Joseph W. Beach

Joseph W. Beach, of Bangor, Maine, graduated from Yale in 1911 and taught at the Harrisburg Academy in Pennsylvania for three years before entering Bangor Theological Seminary. He came to the Near East aboard the S.S. Pensacola with the first Near East Relief personnel and took up the post of Industrial Director at Cesarea (Caesarea/Kayseri). In May 1920 he became Director of the Cesarea Unit. He oversaw relief and vocational work for Armenian and Greek refugees and orphans in the Kayseri and Talas district of central Anatolia, a community broken by the Armenian Genocide deportations of 1915. Beach returned to the United States in May 1921 and married a Near East Relief nurse, Blanche S. Easton, at Ridgewood, New Jersey on July 12, 1921. As a clergyman he later officiated at a double wedding of relief workers in Beirut, joining Marion Kerr to Roy King and Ann Frances Sproule to Alfred Bastress.