COMMENTARY: Beardsley remembers Peter Dean
May 6, 2022 | By Tom Beardsley Editor’s note: The following are lightly edited remarks by longtime WDEV staffer and broadcaster Tom Beardsley made April 25 when he guest-hosted the Vermont Viewpoint program.
Peter Skidmore Dean, undated photo
I know there's a lot of people in the immediate area around Waterbury in particular who will want to know about the passing of Peter Dean.
Peter Dean was an engineer for this radio station and …his association with WDEV goes back not years, but decades.
He was around in the Warren Chase years, way back when the station really was put together and made into what it is today. It may not look like much. We’re in the old building on Stowe Street in Waterbury. But inside these hallways and stairways and closets and secret passageways and everything, the radio station is wired together in such a way that we can do all the programming we do at ease. And the old AM radio station with its directional array of antennas up on Blush Hill – Peter Dean's fingerprints are all over it.
Peter was the go-to guy. If you had a technical issue, if you needed something built or jerry-rigged or modified in one way or another… he was the guy that you would go to and he would string it all together.
Peter goes back – just a wonderful, wonderful human being. If you ever met Peter, you just could not dislike Peter Dean. He was a terrific guy, he was a very interesting guy. Boy, talk about someone who marched to his own drummer and took life in his own terms.
Peter, for many years, didn't have an automobile and he would walk everywhere he went around Waterbury. He'd walk up to Blush Hill to work on the transmitters and the towers. And everywhere he went, you'd see Peter with his hiking boots on and his backpack. It was a large backpack. Everything he owned, I think, was carried in that backpack for a good many years.
I don't know where he lived exactly, but he had a couple of different places around Waterbury. For a while he lived out west somewhere. Arizona, I think. But he was a hiker. He was a mountain man. He was a guy that went out and enjoyed nature in Vermont to its fullest. And I had the honor of going hiking with him on many occasions.
Peter and I hiked up Mount Mansfield one day, hiked along the ridgeline from the chin to the nose of Mount Mansfield. And he would know all the vegetation and the berries and the types of rock. He knew all of that stuff, and he would tell you all about it. He was extremely knowledgeable and respectful of the great outdoors. And he really was a steward of these great natural resources that we all enjoy in Vermont.
He and I hiked up Camel's Hump. We visited the site of that plane crash many years ago on the side of Camel’s Hump, the military airplane that went down up there. He knew the whole story behind it. He knew the history of it and he would tell me about all the different trails.
He knew the Green Mountain Club trails like the back of his hand. He knew where they were. He didn't need a guidebook. He didn't need a map. He just knew where all the trailheads were and where they all went, what ponds you'd find along the trailside. He knew about the various lodges that you would find out in the woods. I believe he did hike the Long Trail at one point, top to bottom – or one end to the other.
He was a good friend and a real part of this community for a great many years, and certainly a huge part of this radio station for decades, years and years…
I came in one morning. I was doing the early morning shift at the radio station and I was filling in. And for whatever reason they had decided that they were going to change the configuration in the studio from a sit-down studio to a stand-up studio… I arrived at quarter to four in the morning to go on the air at five o’clock to sign on the radio station, and the entire control room was dismantled, everything was disconnected.
And Peter was in the process of, I guess, raising at that point the control panel – the console – from a sit-down setup to a stand-up setup. So I'm on the air an hour later and I had to operate from an auxiliary studio across the hall which was totally ill-equipped for such a broadcast. But Peter was in here working. He helped me get through the shift in working on equipment that was nowhere near as capable of conducting such a show as the one in the main control room is. That was one of my adventures with Peter Dean.
Peter Dean – great fellow, passed away over the weekend I'm told, and he will be missed and we will think of him fondly many times in the future here at the Radio Vermont Group… Just a remarkable human being, a great guy with a good soul.
Now retired from WDEV, Tom Beardsley spent 30 years of his career with the radio station and can still on occasion be heard on the air.
A full obituary for Peter Skidmore Dean can be found in the Obituary section.