From These Roots

“It’s the dreamers who gave us the things we have today. I like to think of them as independent thinkers. To me an independent thinker is the loneliest man in the world.”- Admiral Raymond H. Beyer

One of the most interesting alumni to attend North Greenville was Raymond H. Beyer. These stories usually start with the person’s time at North Greenville, but Raymond’s story starts earlier. He was born December 11, 1902 in Indiana to parents Herman Beyer and Bertha Hagedorn Beyer. From a very young age, Raymond filled his days with dreams of flying. He read H.G. Wells books, built wagons from scraps he found around town, and would pretend to fly using a broom handle with a makeshift propeller on it. At one point, he even jumped off a barn on his broom handle and ended up falling on a greenhouse instead of taking flight.

In 1912, Raymond’s Uncle Bill and some friends sent a request to France to obtain blueprints for a Bleroit monoplane. It took them about a year to build their plane, but it was done by the summer of 1913. Raymond tagged along with his uncle and friends to a field on the northwest side of South Bend, Indiana. Uncle Bill was supposed to fly the plane, but even after drinking some alcohol, he couldn’t muster up the courage to fly. One of the friends was too heavy and the other only had one leg, so that left Raymond. He was just 10 years old, but he begged his uncle to let him fly the plane and his uncle finally agreed. According to Raymond years later, “Being too scared to go on, and too brave to quit, I pushed the throttle wide open and went high-tailing across the pasture in a turbulent cloud of dust.” He succeed and took off into the air as possibly the first person to fly a plane in Indiana. However, after a while, he realized he didn’t know where he was. “I found myself flying in a wonderfully serene world. The celestial view was so breathtakingly beautiful I forgot that I was lost. I was experiencing a sight known only to God’s winged creatures.” Eventually, he used some landmarks to find his way back to the field and was forced to land because the motor quit. He had a rough landing and would need to rebuild the plane, but he had achieved his dream of flying.

The next year, Raymond’s family moved to South Carolina where he would attend high school at North Greenville Baptist Academy. At North Greenville, he was known as “The Yankee Aviator” and would make extra money by giving plane rides to locals. He played basketball and was the 3rd baseman on the school’s baseball team. For a while, when he was only 15, he went to Georgia to teach WWI pilots how to fly since he was too young to join the military himself but flight instructors were rare. During this time, he also purchased a $50 Jenny biplane and had his only accident while flying. The injuries included a smashed pelvis and a broken leg and they would bother him for the rest of his life. He graduated from North Greenville in 1920 and then attended Furman University for a year before obtaining an engineering degree from Keystone Institute in Indiana.

Raymond’s flight career would end when he was about 22 years old. He helped push for legislation that would require pilots to be licensed. When the legislation passed, Raymond was unable to pass the physical exam. Raymond then turned to his engineering and creative abilities. He would spend the rest of his life inventing things such as an airport flood light, the wheel and brake for airplane balloon tires, an oxygen regulator, a toothpick dispenser, a fishing lure, and a pressure cooker. He also helped to develop the amphibious airplane for the Navy.

One of the most famous projects Raymond ever worked on was The Manhattan Project during WWII. According to Raymond, he helped to create the detonator for the atomic bomb. He later told The Greenville News in 1971, “I cried for days after Hiroshima. I thought I was going to lose my mind.”

Raymond rarely stayed in one place for too long. Some of the companies he worked for included Dodge Manufacturing, Westinghouse Electric Company, Bendix Brake Company, SB Bait Company, and Chevrolet Motor Company. According to his grandson, Mike McIntyre, Raymond moved his family roughly 44 times in the first 22 years of marriage he had with his wife, Erma. The couple had three children together before divorcing in 1964.

By the time he had retired, Raymond had over 150 patents to his name and was listed in several Who’s Who publications. He was also made an honorary admiral by the state governors of Texas and Nebraska. He spent his last years writing, painting, and serving as a guest speaker at civic clubs and universities. He passed away in 1990 at the age of 87.

“My last real desire is to come back once more to North Greenville and talk to the students…I want so very much to give one more lecture where I learned to have faith in God and to help my fellow man.” – Raymond Beyer in a 1985 letter to Mr. McKinney