Six months later, Marinella married Elia and they had five children. Eliana, number four, was born November 7, 1915. Marinella enrolled in English classes at the YWCA after the school sent her first child home with a note demanding that Mama teach him English or else keep him home. Soon after, they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Elia was a successful home builder. The Liatti family was the first family on their block to buy a car; first a Ford, followed by a long sleek Packard with side-boards. They were also the first on the block to buy a piano. Life was good in the 1920’s, both for the Liatti family and for the country.

At age 9, Eliana was visiting her elder sister’s fiance’s house, when she came upon a book of poetry with long narrative poems. She fell in love with the language and form of poetry right then and there, sitting on the staircase, mesmerized by the magic of rhyming words. Eliana undertook memorizing hundreds of lines of long narrative poetry. Her first and favorite was the tear-jerker Over the Hill to the Poor House, Will Carlton after the Civil War. It is about an old woman whose children will not take her in. The first stanza of 84 lines begins:

Over the hill to the poor-house I'm trudgin' my weary way-
I, a woman of seventy, and only a trifle gray -
I, who am smart an' chipper, for all the years I've told,
As many another woman that's only half as old.

Soon her teachers began unexpectedly calling on Eliana to stand up in class and recite poetry. Before long she was the school poet laureate. Her principal would ask her to write a poem to commemorate every school event or holiday. To this day, she still writes a witty Christmas poem for her family and friends, such as a provocative one about euthanasia, Caroling at the Nursing Home (2002), and My Christmas Song (2003), about moving to the Bible Belt of North Carolina.

At age thirteen she competed to be in a poetry recital for students and parents. Ten students recited poetry and admission of ten cents was charged. Eliana’s parents sat proudly in the audience as she recited from memory the 68-line poem The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Sam McGee is so cold from living in Alaska, that when he is being cremated, he calls out for the door to be closed:

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear, you'll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm.

Eliana was fourteen when the stock market crashed on Black Friday in 1929. Unlike the proverbial “rags to riches” story, her story was reversed. One by one the bank foreclosed on her father’s beautiful houses and a disabling stroke left him bed-ridden for six years before his death. The children all went to work. Eliana cut cardboard innersoles to cover the holes in her shoes and walked three miles to school in the blustery winter snow, arriving with frozen feet and hands.

Even though Eliana scored the highest on a national standardized test out of her senior class of over 300 students, she was financially unable to attend college. In her own words from About and by the Author she writes:

When I finished with high school, the Depression was there;
Employment was ailing and gasping for air,
So, college was out, cardboard innersoles in,
Jogging unheard of, and everyone thin.
So, when ego was finally trampled to dust,
I took any old job. One does what one must.

Singer-songwriter John Kubilus memorialized Eliana’s life for her 90th birthday in his original song, Eliana, whose first stanza is:

The story was repeated by Eliana to three generations until Grandma’s cardboard innersoles became family folklore. When Kubilus sang this song for her at her 90th birthday party, the entire extended Beam clan exploded with tears of laughter. It is the cardboard innersoles story that symbolizes the desperation of an entire generation who came of age during The Great Depression. It was an era that fortified her with steel determination for the next eight decades.

It’s no wonder that Eliana’s mother Marinella never stopped reminiscing about Italy a day in her life. She grew up in San Mango di Piemonte, a suburb of Salerno on the breath-taking, tropical Amalfi Coast, four kilometers from a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. She married a man she didn’t get to choose and never saw her parents, Italy, nor the ocean again. Marinella weaned Eliana on the glories of Italian giants such as Michelangelo, Dante, DeVinci, Caruso, Verdi, Leonardo, Galileo, Columbus, Marco Polo, and Marconi. Her mother imbued in her an unshakable belief in herself and an unquenchable thirst for art, knowledge, culture, literature, and language.

Later in life, Eliana wrote her own 98-line narrative poem, A Crown of Sonnets: for Marinella, which celebrates her Italian heritage. This is one of her most ambitious and serious works as a poet. A Crown of Sonnets is an Italian style of poetry that is seven sonnets in length and tells a narrative story. The first sonnet is:

As a teenager during the Depression, Eliana worked as the live-in “second maid” (in charge of cleaning the second floor and serving dinner) in a grand mansion on the shores of Lake Erie in Bratenahl, Ohio. This provided her a place to sleep and eat. She learned about etiquette and crystal finger bowls, even if she didn’t attend Wellesley College for women. She shared her meager salary of $8 a week with her mother. She knew her future was not that of a maid, so at age 19, Eliana went in search of an “office” job. When she went for job interviews, she had to remove her engagement ring, because married women were not entitled to “take jobs away” from men who had to support families during the Depression. (Her fiancé died, leaving her heart-broken at 21.)

She worked in the foreign department of Cleveland Trust Bank where she translated correspondence from Italian and French. That’s where she met her husband James H. Beam (“Jimmy”). It was chemistry at first sight. Eliana was 23 and Jimmy was 33 when they married and raised five children in a big old house on sixteen acres that Jimmy had bought through a bank foreclosure. (What goes around, comes around.) Renovations took nearly the length of their marriage and were sometimes the subject of her gripes which she transformed into poems, one of which was published by Better Homes and Gardens, entitled Lament of the Craftsman’s Wife (1952).

The idea of humorously griping has been the basis of much of Eliana’s writing career for six decades. In 1947 she sold her first poem to The Beekeeper’s Magazine, followed by an article entitled Gripes from a Beekeeper’s Wife. At age 90, she published Old, Blind, and Pissed Off. In the intervening six decades, Eliana Beam has written over 500 rhymed and metered poems, both serious and light.

Her poems have appeared in McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens, The Farm Journal, Slate and Style, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ohio Motorist, Ohio Farmer, Bird Watcher’s Digest, The Cleveland Press, and elsewhere. When the magazine market for poetry dried up, she began publishing collections of her poems. She has recently begun a new volume entitled Don’t Teach Me How to Peel a Banana.

Many of her poems are autobiographical or observations of the world in which we live. Her autobiographical poem, My Headless Hostess, was written for her 90th birthday to prove that her mind is still in tact, even if her central vision is clouded by macular degeneration. When she looks at people, she cannot make out the features of their face. This poem motivated her to write another 49 poems, collected in Old, Blind, and Pissed Off (2006).

Eliana Beam is not going quietly into the night. She is pissed off about a lot of serious issues such as losing her central vision, her driver’s license, her friends who are all dying on her, and four inches in height. In addition to her declining health, she’s pissed off about picayune things that set her to ranting like people who mumble, “child proof” safety caps, shrink wrapping, outsourced customer service call centers, and automated telephone menus. In her latest volume of collected works, Old, Blind, and Pissed Off, Eliana gives vent to these frustrations, and speaks for millions of us who are also pissed off.

         To continue reading about the author, please read about her collected works: