Ethel "Sandy" (Beach) Socolar Family Papers

Ruth Porter Ward [Beach] was born on December 10, 1881, in Newton Center, Massachusetts, to Langdon and Laura Bliss Ward. Her father worked for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for 40 years, 30 of them as treasurer, and her mother was the daughter of Edwin and Isabella Bliss, missionaries in Turkey, and herself briefly a missionary. Ruth was one of 8 children. Langdon Ward died in 1895 when Ruth was 14, and the large, close-knit family soon moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, so that all the children could finish high school and then attend local colleges – Amherst College for the boys and Mt. Holyoke College for the girls. After graduating from Mt. Holyoke in 1903, Ruth studied teaching and music at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. In late 1907 she sailed for the Foochow Mission in China, where she taught at the Wenshan Girls’ School and then at Fukien University. While in China she met and married Reverend Frederick Paul Beach, who had arrived as a missionary to China in 1910, started a boys’ school, and then helped establish Fukien University. Ruth and Frederick had three girls – Frances, Ethel (Sandy), and Elizabeth. In 1933 Ruth fell ill and died suddenly of meningitis on January 10.

Frances Helen Beach [Bingham] was born in China on May 19, 1912. She spent most of her youth in China, including boarding school in Shanghai. In 1929 Frances left China to attend school in the United States. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1933 and then studied sacred music at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There, she met Brewster Bingham, whom she married in 1934. In 1935 the couple went to China as Congregational missionaries, where they worked until 1940, when events in China during World War II forced them to leave. Soon after their return to the United States, they met Frank N. Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA), “a Christian revolution for remaking the world” (Buchman, from his collected speeches titled “Remaking the World”), regarded by others as a religious cult (Frances addresses this issue in her letters in the collection). The Binghams dedicated themselves to working closely with Buchman and his group for the rest of their lives – the scrapbook in Box OS2 called “The Story of Frances Brewster Bingham” outlines their experience with the group.

Frances Bingham died on April 22, 2000.

Ethel Bliss Beach [Socolar] was born on May 31, 1916 in Oberlin, Ohio, while her parents were on furlough from their missionary work in China. Ethel – known since her undergraduate years as Sandy – spent her childhood in China: “Diongloh, then Fuzhou, then downriver on the campus of Fukien Christian University. Summers on Kuliang” (Sandy Socolar, for her Shanghai American School Reunion, Box 1, Folder 18). Her first year of college was at Yenching University; she then spent a year at Oberlin College before she transferred to Smith College, from which she graduated in 1937. Sandy received a Master’s degree in group work and worker education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and then worked for several years. In 1950 she began graduate work in pediatric medical social work at the University of Chicago, the start of a long career in early child development issues. While in Chicago she met Dr. Sidney J. Socolar, a biophysicist. The couple married in 1951 and had two children, Paul and Deborah. They moved to New York City in 1957 and have remained in the city and continued to work at their careers ever since – at 100 years old, Sandy was still working on issues of social justice.

The youngest of the Beach daughters, Elizabeth Waterbury Beach [Keller], was born in Foochow, China, on December 28, 1917. Her childhood was spent in China, and she graduated from Shanghai American School and then attended her first year of college at Fukien University. Like other members of her family, she studied for a time at Oberlin College and then finished her degree at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1940. In 1946 she received a Master’s from George Washington University, and in 1948 she received a Ph.D. from Cornell University Medical College in New York. She worked as a biochemist in several institutions, including at Cornell University, where she was a professor in molecular biology from 1965 to her retirement in 1988, after which she continued to do research throughout her retirement. Part of Keller’s work at Cornell included formulating a model – the “cloverleaf model” -- for the way amino acids transfer and link together into proteins.

Elizabeth Beach married Geoffrey Keller, an astronomer, in 1941. The couple divorced by 1950, although the circa 1940-1975 scrapbook in Box OS3 suggests that Elizabeth remained close to the Keller family. Keller died in 1997.