William J. Beerman, Sr., has more than 1,000 followers with interests related to nursing homes on LinkedIn. His recent individual posts have drawn nearly 1,000 views on LinkedIn and 6,000 on his Facebook page, Nursing Home Monitor.
After his mother’s ordeal in a nursing home and William’s unsatisfactory experience with the government oversight system for nursing homes, William spent five years researching Mary Regina’s nursing home, utilizing investigative reporting and auditing techniques. The book is outlined on William’s home page.
William grew up as a Baby Boomer near the steel town of McKeesport in southwestern Pennsylvania.
After attending Catholic schools for 12 years, he enrolled in Penn State’s School of Journalism. He wanted to become a newspaper reporter to learn about the politico-rackets complex that dominated the government in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s.
When he graduated in 1970, his journalism professor helped him get a job as the only white employee for a prestigious black newspaper, the New Pittsburgh Courier.
“Thus started my glamorous and exciting career,” joked William. He spent the next 4 decades writing or editing nonfiction reports in the fields of news, auditing, and intelligence. “Most of the work was drudgery,” he said.
His 2 years with the Courier turned out to be among the more interesting ones in his life, as William went out on assignments in the black community with famous Courier photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris. The two developed a rapport. Teenie took William to black nightclubs (during the day) and back-alley numbers joints. Although he was a rookie, William hung out occasionally with the seasoned print and TV reporters in the press room in the office suite of Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty. Among the matters that William covered for the Courier were Pittsburgh City Council and Allegheny County Commission meetings and various class action lawsuits filed by the Neighborhood Legal Services civil rights lawyers.
Court trials later covered by William included a federal trial of two Cosa Nostra figures and a municipal engineer who were convicted of attempting to extort $10,000 from a bidder for a suburban government park-development contract.
William spent a year in the late 1970s as the managing editor of the Monongahela Daily Herald in southwestern Pennsylvania coal country.
After going to work for the U.S. Naval Audit Service, an organization of 500 auditors, he led a six-person team of technical editors who reviewed audit reports. During this time, William also worked nights part-time as a stringer, or correspondent, for the South Jersey edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. For the Inquirer, he wrote hundreds of byline stories including night deadline stories and features.
While with the Audit Service, William attended night school for years, accumulated the necessary credits, and passed the Institute of Internal Auditors’ rigorous exam to become a certified internal auditor.
For the last 8 years of his career, William worked evening and night shifts in the basement of the Pentagon, editing daily, early morning, intelligence reports. He volunteered for a 6-month deployment to Baghdad in 2004, but while en route there he was stopped short in the Persian Gulf State of Qatar to head, as a DOD civilian employee, a team of contractors who wrote reports about information gleaned from captured Iraqi documents. He flew to Baghdad two times to coordinate his team’s efforts with U.S. personnel in Iraq.
William earned a master’s degree in library science/information studies at Drexel University. While at Drexel, he learned how to mine public and commercial databases.
William lives in Las Cruces, NM, with his fluently bilingual Mexican-American wife of 26 years, Martha Del Avellano. She talks to him constantly, normally in English, but in Spanish when she gets angry, which is rare. The couple has a merged family of five children and four grandchildren. William and Martha live and travel with four pets, including a 26-pound blue-eyed cat, Frankie, who is named after Frank Sinatra.