Either just before or just after he had a driver’s license, Dean acquired an old Plymouth, somewhere in the 1949 to 1951 model year bracket. He probably got it because it had issues, someone else had abandoned it over or had given up on. After enough miles and adventures to judge it sound, Dean painted it pea green, and the “Green Dragon” it became.
For many years, Dean’s family had the Minneapolis-Moline tractor dealership in Nampa, Idaho. He got possession of a small tractor that didn’t run. As became his lifelong characteristic, Dean worked on it until it did run. He had plans on using it to custom plow gardens, etc. He was not a happy camper when the dealership sold it.
I think it was at the start of the 1957 school year that I first saw Dean Callahan. I was walking home from Lakeview Elementary School, via Lakeview Park at Nampa and saw a tall, lanky, blond fellow hiking through the park, and for a moment, thought I was seeing a cousin of similar size and hair color.
The Callahan family had moved in over the summer. They had a small farm just east of town, and when the boys traveled from home to the family business, they passed by the small motel my parents owned. We became friends, and it was usual for them to stop by if I was outside as they came by.
When the pedal of my bike split at the crank end, Dean said to bring it to the shop. I was amazed that my preteen friend just grabbed a welding hood, rod, stinger and ground clamp, pulled the crank pedal straight with one hand, and with a couple seconds of welding, had it securely repaired. He did tell me not to look at the welder flash as he welded.
Dean’s dad ended up for a while as the transportation end of scout campouts, and the back of a flat-bed Chevy truck hauled boys and gear. Without incident, other than one event when the wind blew my hat off and it took some coaxing from Dean to get his dad to stop so I could retrieve it.
Most of Dean’s high school years, he was either on crutches or just recovering from their use. A horse Dean was riding fell on him, breaking both bones in a lower leg. Surgeries to place steel rods to hold the shattered bones in place followed, then surgery to remove the hardware. Then a few weeks of no crutches and getting over a limp.
Then we heard he was back in the hospital. He said his brother made him mad, so he kicked his butt, and his leg broke again. A bunch of us went as a group to visit. We wanted to take him a treat but were not sure what was allowed, so I stuck a couple of sacks of candy inside the shaft of my Wellington boots. As we visited and ate all the candy, we talked about where the term “bootlegging” came from, as I had just bootlegged candy into our friend's hospital room.
Dean’s trusty Green Dragon finally had an issue. He ran it as a five-cylinder for a time.
Meanwhile, his grandpa had given him a 1953 Oldsmobile he’d rolled, and he talked his dad out of a 1956 Chevy that had been damaged, now sitting minus an engine. Dean proceeded to transplant the Olds engine and transmission into the Chevy.
After our junior year at high school, Dean drove the Olds-powered Chevy to Washington state to farm with his grandpa for the summer. He never came back. A couple of years later, it was obvious to us that a Washington native named Nancy Hempel was most of the reason he never came back to Idaho.
Dean and Nancy farmed for a while, then they opened a repair shop, which quickly grew into a manufacturing facility. With this base, they added farming, growing lawn turf at the beginning. Later, an alfalfa hay export facility was added, then a dairy farm. In 1992, I followed Dean to Washington and managed his hay export facility, Agri-Pac, for a couple of decades.
On Nov. 1 this year, there must have been a serious breakdown at the Pearly Gates of Heaven, and those who knew him well saw a vision of Dean Callahan walking near them and saying, “I can make that work again!”
Some of Dean's often-used quotes:
- “If I had my pickup with me, I could fix that.”
- “If it doesn’t work, we’ll work on it until it does work.”
- “I can teach almost anybody how to weld. If they don’t know how to work, I can’t help them.”
- When making an impossible-to-disassemble repair: “We’ll go in with a blue-tip wrench and come out with a spark wrench.”
I overheard a fellow reminiscing about Dean; he said he’d had to file a Chapter 12, and he owed Dean’s shop money. He went to talk to Dean, to offer to be on a cash-on-delivery basis for repairs and supplies he needed. He said that Dean told him these things happen. That they’d just start over, and to just come and get what he needed.
Yeah. Above all, Dean was a people person. And whenever I join him, I’ll betcha that those pearly gates won’t even squeak.
