter,” because they answered sixth grade questions when they were fourth graders, and during the time they were getting to be sixth graders they were getting reviews of the fourth and fifth grades. By the time they got out of that room they “had it all down pat.”

In the 1940s Lillian also served a stint as postmaster at Plains, and worked awhile in the grocery department at McGowan’s. That was before customers had their run of the aisles, back when clerks fetched and sometimes delivered items on the lists. These days stores couldn’t operate that way – they’d have to have 50 clerks.

Always a “doer,” Lillian started the first boy’s 4-H group in Plains and chaperoned many youth activities.

Lillian could have taught longer than 1971, but she figured it was a good time to quit. For one thing, the trend in teaching was against strict discipline, and Lillian considers her teaching philosophy disciplinarian. “Tet your scare in first,” she says, “then be a friend, but keep order.”

In Lillian’s classroom there were often children sitting on the floor or standing up, because sitting in one position is very uncomfortable for an active child. But they were all studying.

Another reason for leaving the classroom was because Lillian figured it was time to relax a little. And how does she relax? Well, by presiding over the Sanders County Council on Aging and by scribing for the Over 50 Club and her Rebekahs chapter…and by participating in Homemakers and Delta Kappa Gamma. And then there’s bowling twice a week and pinochle and bridge.

And when all the relaxation gets to her, she retreats to an immense flower garden which doesn’t have a bare spot in it.

Good luck with her garden, despite a round or two with the yellow jackets last summer, has also been good luck for Sanders County because Lillian has managed the horticultural building at the county fair the past two years. Relaxing, it seems, is a full time occupation.