Roger Beaumont

On September 1, 2025, Roger Alban Beaumont, 89, passed away peacefully at home in Bryan, Texas, surrounded by his family.

The only child of Claire Irene (Poser) and Spencer Alban Beaumont, Roger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1935 and graduated from Riverside High School in Milwaukee in 1953. He served as a military policeman in the United States Army, including during the Cuban missile crisis, and was discharged with the rank of Captain. One of Roger’s performance evaluations described him as “one of the finest officers I have ever met.” In 1963, he married Mary Ann Reschenberg.

Roger graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin and earned a Ph.D. in military history from Kansas State University in 1973. His dissertation was published the following year as his first book, Military Elites: Special Fighting Units in the Modern World.

In 1974, he married Jean Prentice Naughton, known as Penny, who was the love of his life and is bereft without him. Roger was a brilliant historian of the highest caliber, working tirelessly throughout his career and even after retirement to understand and analyze the issues that fascinated him. From 1974 to 2003, he was a professor of military history at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The subjects of his scholarship were wide-ranging and included elite fighting units, command and control, the British Army in India, joint military operations, and chaos theory. Among other things, he published more than a hundred articles and papers and nearly a dozen books and monographs, both nonfiction and fiction. These include the seminal work on joint military operations, Joint Military Operations: A Short History, and Deep Space Processional, a science fiction novel which he co-authored with his dear friend, the late R. Snowden Ficks, and which is replete with characters based on their family and friends. Roger also co-founded the journal Defense Analysis. During the 1989-1990 academic year, he served as the Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He mentored countless students, graduate students, and colleagues, and also was an advisor to Cepheid Variable, the student science fiction and fantasy organization at Texas A&M, and participated in many AggieCon gatherings.

After Roger’s retirement from Texas A&M, in 2010, he and Penny co-authored Imperial Divas: The Vicereines of India. He also collaborated with his son Eric Beaumont on a radio play in the form of an operetta called “The Ethiopian Ball,” which is based on true events at the end of the American Revolutionary War.

While Roger was a historian of events that showed the worst of humanity, he was an example of the best of humanity. He was kind, sweet, benevolent, selfless, humble, dutiful, generous, and good-humored and yet continuously endeavored to improve himself. Roger also was a gifted visual artist whose works in pastel, charcoal, ink and other media captured his personal experiences as well as the natural beauty he saw on his travels with Penny, including in the United Kingdom, New Mexico, and the south of France. Roger was a welcome and jolly guest at any party, always the most charming and interesting person in the room, although he never acted like he knew it.

In addition to Penny, Roger is survived by his son Eric of Milwaukee, daughter Anne Beaumont of New York, New York, and daughter Katherine Mason and son-in-law Gregory Mason of Bryan; grandchildren Jennifer Thomas (Matthew) of Amarillo, Texas and Andrew Mason of Borger, Texas; great-grandchildren Abigail and Ethan Thomas of Amarillo; and other extended family members. He will be missed by all of them, and by a host of other family and friends, who will gather from time to time to tell funny stories about him, as he would have wanted. His half-sister, Jeanette Caroline Beaumont, predeceased him. The family is grateful beyond measure to all those who provided such compassionate care for Roger in the last years of his life, particularly Ebone, Vicki, Helena, and Julia and Hospice Brazos Valley. Special thanks also to Jeanette Phariss – for everything.

A memorial service will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 6, 2025 at Callaway-Jones Funeral Home, 3001 South College Avenue, Bryan, Texas 77801. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, gifts in Roger’s memory be made to the Milwaukee Art Museum,where he introduced his children to the wonders of art, Hospice Brazos Valley or the WoundedWarrior Foundation.