Beatrice Blain

1935 - 2025

Beatrice Blain

Greenfield, MA - Beatrice Blain

1935 - 2025

Beatrice Young Blain was a mother of four, a grandmother of ten, a teacher, a school administrator, a singer, a gardener, and an involved member of her community. She was a thoughtful friend to children. And she was an amiable and welcoming presence throughout her life. She died peacefully in Greenfield MA on January 6 with a daughter, a son, and a daughter-in-law at her bedside.

Beaty (as she was known by all) was born in Brooklyn in 1935, the daughter of Evelyn Orne Young and Lorin Bradford Young, and the sister of two older brothers – Merrill (Bink) and Ernest. She spent most of her childhood in Manchester, NH where her father served as the rector of Grace Episcopal Church. In an exhaustive record of Beaty's childhood her mother quoted an eight-year-old Beaty as saying "If I marry a farmer, I am going to have eight children. If I marry a minister, I am going to have four."

She attended Radcliffe College, where she sang in the Choral Society. It was through the Choral Society that she met Harvard Glee Club member Judd Blain, who would be her husband from 1958 until Judd died in 2014.

While Judd was in seminary in Alexandria, VA, Beaty earned a Master's degree in early childhood education at Goucher College and then taught at William Ramsey Elementary School in Alexandria, during the school's first year of desegregation. She and Judd then moved to North Dakota, where they started their family while Judd served as an Episcopal minister on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Beaty and Judd moved from North Dakota to Farmington, New Mexico for a year at the San Juan Mission when Judd took a position as an associate priest. The family then moved to Clinton, Iowa, living on the campus of the Job Corps where Judd worked. Their fourth child, Peter, was born there.

In 1969, Judd started a new job at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, MA. Beaty settled her family and took a job in the nursery school at Eaglebrook School. Subsequently she worked at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst MA, where she worked in the teacher training program at the Skinner Lab School and ran the university daycare center among other roles.

In 1978 she took a job teaching fourth grade at Gill Elementary School in Gill, MA. In 1984 she became the Principal and remained in that role until the Spring of 1994. One of her colleagues recently commented that she was "the core of the ideal that was the Gill School…the ideal of what a school should be". It was a joy of her life to run into former Gill Elementary students, and she treasured being a part of the Gill community. One of the caretakers at her bedside in the final days was one of Beaty's students at Gill.

During this time, she continued to manage her family. She prepared a sit-down family breakfast each day and left a handwritten note for the child responsible for dinner preparation with a warm greeting and instructions on what they needed to do to get dinner ready for the family that evening. Beaty often said "If you can read, you can cook" and even the reluctant cooks in her family managed to prove her right.

Each summer she took her children to Savage Den, a family cottage on the Lake of Bays in Ontario, Canada. She taught her children to paddle a canoe, helped them to become sturdy swimmers, and developed their appreciation for nature. Likewise, Christmas was a special time for Beaty. She enjoyed the gathering of family, church, stocking gifts, and perhaps most of all, the music.

Beaty was a gifted and enthusiastic singer. The dementia she suffered from in the last decade of her life never diminished her ability to recall her extensive catalogue of favorite songs. She and Judd would often pass the hours of their many long car-rides challenging others to produce a word for them to use as an actual lyric in the seemingly endless collection of songs they knew.

Her last job was teaching fifth grade at Eaglebrook School, where her husband and daughter were teaching. In retirement, Beaty sang in the Franklin County Community Chorus and volunteered in the restorative justice program, in her grandchildren's schools and at the library in Greenfield. She was an active parishioner at Grace Church in Amherst and often worshiped at St. John's Ashfield as well.

In their retirement, Beaty and Judd also travelled to Xiamen, China where they taught English. Beaty was an adventurous traveler throughout her life. She traveled through Japan by train for a summer while in college and she accompanied her parents and her brother Ernie on a driving trip through the Soviet Union in 1957, which included dodging an arrest for public dancing in Kharkiv. And, at 56 she caught rides in the beds of pick-up trucks and slept on outdoor benches as she explored the Amazon basin with her son.

Beaty greeted all in her life with a foundational faith in the goodness of others. That faith has been a blessing for everyone she met.

Beaty is survived by her brother Ernest (wife Brady Mikusko of Ann Arbor, MI). Beaty is also survived by four children - Rachel (husband Andrew Chase of Deerfield, MA), Sarah (husband Craig Byrne of Oakland, CA), Nathan (wife Sue Blain of Bethesda, MD), and Peter (wife Lisa Blain of South Hadley, MA). Beaty also has 10 grandchildren; Calla (husband Sam Jack), Lucy, Hailey, Lily, Sam, Saul, Audrey, Harrison, Kyle and Seth.

A memorial service will be held at 11:00A.M.on Saturday, February 22, 2025 at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, MA.