Earl Lee Beemer, Consummate Creative, is Dead at 76.
Earl Beemer, career copywriter, sire to seven, beloved of Susan, friend to a select few, signed off this Sunday, the first of September 2024, in a Blue Springs, Missouri hospice facility after a too-long extent of worldly languishment. We would like to believe he is traversing an endless stretch of road, scattered with Joshua trees, straddling a 1966 Suzuki 125, the wind forever tumbling his perpetually plentiful head of hair.
Earl, a prideful, circumstantial college dropout, was a true autodidact, his bookcases brimming with leather-bound classics and Time-Life tomes. A young man sans any significant formal education, he would forge a decades-long career as a copywriter, beginning with the truck-sales division of Management Marketing Services in Royal Oak, Michigan, and rounding out with a spell for Hallmark in Kansas City, M.O. Earl’s success in supporting a family of nine on his inherent intellect alone is a hands-down exclamation point to his existence.
Duty-bound to a 9-to-5, Earl, a frustrated artist, would seek spiritual satisfaction through ancillary endeavors of independent writing, diligent in his journal-keeping (ever scripted with a Waterford fountain pen), occasionally submitting pieces of himself for publication. He was tickled the day Highlights for Children green-lit his poem re dancing hippos. But his creative pursuits did not stop with writing. He was a photographer before modern technology made it possible to phone-in the pastime. Toiling away in a basement darkroom, Earl would amass hundreds of contact sheets—travels, strangers, kin, Susan, Susan, Susan—images that, when regarded in one sitting, detail the life of a dreamer, awash with hopes both realized and lingering. And he would continue this craft throughout the whole of his children’s childhoods, curating family albums so artful, they are fit to adorn the coffee-table of even your, the reader’s, home. Oh, and, boy, could he draw, too.
Why are we here? Because we’re here, roll the bones…
The answer for Earl would reveal itself in 1975, when he and Susan merged and set out to do life together. Over the next dozen years, and having brought one child each into the union, the two would see-in five more, and Earl would truly shine as a father to little ones. It was in the maintenance of his kid-menagerie that Earl found purpose. He made certain each birthday was celebrated with a handmade birthday crown and was earnest at playing documentarian, spending countless hours on the other side of a video camera, diligently capturing the wonderful chaos of a one-bathroom bungalow bursting with a bevy of babies. He made sure to do interviews, too. So, we will always remember that it was little Remy who nicked the stuffed owl from the market, not Thea.
Earl was master at manipulating the mundane into something magical. Some of our everyday events were zanily memorialized in The Beemer Babbler, a weekly periodical Earl penned simply for his family’s amusement. Even our punishments were an opportunity for creativity. Best Friends Day comes to mind, an afternoon of forced togetherness, handed down to whatever pair of warring siblings. And then there was Average Day, an Earl-created holiday observed on whichever August-day resultant of the average of all our birthdays. Ours was a whimsical upbringing, our extracurriculars many, the chauffeuring constant, sometimes with the top down in a Miata or Stealth, and always with one of Earl’s favorite bands, like Rush, playing just a little too loudly in the background… But usually in a big orange van, the one that would transport us to so many family-vacation destinations—the Great Smoky Mountains, Graceland, Mammoth Cave National Park, the Grand Ole Opry—the ambience during those drives, old radio shows, much to the chagrin of his kin.
Listen, like most memorable characters in literature, Earl was a complex, hard man. Strict, stubborn, certain of his opinions. The inevitability of children growing up, moving away, no longer holding fast to Dad-idolatry, meant some difficult, strained relationships for Earl in the end. I imagine it disorienting to wake one day and have no subjects over which to reign. But on his penultimate day in this lifetime, Earl’s adult brood reverted to the Daddy-adoring kids they once were, and came together to gift him the goodbye every good human deserves: one of forgiveness, gratitude, and reverence for what was. My children are incredibly, unbelievably, incomprehensibly beautiful, blue-inked inside the cover of Earl’s copy of The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine.
Earl, born on the 12th of May 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, was preceded in death by his mother Gloria, fathers Earl and JD, and brother Mark. He is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Susan (Suffy), daughters Kristin (“Dack’s” firstborn), Marni (“They’re here,” wink, wink), Erin (Peanut), Remy (Beiya), Thea (O-Bay), Kelly (Fun Bunny), and son Daniel (Fuzzy Boy), and ten grandchildren.
Because being devoured by a pride of lions is not an option available to us for Earl’s send-off (what he would have really wanted), he will be processed from this realm via a simple cremation ceremony witnessed by family. If you would like to honor Earl, maybe take a twirl through some of his musings at rickscrapsack.blogspot.com, bracing yourself for a wittiness that is one-of-a-kind. Or donate to your local library. And, at the very least, try a little tenderness. With yourself. With your loved ones.
Finally, a true tragedy is that Earl is not with us to red-pen the hell out of this obituary. And so, let’s mic-drop with some of Earl’s words:
Just imagine: Maybe all those dreams we’ve had of soaring high above the world below are, in truth, visions of what’s to come once we have “quit the dunghill.” Visions benevolently bestowed by a kind and caring God.
