A Man of His Time
By Dena Firkins
Melvin Dean Pettay
November 30, 1926-November 21, 2004
Melvin Dean Pettay, my great-grandfather, was born on November 30, 1926, to Martha Jane Evans and Vernie Pettay. He had a younger brother named Donald. He graduated from Haven High School in Haven, Kansas, in 1944. A good-looking and willful young man, Dean enlisted in the U.S. Navy on October 25, 1944, a month before he turned 18, in order to avoid having to be in the Army.[1] He was sent from Kansas to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois, the largest naval boot camp in the nation at the time.
The Great Lakes Naval Station supplied over one million men to the war effort, this number accounted for nearly a third of all naval recruits.[2] Recruits at GLNS steadily decreased after World War I, but after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the GLNS experienced a massive influx of funds from the Navy as well as a steady supply of naval recruits. By the end of 1942, over 100,000 recruits and teachers were on base.[3] Sometime during his training, Dean took a small leave, and contracted the mumps! He went back to base without getting treated, ensuring his place in the sick bay while other recruits were sent to war. The Navy lost his papers, leaving him on the GLNS until they were found, whereupon he was released from training and assigned to the USS J. Franklin Bell.[4] Dean served on the J. Franklin Bell from September 1945 to January 1946.[5] Dean sailed with the Bell from the Philippines, carrying troops back to the US after Japan surrendered. After reaching the western shore of the United States in October, the Bell ran coastal operations, shuttling between California and Washington before being decommissioned in March 1946, and Dean was transferred for a few months to the USS Stentor, assigned for Chinese occupation.[6] As World War II ended, United States politicians and military officials worried about spreading communist influence to countries like China; the political situation of communist countries like China motivated the United States to engage in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, an ideological conflict that lasted for the rest of the twentieth century.
After Dean was released from the Navy, he met his future wife and my great grandmother, Phyllis. Great Grandma described Dean as “tall, dark, and handsome”, and he was quite the ladies’ man! Within three months of meeting, they were married. He was 21 and she was 17, and they were married for 58 years until his passing in 2004. Their marriage produced four daughters; Linda, Dena, Patty, and Katherine. Of those four, only Dena and Katherine are the only daughters left.[7] Dean, Phyllis and their children moved between Kansas, Wyoming, and eventually ended up in Colorado, through the 1950s to the early 1960s. After his time in the war, Dean began working for the South Bell Telephone Company. When they moved to Colorado, Dean transferred to the Mountain Bell Company, where he had a successful career. He retired with a pension.
Dean was a hard-willed man, but cared very much for his family. He set strict rules in the household, but made sure his daughters and his wife knew they were loved. Dean constantly challenged his girls as they grew up, requiring them to logically persuade him when asking him for anything. He worked hard for his family in order to provide for his daughters, and thrived in his career with Mountain Bell. His wife also worked, but they made sure that their daughters had guidance and parenting. They rented a small lakeside property on Lake Mcconaughy, Nebraska that they visited as often as they could.
While growing up, Dena watched her father go on hunting trips with his buddies, and return with snacks and goodies to divvy up amongst his daughters. When recalling her father, she said, “My daddy was a hard task master, but my daddy loved me, and I knew it.”[8] Dena celebrated a special bond with her father when she picked up hunting with her husband, and grew very close with Dean on goose and deer hunting trips. On these trips, she shared with him a love he had held close to his heart for most of his life. When recalling the days she went hunting with him, Dena expressed how special it was to share something with her father that her fellow sisters did not.
As Dean got older, his knees started to give out on him, so he invested in what was then new technology: knee replacements. One fateful day in 1996, while Dena and her husband helped Phyllis paint the interior of their house, Dean left for a solo trip to Lake Mcconaughy. During this trip, one of Dean’s knees locked up while he was standing on a chair hanging a wind chime, causing him to fall on the concrete and break his spine. The owner of the property had a cat, who found Dean unconscious and led the owner to Dean’s body. He was airlifted to Denver for emergency medical attention, but the damage was done; this once proud, tall-standing man was reduced to a quadriplegic. This debilitation in no way deferred his strong personality, which shined until his passing in November 2004. I remember sitting by my great-grandfather’s bedside as a little girl, listening to him talk about things I did not understand and do not remember. Dean lived a long, full life, marked by daughters and a wife that loved him, a successful and stable career, and his unwavering grit in the face of his accident. He was truly a man of his time.
Footnotes ↓
[1] Phyllis Pettay, interview by Dena Firkins, Denver, Colorado, August 22, 2019, DU VLP.
[2] “Great Lakes Naval Training Station,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org (accessed February 7, 2020).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Phyllis Pettay, interview.
[5] Melvin D Pettay, Navy Muster Rolls, Ancestry.com (accessed February 7, 2020)
[6] “J. Franklin Bell AP-34”, HistoryCentral.com, historycentral.com/navy (accessed February 7, 2020); “USS Stentor”, NavSource Online, navsource.org (accessed February 7, 2020).
[7] Dena is my grandmother.
[8] Dena Pettay-Montgomery, interview by Dena Firkins, Denver, Colorado, August 22, 2019, DU VLP.
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