Books and films about Dean/Bücher und Filme über Dean

The Class of '58 Writes a Book

A Collection of Original Stories by the Class of 1958 Wheat Ridge High School Wheat Ridge, Colorado

Edited by Don Shepperd

Authorhouse 2008. ISBN: 978-1434397270, 348 pages

About Dean Reed: page 90

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We were children who grew up in the 1940s and reached adulthood in the 1950s. They were wonderful times. As children we lay in our beds and dreamed of the joy, wonder and excitement to come in our lives... not realizing that we were already near them... Life is what happens to us when we are waiting for fame, fortune, happiness and success... We are all thousands of stories surrounded by friends and family... Stories are the way we vicariously participate in the secret lives of others...

Don Shepperd was a member of the class of 1958 at Wheat Ridge High School, Wheat Ridge, CO and went to school with all of the authors in the book. He joined the Air Force at age 17 with the fourth class of the United States Air Force Academy, became a pilot, went to Vietnam and flew 247 fighter combat missions. He retired from the Pentagon in 1998 as a Major General, after almost 40 years in uniform. In 1962 he married the former Rose Driskill who attended Wheat Ridge for one semester in their junior year. They have one son and three grandchildren. He has his own consulting firm, is a Military Analyst for CNN, an author and writes from his home in Tucson, AZ.

page 90

"Small World" by Nancy Keyes (Nancy Winslow)

... And, sometimes we would get to hear some really good singers from our own ranks perform. Gary Stites with his country and western songs was our class favorite, while Joan Cline who sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" was from the class ahead of us, and Dean Reed, class of '56, sang songs like "Company's A Comin'" with a real twang.

Dean Reed also worked at the Wheat Ridge Dairy, and whenever I'd wander across 44th to get a chocolate malt, I'd hang out and talk with him. He was a thin guy with a crew cut who was on the track team and once raced a donkey up Pike's Peak - a race I think he won. I remember thinking that caper was kind of bizarre, but outside of that, Dean seemed like a real "country boy". Somehow, maybe because he wasn't one of the football heroes, I always thought I was the only one in my class who knew Dean at all.

When Dean Reed reportedly "defected" to the Soviet Union, it not only made headlines in the local papers, but absolutely shocked everyone who heard about it. It was unclear how it happened. Rumor had it that Dean, after graduating, wasn't making it as a singer and drifted down to South America where he was married and was indoctrinated into communism which every one in Wheat Ridge spelled with a capital "C." "Defecting" in those days was REALLY a big deal and the mark of a traitor, which I suspect, sometimes rested heavily on him. However, Dean Reed did achieve fame and fortune there, and we shook our heads as we heard that he had become the Elvis Presley of the Soviet Union. He had, after all, been a part of our small, mostly innocent world...

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