C. Richard Beam was born on February 25, 1925 in Red Run, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He attended local public schools in the Ephrata area and after graduating high school was accepted at Louisiana State University in 1943. After only 12 weeks in college he entered the United States Army and served in the European theater during the Second World War. Following the war, Beam returned to Lancaster County and attended Franklin & Marshall College. He graduated from the school in 1949 with a Bachelor's of Arts degree in German. From the fall of 1949 to the summer of 1954 he attended the University of Marburg (1949-1950), the University of Vienna (1952-1953) and McGill University (1954). In 1955 he was admitted to the graduate school at Middlebury College and two years later received a Master's of Arts degree in German. Between 1957 and 1961 he continued his graduate work at Pennsylvania State University. In the fall of 1961, Beam accepted an appointment at Millersville State College as a foreign language professor. His major focus of research was in the Pennsylvania-Dutch dialect spoken in the United States and Canada. He has spent his academic career documenting the dialect, revising Lambert's Pennsylvania-Dutch Dictionary and developing the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies at Millersville University. In the fall of 1990 he retired from Millersville University after 29 years of teaching.
From the description of C. Richard Beam Pennsylvania-Dutch newspaper clippings, 1879-2000. (Millersville University Library). WorldCat record id: 60525510
