Thaddeus Beal – 50th Reunion Essay

Thaddeus Beal

170, Varick Road

Waban, MA 02468

thadbeal@tiac.net

617-821-7258

College: Pierson

I went to Yale because it was preordained. My family was blue blood and involved with the Vietnam War at a policy level. At Yale I evolved from an unsettled preppie to an unsettled dissident, and after Yale I had no idea what to do with myself. I worked for a short while at the Nixon White House and then took off for a trip around the world. At that time, Africa was delighted with independence and international loans. Americans were welcomed. The Middle East was beginning to fracture, but Americans were ignored or tolerated. It was the trip of a lifetime, but in India, duty called. I signed up for law school and flew back through Southeast Asia. I chose a school on the West Coast in hopes of escaping the East, but I gave in to the call of my family by returning to Boston when I was done. I went to work as a criminal prosecutor. It was a remarkable job. In less than two months I was arguing appellate cases before the state’s highest court, and in less than two years, I was trying murder cases. The pay was meager, though, and I had a house calling for repair, so I joined an old Boston law firm. It got bigger, and I got better. I worked hard and began a family. Then my father fell off his bicycle and died. He was 64 and about to retire from a curiously unfulfilling collection of jobs in law, banking and government. His death hit me hard in many ways and softened my professional foundation. I started asking questions whose answers undermined my commitment to corporate law. I stayed at my firm for two more years, long enough to make senior partner. With that achievement behind me, I began scanning for other things to do. I considered jobs in politics, health care and academe. None appealed to me as much as taking a studio art course. To this day I am not sure what pushed me in the direction of art. I suspect that the real reason was that I wanted to challenge myself and to make a clean break from the law. I ended up going to art school half time and working at the firm the other half. I found art confusing but exhilarating. But I never looked back and enrolled fulltime the next year, withdrawing from the firm. I still find art to be confusing but exhilarating, but I have persevered for nearly 30 years with some modest local success and with several years of solo shows in New York City. My New York career seems to have ended when my gallery became a Tesla dealership and I lacked the ambition to find another. Nonetheless, I am still at it and show my work often around Boston. And, more important, I wake up every morning determined to make sense of it all.