McDonald: Men like Dean fewer, farther away

He was a short and stocky man, loud in life and with a laugh to beat all hell. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the most interesting man I’ve ever known.

link Tom McDonald

Unfortunately, I lost touch with him years ago, so to protect his privacy I’ll only call him Dean in this writing. I wouldn’t want to make him mad, as he was also the toughest man I’ve ever known.

He had a mouth that would make a sailor blush, but it was offset with a soft underbelly that was clearly exposed around little children. He was downright goofy around babies. Such an extreme change from his tough-guy demeanor made it impossible not to smile.

Dean was a living paradox of personality, but he was comfortable inside his own skin. When I knew him, he was the maintenance engineer in his 40s, at a small town hospital in Arkansas, and he hired me to be his assistant.

I was 24 at the time and quite restless, and at first I didn’t cotton to him. He was verbally brutal to me, like a drill sergeant, criticizing my every move as if I didn’t have a lick of sense. It didn’t take long before resentment welled up inside me and, after about a month on the job, I lashed back at him.

He had sent me into a boiler room to repair a pump. I did exactly as he instructed me to do, but when he came to inspect my work, he started yelling at how I’d done it all wrong. But I’d had enough and I yelled back, defending my work as nothing less than what he had told me to do.

I remember him looking at me during that confrontation and, instead of beating me up one side of that boiler room to the other (which I half expected), he laughed. It was as if he’d been waiting for me to stand up for myself, and from that day on, we got along — with both of us yelling at each other from time to time.

Dean wasn’t just a “jack of all trades,” he was a master of all things mechanical. In just one year under Dean’s supervision, I learned much about how things work — sometimes the hard way. I remember being 10 feet up on a ladder, changing the ballast in a florescent light fixture, with the electricity still on.

“You’ll learn better with it hot,” Dean insisted.

“But what if I accidentally cross the wires?” I asked.

“Then it’ll hit you so hard you’ll fall off that ladder and bust your a--,” he replied with that damned laugh of his.

Despite my shaking hands, I replaced that ballast and survived another one of Dean’s lessons.

Of course, Dean was a lot deeper than all that. He and his wife took in foster kids — more than 40 had lived with them through the years — though he had a terrible relationship with his son, who had left home as quickly as he could.

Dean was conservative in his politics and lacked tolerance for a lot of things, including the racial prejudices that surrounded us in that small Southern town. He loved and cared for foster kids who were black, and he practically dared people to have a problem with it. To him, they were kids who needed a home, and that was all there was to it.

I suppose that to Dean’s way of thinking, children were the only innocent people on Earth, and he would do all he could to protect them.

He was also a man with boundless energy. He slept only a couple hours a night and never wore a coat. No matter how cold, he always wore short-sleeve button-down shirts. But he never got sick. Once, however, he came to work with a cold — caught the night before, he told me, because his wife had made him put on a jacket while he was working underneath his van in the rain.

“I broke a sweat because of that, and that’s why I’ve got this damn cold,” he told me. I laughed at his reasoning, but I believed him nevertheless.

Dean was, in his own way, all man, tough as nails but always willing to defend the vulnerable. He could be a first-class jerk, but he was a protector, a provider and a problem-solver. I came to respect him, despite our stark differences, because of his enormous heart.

Where are such men these days? Did they pass with the antiquated values of yesteryear? I suppose they’re still around, but they’re fewer and farther away, and that’s to our detriment.

Dean wasn’t the perfect role model — far from it — but he was a man of consequence, because he always stood firm. He was solid as a rock.

And wouldn’t you know it, I can still hear that beat-all-hell laugh of his to this day.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: [email protected]