Saturday September 8, 2007  11:41pm
 
   I got home from work late tonight and my little six pound friend Lucius had finally died. Lucius was a pedigree sphinx, a rare hairless cat. He was seventeen years old. For the past two months his health was in a long slow spiraling state of decline. Every time he seemed to be reaching the End, another one of his nine lives would show up at the door with luggage, move in, and reanimate him. Time and again it filled me with a renewed hope for his recovery.
   Lucius, like all cats, loved to be in the warm sunlight.  Many years ago I made him a small private patio outside a southern window overlooking our backyard garden. On sunny days, with the air scented from the nearby jasmine, honeysuckle, and lemon blossoms, he would spend the whole day out on his patio, much of the time sleeping under a towel.  And many times, while he lay hidden under the towel, I was amused to see slight movements going on beneath, showing me that that he wasn’t sleeping. . . he was ‘watching the birds’ by following their sounds of flight and song, even though he couldn’t see them through the fabric.
   I’ll bury him tomorrow in that backyard garden filled with lively birds, bright flowers, cedar, lemon, and redwood trees. As his burial shroud, I’ve wrapped him with proper dignity in an old San Francisco flag.  Placing him in the middle of the flag, his body covering the body of the Phoenix, he’s acquired for a moment, the wings of that unique, mystical bird. . . the mythological creature that symbolizes so perfectly, the remarkable history of San Francisco beginning with the epic California Gold Rush.  Into those folded Phoenix wings, Lucius will now rest in the gentle peace of our lush and sunny backyard garden.  
   As a kitten he was given the very distinguished name of. . . Lucius Beebe.   

Lucius Morris Beebe (December 9, 1902 – February 4, 1966), was an American author, gourmand, photographer, railroad historian, journalist, and syndicated columnist.
Lucius Beebe as a writer was qualified both by temperament and experience to write about magnificoes and money. A descendent of a family of Bostonians prominent in banking in mercantile circles for three generations, he was a member of the editorial staff of the New York Herald Tribune in the days when its members numbered Stanley Walker, Henry Cabot Lodge, Alva Johnson, Percy Hammond, W.O.McGeehan, and Virgil Thomson. During much of this time his syndicated column This New York was a nationally read mirror of expensive things and people in the voluptuary attitudes of metropolis. Leaving New York in 1950 “because it was getting soup stains on his boiled shirt front,” he and his partner, Charles Clegg reactivated Mark Twain’s newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, which was their home at that time. In the 60’s he became a member of the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle where his editorial page column This Wild West took up where his This New York left off.   Lucius Beebe and his life-partner Charles Clegg were inseparable, developing a personal and professional relationship that continued until the end of Beebe's life. By the standards of the era, the homosexual relationship Beebe and Clegg shared was relatively open and well-known.  Beebe authored over thirty books during his lifetime, approximately half of which were in collaboration with Clegg. Almost all of their books are in the field of railroading and Western Americana.  It is likely that Clegg's contributions were primarily photographic in nature; his images were known for an expressive quality that helped broaden the artistic scope of railroad photography. The library of photographs produced by Clegg and Beebe are now in the collections of the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Beebe and Clegg lived in San Francisco (with T-Bone, their 300 pound Saint Bernard),  from 1961 until Beebe’s death of a heart attack in 1966. Clegg committed suicide in 1979 , on the day that he reached the precise age at which Beebe had died.

Some portions of my text above were respectfully taken from, Lucius Beebe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and, the dust-jacket cover of  The BIG SPENDERS by Lucius Beebe, published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in 1966.  For photographs of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, and for more information on these interesting, important, and colorful individuals, who as a couple, contributed so much to the literary and photographic world of the  American West, and America’s Railroad History, I recommend you visit these sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Beebe  
http://www.library.unr.edu/friends/hallfame/beebe.html
http://www.wakefieldlibrary.org/zbeebe.htm

 

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