Donald Paul Golden Jr

Beaumont in French means beautiful mountain. Anyone who has ever seen Beaumont wonders why it was so named because it is flat as a pancake and not particularly beautiful. At least it is not beautiful like a seashore or a lake or a mountain.

Beaumont is about 90 miles east of Houston, 120 miles east of Richmond shown by the star on the map below.

Beaumont, Texas

So..Beaumont. I guess Beaumont in 1946 was a relatively small town in the 80,000 range of population. Industry at this time included the shipyard on the Neches River, the Port of Beaumont and the Magnolia refinery. To the east of Beaumont was a swamp to the southwest and west were rice farms and to the north the piney woods formed the backbone of the logging industry.

I was born in Beaumont in the early afternoon of 25 March, 1946. I was delivered by Dr Bibee, I am told, but have no particular recollection of the event. I was not delivered in a hospital but in the Beaumont Infirmary. The joke at the time was that was for the infirm, the mentally unbalanced, the insane. So maybe that explains me a little bit.

From age 0 to age 18, Beaumont was home and theses stories will fill in some gaps

l left Beaumont in 1964 to attend Rice University. I spent the summer of ‘65 in Beaumont and then never lived there again. The parts of Beaumont where I grew up are now somewhat blighted and unattractive and that makes me somewhat sad.