Beulah Grahm

1890s–1900s

Born 26 September 1897 at home in Fort Morgan, Colorado, to Charles Jay Grahm and Annie Frances Brown, one of seven children, and went to grade school there.

1910s

Moved with her family in 1910 to Fox Island on Puget Sound. Worked for her room and board in Tacoma to attend high school, graduated from Stadium High School in 1917, and entered the State Normal School in Bellingham. Began teaching in 1919 at Forks.

1920s–1930s

Taught at Joyce and Port Angeles, where she met Ed Loomis. Graduated from the Normal School and married Ed in August 1922, and about a year later went camping with him in Yellowstone. Daughter Patricia was born in Port Angeles in 1926 and Jean about 1931, and in 1934 the family moved to West Seattle.

1940s–1950s

Kept house and garden in West Seattle and later Manchester, volunteered with the PTA and the Camp Fire Girls, and began traveling widely with Ed, including a three-week drive around the West in 1953.

1960s

Lived on North Hawthorne Street in Tacoma, where she belonged to the Tillers & Toilers Garden Club, wintered in a trailer in the Southwest, and sailed to Jamaica. Died in Tacoma on 1 November 1969.

A Colorado Girlhood

Beulah Grahm was born on September 26, 1897, at home in Fort Morgan, Colorado, the daughter of Charles Jay Grahm and Annie Frances Brown. She grew up with her brother Ralph and sisters Gladys, Ethel, and Fern, and a younger brother, Clarence, who died of heart trouble after rheumatic fever at thirteen. In 1910 the family moved to Washington to be near her mother's parents. Beulah's father stayed behind in Colorado until he could sell his livery stable, while the rest of the family went ahead by train to Tacoma and then by boat to her grandparents' place at Joe's Bay. The children were thrilled by the boat, though their mother wouldn't let them near the railing, and they loved the beach and the bin of apples in their grandparents' cellar.

The family settled on Fox Island, and to go to high school Beulah lived with families in Tacoma during the school year, working for her room and board. She graduated from Stadium High School in 1917 and that September entered the State Normal School in Bellingham to train as a teacher. For a time the family kept a horse, Lucy, that they rode to the ferry.

The Schoolteacher

Beulah's first teaching job, in 1919, was at Forks, on the far west side of the Olympic Peninsula, and she had to ride a horse over a trail to get there. She also taught at Joyce and at Port Angeles, and it was in Port Angeles that she met Ed Loomis. She went back to Bellingham to finish her training, and in August 1922 she helped run a children's Community Circus Day, with a parade down Holly Street, admission at two cents, and pink lemonade at a penny a cup. She graduated from the Normal School on August 18, 1922, and eight days later, on August 26, she and Ed were married at the Church of the Holy Communion in Tacoma. In 1924 the Normal School granted her a life diploma, noting her special preparation to teach grades three through six, and she also took courses at the College of Puget Sound. After her marriage, though, she did not work outside the home.

Home, Garden, and Family

The Loomises lived in Port Angeles, where Patricia was born in 1926; Jean followed about 1931, and in 1934 the family moved to West Seattle. Beulah's own sister Fern was among the teachers who inspired Patricia to teach. In 1940 Beulah was a hostess for the Jefferson School PTA and won its prize for the best backyard playground, and she served on the awards committee of the local Camp Fire Girls. In 1947 she spent the afternoon of May 30 sewing Jean's maid-of-honor dress for Patricia's wedding, only to have Ed phone at four o'clock to announce he was bringing home twelve crabs and a General Petroleum executive for dinner; she and Patricia had the house cleaned, the guests invited, and the table set by eight. One of her standbys in those years was a dessert of lemon Jell-O, graham crackers, condensed milk, and crushed pineapple. One Christmas Eve in the mid-1920s the family gathered at her parents' house on Fox Island, where they lit real candles on the tree and watched them carefully all evening, and in later years she and her sisters Gladys, Ethel, and Fern gathered for birthday lunches and card games.

A granddaughter remembered her as "a quiet artistic woman who liked harmony and beauty around her." She loved handicrafts, gardening, and baking; she taught that granddaughter to knit and embroider and gave her the family banana bread recipe. She was an early believer in organic gardening, with a carrot juicer in the kitchen and fish buried under the corn for fertilizer. In 1954 she took a photography class and went to Seward Park to photograph the cherry blossoms. At the house she and Ed built on the water at Manchester she had apple and pear trees, and at their last home, on North Hawthorne Street in Tacoma, she grew irises, geraniums, and the Peace roses Ed bought with birthday money from Patricia; she was also known for her giant lilies and calla lilies. From 1963 she was a member of the Tillers & Toilers Garden Club of Tacoma, helping host its meetings and workshops.

Travels and Last Years

Beulah and Ed traveled widely, and she kept detailed journals of their trips. The travels started early: about a year after their wedding they took their Ford to Yellowstone, camping in tents, fishing the Yellowstone River, and seeing the terraces at Mammoth. Around the same time, while they lived in Klamath Falls, they went down into an ice cave near the Lava Beds and saw a frozen river with frozen waterfalls. About thirty years later, from May 30 to June 20, 1953, they made a three-week loop of the West. They went down the Oregon coast into California, called on Ed's mother Augusta and his half-sister Fran in Los Angeles, and crossed the desert in 95-to-100-degree heat with the windows rolled down because the air conditioner couldn't keep up. In Albuquerque they saw their daughter Jean, who came along with her husband as far as Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak. In Fort Morgan, Beulah didn't recognize her childhood home under its new mock shingles, but her old school and the Presbyterian church were just as she remembered them; they stopped at Stella's house and took her to lunch at a little café. They came home past the Tetons, through Yellowstone and Mammoth Hot Springs again, and by way of Butte and Grand Coulee Dam. In August 1952 a little seaplane flew them from Chelan to a primitive cabin on Domke Lake, with split-cedar walls you could fit your fingers through. Their food came hours late, Beulah spent the first day sick in bed, and at Stehekin, while she napped on the beach, Ed went off on a jeep tour without her. Her journal of their three-and-a-half-week drive to California in 1960 is just as frank. She disliked the casinos in Reno, found Virginia City a wreck even by ghost-town standards, thought dinner at the Furnace Creek Inn a rip-off, went swimming at Twentynine Palms for the first time in twenty-five years, and at Disneyland liked Frontierland but found the fairy-tale part too scary. Later came Banff and Lake Louise, a coastal voyage to Alaska, Glacier National Park, Death Valley, and in December 1960 a voyage to Hawaii. The winter of 1962–63 they spent in a trailer in Arizona and California, and Beulah enjoyed escaping the cold and wet of home; by the end of their Mexico trip in the fall of 1964 she wrote that she was tired of trailer life. There were also Florida, the Bahamas, and New Orleans early in 1964 and, from late November into December 1966, a cruise from San Francisco on the S.S. Statendam through the Panama Canal to Jamaica. Beulah thought the frog legs at dinner one night were really good, they won nothing at shipboard bingo, and when Ed was laid low by seasickness in the Caribbean she went to the Captain’s Gala Dinner alone. When a grandson stayed with them in 1965, she had him build a birdhouse with her.

Beulah died of stomach cancer in Tacoma on November 1, 1969, at seventy-two, after ten days in a private hospital. Her garden club planted a pink flowering dogwood in her memory.