Santa Rosa's 'Miss Bea' taught lessons to kids and their parents

Remember Miss Bea?

Pose the question to one of the great many adults who had Beatrice Harris as a preschool or Sunday School teacher, and await the smile.

Harris, a coal miner’s daughter who came to Sonoma County 60-plus years ago as the wife of a restless Methodist preacher perfectly willing to make ends meet by hacking weeds or scrubbing floors, knows and loves children. She knows that when a 4-year-old crosses her arms and tightens her jaw, it’s time to back off from trying to make her do whatever it is you want her to do.

“That kid is not moving,” Harris said.

She’s often counseled parents to say what they mean to their children, and mean what they say.

“I’ll tell parents, please don’t tell your children you’ll throw them out of the window if they don’t behave, because you’re lying.”

Harris, for the past 17 years the widow of former Sonoma County Jail counselor and chaplain Homer Harris, was born in Pittsburgh, PA, on March 24, 1926. One of 10 children in a family that got by leanly even before the Depression, she learned quickly about good and less-good parenting, the bane of institutional racism, the value of work and myriad other matters that would serve her throughout her life.

She was 2 when her father, Moses Cooper, uprooted the family to follow mining work to West Virginia. She attended segregated, this-one-white, this-one-black schools until the eighth grade.

Then her father sent her back to Pittsburgh, a distance of 96 miles, to attend an integrated high school and share a house with his mother, four of his sisters and eight of the sisters’ children. She remembers well the house’s one bathroom.

“It had to be cleaned every day,” she said. “Nobody wanted to do it. I said, “I’ll do it but I’ll charge you each 10 cents.’”

She smiled, “I always had money.”

Certain aspects of life in the house disappointed the teen-ager. Her parents had taught her and her siblings they weren’t to touch what didn’t belong to them, but in Pittsburgh some of her cousins helped themselves to her clothes, and various housemates kept their personal food locked up.

Shortly before Beatrice Cooper turned 16, the U.S. entered World War II. Needing to support herself better than by cleaning the bathroom and ironing her uncle’s shirts, she found an after-school job doing housekeeping and babysitting for a white couple with a handful of a preschool boy.

The couple, an Army major and his wife, invited Cooper to live with them. “They built a cute room in the basement,” she said. “It was the first room I had on my own!”

In 1945, Bea Cooper became the only one of her siblings to complete high school. Before the end of that year, her employer the major arranged a transfer to California and he and his wife asked her to come with them as their maid and nanny.

She recalls, “I always wanted to go to California.” Some members of her family scoffed at her eagerness to go west. “Most of them didn’t know where California was.”

Early in 1946, following a lengthy layover in Nebraska, where the major had kin, the family and their domestic helper arrived at their destination, San Carlos, on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Her first Thursday in California, Beatrice Cooper called for a taxi and ventured out.

“All maids have Thursdays off,” she noted. She got into the cab and asked the driver to take her to the church in the black neighborhood. The driver took her a long ways, about six miles, out of San Carlos and into San Mateo.

The 20-year-old newcomer met the pastor of the neighborhood’s church and arranged to return that coming Sunday. When she walked into the sanctuary church for that first service, she felt at home - and she liked what she saw.

“There were a lot of good-looking men there, and I had my eye on some of them,” she said. “But I found out they all were married.”

Not so this one fellow. A rather over-wound sort who “wore weird clothes,” Homer Harris was a transplant from Texas, an Army veteran of the just-concluded war. He was an ordained Methodist pastor who preached on occasion at the San Mateo church but made his living doing landscaping and taking whatever odds-and-ends work he could find.

An African-American, Homer Harris would recall that he never felt hated or discriminated against until he left Texas for the Army. He’d tell, though probably only when asked, of the time in Louisiana when he was pelted with bricks and when, in Alabama, he was shoved into the street - in uniform - and told, with a racial slur, that blacks “don’t walk on the sidewalk on Saturday.”

Despite all that, the first-time visitor to the San Mateo found Homer Harris to be a reliably upbeat, endearing, grateful man of God. The two of them met socially for time, then began dating.

On June 30 of 1946, they married. The family with whom the new Bea Harris had come to California was sorry to see her leave their home and service.

The newlyweds rented a room in a house and Bea Harris found work cleaning homes and preparing dinners. Homer Harris worked mostly in yards and gardens, and he wasn’t too proud to shine shoes. “The man worked all the time,” said the woman who was his wife for 53 years.

Their first child, Homer Jr., or Buddy, arrived in 1947. Wanda Jean followed in 1950.

Bea Harris recalled that from time to time they’d all take a weekend drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and on up to Sonoma County. On one such drive, her husband slowed at the sight of an old farmhouse that reminded him of his childhood in Texas.

The two-story, wooden house was located on Santa Rosa’s West Third Street. Homer Harris got it into his head that he wanted to buy it and make it his family’s home.

His wife thought it looked like something out of a horror movie. She recalls, “I told him, ‘I’m not moving up into a ragged, rundown, dirty house with my kids.’”

Eventually, though, she did. After her husband arranged for a mortgage loan in 1953, sent away the people operating a house of ill repute on the premises and hauled off 18 truckloads of garbage, she moved in to do her part to make the place habitable.

“We never worked so hard,” Harris said with a gentle shake of her head. “We were so poor, we couldn’t afford paint.”

She and the Rev. Harris found there were very few black families living in Santa Rosa in the 1950s. Some experienced in-your-face prejudice and affronts. Bea Harris recalls more subtle discrimination - “You going into a store and people act like you’re not there.” On a bus, if she didn’t speak up and wish a fellow passenger a good day, it was likely no one would address her.

As she always had, she found work cleaning houses. The Harrises were welcomed as the only black family in the Methodist Church on Montgomery Drive and in 1960 Bea Harris began teaching Sunday school.

Through her children’s schooling, she met Andy Wallstrum, then principal of Cook Junior High. He encouraged her to apply to become a teacher’s aide. She did, and for eight years worked in classrooms at Lincoln and Burbank schools.

Encouraged by President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to eliminate poverty and race-based injustice through the domestic initiatives known at the Great Society, Harris also enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College in the mid-1960s and became certified as a nursery school teacher.

The greatest professional surprise and joy of her life came in 1973, when founders of the Multi-Cultural Preschool located on the grounds of Knox Presbyterian Church, located just down Third Street from her home, asked her to become its first director.

Harris went to work and immediately embraced the essential mission of providing subsidized preschool to working families that could neither afford full-priced preschool nor qualify for federally funded Head Start. “A lot of these families were desperate,” she said.

She grew and refined the school for the next 16 years. Meanwhile, the entire Harris family thrived. Respected for the positive effect he had on the lives of inmates he would visit at the county jail, Homer Harris was hired to work as a counselor to men and women incarcerated at both the main jail and the honor farm.

Homer Jr. became a physician. Wanda earned a law degree.

Bea Harris received honors for what she did to advance the education of a great many low-income, ethnically diverse preschoolers. She was 64 when she retired from the Multi-Cultural Preschool in 1990.

Right away, operators of the preschool at her church, First United Methodist, asked her to become its director. “I said, ‘I’ll do it for two months, and you have to find someone else.’”

That happened, but when the new director arrived Harris agreed to come in from time to time and teach.

“A day at a time turned into full-time,” she said. “I tried to make every moment a teaching moment.”

When she retired for good 10 years ago, she was 80.

She lived for six decades in the ramshackle Third Street house that she and the Rev. Harris, who died in 1999 at the age of 82, had made into a lovely, loving home.

Keeping it up had become too much for Bea Harris when she moved out two years to share a mobile home with a friend. Just last year she sold the house to a young couple, and she moved into a nice retirement residence where she no longer has to cook or do the laundry, even for herself.

Her legs don’t carry nearly as well as they used to, but overall she has few complaints and much gratitude.

“I still miss kids,” she said.

A couple of months short of age 90, Miss Bea knows she tried to teach little ones something useful to their lives and she marvels at what they taught her.