JOHN WARREN
Contributing Writer
At the outset of the Chautauqua Assembly, a foundational member of the troupe was a court jester of sorts, a man his admirers called “the crayon clown.”
Frank Beard was known for an improvisation he created and perfected called “chalk talks,” in which he accompanied lectures with rapid-fire illustrations blending humor, art and biblical or moral lessons.
“Pictures tell a story so much quicker than anything else that they will always be in demand,” he once told a newspaper reporter.
Beard was near-deaf for most of his life. He carried a black rubber tube coiled around his neck, and encouraged those he encountered to put their lips to the mouth of the tube and speak.
Despite being deaf, Beard had enlisted (sort of) in the Union Army at 18 during the Civil War. Because of his hearing impairment, he was ineligible to join, but a captain, motivated by a mix of pity and Beard’s patriotism, allowed him to join the Army of the Potomac as an unpaid private.
With little else to do, Beard drew illustrations, which soon turned to the subject matter in front of him. One cartoon depicted a general defending the capital as a big bulldog, standing behind a plate with a bone marked “Washington.” In front of the bowl was a cowering, lean hound labeled “Jeff Davis,” afraid to seize the bone. It was lithographed and sold in Cincinnati for 10 cents per copy and was later published in newspapers across the country.
After the war, he worked for publications including Comic Monthly, Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, Vanity Fair and a publication that employed the famed political cartoonist Thomas Nast.
Beard was once asked to lecture to his wife’s Sunday school class, and he decided he’d rather draw and talk than talk alone. The “chalk talk” was a hit. Word quickly spread, and he found he could charge up to $50 per talk — about $1,500 in today’s dollars.
In his Chautauqua chalk talks, he would stand on the platform with a roll of paper stretched on an easel before him and, with several colored crayons, he dished out philosophy, fun and satire.
Due to his hearing impairment, he had a unique, “queer nasal drawl” that was remembered as both endearing and highly effective at commanding thousands of listeners in the open-air Amphitheater. In a 1895 interview, Beard said, “I can take a text from the Bible, and with the utmost reverence can, through the medium of the cartoon, apply it to the civilization of today.”
At the Assembly, he bridged the gap between heavy theological topics and popular entertainment. His chalk talks drew thousands. Attendees would line up with autograph books for him to sign, to the extent that Beard once called autograph books “an instrument of torture.”
The chalk talks also became a staple of the Children’s Meeting. Of Beard, the author Rebecca Richmond wrote in Chautauqua: An American Place: “The illustrations of Bible stories and homely truths that grew before their eyes on the easel, drew youngsters to the hall like bees to a honeypot.”
In his instructional book Chalk Lessons, Beard presents a typical lesson, based on Matthew 7:13–14. In the lesson, a sharply dressed, clean-cut young man in a bowler cap gives in to all manner of vice and books “which mislead and give us the wrong notions in life, that make heroes of camps, thieves, and liars.” By the last in a progression of images, the young man is hopelessly wrinkled and scruffy, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and (the indignity) a squashed bowler hat.
Beard’s popularity was such that Chautauqua co-founder John Heyl Vincent enlisted him for road shows at sister chautauquas around the country.
In Long Beach, California, the local newspaper wrote of the “bubbling effervescence of laughter” at his fourth appearance at the Long Beach chautauqua: “… his auditors scarce know whether they laugh more at the tropes and witticisms of the running fire of comments with which the cartoonist accompanies his drawing, or at the drawings themselves.”
After Beard delivered an uncharacteristically somber talk at Lakeside Chautauqua in Ohio, Vincent admonished him. Beard reported Vincent’s words as follows:
“Now, Frank, I want you to understand that we bring you here to brighten up the program with a little fun. We don’t need you to make serious speeches; there are plenty of men to do that; I can do it myself, a great deal better than you can. Tonight I’m going to give you another chance, and I expect you to rise to the occasion with something to laugh at.”
And so Beard began the next presentation with:
“Dr. Vincent, he didn’t like the speech I made last night. He told me this morning before all these fellers that it was too eloquent, and he said, ‘Mr. Beard, when you are eloquent you take the shine off from me, and these other men, and you mustn’t do it. If there is any eloquence needed, I will do it myself, and you mustn’t interfere with the regular program.”
By the later part of the 19th century, Beard became a staff cartoonist for the religious publication The Ram’s Horn, and he became a less frequent visitor to the grounds.
He returned one last time for the 1905 Assembly, during which he was a staple of the program.
Physically, he was noticeably changed on account of Bright’s disease, or kidney disease. He was visibly frail, but his drawing hand remained steady, his humor as on-point as ever. His peers remarked that his timing in that final summer remained flawless.
He returned home to Chicago after the 1905 Season and died shortly after.
The man the Oregonian newspaper once called “the father of the American cartoon” was widely remembered in tributes and memorials.
Chautauqua’s co-founder, Vincent, said Beard had transformed religious education, turning the act of drawing into a profound tool.
“Frank Beard … did not occupy a traditional pulpit, but his massive blackboard was his altar, and his crayons were his tongue,” Vincent wrote. “Chautauqua has lost one of its truest architects, and our people will long remember the absolute sincerity and pure joy that flew from his busy pen.”
