Dr. George D. Beelen of Canfield, a longtime high school and college history professor, holds the distinguished Heritage Award he received in 2006 from Youngstown State University.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com or metro editor Marly Kosinski at mkosinski@tribtoday.com.

CANFIELD — Dr. George D. Beelen has spent most of his life personifying not only thinking outside of the box, but reaching far beyond it, by thousands of miles and numerous countries.

“My (high school) English teacher taught us that a whole other world exists outside of Campbell,” Beelen, a 1954 Campbell Memorial High School graduate, said about the city where he grew up.

Such enlightenment was perhaps the first major step that led to a life steeped heavily in a deep love of U.S. and international history and culture for Beelen, 84, who also has traveled the globe during and after his years as a history professor at Youngstown State University.

After high school, Beelen wasted no time charting his education-rich course. He majored in social studies and English at Youngstown College (now YSU) before earning a master’s degree in history in 1962 from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), where his interest in that subject came into sharper focus.

The 1964-65 academic year, which he referred to as “a transformational year,” was coated with an extra layer of enrichment because Beelen was one of 15 teachers from across the U.S. to have been awarded a scholarship from the John Hay Fellowship program while attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

“We had total run of the university,” Beelen said, explaining that he and the other recipients also received free tickets to plays, the Chicago Symphony and other cultural events, but more importantly, additional opportunities to broaden their learning experiences.

To that end, the scholarship allowed him to take supplemental noncredit courses in addition to history and political science that included Hellenistic and Roman Art, philosophy and Introduction to Opera. For credit, Beelen took a class in Latin American Politics taught by Dr. George Blanksten, who had worked for the U.S. State Department and largely influenced Beelen’s decision to teach Latin American history, he recalled.

Soon after, he returned to his teaching position at Poland Seminary High School, where he taught speech, U.S. government and Advanced Placement American history classes from 1958 to 1966. Beelen was welcomed with open arms upon his return — as well as given an extra chance to expand his love of history and culture, he remembered.

“When I came back to Poland, the principal said, ‘What do you want to teach?’ I said, ‘A course in Latin American history,'” Beelen recalled, adding that he also taught evening classes part time at YSU.

Like a seasoned jazz musician, the longtime educator wasn’t afraid to improvise. He collaborated with Poland Seminary High’s music and art teachers to fuse those subjects with history, seeing the connections between the three, Beelen continued.

“It propelled me to think more globally,” he said.

Meanwhile, Beelen continued furthering his own education, which culminated with earning a doctorate degree in August 1971 from Kent State University after having written his dissertation, titled “Harding and Mexico: Diplomacy by Economic Persuasion” that examined economic diplomacy between the U.S. and Mexico in the 1920s.

Concurrent with resuming his graduate studies at KSU was full-time teaching at YSU, where he had taught part time in the early and mid-1960s before serving as chairman of the history department from 1977 to 1992.

Even after retiring from teaching there, Beelen was anything but disconnected from the university. Leslie H. Cochran, YSU’s president from 1992 to 2000, hired him to serve four years as a lobbyist to the state of Ohio on behalf of the university.

More recently, Beelen was part of a ceremony in September at which Dr. Martha I. Pallante, a YSU Early American history professor and leading expert on local history, was named the first Charles Darling Endowed Faculty Chair in American Social History. The position was named in honor of Darling, a former YSU history professor and WYSU-FM radio personality who died in 2018 at age 86 after having left a $2.3 million gift from his estate to establish the faculty chair position.

“It was a privilege to put the medal on her,” Beelen said. “She was in five of my classes.”

In 1987, Beelen founded the Ohio Cultural Alliance, a group that met 10 times annually to educate and deepen the Mahoning Valley’s appreciation for cultural differences, locally and internationally. It began with about 15 members and discussions mainly about Mexico before growing to a few hundred people and broadening its scope to include Latin America as well as ethnic groups in the Valley and worldwide, Beelen noted.

The OCA held its final meeting in February 2017, at which the organization closed its books with about $30,000 that included $5,000 from YSU President Jim Tressel and his wife, Ellen. The funds went to the YSU Foundation and were used largely to support an intern to work at the Tyler History Center, Beelen said.

“We wanted to study people with similarities and differences from us and study our own nationalities, and our overriding theme was, ‘Genius knows no boundaries,'” he said, referring to the OCA’s primary goals.

Beelen had nothing but praise for Tressel, whom he credited with deepening connections between the university and downtown Youngstown, as well as his fundraising abilities, which have contributed to the university having 13 endowed chairs.

Beelen also has dipped his toes into the political waters when he served three terms as an Austintown township trustee from 1973 to 1982. During that time, he also ran for Congress in the 1976 primary election but lost to state Rep. Charles J. Carney, D-19th District.

Beelen, who remains active with the Mahoning Valley Historical Society and the YSU Retirees Executive Board, shows no signs of slowing his travels, which have taken him, among other places, to El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, China, the Holy Land, Switzerland, Croatia several times and an 11-day stay in Rumania, where he met one of his relatives.

“It’s one thing to read about it and one thing to see it in movies or on television, but another to see it,” Beelen said of the countries he’s visited.

His basement houses several floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books on world history, along with YSU memorabilia and bound volumes of the countless speeches he’s given over the years in Middletown, Ohio, and Guadalajara, Mexico, for example. Nearby are a series of framed photographs that are testimonies to his time in the political arena, including one of him standing between the late U.S. Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Glenn.

Beelen and his wife, Betty, whom he married in 1956, have three children, nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.