DURING THE YEARS THAT DEAN WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, HE experienced many things for the first time: a best friend, a girlfriend, a job, and the feeling that he might have a talent that could provide a real sense of direction.
Bedford High School served most of the small towns in the county, so there were nearly two thousand students. Dean’s class had around one hundred and forty. He was a class clown, but not a dedicated student, unless some subject caught his attention. He continued to read science fiction and to teach himself with great fervor about subjects that interested him, yet remained relatively unaware of events in the culture at large that would one day have a significant impact.
The political climate was heating up. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, during Dean’s sophomore year, exposed the CIA’s clandestine little universe. Then there was the “situation” in Vietnam that became a hot potato for both political parties, since neither wanted to be considered soft on the Reds. That same year, Germany constructed the Berlin Wall, the United States launched its first manned space flight, and whites in Birmingham brutalized the black “freedom riders.” Two books were published that, years later, would catch Dean’s interest: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
The following year, the United States established a military council in South Vietnam and television brought the conflict into homes across America. The Soviet Union tried to send arms to communist Cuba and Kennedy’s answering blockade threatened to start a nuclear war. America held its collective breath as the confrontation escalated, but the Reds ultimately backed down. For the moment, the Cold War remained tepid.
Things boiled up on the spiritual front, however, as the second Vatican Council met in Rome to consider “updating” the Catholic Church. Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Marilyn Monroe ended her conflicted life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Around the country, angry black voices demanded to be heard.
People in Bedford discussed these changes, but their town was fairly isolated. David Bradley, a black man who grew up there and who later became a writer and one of Dean’s editors, remembers the sense of oppression. “There was a strict class consciousness,” he states. “There were lines that were not to be crossed. You had Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, an upper class and a lower class. It was not an equal opportunity kind of place. There was a coffee shop in town that would not serve you if you were black, and if you had black people living next door, you were not in the right part of town.”
The civil rights movement had minimal impact on Dean at that time. He knew that blacks had trouble with prejudice and poverty, but little was said in his own home. “I suppose there was a degree of prejudice in my family, but no one really talked about it. I think I was actually in college before I understood that there were people who had negative attitudes about other people just based on their race. But in our little town, I didn’t see much racial diversity and the black families there seemed relatively prominent, especially compared to mine. There were probably no more than five to ten black families, and the kids in one family were sports stars. Everyone adored them. So I didn’t grow up with any sense of racial tension.”
Ray Koontz still had his problems with keeping a job, so Florence worked part-time in the local G.C. Murphy five-and-dime in order to have steady, if meager, income. She bought her own car and worked hard to pay off their five thousand dollar mortgage, but Ray would sometimes forge her signature on another mortgage to finance his debts. This devious practice found its way into Dean’s 1974 novel, After the Last Race. He invented a character, Ely Grimes, a salesman who continually loses money at the track, but who endlessly envisions a big killing. He takes out a five thousand dollar mortgage on his home (which his wife had paid off), because he is dying of cancer and he has a “sure-fire” way to win money for her. (As if in retribution, Dean ensures that this man’s wife actually gets the money, but not because Ely has been a successful gambler.)
Dean could see that his mother was under terrible stress from her unhappy marriage. In high school, he took a job stocking groceries to help save for college, but there was little he could do for his mother’s situation. They were all trapped together in an escalating codependence that would reverberate in Dean’s life for many years to come.
Ray continued to cajole people into investing in his inventions. Another that Dean remembers was a tent-like structure meant as a sun shield for small fishing boats. “The idea was that you’d take this tent with you,” he explains, “and if it got too hot, you could put it up while you were in the boat. More than once, as my father tried to attach it to the boat, he fell right into the water. And since it was made of canvas, it grew very hot inside. He was sure this one was going to be very big, but it didn’t sell.”
When Dean was around seventeen, Ray came up with a rather expensive and bizarre idea. He was working again as an insurance salesman, but he hoped to quit once he got enough investors. This time, he was absolutely certain he had a winner: an electric jump rope machine.
“It was the first electric exercise machine that anyone had ever manufactured. That was the selling point. It consisted of a big, blocky pine console, like an old-fashioned television, that stood about three and a half feet high and three feet wide, and it housed a big motor. On one side was a hole with a little hook and when you pulled on the hook, a rope came out of the hole. You pulled out as much as you needed to attach to an eye fastened to the wall. Then you turned on the machine and it turned the rope.”
According to Ray, this invention was going to become the biggest thing anyone had ever seen, but Dean was puzzled.
“Dad,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense. People who jump rope want to exercise their upper bodies as much as their legs. They want to turn the rope themselves.”
Ray hated to be challenged. “This damn machine,” he insisted, “is for people who don’t want to exercise too damn much !”
Dean did not know how to respond. Under other circumstances, his father’s creative oddities might have been amusing, but he knew his mother struggled to make ends meet and these gizmos drained the available funds. “It’s not funny when your mother has to work to put food on the table and your father doesn’t bring home more than fifty dollars a week, and he’s always running up debts.”
Nevertheless, other people apparently saw the potential. “He got people to put up money and they produced it,” Dean says. “They never sold any, but at some point, I think they had eighty or ninety of them built and had a warehouse where they kept them. And the machine was not cheap. It was really expensive.”
Dean wondered out loud just who would buy it when they could pay a dollar for a regular jump rope.
Ray blew up at him. “You people don’t believe in me! You don’t have vision. These other people believe in me, they’re putting up money, we’re going to make these machines, and we’re going to be rich !”
When Dean continued to press him on its practicality, Ray finally thought of an answer that should satisfy his son. “This,” he said, “is the only exercise machine that blind people can use.
“Blind people?” Dean asked. “How can a blind person use this?”
“Besides having the machine turn the rope,” Ray pointed out, “when the rope reaches the top of its arc, the machine rings a bell, so a blind person knows when the rope is coming down.” This was self-evident to him. What more was there to say?
For Ray, the mere idea of forming a company and having stock made him a success. “Even though the company had nothing,” says Dean, “and you had to pay the attorney’s fees, you had stock and something to manufacture. That was enough for him. He’d get people to put money in it and I’m sure he filched some of it to spend on girlfriends and gambling, but he never brought it home. And when one of these things failed, that was not the end of it. You heard about these inventions forever. There was always some reason why it had gone wrong and he was always hustling to get new people involved to start it up again. There were six or eight of these things going on at once and it would drive us crazy. You knew that none of what he predicted was ever going to happen, but it was his dream. He was always going to get rich.”
Not everything Ray envisioned involved an invention. In the early sixties, he decided to manage a country singer. “My father put together a consortium to sponsor this guy named Smiling Jack. The guy was in his fifties. My father had probably seen him playing in a bar. He started chatting him up—my father was always good about chatting people up — and he presented himself as this big important person. My father claimed that Smiling Jack was a big success, that he’d sold more records than Bing Crosby, but his career just hadn’t gone as well as it should have, so my father was going to manage it. Now, what that meant was, he was going to put together a bunch of people who would put up money for recording sessions and advertising. But when I met the guy, I wanted to go wash after shaking hands with him. He seemed real oily. You knew exactly the kind of person you were dealing with, but of course, my father didn’t. My father could never see deception in other people because he was so deceptive himself.”
Never one to accept his father’s word, Dean challenged him: “If Smiling Jack has sold more records than Bing Crosby, why does he need money? “
“Well,” said Ray, “he’s fallen on some hard times.”
“But why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him?”
Ray flew into a rage. His face reddened as he yelled that his son just did not understand. Then he stalked off. The people who believed him were the ones who counted.
Dean was mystified that other people were not asking the same questions. Instead, they seemed just to accept whatever Ray claimed, and he managed to get the backers he needed. “I knew someone who actually put twenty thousand dollars into Smiling Jack,” Dean says.
The Smiling Jack craze lasted a year. Ray got recordings made and landed some gigs in local bars, but eventually the steam ran out, people lost money, and Ray moved on to his next project. That people were hurt by this debacle seemed not to bother him.
“Periodically people came after him to get money back,” Dean acknowledges, “but there was never any money to get back. We were poor; we never knew if we were going to have a roof over our heads the next day. Even when my father was making acceptable money, he never held on to it for any length of time. So there would be lawsuit threats, but the attorneys would finally tell their clients that they were just throwing money away because even if they won, there was nothing to take.”
Another problem was that Ray got into many car accidents, often caused by his drinking. “Over the years, he had totaled I don’t know how many cars,” Dean states. “He was always drunk and he always would get off without any fines. He was ticketed once or twice for drunk driving, but generally when he was stopped, even if there’d been an accident, he’d talk his way out of it. There were even instances where cops would call up my mother and say, ‘We’ve stopped Ray down here. He shouldn’t be driving. Can you come down here and drive this car? I don’t want to have to give him a ticket, but I can’t put him back on the road.’ He would always be able to charm them into that.”
As family life continued to be stressful, Dean became a more avid fan of horror and science fiction. He continued to read Bradbury and Heinlein, but as he began paying more attention to language, he became fascinated with other writers as well. “I liked H. P. Lovecraft because of the way he overwhelmed you with language. Bradbury, too, had this incredible language in some of his books and it was much more refined and controlled than Lovecraft. There was a whole string of writers that I liked for that reason.”
Dean bought paperbacks from the local pharmacy, which he later described in Cold Fire, his 1991 novel about a man named Jim Ironheart who came from a similar town. Jim shows the pharmacy to Holly Thorne and admits that, even as a kid, he had loved books and could not get enough of them. The pharmacist describes Jim’s passion — and he could as well have been describing Dean: “Used to spend his allowance buying most every science fiction or spook-’em paperback that came in the door.”1
Another similarity was that Jim had developed a passion for reading Edgar Allan Poe and had memorized all the macabre pieces of his poetry. Dean, too, read Poe. He also read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack London’s adventure stories, and Mark Twain’s tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
When Dean was fifteen, he encountered the writings of Richard Matheson. He was reading a science fiction anthology when he discovered Matheson’s debut story from a decade earlier, “Born of Man and Woman.” About a mutant child kept locked in a basement, it was one of the earliest representations of psychological realism in the field. As a way to draw sympathy, the story was told from the perspective of the child, yet all the while it was building toward the startling realization that the child had been locked in the basement for good reason.
Dean was in awe of Matheson’s ability to elicit the chills he felt. He had always hoped one day to be a writer, but that night he wanted, specifically, to be Richard Matheson. He wanted to make readers feel the way he felt in that moment. He thought that the unusual voice in which the story was told was unbelievably effective. Over three decades later, he would write a Foreword to a reissue of Matheson’s Hell House explaining the unique power of his writing and pointing out how impressed he had been with the way this writer had recast ancient myths into modern form to make them strikingly relevant.
Besides reading, Dean loved music, particularly rock ‘n’ roll. He managed to save up enough money from odd jobs — hawking souvenirs during special events or gathering coins below the fairground bandstand — to buy a small record player and some records. Inspired, he tried his hand at several instruments. “I played the drums for a while, and the trumpet. I also tried the guitar.” He quickly discovered, however, that he had not inherited his mother’s musical talent. “I could never play any of them well and I felt that even with a lot of practice, I’d never be first-rate, so I didn’t want to do it. That’s a character flaw, I assume. I wanted all or nothing.”
Dean joined the chorus in high school and it soon became his primary activity, partly because he had a best friend now who was also involved. “I met Larry Johnson in high school,” he recalls. “Larry’s dad was the town banker whose public persona was very sober, but Larry was exactly the opposite. He was outgoing and always looking for something to laugh about. That appealed to me. He saved my sanity as a kid.”
They had homeroom and several classes together throughout high school, so they saw each other fairly frequently
“The class of ‘63,” Larry explains, “was the first class that had accelerated programs for math and English and other subjects. There were twenty or thirty kids in certain classes for three or four years. Dean and I were among that group. We took Latin, which both of us regretted, and French, which was also not our strong suit.”
One of their favorite teachers was the chorus director, Arch Stewart. He enjoyed his students and got them involved in school plays and musicals. “We didn’t have anything quite like that until he was there,” says Dean. “One year we did an elaborate production of Oklahoma, which was a lot of fun. Larry had a good singing voice and he played Jud, the bad guy. I had a minor role, just a few lines and part of a song. I was basically the chorus treasurer.” Yet it would be in this role that he would have his first contact with one of the most significant people he was ever to meet.
Other than a brief stint in a band in college, that was the extent of Dean’s musical directions.
Dean admired Larry and envied his normal, happy family. For special events, Larry told him, they went to Ed’s Steak House near the turnpike, which seemed to Dean to be the place to go — it was where rich people went. He wondered if he’d ever get to eat in such a fine restaurant.
Dean often went after school to Larry’s house rather than risk having Larry encounter his father. “When I did go to his house,” Larry recalls, “it was rare that his father was there. I really never saw Dean’s father, so I didn’t realize what Dean was going through. He didn’t talk to me about it. He was kind of funny that way. He was private. He never bragged and never complained. I knew his dad wasn’t much in favor with a lot of people in town. He was strange. He was in and out of a million little businesses, but my father never had anything to say about him, and that was a negative to me.”
Larry did go over to sneak into the fairgrounds with Dean, and he liked Dean’s mother. “She was very sweet. I don’t remember ever seeing her in a bad mood. She was a spectacular housekeeper and the house was always well cared for.”
At Larry’s they often played in the adjacent cemetery, or passed hours inside playing monopoly or pretending to be disc jockeys on the radio. “We’d sit and laugh for hours,” Larry remarks. “We laughed at ourselves all the time.” Although Larry read Westerns and had no interest in science fiction, they shared a passion for Mad magazine. “We’d go around putting Alfred E. Newman faces on everything,” Larry laughs.
Eventually another boy, Steve Shriner, joined them, and their small group established camaraderie in a shared sense of humor, particularly in practical jokes.
“Dean loved to fool people,” says Larry. “He’d dream up pranks, but they rarely worked in actuality. One night he and two friends were outside my house making all kinds of racket to make me think aliens had landed. My dad thought it was the furnace and he got up to check it. Everyone in the house woke up except me.”
One day, Dean and Larry decided to announce a school event that would never materialize. “That one worked well,” Larry remembers. “We got on the radio with that.” Because of chorus, they were familiar with the backstage area, where they had discovered a way to get into the school after hours. To parody all the programs established to encourage school spirit, they made hundreds of posters featuring a bear-like creature announcing “Grep Day” on the upcoming Friday. They hung these posters all over the school. “Bring a Grep to school,” they urged. “Be a school booster.” Some students attempted to observe it with strange hairstyles or by carrying teddy bears to school that day, but people were confused as to what they were actually supposed to do. Then Dean and Larry broke into the school the following Sunday night and hung more posters reprimanding students for failing to show the proper spirit: “You missed Grep Day. Where were you?” or “That is how you celebrate the Grep?”
On Monday, the administration wised up and attempted to root out the perpetrators. “They called in the class officers, the chorus officers, the band officers, some of the clubs, and just all kinds of people,” says Larry. “It was so interesting to watch everyone trying to figure it out.” Larry and Dean remained silent and no one ever figured out who had done it.
Another prank was to “borrow” a six-foot-high, ten-foot-long masonite “For Sale” sign from Arch Stewart’s property out by the Elks Club, carry it across town without being seen, and hoist it onto the roof of the high school. They managed to get it in place, though while they were tying it, a police car cruised by and shone a light over the building. They froze, but the car continued on. The next day when the principal, Mr. Townsend, saw the sign, he laughed and kept laughing even as he climbed up to take it down. “I never saw him laugh so hard,” Larry claims.
They also figured out how to skip out of the last period at school by signing fake excuses so they could go to the Dairy Dell and indulge in cherry Cokes. One day, Mr. Townsend came in, greeted them, and left without realizing that they should have been in school at that hour. They looked at each other in relief. They had gotten away with yet another misdeed.
As part of the college-bound track, Dean took subjects that would prepare him. One of his teachers, Winona Garbrick, taught the advanced English course. A former WAC, she had a stern military manner, but she also knew her subject. Concerned that students from a small town might not get noticed by colleges, she had taken it upon herself to find out what they needed in order to impress admissions committees.
“Kids feared her because she was so gruff,” Dean remarks, “and she could certainly take your head off. She would be really sharp with us, but only when it was deserved or when she thought we weren’t working up to our potential. But then as we got older and had her for a second year, most of us came to love her and just thought she was wonderful. She did care about us. She was a good teacher.”
One of Miss Garbrick’s course assignments was a class newsletter, to which Dean contributed several pieces, including cartoons. He ended up as the editor. “I even made up a crossword puzzle,” he says. “The clues were embarrassing traits of teachers and the answers were their names.”
One day, Miss Garbrick brought a tape recorder to class. It was a large, bulky machine, but very exotic to the students. Dean decided to use it for some of his own creative endeavors. “We had a radio station in Bedford,” Dean explains. “KFBD was a little five-thousand-watt station that played rock ‘n’ roll part of the day and country music the other part. I did a series of things on the recorder that purported to be shows on KFBD. I would pretend to be a disc jockey. I’d tell jokes related to songs, or interview people and do both voices. I also did funny commercials, which were a hit in the class. I was willing to risk humor at the teachers’ expense. I had these Big Band records that some well-meaning relative had given me, and one of the songs I really liked was “Big Wind Blew in from Winnetka.” I taped this song, but sang over it and changed the words to “Big Wind Blew in from Winona.” Of course, the kids loved the teacher being mocked, and she had a good sense of humor. She’d get kind of red-faced, but she’d laugh.”
He got along well with Tom Doyle, who taught history at the school and who was his homeroom and driver’s education teacher. “Dean wasn’t outgoing unless you spent some time with him,” Doyle recalls. In homeroom, Doyle would read verses from the Bible and have the kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance each day. He had students read out loud, and went out of his way to make holidays special for those who did not have much. He also took them to see historical places in town, such as the building that had once been part of the Underground Railroad. Years later, after Dean got published, he sent this man each of his books.
As Dean began to think about college, he decided it would be best for him to major in history. That was his easiest subject. Miss Garbrick heard about this from the principal’s office, and one day in the hall, she shouted at Dean that she wanted to speak to him. “Every other kid in the hall scattered because they thought I was in deep trouble,” says Dean. “She marched up to me and said she’d heard I was going to major in history. She was really steamed.” To her mind, what he should do with his life was quite clear.
“She told me that I wanted to study history only because I was lazy,” Dean continues. “Then she said I should major in English because I had writing talent and that was going to be harder to develop. That had a profound effect. She impressed me so much that I changed my mind.”
Later he dedicated Prison of Ice, subsequently reissued as Icebound, to Winona Garbrick in appreciation; his editor on that book was also one of her former students, David Bradley. Dean kept her informed throughout his career about what he was writing until she died. She was happy to know he was succeeding as a writer, but she never quite approved of the kinds of novels he wrote. Even so, his meeting with her in the hall proved to be pivotal.
At that age, Dean was painfully shy. He went out with a few girls, but no relationships had materialized for him. In part, he was hampered by not having a car and being unsure when he could use his mother’s, but he also did not pick up clues that girls liked him and wanted him to ask them out. He was friendly with some of the girls in his class and they tossed him hints, but he did not realize they might truly be interested in him.
“The first time I went out on a date,” he remembers, “my mother had to drive us because I was fifteen. The girl’s name was Jamie Fries and we went bowling. Not long thereafter, her parents moved out of town and she transferred to another school — I hope not because I had dated her. I also dated a girl named Alice Whisker for a while, but I didn’t date anybody for an extended period of time.”
During his senior year, Dean was with his friend Larry when he spotted a thin and pretty young woman with dark hair standing on a street corner.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Gerda Cerra,” Larry said. “Ross Cerra’s daughter. You know, the shoemaker?”
Dean knew of the man. He was a first-generation Italian immigrant who lived at 127 South Bedford Street. Dean’s father had once bragged that his own shoe shop would put Ross Cerra out of business.
As Dean watched Gerda, he was struck. He had to ask her out. He knew he would have trouble approaching her, but there was no turning back. She was beautiful!
He soon learned that she was a junior, and very busy. She was the president of her class and actively involved in her church.
“She was probably the smartest kid in that high school,” says David Bradley, a few grades behind her. “She had a lot of talent. You worshipped her from afar.”
“She was a good student and very personable,” remembers classmate Norma Cuppett. “I don’t know of anyone who disliked her. She was a hard worker and very ambitious.”
Mary Jeanne (Heit) Wilt went all the way through school with Gerda. “She was quiet and shy,” she recalls. “That was the way she was raised. You would walk into their home and it was very quiet and religious. She had a nice personality and a dry sense of humor.”
The one drawback, some people warned Dean, was that she was Catholic. In a town that small and conservative, there would be prejudices.
Dean was not deterred. He had a plan.
“The school chorus was putting on Oklahoma and I was the treasurer, so I had to have a meeting with the class presidents because they were involved in ticket sales.” He talked to Gerda twice, briefly. She did not show any interest, but at least now she knew who he was. He could say something personal the next time he saw her.
“I noticed her in the hall going to or from a class, so I stopped her and asked her out to a movie. She said, ‘Oh, I can’t, I’ve got to work at the dry cleaner that night.’
“I was a shy kid and I did not approach girls and ask for dates easily, so I went away all clammy. The rejection was so terrible. And once rejected I never asked again. I never, ever asked again, not even if the girl said, ‘Oh, I’d love to, why don’t you ask me another time?’ A rejection meant that was the end of it.”
Even so, two weeks later, Dean worked up his courage again. “I stopped Gerda in the hall and asked her out again and she said, ‘Oh, I can’t. I’ve got to work at the movie theater.’ So I thought, ‘Huh? It was the dry cleaner last week, lady! You know, you should keep your story straight.’ But somehow or other, I went back and asked her out a third time and that time she said, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to baby-sit.’
“So by this point I feel like I’m bleeding from the nose. I waited probably a month and I got it into my head that, okay, she’s class president. Her class dance is coming. She has to go to her class dance. She can’t make up some story about working.”
Dean waited until it was close to the event, but far enough away where Gerda would probably not yet have a date. He approached her and asked if he could take her to her class dance.
Gerda brushed him off with, “Oh, I can’t. I’m busy that night.”
“You can’t be,” said Dean. “You’re the president and you have to go to the dance.”
“I’ll be there,” she responded, “but the first part of the evening, I have to take my turn selling tickets at the door. Then I have to sell refreshments, and the last third of the evening, I have to run the record player. Afterward, I have to clean up the gym.”
Thinking quickly, Dean said, “I’ll do all those things with you. Why don’t we just make that the date?”
Gerda shrugged. “Okay,” she said.
Thus, Dean had his first date with the girl who had caught his eye. He was elated.
At the dance, as Dean helped Gerda with preparations, the record player, and cleanup, he cracked jokes and made her laugh so hard that her stomach hurt the next day. They both felt good about each other.
“Dean had a sense of humor unlike anyone I’d ever known,” Gerda said. “I really enjoyed him and I liked the fact that we both liked to read.”
What Dean later wrote of Gerda was this: “She was intelligent, creative, warm, sexy, had darting, dark eyes that took everything in.”2 At the end of the evening, he gave her a chaste kiss good-night. He was in love.
As he got to know her, Dean discovered that Gerda did indeed have all those jobs. Not only was she involved at school and church, but she worked at the dry cleaners and the movie theater to help with expenses at home. Her father, Ross Cerra, was an Old World Italian who had immigrated as a teenager, and Gerda was his eldest daughter. She had two older brothers, Ross and Vito, and a younger sister, Donna. As the oldest girl in the family, she was expected to work and pay some of her own way. Her mother, Dorothy, had died of leukemia when Gerda was thirteen, and she had acquired a stepmother, Angie, by the time she was sixteen.
Gerda sewed her own clothes or put aside money to buy the few she did not make. She could embroider, cook, and knit, but never felt much kinship with other girls. She and her best friend, Sheila Rawlings, were more like tomboys. Gerda was stronger, more determined, and more focused than other girls she knew. She had never liked playing with dolls or discussing fashion. Yet those other girls respected her.
“She was real smart,” said Mary Jeanne Wilt. “When the school was having its seventy-fifth anniversary, she’s the one who noticed and then organized events for it. We even had a parade.”
Even her teachers respected her. “Gerda was from a real good family,” says Tom Doyle. “She was quiet and very serious.”
Gerda’s father, however, was not keen on this budding romance. He warned her that Dean was Ray Koontz’s son, and Ray Koontz was unreliable. “He told me not to trust the things that Dean said,” she remembers. Yet she felt differently. Dean seemed to her to be quite sincere and responsible.
All in all, Dean had found a person with whom he felt comfortable. She laughed at his jokes and knew the difficulty of being from a home where tensions and hardship were part of growing up. Gerda’s strength of character would serve Dean not only as a model for female characters in his future novels, but for males as well. “I see more of me in his male characters,” Gerda says. She considers herself a realist who relies on reason and logic to make sense of the world, and she does not tolerate nonsense or poor treatment from thoughtless people.
When Gerda had time, she and Dean began to see each other. Within a few weeks, by the third or fourth date, Dean was ready to pop the question: Would she wear his high school class ring? He had never before asked this of any girl, but it felt right. He wanted to go steady with this dark-haired, intelligent beauty.
Toward the end of the evening, when they were standing at her back door, Dean took off his ring and offered it to Gerda. She looked at it, accepted it, and then said in her matter-of-fact way, “Okay, for a week.”
Dean was thrilled, even with this qualified commitment. It was a big step toward a real relationship. She was his girl now, at least for the next seven days.
Gerda’s indecision stemmed from having had a long-term relationship that had gone sour. “I didn’t want to get attached again,” she explains, “so I was hesitant about accepting Dean’s ring.”
Yet Mary Jeanne Wilt remembers that Gerda was quite excited about it. “Dean was good for her because she was so quiet,” she remarks. “He was studious, but he was a character. He brought out a lot of her personality.”
They soon became a couple.
“At the end of the week,” Dean says, “I asked whether she was going to give the ring back and she said, ‘I think I’ll keep it if that’s okay.’”
Their relationship developed in a similar fashion to that of the two young adolescents in Dean’s 1980 novel, The Voice of the Night. Colin, a shy, insecure teenage boy, meets Heather, a girl his age who suffers from low self-esteem, although he cannot fathom why. They team up to fight off a psychotic bully who threatens to kill Colin, and Heather proves her mettle by staying with the plan even when it becomes increasingly dangerous for her. She is committed to Colin, and the impression by the end of the book is that their friendship is solid and could lead to something more.
So Dean and Gerda went steady. Everyone who knew them expected they would eventually get married. Dean’s mother approved. “My mother really liked Gerda. She’s quiet and very considerate of other people and I think my mother saw in her some of herself. She liked her industriousness. They had the same inner strength. I think Gerda is tougher-minded than my mother. And she has a much greater sense of humor than my mother did. Gerda has an extremely dry wit. One of the things that has helped us is that we both share a sense of the absurd, and there’s a lot in life we don’t take too seriously.”
Since Bedford was such a small town, their dates consisted of school dances, bowling, movies, and just driving around talking and listening to music on the radio. Sometimes they drove to Altoona and Johnstown to visit Gerda’s extended family, and Dean was impressed with their liveliness and warmth. “Every house we went to we’d be offered something to eat,” he says. “First thing when you walked in the door, bang, there would be a plate of cookies here, cakes there. Her Uncle Pete made homemade wine so he’d go down to the cellar and get some. Their strong ethnic tradition was very exotic to me.” He also enjoyed the fact that they were a large family, but they did not bicker the way his own did.
In the spring of 1963, Dean graduated from high school. His father had to be cajoled into attending the ceremony. “I remember the giant argument my mother had with him about going,” says Dean, “and he finally went, but he made a big issue about it.”
Dean did not care. He was getting away. He had already decided, based on finances, that he would attend the state teachers college in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, just over an hour away. He had worked for the past two years in a part-time position at the Acme grocery store and would continue to work over the summer. Gerda had one more year of high school and then, should they decide to stay together, they could make real plans. What Dean knew as he graduated was that, from that day forward, his life would be different.
1Dean R. Koontz, Cold Fire (New York: Putnam, 1991), p. 328.
2Dean R. Koontz, Soft Come the Dragons (New York: Ace, 1970), p. 5.