Beatrice Frost

Born February 2, 1927, died April 1, 2023

The family will gather to honor this remarkable woman at a later date.

She is survived by one sister, Burness Moffitt of Broken Arrow, OK; three daughters: MaryAnn Hardy (Richard) of Nanoose Bay, British Columbia, Edythe Janice Popper of Chico, and Stephanie Merritt (Roy) of Titusville, FL; grandchildren: Andy (Hilary), Aaron (Nu), and Jamie Popper; great-grandchildren: Alison, Maya, and Dylan Popper; and many cherished nieces and nephews.

She was a farmer's daughter, raised and loved by parents who believed that all honest work was honorable work. She and her three little sisters, Bonnie, Blanche and Burness, grew up on the good bottom land of the Black Fork River which curled through the green valleys and hills of eastern Oklahoma.

Bea was born to loving parents, Thomas J. and Floy Bailey, on February 2, 1927, in Zoe, Oklahoma, and would grow up on the farm, attend a pretty country school and learn the rhythms and traditions of farm life until the Second World War changed everything.

To answer the call for workers in industries supporting the war effort, the family moved to southern California. To their new home, they brought their dedication to hard work, high regard for education, and their unwavering sense of duty to honest and charitable living.

Bea had just graduated from high school and was enrolled in the local college when she was enlisted with many other young women to work for the telephone company, and it was there that she met the love of her life and made decisions that would set her course for the coming decades.

She was connecting a call for Alexander Popper, a young Marine home from the war in the Pacific and recovering from injuries. He flirted, and she was curious. When they finally met, she was smitten by his good looks and his red convertible. They eloped to Yuma, AZ, and returned to California a married couple.

When the war ended, they settled in the Bay Area, living in the Berkeley Hills, while Alex attended and graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law and Bea worked at the telephone company to support them. Three years later, 1947, they greeted their first child, MaryAnn.

When their family had grown to four children, MaryAnn, Alexander Jr. , Edythe Janice, and Abigail Liu Alice, Bea embraced her husband's dream to have a ranch, and they settled again, putting down deep roots in Glenn County, on a ranch at the cross of roads 30 and XX, in Ord Bend. Two more beautiful baby daughters, Stephanie Zoe and Martha Linn were born.

Bea's life was busy with family, working full-time as Chief Operator at Pacific Bell in Chico, doing all the work of a ranch wife and mother, and staying active in community affairs as 4-H Leader, member and President of the Ord Women's Club, and member of the Republican Central Committee.

Through all these years she took pride in her children and enjoyed traveling with them. She never missed a school function or a 4-H event, their sports games, or any chance to give them a new and exciting experience. She also loved her gardens and was proud of the climbing roses that billowed over the long fences around the homestead. Bea also enjoyed sewing and kept her five daughters in pretty dresses, skirts and blouses in bright floral prints, her favorite.

She was a cheerful optimist, loyal to old friends, and devoted to extended family. She met every stranger with an open mind and a warm heart, and was rarely disappointed when they became a new friend. It came naturally to her to accept people with their flaws and then in abiding friendship, to help them celebrate their gifts. She had learned this in the constant and loving care of her family, from her earliest days. To her, it was the most natural way to live with others.

A favorite time of year was Pheasant Season in the gentle days of autumn, when the sprawling ranch house would fill with visitor, friends from towns and cities. It was grand for the children too, with more friends to play with, lots of cooking, and the grown-ups too busy with each other to be strict in their minding of them. Family photos from those days show adults who were happy to be in the country experiencing ranch life and children freer than usual.

In 1966, a lucky break came to Bea when LIFE MAGAZINE printed many of her amateur photos in their special, year-end edition. From the royalties, she she could buy all the film she wanted, and she felt encouraged by the magazine's staff to expand her "hobby." She truly loved "taking pictures" of people. The 35mm slides she took with her cherished Voghtlander SLR on the family's trips deep into Mexico show her obedience to her husband's instructions to "Shoot this" and "Shoot that," examples of natural history, colonial ruins and relics, but then she would veer into her favorite subjects; the people, the families, their children, their homes and their celebrations. Their favorite place was San Blas, then a small and humble relic from Spanish colonial days, set into the jungle, with dusty cobblestone streets leading to a warm sea.

(Decades later, after she had retired, she went back to the village in Mexico. She carried a large suitcase filled with "extra" prints and the negatives of the people she had photographed there time after time. For a week, she sat in a cafe that had been there as long as she could remember, and greeted the aged children, the grandchildren of the people in those photos. Bea knew only enough Spanish to order "One more Dos Equis beer, please," but language was not a barrier to the happiness everyone shared with Bea. )

By 1968, Bea was faced with disaster and crushing responsibility. The marriage shattered and ended in divorce. She found herself penniless and with her four youngest daughters to raise. Once she found a home in Chico, she set out for a job and met Henry McMillan, a professional photographer with School Pictures, Inc. He put her to work as a school photographer, which meant long drives to schools and long hours, but she was very good at it, and she was secure. He also put her to work shooting weddings for him, and that's when she found her life's true vocation. Weddings! Capturing on film, their excitement, joy and love and delivering this gift to the family.

In the spring of 1969, sudden tragedy came with Abigail's accidental death at fifteen years of age. Though the loss of her lovely daughter was devastating to Bea, she found strength to rise each morning and meet her responsibilities. Summer brought another devastation; the news that her son, Alex Jr., a young Marine, was critically injured in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam. For months the only news came to her in telegrams with terse descriptions of the severity of his wounds and his failing condition. At last a telegram notified her that her son could be flown home, to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, where he would continue to recover. Through it all, Bea was strength for her son, pouring all the love she had in her heart into his.

Bea was bright, with an inquisitive mind. She was an avid reader of textbook-style non-fiction, and "the Great Books." She enjoyed a good laugh and would raise her spirits with with authors such as Patrick Dennis, the creator of "Auntie Mame," and fall apart in laughter as if someone would not stop tickling her. During these years she somehow managed to find time to enroll and complete college courses, taking classes in what she was just terribly curious about.

It didn't take long for Bea to find herself working full-time as a wedding photographer, serving the brides of Butte and neighboring counties as well as cities up and down the state. She once said, "Love it? YES, I love it. People pay me to come to their parties!" She saw every wedding as the best time in a family's life, and she would celebrate it for them, in beautiful photos that expressed their joy. Every family became her new friends. If it had only been a business for her, she would not have derived the satisfaction and joy that she did from shooting the weddings. It was much more for her. She felt honored to be invited to these most special events, and had real affection for the families of the wedding couple. She gave her heart to her work, and was gracious in accepting pay for it.

It was 1983, and all her children seemed safe from harm, when on a stormy winter night, Martha Linn, 26, lost control of her powerful sports car on The Midway from Chico to Durham. She was mortally injured. Again, the shock and grief of her child's death would be overwhelming. After drying her tears, she said, "If Rose Kennedy can do it, so can I." And do it, she did. She survived the gutting loss, and years later when she was asked by a grief-stricken friend, "Will the pain ever go away" she would answer with, "No, it never goes away, but YOU get stronger and can bear it better."

In the late 1980's, someone came into her life of whom she said, "Makes my heart beat fast!" It was Sherman Frost (Frost Oil Co.) and she accepted his proposal of marriage. Bea loved "Sherm" and was happy being devoted to him. Those years were filled with a full calendar of wedding work, but also much gathering of blended families, grandchildren, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, with every holiday and every birthday being a good reason to make a party.

Now she was amused by the fact that she was photographing the weddings of the sons and daughters of her first bride's and grooms. She shot her last wedding when she was 80, and joked that she had finished her career by photographing the grandchildren's weddings.

When years passed and she had buried two sisters, her parents, two daughters, both of her husbands and her son (complications from his war injuries), and too many friends, she turned to being fully a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She spent long months in Canada with her eldest, MaryAnn, thrilling to close encounters with bears and moose, living and loving her newest adventures in Canada's wilds. Sometimes she stayed through the long dark winters, cooking breakfast on a wood stove if power had failed, bundling up and tramping out in -40º, standing in awe to watch vast curtains of green Aurora, unfurl across the night skies. Winter would usually send her to Florida to her youngest, Stephanie, where the stands of ancient trees dressed in Spanish Moss was all that stood between her and the lake's alligators.

She still found a little time left over for spring in a small home on Filbert Avenue that she had retained for her retirement, where on the long wide lot reaching toward Bidwell Park, she installed countless flowering shrubs and trees, masses of flowering perennials such as irises, roses, larkspur, dianthus, spring bulbs of every kind, and then ground covers, with violets for flowers and fragrance. She planted with no design in mind, but according to what she wanted to see, and blossoms billowed over boundaries in joyful disorder. And because it was inconceivable that she would ever live without one; she kept a space for her garden vegetables. There is a photograph of her standing in waist-tall flowers, while she reaches out to more blooms hanging from a riotous row of arching climbing roses.

In 2022, she was looking forward to being the "oldest one on the family tree," which meant she would have to live to 104 to beat her own grandfather, Nathaniel Wickware (103). She received a diagnosis of melanoma and faced the treatments with calm resignation and as much grace as ever. Even this did not make her bitter. The discomforts of treatment were real, but she accepted them as her own, without blame to anyone else. Bea's sister, Burness, moved into the little house on Filbert Avenue to be her constant companion in the campaign against melanoma. Her "Chico-Family" rallied around her to support her. Scans showed that the surgery and treatment were successful for her.

Then she weakened, and it was clear that she needed more support in daily living, she joined her daughter Stephanie and spent her last months in the comfort of the Florida climate and the constant and loving care of her daughter and son-in-law. When she died, she was surrounded by cherished family who loved her completely: her baby sister, Burness Moffitt, a daughter and son-in-law, Stephanie and Roy Merritt, and two of her adored grandchildren, Aaron and Jamie Popper. In a gentle sleep, she passed from her long life while she was embraced in their love.

And flights of angels sang her to her rest.