Hazel Beard

Infobox Mayor | name=Hazel Fain Beard


nationality=American
office= Mayor of Shreveport, Caddo Parish, Louisiana, USA
party=Republican Party
term_start=1990
term_end=1994
preceded= John Brennan Hussey
succeeded= Robert Warren "Bo" Williams
office2=Shreveport City Council member
term_start2=1986
term_end2=1990
preceded2=
succeeded2=Robert Warren "Bo" Williams
date of birth=1930
place of birth=
date of death=
place of death=
occupation=Businesswoman
spouse= Charles Carroll Beard (1920-2002)
children=
religion=
footnotes=Beard is the first woman to have been both chairperson of the Shreveport City Council and mayor of Louisiana's third largest city. She is also the first of thus far only two Republicans to have served as Shreveport's mayor.

Hazel Fain Beard (born 1930) is the first woman and the first Republican to have served as mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, since the era of Reconstruction. A fiscal conservative, Mrs. Beard grappled with many economic and social problems during her single term as mayor from 1990-1994.

Prior to her mayoralty service, Beard was a small business owner and a member of the Shreveport City Council from southwest Shreveport. She was the first woman to have been chairperson of the city council.

Beard entered the mayoral race against three serious opponents, including the African-American dentist C. O. Simpkins, a Democrat, and two fellow council members, Republican Carolyn Calhoun Whitehurst and Democrat Bill Bush. Simpkins was a veteran of the civil rights movement. Bush, a businessman, led in the pre-election polls. Whitehurst, a real estate operator, later Carolyn C. Huckaby, is descended from a prominent De Soto Parish family: her father, Reimer Calhoun, was a Democratic member of the Louisiana State Senate from 1944-1952. Whitehurst, who represented a southeast Shreveport council district, had the support of the "Shreveport Times".

Simpkins led in the primary, but Beard secured the second slot to proceed to the general election. She then prevailed, 38,604 votes (59 percent) to Simpkins' 26,341 (41 percent).

The Beard administration granted the first riverboat gambling license in Shreveport history. The designation went to Harrah's. Beard created a Growth Management Issues Committee, chaired by former Democratic Mayor James C. Gardner and Wendell Collins, a telephone company executive who thereafter became the city's chief administrative officer under Beard's successor as mayor, Robert W. "Bo" Williams.

In 1992, when Mayor Beard welcomed U.S. President George H.W. Bush to Shreveport during Bush's ill-fated reelection campaign, the president mistakenly referred to her as "Nasal" Beard. The mayor accepted the slip of tongue with humor.

Hazel Beard is the widow of Charles Carroll Beard (November 24, 1920 - May 30, 2002). After her term as mayor ended, the Beards moved to Kingsland in Llano County in central Texas.

As mayor, Beard appointed the Republican activist Harriet Belchic to the Shreveport Women's Commission and the Riverfront Redevelopment Advisory Committee.

It was widely anticipated that former Mayor John Brennan Hussey, the man she had succeeded, would challenge Beard for reelection in 1994, but Beard surprised political observers by not seeking reelection. Hussey ran as expected, but two city council members, Republican Bo Williams and Democrat Roy Cary, an African- American, went into the general election, which Williams won by a comfortable margin.

Former Mayor Gardner, in his memoirs entitled "Jim Gardner and Shreveport, Vol. II", describes Beard accordingly:

". . . a large woman physically and had been a high school basketball player. . . . totally self-assured, [this] gave her strength as mayor. Her public appearances and demeanor were of one who was acting under a voter mandate to change everything. She began her term in office by asking for the resignation of all board and commisson members, something not done before or since. At her inauguration, she had stated that 'the era of darkness was gone, the era of light had begun.'. . . This made me uncomfortable with Mayor Beard . . . but we did develop a comfortable working relationship."

Beard received her college degree from Louisiana State University in Shreveport at the age of fifty-five in 1985. In 2007, she received the LSUS "Distinguished Alumnus Award" when she delivered the commencement address in a ceremony at the CenturyTel Center in Bossier City. Beard is, meanwhile, active in such groups as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Christian Women's Job Corps.

Beard's archival material is located at LSUS.

References

http://www.sos.louisiana.gov:8090/cgibin/?rqstyp=elcpr&rqsdta=11069009http://www.rinkworks.com/said/famous.shtmlhttp://www.lsus.edu/library/archives/guide/coll050.htm

James C. Gardner, "Jim Gardner and Shreveport, Vol. II" (Shreveport: Ritz Publications, 2006), pp. 289-290

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:YONlR2G5PLMJ:www.lsus.edu/foundation/news_details.asp%3FID%3D181+hazel+beard&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us