NURSING'S DIANA DEAN LEAVES LASTING LEGACY

Although it may seem empty at times, the Mt. Hood Community College campus in Gresham is blessed with a robust history of diversity and community that is there to help one another.

The strongest impression was actually made by his mother, Diana Dean, who left a rich legacy all during her toobrief life and career. But the campus left its mark, too.

That feeling was rekindled by a recent visit to the campus by a father-daughter duo that motivated us to start digging into our Advocate student newspaper archives and asking more questions to learn more. Donald Dean, of Los Angeles, and his adult daughter, Dondei, walked around the college last autumn. He wanted to show off where he grew up and spent much of his youth, and where lasting memories were made.

Diana was likely the first female, and definitely the first African American, nursing program director at MHCC. Working here from the mid-1960s until 1974, she was a trailblazer of sorts, constantly innovating and changing the way we know and learn about health today. She pushed the boundaries for woman and minorities alike, and was phenomenally successful in influencing every community in which she was a part. For instance, an Advocate story published in April 1973 tells how Diana had recently been involved in consulting with a children’s educational television workshop. A second article, headlined “Career women to gather for Eugene Conference,” explained her contribution at the second annual Lebanon, Oregon, Business and Professional Womens Club conference, helping lead a timely discussion titled “The Changing community and Women’s Role.” This was the second conference for the working woman that Diana had attended as part of a panel.

As a powerful woman, it was not always easy for her, Donald told the Advocate in an interview.

“I recall her having a rough time, because she was a woman in the program and she challenged not only folks involved in the nursing administration and the doctors and such (but also others), being an advocate for much larger and important roles for nurses in that program,” he said.

A Second Home

Mt. Hood has always been a home to influential and strong-minded people and also a haven for those who were not always treated so favorably elsewhere – a critical value for all community colleges since their formative years in the 1960s and ’70s.

Donald, Diana’s youngest son, recalls spending many hours on campus as a safe place to stay as other local public schools had rejected or mistreated him and his brother, Darryck, numerous times for reasons owing to overt racism. At his Sandy middle school, Donald and his brother, as the only Black students there, were made to role-play as slaves during a class exercise and would suffer verbal and physical harassment, he said.

When Diana then transferred the pair into the Gresham school district, waffling a bit on their home address as had other Mt. Hood employees at the time, administrators blocked them.

The school district “decided they had their quota on Black students, and they recognized that we were using the address of other colleagues of my mother’s,” Donald said. “They threatened to expel the other people’s kids, too, if they did not get rid of us.”

That’s when MHCC became the two boys’ second home.

“We had nowhere to go, so when my mother was teaching, she would bring us to campus, and we would spend every day in the library stacks reading,” said Donald.

Feeling welcome and safe on the campus, the brothers learned as much as they could while their mother worked. On the lighter side, Donald said he remembers running through the college’s concrete corridors and sneaking junk food from the cafeteria when his mom was not looking.

Seeding Success

Sadly, Diana would suffer uterine cancer and died quite young.

“We ended up at Catlin Gabel (a private Southwest Portland academy) in middle and high school,” said Donald. “My mother passed before I finished high school, so I finished down here in California while my brother stayed with an aunt, out in West Linn.”

Diana’s wonderful legacy includes life and learning success throughout the Dean family tree. Donald is a technology consultant, while Darryck works for the federal Department of Justice in Boston. Donald’s daughter, Dondei Diana Dean, who joined his nostalgic visit, has entered a master’s program in social justice at USC, and her sister, Darynn, is studying jazz at UCLA.

Ultimately, Diana and her two young sons received a great amount of respect and acceptance from MHCC when other parts of our community were not so loving.

Today, we often overlook our campus for all that it really is – not just a maze of cement pillars and malls, but a blooming ground of opportunity and hope for those in our community who need a place to grow. And one can feel a sense of welcoming to all communities, from the Student Union being always open for anything and everyone, to the Multicultural & Diversity Resource Center, all the way to the open stacks in the Library. Our campus will always be a wonderful place to grow and learn.