“Definitely a unique individual with many, many talents,” said David Dixon, who served as managing editor for The Gleaner for about 20 years while Dear was at the helm. “He was a doozy. He had a very inquisitive mind. He’d come into the newsroom and ask questions that had never occurred to you before.”
In about 1980, when Chuck and Donna Stinnett were young reporters at The Gleaner, Walt invited them to come to his home on Horseshoe Drive for dinner with he and his wife, Martha. There had been some polite pre-dinner conversation in the living room when Dear suddenly leapt to his feet, scurried over to his World Book encyclopedias and pulled out the “F” volume.
“Let’s learn everything there is to know about Millard Fillmore!” he declared, apropos of nothing.
To be sure, Dear was endlessly curious, including about the state of affairs in his adopted hometown of Henderson. One anecdote recalls the time he was filling his car at a self-service station when, probably bored and impatient, he popped over to the other side of the gas pump to ask another motorist, a complete stranger, “What do you think about our community college?”
“I was always fascinated by his breadth of interest,” Davis said. “Even after he moved to Colorado, he’d call me — it might only be 15 minutes, just 10 minutes — he’d come up with a hundred different things to talk about: Rails-to-trails. What’s being done with the riverfront? What’s going on with the Preston Foundation and how’s the bank doing? It was really something.”
David Thompson, the retired longtime executive director of the Kentucky Press Association, recalled a not-untypical first encounter with Dear.
“As for Walt, my first introduction to him was during a KPA Summer Convention at Kentucky Dam Village State Park,” Thompson recalled in 2019. “During some down time one afternoon, Walt went fishing, one of his favorite hobbies. That evening, as others were in the dining room beginning their meal, this vociferous individual walked in, told the waitress he wanted to see the chef immediately. A large bass in tow, Walt marched right into the kitchen, told the chef to clean and filet the fish and fix that for him for supper.”
The Dear family was active in the Presbyterian Church of Henderson. There, according to the obituary his family prepared, he “alternated singing boisterously with dozing in the pew.”
In retirement, he made a new home in Durango. On his trip to see Dear a few weeks ago, John Hodge said he mentioned to some locals that he was visiting a friend. Who, they asked. Hodge shrugged and told them.
“Oh, Walt Dear! He’s a legend in Durango,” he was promptly told.
“He left an impression wherever he went,” Hodge observed.
Walt the entertainer
Walt Dear loved to entertain people. He began playing the piano at age eight, the start of a lifelong passion. Visitors to his home were frequently treated to spirited performances of him tickling the ivories. During the 1990s, when the Dave and Connie Walaskay owned and operated Planters Coffee House on Main Street, he would come by about once a month to play an upright piano to entertain customers.
“Oh, he was talented,” Connie Walaskay said.
Walt and Martha started a family tradition of an annual Christmas caroling party, with him at the piano; his children recalled him singing with their miniature schnauzer, Rita, “howling along from his lap.” That caroling tradition, they said, continued into his 90s.
“One time, I don’t know if it was a holiday, he called me from Colorado and played the piano over the phone for me,” Austin said. “Anytime he could do it in front of people, you could bet your butt he was going to do it!”
At the annual three-week-long Music in the Mountains concert series in Durango for which he was a major sponsor, Dear each year would sit at a piano dressed formally in red sports jacket and a bow tie to perform a couple of songs.
He didn’t mind being a comic figure. One old photo showed Dear posed in front of the Audubon State Park museum with binoculars in hand and dressed in hiking shorts and knee-high socks, scanning the skies for birds, seemingly oblivious to four geese (actually, decoys) right at his feet. In another, he performed on stage, vaudeville-style, in a garish striped jacket and straw hat, his head thrown back as he crooned some song.
One Halloween, Walt and Martha Dear recreated the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice,” with Walt in the role of a rodent and Martha, in a gray wig, as the farmer’s wife chasing him with a carving knife down Main Street in Henderson. The stunt brought a crowd into Planter’s Coffee House, a favorite haunt of the Dears.
Connie Walaskay has photos of Dear dancing enthusiastically at Planters with a white-haired Marty Branaman, a family friend and wife of a well-known attorney here, and him and Martha belting out a song at the restaurant. Could Martha sing, too?
“It didn’t matter,” Walaskay said. “He could.”
A physical life
Dear led a vigorous lifestyle throughout his life. He jogged and biked. When he played racquetball at the YMCA, it was a contact sport; he defended his space on the court like an NBA power forward.
Like his mother, he swam into his 90s. Dear biked the mountainous Iron Horse Bicycle Classic in Durango twice in his 70s, according to his family. He climbed the 14,058-foot Handies Peak in the San Juan Mountains at age 78.
And a long life
Walt Dear came to Henderson with nearly a century of printer’s ink in his family’s veins. He arrived as an outsider, a Jersey kid by way of North Carolina and the U.S. Navy, but soon wove himself into the fabric of Henderson community life. He was confounding but also came to be beloved. He made life interesting.
“I loved working for Walt Dear,” Dixon said.
“A peculiar fellow but a very good-hearted fellow,” Austin, his longtime second-in-command, said. “He liked people and liked to talk to people and he liked his agencies he worked with.”
“Walt was a wonderful guy,” Logan said.
“He was someone who deserves to be remembered well,” Davis said. “He had a big impact on our community.”
