Dean Ramsey

I lost an old friend the other day.  Dean Ramsey died last week, at the great age of ninety-one years old.  Dean, the son of the Pataskala local hardware store owner,  graduated from Pataskala High School, a few years before it was consolidated into the Southwest Licking Local School and high school kids were sent to Watkins Memorial.  He went on to The Ohio State University to become a landscape architect, then into the Air Force during the Korean War.

Dean came back from his service, and began a career in Kansas City.  But he soon returned to become the first University Landscape Architect of Ohio State, and spent a career there at his alma mater, retiring in 1988 as an Assistant Vice President emeritus.

Everybody knew him as a Buckeye.  But Dean was even more dedicated to the place where he grew up, Pataskala, Ohio.  The little farm town where Dean was born during the Great Depression, was going through tremendous changes, as Columbus spread out and farm fields became suburban housing developments.   Dean helped the town through that process, dedicating a big portion of his life to kids through Boy Scouting and his work in the schools.

I met Dean early in my career at Watkins.  His son Brooke was a runner, (we met on the track when I was a student teacher and he was a hot-shot eighth grader), and was part of the track and cross country programs through high school.  Dean always followed Brooke’s career, and was always there with words of encouragement both for his son and this young coach and teacher, just a few years older.

But where I really got to know Dean Ramsey was through Scouting.  Dean was involved in the local Pataskala Troop, 21.  Scouting had always been a big part of my life, so while I was an Assistant Track Coach out at school, I was also an Assistant Scoutmaster, and for several years helped out in that program where I was most familiar. 

One of our “Good Deeds” was to clean up the town after the annual Pataskala Street Fair ended at eleven on Saturday night. I remember getting “chewed out” by Dean – I was picking up a broken bottle – “we don’t pick up broken glass without GLOVES, Marty!!” He was taking care of folks, even then – in the middle of the night. 

Dean was always my vision of “old time” Pataskala.  He married his sweetheart in 1952, and Ann worked as a secretary at the Middle School for much of the time I taught there.  It was Ann’s gentle voice that was on the phone call at 7:30 in the morning – “Marty, Mr. Gardner (the principal) wants to know if you’re coming in to school today”.  It was such a gentle way to wake up to the terrifying reality – you slept through the alarm, and kids were already in your classroom.

Dean knew everything about the school and the town.  He designed the stadium at the “new” high school (that’s the 1955 school, not the 1980 school or the 2022 school), and when we wanted to find where some drainage was blocked, or how the wires were run, Dean was usually the answer.  He was part of the community group that built the field (and the new all-weather track) in 1977.  The National Guard came out to help, and stayed at the school (it was the year before I arrived, but I heard stories – beer kegs rolling in the halls?).  They built the second all-weather track here in Licking County.  It was awesome as a student-teacher and first year coach.  I remember when the snow melted and I finally saw “our” eight lane “super-highway”.

I’ve been part of building two tracks on that site since then, and I understand both the pride and the ownership you feel for that quarter-mile piece of asphalt and surface. And when we were trying to re-do the facility, Dean always had the answers we needed, like what to do about the drainage that created “Lake Watkins” (I actually windsurfed it once behind the visitors bleachers).  Dean usually remembered off the top of his head, or he went home and found the precise landscape architectural plan that showed the answers.

Dean served on the school board long before I came to Watkins, but he was on the County School Board for a number of years during my career.  And he was always supportive when it came to passing school levies.

So I knew Dean through track, through school, and through Scouting.  And I also knew Dean through his work at the West Licking Historical Society.  He and a number of his “peers” from “old Pataskala” compiled a huge history of the area, thousands of pages of what life was like in the town where they grew up, and what life was like in the present as well (around 1990).   It was all encompassing.

Everyone in “old” Pataskala probably has a “Dean Ramsey story”.  Here’s mine.  Back in 1988 I had a pole vaulter named Chris, an all-state athlete, who also was a brilliant student.  He loved pole vault, and he loved art and music as well, and wanted to find a way to combine those into his senior art project.  

He decided to build a set of bag-pipes, and asked me if I knew of anyone who knew about the instrument.  And I did – Dean Ramsey was a “piper” in the Scottish rite,  and I arranged for Chris to meet him.  Dean was incredibly generous with his time, and whole-heartedly helped with the project.  They created ceramic pipes, and installed all of the proper “bags” to make it work.  As I remember, they may have been the heaviest set of bagpipes ever made, but they did play.

I don’t know this for sure, but knowing Dean Ramsey I bet he and Chris had conversations that went beyond bagpipes.  Maybe in that discussion, they talked about design and architecture.   Anyway, Chris graduated and went off to pole vault for Yale and work towards an engineering degree.  But he soon found the way to combine his skill in math and physics with his artistic drive.  He became an architect, and designed buildings all over the world.  He’s still doing that today.

That was Dean, always willing to help, always supportive, always a strong “pillar” of our community. Even when he was older, it was always good to have a fifteen minute conversation in the coffee aisle at Kroger.  I never have to look far to think of him – his drawing of old “downtown” Pataskala in the “good old days”, with Ramsey’s hardware in the center, is hanging on the wall in our kitchen.  Dean was a good man, always with a story about his kids or grandkids, and even when his health was starting to fail, always wanted to know what YOU were doing.  

Pataskala lost a pillar, a friend, and a link to the past, last week. He will be missed.