A good day to remember Port Beasley

Editor

link David Stevens

Port Beasley claimed he was “the scaredest man there.”

He probably wasn’t, but this is his story.

He had just finished breakfast on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when hundreds of planes began to fly into Pearl Harbor.

“Bullets hit about three feet away from us,” Beasley told a newspaper reporter in 1966. “We dug up (a) bullet with our kitchen utensils and found it was live ammunition. That’s when we realized that it wasn’t the Navy doing exercises.”

Beasley and his Army buddies attached to the 97th Coast Artillery Anti-Aircraft Unit hadn’t been in Hawaii long. They’d not yet been assigned to barracks. While their mission, he said, was to defend Pearl Harbor, “we hadn’t been issued our weapons yet.”

“If anybody tries to tell you something can’t be scared out of you,” he joked with family members the rest of his life, “they’re wrong. It can be.”

Beasley told Clovis News-Journal reporter Imogene Baumgart in 1966 that he and a friend soon found rifles and began firing at the Japanese pilots, “to keep them as high as possible.”

Beasley said one of the men he knew had broken his arm in a basketball game the night before.

“He had his rifle through his sling and was firing at the planes,” he said.

Historians tell us more than 350 Japanese fighter planes attacked the U.S. Naval base that morning, killing more than 2,000 Americans and leaving another 1,000-plus injured.

Beasley, 22 at the time, survived Pearl Harbor and went on to participate in another famous battle of World War II, D-Day in 1944.

Master Sgt. Beasley’s military career ended Oct. 7, 1945, with his honorable discharge. And then he began the life he had planned for himself.

This is the rest of his story.

A classmate from Beasley’s hometown in Stewart, Tennessee, wrote him a letter about her new job teaching school in New Mexico. The benefits and the pay, she said, were better than in Tennessee.

And so in 1948, Port and his brother Harlan packed up and moved to Clovis.

Harlan was the longtime principal at Clovis High School. Port spent 32 years educating Clovis children.

Port and his wife Winnie, unable to have children of their own, adopted a girl they called Sidna, who graduated from Clovis High in 1974 and began taking classes at Eastern New Mexico University. She’s Sidna Gee now, a pharmacist in Huffman, Texas, near Houston.

She tells us more about her dad.

z He was drafted into the military, beginning his service on June 4, 1941. One of his main jobs, she said, “was to follow (Gen. George) Patton around and make sure they had all the jeeps, tanks, and (heavy) equipment they needed.

“There was one night where they needed a jeep and didn’t have one, so they went all over Europe ... and finally found a jeep they could present in the morning because he didn’t want to make Patton mad.”

z Beasley was in the second wave of Americans to storm the beach at Normandy in June 1944. “His main focus was to get equipment to those that had crossed over, replacing equipment they had lost,” Gee said. “He did talk about all the bodies in the water.”

z Gee’s dad was one of five Beasley brothers who fought in World War II. They all made it home, but not all were unscathed.

“We don’t know what happened to Uncle Caleb,” she said. “He was missing for a while, and then he just showed up in California in a hospital. He never talked about the war. He acted like he could not remember anything.”

Her Uncle Harlan, who became the Clovis High principal, was stationed in Italy. One night a younger soldier asked Harlan if they could trade watch duties. “The kid never came back,” Gee said. “He was killed during his watch. I think that always bothered my Uncle Harlan.”

z If her dad were alive today — he died in 2011 at age 91 — he would probably rather talk about his career as an educator than his career as a soldier, Gee said.

He began teaching in Tennessee and was a girls basketball coach for a while. Brother Harlan was also a girls basketball coach in a neighboring town. Port liked to joke about the time their teams played each other.

“Uncle Harlan’s team whipped Daddy’s team pretty good,” she said. “He said he could remember people saying, ‘Well, looks like we hired the wrong Beasley.’”

Gee said her dad loved being an educator. He worked 32 years for Clovis schools, retiring in 1980 as assistant superintendent. About 1985, he and Winnie returned to his wife’s hometown of Erin, Tennessee, until Winnie’s death after 53 years of marriage. Then he went to live with his only child and her family in Texas.

“He was a very humble man,” Gee said. “He was well loved by most of the people who worked with him or for him. And I know my mother and my dad loved Clovis.”

It’s important to remember Pearl Harbor every Dec. 7.

Let’s not forget Port Beasley either.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. He can be contacted at 575-763-3431. His e-mail address is:

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