Calvin Lunsford Beale was born in Washington, DC, on June 6, 1923, and passed away at age 85 on September 2, 2008. He was a city boy born and bred, and while he "never wanted to live in a rural area" he became one of the most astute observers of rural America in the latter half of the twentieth century. Calvin spent the majority of his professional career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, where he was senior demographer at the time of his death. Together with his longtime friend and colleague Glenn Fuguitt, Calvin was arguably the world's most prominent and influential social scientist studying rural population dynamics. Calvin is generally acknowledged for his substantive contributions to rural population analysis, but he also made lasting contributions in the area of research design. In this article, the authors talk about Calvin Beale's legacy for rural demography. They identify three areas where Calvin Beale's name is firmly affixed to social science understandings of rural people and communities in the United States: (1) migration and population redistribution; (2) subregional variations in rural demographic processes; and (3) racial and ethnic composition of rural populations. (Contains 2 footnotes.)