My Father: John C. Dean, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.)

Today is the 12th anniversary of my father's death, and I want this blog entry to be in his honor, and (mostly) about him.

John Courtenay Dean, born in 1921, grew up in Southeast Missouri; his parents (Freda Dierssen and Edward Dean) were divorced when he was very young. His ethnic heritage was German and English. I never met his biological father (my grandfather); he died before I was born. But the very fact that my grandparents were divorced, back in the 1920's, tells me that my grandfather must have been a very difficult fellow. The good news was that after the divorce, my grandmother soon met and married a wonderful man: Oliver George (O.G.) Edwards, from Dexter, MO. People called him "Doc," but in the family, we called him "Pop." He had a son (James) who was near the age of my father; Jim and my father grew up together on the family farm, as brothers. I have a wonderful picture of Pop and me (we are sitting on a tree stump, with our dogs beside us), taken when I was about 5 years old: I cannot express how much I loved my grandfather. He taught me how to make a whistle out of a willow branch; we fished, we seined for minnows, we picked cherries and blackberries, and we chopped down corn stalks. I helped him make his cherry wine, and I rode around on the tractor with him, standing on the drawbar, holding onto his belt.

My grandmother, Freda, was a social worker who helped families with adoptions of infants and children. She also was an artist, and a great cook... When, on special occasions, she had a glass of wine, she would lean back and declare "I've got money in my pockets!" Her signature dish was an amazing lemon meringue pie, and she made beautiful hooked rugs, out of old men's wool suits she got at the Goodwill store.

My father learned to fly airplanes when he was just a young kid, in high school. Pop was a WW I veteran, and a pilot; and he had an airstrip and a hanger out in the back part of his farmland, alongside the creek where we seined for minnows, and found arrowheads. My father told me that he earned the money for flying lessons by "scraping axle grease off of tractors." I still don't really know exactly what that means; but he did learn to fly, and when the United States entered WW II, he was very happy to leave college and enter pilot training in the Army Air Corps. He became a B-26 pilot when he was about 19 years old, and flew bombing runs over Italy, from their base in North Africa. He remained a bomber pilot for many years thereafter. He flew the B-47 in the Strategic Air Command ("Peace Is Our Profession") throughout the Cold War (after the B-47 was phased out, he flew the KC-135). I understood, throughout my childhood, that his greatest obligation was always to be ready to drop bombs on targets in the Soviet Union. I also knew that if he were ever called to engage in that task, he was not going to survive. That was what being in a military family was all about. When he was home (which wasn't all that often), he built model railroad cars, and he built sailboats, and sometimes we all went sailing together in Tampa Bay.

My father finished out 30+ years of military service, then retired from the Air Force and moved back to the Missouri Bootheel in 1972. After that, he worked for 20 more years with the Highway Department of the State of Missouri. He did that, and he also taught people how to fly airplanes. He and my mother had a house and some land, near the place where he grew up, in Dexter, MO. That's where he ended his life, in 1996. He battled some terrible personal demons along the way, and in the end he could not transcend them. He walked out the back door one night, and shot himself. It was Holy Thursday.

My father was a quiet, private man. He loved to read, and to build things. He was a good photographer. He was a good friend and mentor to many people over the years; but, even though I was his daughter, and his only child, I never felt that I knew him well. But I do know that he loved me; when he came for visits to my house, his eyes and his face always lit up in a wonderful smile, the moment he first caught sight of me. But he really didn't allow people to get very close; during most of my life, I felt his absence more than his presence; and, since his death, I have felt his loss every day. Especially in the Spring, near Easter and my birthday.