S I N C E 1 8 7 5
CL
n NEWS & NOTEWORTHY n
Home of the Brumby® Rocker the Earl and Rachel Smith Strand Theatre’s right portion
of the lobby area was Bradley & Bandy Drugstore, where
he would deliver prescriptions curbside and steal a sip of
leftover milkshakes in the back from time to time. Or how
the Strand used to have “bank nights,” where every ticket
to that night’s movie had a number on it and local bankers
would give out various prizes. Or even how he collected
bets from his friends that his cousin Ruby could remove
her own eyeball (a glass eye, unbeknownst to them), put
it in her hand and put it back in her eye socket, for which
he collected a pretty penny until she called up his mama
and said he needed to stop making money off of her
performing for his friends.
But when he was asked the more philosophical
questions of the legacy he wants to leave behind, his
humility quieted him a bit. Those were harder to share.
“I suppose I would just say be good to people,” he
finally said. “Just try to treat everyone fairly.”
“A construction worker who worked on their house in
Ellijay once told me, ‘I like your dad because he don’t high
hat nobody,’” recalled his daughter, Debbie Dean Ducas.
“He doesn’t have airs with anyone, he just accepts all as
they are.”
Dean said most of his closest friends have passed on
before him, but they live on in his memories. People like
his Class of 1937 Marietta High School best friends Wally
Groover, Ed Massey, Ross Reeves, Sam Lindley and Mickey
Benson. Mr. Harris at the Marietta Daily Journal, who would
give him a dime a week to deliver newspapers to the
northeast part of town via bicycle, even putting them inside
people’s doorways if they weren’t home (something Dean
said you surely can’t do now). Mr. Richardson at the bike
shop on the Marietta Square, who gave him an old front
tire for his bicycle and fixed it up for him at no charge.
And of course the love of his life, the girl he met
while delivering the MDJ in the 1930s, fell in love with
after seeing her at a USO dance and was married to for
63 years, Martha Love West Dean. Martha Love passed
away in 2007. Dean said he and Martha Love would often
dance in their living room for no reason, often to big
band music, which he can’t understand why people don’t
still love today.
“That music, you knew the words, you could sing along,
it meant something to you. Music today, it’s just not that
way,” he said.
Dean said he’s kept himself pretty happy and healthy,
but that his longevity probably has something to do with
his genes, too. Many of the men and women in his family
lived well into their 90s, and having his “pride and joy,”
his daughter and her husband, living with him now has
helped, too.
Dean has countless more stories from his 100 years, and
Ducas has been collecting them through the years in print
form so the family can cherish them for another century.
One last bit of advice Dean shared is timeless: “Life’s
too short to do everything you want to do, but you can try.
Work hard, but play hard, too.”
/www.brumbyrocker.com
link