In a few months, the Clayton Record newspaper will celebrate 100 years of serving the people of Barbour County. For Publisher/Editor Rebecca Beasley, it is more than business milestone; it represents an extraordinary family legacy that began years before she was born.

Rebecca Beasley

Beasley, who was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Alabama Press Association, grew up working side-by-side at the newspaper with her mother and grandmother. But her newspaper heritage dates back even further – to her great-grandfather, who was a pressman at the Montgomery Advertiser.

Beasley’s family arrived in Clayton in 1915. Her maternal grandparents were editors and publishers of the Clayton Record, and her mother, Bertie Parish, took over in 1960 when her grandmother died suddenly.

Beasley’s mother was a teacher. But like her daughter would do years later, she left that career to devote herself to putting out the weekly paper.

Bill Gammell at desk

Indeed, Beasley remembers the newspaper as always being a family affair. As a young child she watched her grandmother, Perle Ennis Gammell, feeding paper onto the press. And one of Beasley’s first jobs was to stack the papers as they came out of the folding machine.

Pearle Ennis Gammell

“I remember my grandmother standing at the big newspaper press, feeding the newsprint,” said Beasley, a mother of two. “She never missed a beat. As a matter of fact, she did not            trust anyone else to do the job.”

Through her high school and college years, Beasley served as the paper’s bookkeeper. After graduating with a degree in education, she began to cover public meetings and writing articles. She started teaching English at the local junior high school, but she never left the newspaper, working there in the afternoons.

After getting married and having her first child, Beasley decided to leave teaching to work with her mother full-time at the paper. They worked shoulder to shoulder until her mother’s death in 1998.

Writing her mother’s obituary was one of the hardest things she has ever done, Beasley said. “I knew nothing could stop the newspaper from being published, not even my mother’s death. I had to go to work as usual and do what I had to do. It was hard, but I knew that is what my mother would expect of me, so there was no turning back.”

While newspapering is clearly in her blood, Beasley has built another successful career: in public service. She was the first woman elected to the Clayton Town Council, serving two terms before becoming the first woman elected mayor of Clayton, in 1996. She is now in her fourth term as the town’s chief executive.

Politics also seems to run in the family; Beasley’s husband, Billy Beasley, served 12 years in the state House of Representatives and is now in the state Senate.

But it is her family’s century-long connection to the Clayton Record that is especially dear to Rebecca Beasley. “This is a legacy that our family cherishes.”