Winter
2003
Volume 96, Number 2
C L O S E - U P
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The Making of an American 
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| 45Consider
the values reflected in an advertisement for prosthetics taped to my
office wall. In it an older man leans on a tall walking stick. His grin
lends sparkle to his eyes. Bicycling shorts reveal a mechanical leg.
(His own leg was lost in an accident at age 14.) The ad reads: “The
hat and shirt have canoed 400 miles of Maine’s rivers and lakes.
The shorts have bicycled 2,400 miles through Ireland, Scotland, New York,
Vermont and New Hampshire. The boots and staff have hiked England’s
Pennine Way (175 miles). Along the way, Bob managed to found seven companies
and be father to five children. If you ask Bob what his greatest accomplishment
has been, though, he’ll tell you it was convincing Nancy to marry
him 50 years ago.” The ad concludes, “It’s the ABILITY,
not the DISABILITY.” This man is my father, Robert C. Dean Jr. It is said that a family is a microcosm of civilization and the most important civilizing influence in human lives. Certainly this was true in ours. We were taught, “Deans leave things better than the way they found them.” “Deans solve problems.” “Deans don’t whine.” “Deans give back in recognition of all they have been given in life.” When my older brother, James ’73, was struggling in his teenage years with what he wanted to be, my father’s only words of advice were, “It doesn’t matter what you decide upon—truck driver or anything else. What matters is that you dedicate yourself to becoming the very best that you can be.” Coming from a man who, in his 20s, was one of the youngest assistant professors ever at MIT, this was astounding advice. When choosing courses during college, I asked my father how to decide. His simple advice was to select courses that teach you how to think—not what to think—no matter how difficult they may be. Your major course of study should be in an area that requires the guidance of professors, he recommended, leaving studies such as history (to which I was drawn) for study throughout life. The things we are naturally interested in we will always study on our own. It was when I was 6 that the compelling and empowering quality of my father’s teachings were most vividly revealed. Sitting on my parents’ bed, I begged them for a horse. My father looked directly at me and said, “We are not going to give you a horse, but I will teach you how to get one for yourself.” Over the following weeks, he showed me how to start a lawn-mowing business and save money. He encouraged me to read everything I could on horses and to learn to ride. Five years later, at the age of 11, I had enough money for the horse but nowhere to keep it. My father helped me to find an old barn in a field within a bike ride of our home and to negotiate the $1 per year lease with the property’s owner. But the lesson of the horse also taught me that even wise and well-intentioned people, such as my father, are sometimes fallible. Returning from a trip, my father was outraged to find that, on my first day in the saddle, the horse had bucked me off, causing three compressed vertebrae. To my astonishment, he insisted that it be sold. It was then that my mother stepped in to complete the lesson my father had begun. “If we had given her the horse,” she said quietly to my father, as they sat by my hospital bed, “we could take it away. But she bought it herself, and it is now her decision whether to keep it.” In the years that followed, that spunky horse and I went on to many victories. It was in this way that my parents taught their children the meaning of being an American: how to reap the rewards that flow from responsibility, effort, perseverance, skill—and a belief that anything is possible. — Martha
A. Dean ’77
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| Martha Dean is an attorney in Hartford, Conn. Her father, who served Andover as an alumni trustee from 1978-81, is the president of Synergy Innovations, Inc., a high-tech innovation firm in Lebanon, N.H. This article was adapted from the Connecticut Law Tribune of December ’01 and reprinted with its permission. | ||
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