Daniel Nolan Bean
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On October 8, 1941, Daniel Nolan Bean was born to Carl and Willa Maude (nee Casto) Bean. He was the fifth of ten children and third of six boys. Dan was born in the family house in Erbacon, West Virginia, as were most of his siblings.
Dan graduated from Cowen High School in 1960. He attended Morris Harvey College (now the University of Charleston) in Charleston, WV. He completed his Bachelor's of Arts and Education degree in 1964. Upon completion of his bachelor's, he began teaching at Webster Springs High School. Continuing his education during evenings and summers, he obtained his master's degree from West Virginia University in 1968. In the fall of 1968, he became the principal at Cowen High School. In the fall of 1973, Cowen High School and Webster Springs High School merged to become Webster County High School. Dan remained the principal until he retired in 1997.
Dan married Linda Joyce Holcomb in Cowen, West Virginia on December 26, 1964 at Joyce's mother's house. They moved to Cowen in 1965 and bought a house. They still live there (though he has managed to make many improvements over the years). In 1971, Dan and Joyce adopted the first of two girls, Jenn. Sarah was adopted three years later. Their only grandchild, Luke, was born in 2005.
To pass the time, Dan enjoys playing music on various instruments. He also loves woodworking of any kind, especially making guns. He enjoys hunting, fishing and the occasional game of golf. Dan is mostly liberal in his political views. He and his wife live comfortably on their teachers' retirement. Dan is my father-in-law.
As far back as you can go.
As far back as I can go…I remember growing up in a family of older brothers and sisters mostly and I remember being home alone when the older ones were in school during the day and I spent most of my time wondering around on the hillsides next to the farm, doing whatever kids do that takes up their time. Playing around a lot. I also remember having to walk by a bull-lot on my way to school. I walked a little more than half a mile back and forth to school. Walking to school, I always got to watch the bull rake the ground with his horns, attack the fence, and whatever else…I remember it. The whole idea of a bull being that close was terrifying, even though he was behind a fence. I had to actually walk in a creek bed for about, oh, two or three hundred yards on my way to school. I also had to pass a house that had a family of older kids that like to pick on me and my slightly older brother. They were considerably older. They lived us a hard life. On the way to school and on the way back from school, there must have been a total of twenty students or thereabouts in the school and it was way back in the sticks. At that time, the teachers we had, mostly, were probably not even qualified teachers. You'd go to school in the morning and most of the day was just pandemonium in the school.
And, uh, we lived there until I was in the third grade. We moved out of that hollow when I was part way through the third grade. If I hadn't moved out of there, I probably couldn't hardly read.
That was in Erbacon?
It was near Erbacon. There were at one time, more than a hundred schools in that county because there was no transportation. When I was in school, grade school, buses didn't run to haul kids to school. You walked or you didn't go. So the whole county (Webster County), which isn't a very big county, had a little over a hundred grade schools at the time. And you can imagine what it would have been like to try to staff teachers in that many schools in the 1940s. Very difficult to do. So even as late as the time I was in high school, high school graduates were being hired to go out and teach in those little grade schools with no further training at all. And, uh, the qualified teachers in the state were, had a very minimal amount of college education and would be awarded what they then called a "Standard Normal Teaching Certificate". You probably had to go to college for a summer to get a "Standard Normal" or something like that. Everybody went to a little teachers' college, which is Glenville State College in West Virginia at the time. So, education was on a fairly low level at the time, but I count it one of my most lucky moves when we came out of the hollow from White Oak Run school to the Erbacon school. The Erbacon school was actually very advanced. It had two classrooms (big smile) instead of one. Also had two teachers who were probably among the more qualified teachers in the county, so from that point on, things got better.
I was interested in the normal games that kids usually are. The softball games, and, uh, volleyball and…I actually never handled a basketball till I was in high school. We played a little football, touch football. So…I haven't thought much about those memories in a good many years and I'm sure if I took time to think hard about it, I'd think of things in my early childhood that stood out more. For the most part, I guess, just my, my place in the scheme of things, I was fairly good at the sports that we played. Fairly good at most other things. I was certainly among some of the poorest students in terms of what I had and what I didn't have, the clothes I wore and the money I could have in my pocket, which was essentially none. But, there was a lot of work in my childhood. We…I…From the time I could, I had to hoe corn, take care of animals. We always had a couple of cows and a horse. The one thing I never learned to do was milk. My…everyone else in my family had to milk. The older ones could milk a cow. I never learned to do that, and I never wanted to (laugh). I can remember my mother sitting on a milking stool and squirting milk to the cats that gathered around from time to time as she milked. She could just make the milk fly out of that old cow, but I could never do that. That's something that is, evidently, a learned skill. We used to build a fire in a coffee can, or something like a coffee can, in order to get the smoke off that fire over us to keep the gnats off when we were around where the milking was going on. You had to have something to keep the gnats off you.
What kind of education was achieved by your parents and your siblings?
My parents had eighth grade educations, which was probably equivalent to most high school educations, would be my guess today. My mother was very articulate, and she knew about as much math as you would learn in most high school educations. Well, not the more advanced ones like, for instance, she wouldn't have understood trigonometry, but she knew quite a bit of math. She could spell anything. She was an excellent speller. They used to use…what was it they called…I know they used a McGuffey Reader's Series, which was pretty tough. If you get it and look at it, you would certainly see that it's equivalent to the difficulty level you would see in high school today. That's what they used in grade schools. I have an older brother and an older sister who never finished high school. In fact, I have, I guess, two older sisters who didn't finish high school. Then every else in the family did. There were ten of us, except for Kimmy. Everyone else finished high school. But the three older ones did not, probably because we were still in the White Oak school where I was explaining the quality of education to you a little while ago. At the time they should have gone to high school, that's where they were, back in that hollow.
My dad worked away a lot of the time. He would be gone for, always gone through the week, because he didn't have a car. If he'd had a car, he couldn't have gotten it to where we lived about three quarters of the time. But, uh, he worked in timbering and coal mining and normally stayed in either a log camp or a coal camp during the week, and would come home on weekends. And sometimes he couldn't get home on weekends. In winter time, it was difficult to get in there, even from where the train came, because it was about two and a half miles or something like that to where he could have gotten a train. And I can remember snows that were, I remember one snow that was four feet deep. I remember him trying to get home in that. Some of the neighbors helping him break a road part of the way so he could get home. You walk, you walk two miles in four foot snow and you…that's very difficult to do. But anyway…we didn't have transportation. There was no…students were not transported. It would have been almost impossible for them to walk out of there every day and go to Cowan, which was the place of the high school at the time. In fact, when I was in high school, which was from 1955 to 1960 when I graduated, a good friend of mine was a girl who walked across a mountain and down that two mile stretch to catch the bus. Every day. And the mountain she walked across was a tall mountain. It took some walking to get across that thing. She would come down, walk to Erbacon, catch the bus, ride to Cowen, come back, get off the bus, walk in…had to be dark long before she got there. And she did that for at least two years. The last two years I think she, she lived with some relative or friend or someone in the, in the high school area. I also remember she lived in Camp Run. Camp Run is across the mountain from Erbacon, farther away from the bus stop. Camp Run, if you go in…the road that exists into Camp Run, at that time you probably couldn't have taken a vehicle across the road, you can now, but it's about a twelve mile run down to get, follow the road down to Camp Run. There was a school in Camp Run. The only family in the school was the family she belonged to. Only the kids from the one family were in the school. But there was no transportation for them and the state had to provide them an education, so they hired a teacher who would rent a horse on the main road, ride the horse in on Sunday, stay through the week with that family, come back out at the end of the week on his horse, leave his horse at the farm where he rented it, and then he would go and do whatever he did on the weekends. That was the…I was in high school when this was happening. Of course the school is long closed down now. There are really only…there are, now there are three grade, elementary schools in the county. And one high school.
What attitudes do you remember as a child towards minorities in your school, or were there minorities in the school?
As far as we knew, there were no minorities in the state. Minority was a word we wouldn't have understood that far back because we were all native Appalachian kids. Those didn't tend to be minorities. There were in fact people there who lived there that I knew growing up that came from Germany, particularly. But, and the older members of the family really never did speak very good English, but as kids, we were never around them. And the kids grew up speaking like everybody else, so there were really no minorities. I suspect that we had enough exposure to what was happening to the outside world that we would have still used the words to describe blacks that were common words at the time. But we didn't, other that use names that would be offensive now…to us, they weren't because we didn't know the difference and never heard anything different. Other than that, there probably was no racial prejudice because we didn't have anyone to be prejudiced against. There was no one there. We're still talking my childhood, right?
yes…well…up into high school and even once you got to Charleston, to college. As it progressed, the differences that were noticeable.
I've always felt that prejudice, racial prejudice, develops if you live with minority groups. If you don't live with minority groups near you, you don't develop those prejudices, to the extent that you really think that somebody is unequal to you. In high school, we had no blacks. We actually had…a good friend of mine…I'm sure had Negro blood because he had the physical characteristics that now I would recognize as being a racial characteristic. At the time, I didn't. And he was one of the most popular kids in school, by the way, through high school. Excellent football player, baseball…whatever. And there were no blacks in my high school (as principal). There were also no Hispanics. No one from any other racial group really. We were very homogeneous, as you are apt to find in Appalachia, I think, back in the hollows. Because there was no real reason for people to emigrate from another place to go into Webster County. I mean, why would you go there? There certainly were not opportunities there that you would be looking for. In college, strangely enough, I was in a small, private college. We had very few blacks there. The blacks who did come to the college were probably part-time students more than anything else. So they were there part of the time, but, for instance, there were no blacks in my dorm. And I never had any black friends because I was never, they were never around long enough. I don't personally feel like I considered blacks to be beneath me…I mean, you can't get much lower than somebody coming out of the hills in middle West Virginia, anyway…how can you consider anybody to be beneath you when you're already some of the poorest people in the world? You know…so…race at that time wasn't an issue. I think it became, for me, it was not an issue. And, by the way, if you went back to that county now, you might find in the whole county, a dozen black people. You wouldn't find more than that. You might also find that many Hispanics. And they're of very recent origin, in terms that they've only, there have only been Hispanics in the county, to my knowledge, probably within the last three or four years. When I was principal of the high school there, we never had any. We didn't and I was always grateful that I never had a racial problem. As an administrator of a high school…before then, it wouldn't made any difference to me whether we had minority groups or not. But watching some of the racial strife that occurred in other areas, I was always grateful that I never had to deal with that, because I wouldn't have known how.
What were the attitudes of you, and the area , of the things like Dr. King's "I have a Dream" speech?
I of course can't speak for everybody else, but I always admired Martin Luther King and what he was doing. I always admired the blacks in the South for standing up to what had been horrendous prejudice down through all those years. I guess my attitudes towards that were formed by the media, and maybe the only part I saw of what was happening racially in the South came from different media sources, most of whom were probably impressed with Martin Luther King and what they were doing. And that's probably how my attitudes about that formed. I think that's true of the people that I know and knew. In general in West Virginia, we're probably considered southern. On the other hand, there's no way the prejudice in West Virginia could possibly be compared with what happened in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
The first real prejudice among friends that I ran into was probably from friends in the very southern counties of West Virginia and the northeastern counties of Kentucky. And I did know some of those people and associated with them, fished with them, hunted with them and what-not as I was in college. And they were pretty strongly prejudiced, against blacks particularly. But people where I grew up in central West Virginia were not.
What was your reaction when Dr. King was assassinated?
I guess I would have predicted it. I suppose I would have predicted that. I can't say I was surprised. I was certainly disappointed. Not as much as I would have been if I had been one of his immediate followers, but…sadness…along the same lines of what I felt when (John F.) Kennedy was killed. In fact, I've always kind of linked those in my mind, and I think many people have. But I would have predicted that. I suspect Dr. King would have also predicted that. Because he was in a real hotbed of people who were totally illogical with regard to the way they looked at life in the first place. And very hostile. And, of course, when you have a lot of hostile people, many of whom are probably as "countrified" as I grew up, who carried a gun in the woods all the time and hunted all the time, the idea of killing somebody who was such a threat to your way of life, is entirely predictable, I think. I don't really think that there is any way that kind of a public figure could be protected or protect himself from that kind of danger. Certainly, I think people that generated the kind of hate toward Dr. King that ended up with him being killed, failed to meet the end they were after. Dr. King's affect was already there and could not be undone, and will never be undone.
What were the biggest issues of the period that you saw once you got into your teaching and administrating, right out of college time-frame?
Social issues?
Social and world.
Vietnam War, certainly. When I got, when I graduated from college, the buildup of American troops in Vietnam was really just beginning. While I was in college, probably my senior year was the only time I thought much about Vietnam. It was a small conflict and with all my studies and everything else I was involved in, it didn't take up a lot of my time to think about it. And I think that's true of maybe most people who weren't immediately under the gun to be drafted, which I wasn't because at the time, people who were in education, as I was, if they came out of college and were teaching, could pretty well count on deferral. Of course, college students were all deferred too. So you weren't threatened with being drafted until you got out of college. I wasn't threatened anyway because I was going into education. I knew that I would get a deferment. So I really hadn't thought much about it when I was in college, but surely thereafter, the number of people who were being drafted was, went up by leaps and bounds. Being in a small community, I never actually knew that many people who got drafted. Of course, I was aware of what was happening in the state and in the country. The draft was really going full steam at that time. A lot of people were heading to Canada to keep from being drafted and college students were really getting up in arms. There was a lot of protesting going on college campuses. That was a big thing and a big social issue that took everybody's attention from…I remember Kent State very well and the upset that it caused all across the country. But strangely enough, well…maybe not strangely, people isolated back in the hills of West Virginia were, would never have protested the Vietnam War. They would have been part of the very conservative part of the country that felt like "Well"…the main complaint you would have heard there was "here we are over there fighting a war and we are telling our soldiers they can't do this and they can't do that, people, North Vietnamese are staging back in Cambodia, and we can't go over there and do anything about it…we should be bombing Cambodia and we should be…" The feeling being, if you're going to go to war, it should be all out war until it's over with and done with and then we won't have to worry about it anymore. The idea of limited war, I think to most of the people that I knew, was a no-brainer. You just didn't…that didn't make any sense at all. If you were going to go to war, you should go to it with everything you have and get it over with. If you've got an aim, you go ahead and meet the aim. As things wore on, I think most of the people I knew and certainly I felt that we shouldn't have been in Vietnam to start with and we should get out of there and leave those people to run their own countries. Which, of course, we did and of course, it ended up with the killing fields and all that. Predictably so. Very much like what will happen in Iraq if and when we come out of there. They will fight and kill each other, which we're probably not in any position to change anyway. But anyway…Vietnam was a big thing for the first few years when I was in education and I did know a few students who were killed there. Knew them as students. Not as friends. Just people that I knew that were actually killed in Vietnam. I suppose that was the biggest issue at the time.
Did you see any kind of overshadowing of the Vietnam War onto, maybe in place of, the civil rights movement? Would things that Dr. King was trying to do have been more effective if there wasn't a distraction halfway across the world?
I don't think so. I would guess that that distraction would have helped Dr. King's aims. I don't know that it did, but I think it very well could have and I think it may very well have played a part in it because, historically, the people who go and actually put on the uniform and go out there and fight are the poor people. And Dr. King was fighting for poor people. Where do you…you can't get poorer than southern blacks. I mean, you can get as poor if you come from central Appalachia (laughs), but not poorer. And so the group of people whose rights he was defending are the same people who were probably getting killed over there in Vietnam, or a lot of them were. So I would expect that this, the families of those people, the friends of those people, people in the same social classes as those people, would have been fired up even more because their own kind were in Vietnam being killed. So Dr. King would've probably had been received even stronger because of that. And you add that to the whole racial thing…and so it probably to him, would have been of some use, helpful.
Kind of a "I can't date your daughter, but I can go die with your son" mentality?
Something like that. I suppose those things are all wound together. And the fact that we no longer have a draft, and at least people have some choice as to whether they go or don't go. I know from personal experience that the draft boards in the local areas were not entirely unbiased when it came to who did they draft and who got the exemptions. But that changed along with a lot of the rights that people achieved, I think. That was one of the rights. You can't gather me up and decide as a little group of local merchants that you're going to send me somewhere to get shot.
In your administration days, did you see any form of prejudice towards, say, the poor? Was there a group that stood out as oppressed compared to the rest?
Oh…absolutely. One of the worst things about high schools, and elementary schools obviously, although that's not where my experience lies, socially, kids that come from poor families never have a chance to fit in. They are set aside by the more affluent kids and they're kept there. If kids from a poor family, if a student from a poor family becomes, for instance, an exceptional football player, he's popular while he's in school, but only because he plays football. Other than that, he doesn't belong to the top group. Now the kids display that in their dress, they display that in other ways currently, for instance, in the area where I was going to school, kids from affluent families would be driving their cars back and forth to school. The kids that are poor, of course, are the ones that are on the buses. In the school, when you go to the cafeteria, you'll see the kids associating with kids in their same social group. And those upper-level income kids will all be together and they will exclude anyone who doesn't fit that mold. And this use of clothing and spending money to put everybody else down is a real burr under my saddle. I've always hated to see that. I certainly didn't find a way around it. I would be 100% for uniforms at schools for that reason. 100%. Because kids who have to dress poorer than other kids will never be accepted in that upper level, never. It's a pecking order that is very difficult to get into. For instance, there are few businesses, as you know, in the area where I was principal. If students wanted class rings at the time when I was there, they had to buy them from a ring representative. So he would come in each year and I would say, "Well, we're going to have competitive presentations to class officers and representatives they select. Whoever has the best buys gets the ring business." And everybody buys from that person. I would put the junior class together. Class rings were bought as juniors. I would put the junior class together and I would say, "Look. The design of the class ring is standard. Everybody gets the same design. This salesman will offer you all kinds of extras. Those extras cost a lot of money and they don't mean anything. Your parents don't need to spend all that extra money. Buy the ring that is the best buy. Your parents are not here to make the decision for you. Save them whatever money you can. Buy a ring that is a school class ring. Half of you will lose them anyway. Ten years from now they won't mean anything to you. Don't buy the most expensive things he wants to give you." Maybe somebody in the class appreciated that. On the other hand, those kids on the upper level, they don't appreciate that at all. You know, their opinion is "What's it any of the principal's business how much money I spend?" And they will buy all the little extras, which is another way of demonstrating to everybody else "I'm better than you are." So, I tried in every way that I could, in every opportunity that I could, to equalize kids on the basis of the fact that they were all high school students, all at the same class level, all headed for graduation, but they will, those kids in the upper level will resist that in every way they can in order to show that they are better than the kids below them. It is a pernicious kind of problem that I certainly didn't solve and I don't foresee anybody else solving. Poor kids were certainly…they were the minority. They took the place of racial minorities. They were just as much outside the mainstream as a group of blacks or Hispanics or Asians or anyone else would have been as a group. I could always tell who were the drug users. That is the cheap drug users. I could not always tell who might be using something like cocaine. But I could tell who the marijuana smokers were because they were always together. And they were in general, outside the mainstream. I suspect because the upper level kids were using something more advanced. I don't know that. By the way, you might be interested in knowing, when I was in college, I never saw marijuana. I still have not ever smoked a marijuana cigarette. I've always wondered what effect you'd get from it. I always used to collect the marijuana from the kids in high school. There was a police station right nearby. I would pass it off to the, always to the police station. But when I was in college, I never saw a drug different, other than, I did know kids that took caffeine pills to try to stay awake long enough to try to do their exams, but other than that, I never saw any kind of drug use. Alcohol, of course, was there. And during the first half of my time as a teacher and administrator, I never saw drugs. In Appalachia and in our region, we got all the problems that everybody else in society got, but they always came later. So, if marijuana use became rampant on college campuses, we would get it, but it would probably be ten years later, or at least five. So, the last, oh, ten years of my experience as a principal, it wasn't that uncommon to take some marijuana from kids, but it's the only drug I ever saw. Well…that's not exactly true. I saw kids with Quaaludes a time or two and took them from them. But there wasn't a lot of drug use. But the marijuana use was probably fairly widespread. In fact, I understand that Webster County has a fairly good trade in marijuana crops now, but I've been in the woods as a hunter all over the county and I've never run into any of it yet. So, I don't know where they are growing it.
What is your opinion about, towards society's attitude towards the whole advancement of treatment or setback, if that's your take, of minorities in mainstream America and the view overall?
Well…in general, I am certainly in favor of equalizing the rights of people, no matter what minority they might belong to. The fact is that, now I think, over most of our country, it's difficult to pick out who the minority is because they're now…we're such a mixture that there is really no small minority in this country. And I think for prejudice to have a whole lot of effect, the minority has to be an actual, honest to God minority. In this day and time, while in certain areas, there are small minorities, nationwide, I think minorities almost no longer exist because there are so many, for instance, blacks are no longer scarce enough to be a minority. Same is true of Hispanics. And, in general, we're growing toward a time when most racial prejudice will disappear because nothing we do, either individually or as a government, will prevent mixture of different races of people. So races will mix, they will inter-marry. Kids will be just American kids, no matter what their racial background. And I don't think anyone exists who can really prevent that from happening, so, all we're really talking about until we come to a time where there is total and complete equity among races is time. Eventually it will happen. No matter who doesn't like it. No matter what is done to try to prevent it, it's just a matter of time until there are, at least in this country, no racial minorities. And I guess that comes with the mobility of the population. The ability of people to move from area to area or even country to country. It's too easy to go from place to place now for minorities to remain isolated.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
About racial things or?
Yes, or anything in general, or on-topic, off-topic.
Well, I might tell you this topic. Being the only member of my family ever to have gone beyond high school education, I never have been, I never since have been a complete member of the family because I'm a black sheep. And Joyce is the same way. From her family, she's the only one who went to college. And since I've stopped, since I retired, most of my contacts have not been, as they once were, with college educated people. While I was working every day, I was talking to and brushing shoulders with people, who like me, had master's degrees and beyond and knew and actually read the daily paper and got a few magazines and listened to the news. Since I retired, I've begun to lose a lot of my vocabulary. I still read the papers and watch the news and try to keep up on things. And some of my contacts are with people educated, but more are not with educated people. I don't think anyone else in my community around where we live, the neighbors, uh…one of them is college educated. Well, one family. He and his wife. But everybody else around is not. You either use it or you lose it. You know. So I'm getting to the point where I'm regressing, I think. Back into Central Appalachia. And everybody in my family looks at me a little askance because they're not sure what I think about what's being said.
Well, you do have a nephew that's a rather well respected lawyer.
Yes, indeed. But I don't see him very often. Yeah, the younger generation…there's some education there, and especially in special fields. I've got a couple of nephews, one is a very accomplished CPA, works for Columbia Gas. One of them is a mining engineer. One is, of course, the attorney you just mentioned. So the younger…and one owns a store and she has a college education. She lives in Kentucky. So, yeah, there's education in the upcoming generation.
And both your daughters are past bachelor's.
Right. So I feel like the family in general, is sort of moving up in the world, but I'm regressing, none-the-less.
Google Maps for Erbacon, WV. Map of Erbacon, West Virginia area.
Morris Harvey College. History of Morris Harvey College in Charleston, West Virginia.
West Virginia University. Official website for West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV.
CivilRights.org. The Civil Rights Coalition for the 21st Century. Website providing up to date information on the fight for civil rights for all Americans.
McGuffey Readers. Noblemind.com - image and explanation of the McGuffey Readers Series.
Censusscope.org. Chart of racial make-up of Webster County, West Virginia as determined by the 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Censuses.
Photographs on this website were provided by Dan Bean and Jenn Hunter.
Dan has compiled many photos to cd and shared with his family. We searched through these to select the photos seen.