By Jim Carnett
He was a member of the Orange Coast College faculty for just 16 years, until his untimely death in 1982 at the age of 52.
He was Dean Westgaard, a professor of physical education and the college's first athletic trainer. His professional resume also included lifeguard, lifeguard supervisor and fearless man of adventure. He was known throughout the world for "pushing-the-envelope" in his perilous pursuits.
"We always called him 'The Mercenary,'" says Fred Hokanson, who was an OCC track and field coach and physical education professor for more than 30 years. Fred served his last several years as the college's athletic director, and retired two years ago. He is currently OCC's interim vice president of instruction. "We knew that if we ever had to go to war, we wanted Dean with us."
"He was an all-time guy," says Leon Skeie, who succeeded Westgaard as the college's athletic trainer in 1973, and has been an OCC staffer for 32 years. "Dean has been gone for 23 years now, yet we still regularly talk about him in the Athletic Department. That tells you something about the impact he had on this place. We retell his old stories all the time."
I'd only been an OCC staff member for a few months, in November of 1971, when I received my first introduction to "Deano."
I'd seen him around campus, to be sure, and knew who he was. But I hadn't had an opportunity to chat one-on-one with the rugged adventurer. Then, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, we sat side-by-side on a 90-minute bus ride from Santa Rosa to the San Francisco International Airport, and for another hour after that on a plane from San Francisco to Long Beach.
We'd traveled the previous morning with OCC's football team to the Bay Area to participate in a state-playoff football game against Santa Rosa Junior College. Dean made the trip as the team's athletic trainer, and I was sports information director. It was my responsibility to report the game to the Southern California media.
In a less than artistic performance, Orange Coast College's gridders turned the ball over seven times and lost a frustrating 26-22 verdict to Santa Rosa's Bearcubs.
Dean and I talked all the way down the Coast that day...well, he talked and I mostly listened. You might think that the topic of discussion was football. It wasn't. Dean spent the entire time regaling me with stories about his favorite subject...himself.
I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I quickly discovered that Dean was living the most thrilling life of anyone I had ever met. People loved to hear his stories. That Saturday, he enumerated one fascinating tale after another, all the way home. I was transfixed. He'd accomplished things that I realized I could never come close to experiencing.
He told me of his dream to one day jump off Yosemite's famed El Capitan (with a parachute strapped to his back, of course!). That's just crazy, I thought. He actually ended up accomplishing that goal nine years later.
Following our trip south, I was Dean Westgaard's newest and biggest fan.
"Dean was a true daredevil," says George Mattias, who was an OCC assistant football coach and physical education professor for 30 years, from 1963-93. "He did things that most of us can only dream of doing."
Jack Fair, the defensive coordinator for OCC's football team from 1966 through 1986 – and himself a pretty macho guy – once called Westgaard "the most memorable guy I ever met on a community college campus."
Born in Minneapolis, Dean seemed as "un-Minnesotan" as one could be. He was a Californian to the core (or dare I say, Corps?).
Dean attended Ripon College out of high school, a small, private liberal arts and sciences institution in Ripon, Wisc. At the age of 21, he left school to join the United States Marine Corps. That's when he first encountered the Golden State...and became hooked. He served three years at Camp Pendleton and El Toro, and played three years of Marine football. He was a weapons instructor at Pendleton. While moving up and down the coast, he began a lifelong love affair with Laguna Beach, sitting like a jewel on the bluffs and hills above the Pacific.
Following his military service, he attended the University of Redlands where he was a star football player for the Bulldogs. He earned a B.A. degree in physical education, and went on to complete an M.A. at California State University at Los Angeles.
Dean taught history at Santa Ana High School for a year, then was a physical education instructor and assistant football coach at Upland High School for seven years. Beginning in 1955, he worked summers as a Laguna Beach lifeguard. He spent 16 years as Laguna's supervisor of guards.
A big man with a deep voice – and a demeanor that blended the best of "macho" with "cool" – Dean was hired at Orange Coast College in the fall of 1966.
"He was one of those guys that you instantly liked," Fred Hokanson said. "He was a man's man, with a barrel chest, a huge walrus mustache and a booming laugh.
"He loved to joke and he loved to laugh."
Leon Skeie refers to him as "the life of the party."
"Dean was fun to be around," Skeie says. "We attended lots of post-game OCC football parties – frequented by coaches, their wives and staff members – and he kept everyone entertained with his stories. They were mostly stories about parachuting, skydiving and scuba diving. The funny thing is, he told the same stories over and over, but that didn't seem to matter. We never grew tired of them. The more we heard them, the more fascinating they became."
Westgaard taught physical education classes and served as athletic trainer for six years.
"Athletic director, Wendell Pickens, asked me to fill in as trainer during the spring semester of 1966," George Mattias said. "I did, and that summer he went out and hired Deano to become the college's first full-time athletic trainer. We really needed him, and Dean did an excellent job. He had a great personality and the athletes loved him. He was bigger than life."
In 1971, Dean gave a first aid and CPR lecture to the entire faculty.
"That was before we'd begun to teach first aid and CPR in our division," Hokanson says. "He did a fantastic job. I remember that Jim Fitzgerald, our VP of instruction at the time, told the faculty at the conclusion of the presentation: 'As you can see, coaches aren't a bunch of dummies.' Dean made our division proud."
"Dean once gave CPR to a young drowning victim on the beach at Laguna," Skeie recalls. "He worked over the young man furiously until the paramedics arrived...then they worked on him. Finally, they looked at Dean and said, 'He's gone. There's no hope. Let's call it off.'
"Dean wouldn't have it. He kept working. They finally transported the kid to a hospital and he ended up living because of Dean's tenacity. The kid came to campus a few months later and spoke to one of our classes. He told the students, 'I heard the paramedics say that I was a goner. I heard that! Dean didn't give up. He saved my life.'"
Westgaard went into the PE classroom on a fulltime basis when Skeie was hired as trainer in '73.
The OCC hotshot was addicted to adrenaline rushes and high adventure. He was an avid scuba and sky diver. An outdoorsman, he also loved fishing and hunting, and was a river runner. He body surfed up and down the coast and enjoyed climbing mountains. And, he had a stockpile of stories for each adventure category.
"Dean was one of those guys you could plop on the highest peak in the Sierra – outfit him with just a knife – and he'd be fine," says Don Jacobs, who was an OCC public relations professional and political science professor from 1965-95. "He was self-sufficient – one of a kind."
Westgaard taught scuba diving on OCC's campus and was advisor to the Scuba Club and Sky Diving Club.
"Dean is the one who started the college's scuba classes in the 1960s," says Hokanson. "We had a thriving scuba program for years, until insurance premiums made the program prohibitively expensive."
"Dean loved to dive," Mattias says. "He went throughout the South Pacific on a sabbatical leave and dove many of the old World War II wrecks. He also dove up and down the Pacific Coast. He particularly enjoyed going after lobster. And he had a number of close shaves along the way."
In addition to teaching scuba, Westgaard trained hundreds of sky divers through his own private business, Westgaard Parachute Enterprises, Inc. He opened the company shortly after he learned to sky dive in 1969. Under his guidance, not a single student ever died or was seriously injured in an accident. He might have been daring, but never reckless.
Dean soon became an internationally-renowned sky diver...and that's no exaggeration. He ended up logging nearly 2,500 jumps. He jumped in exhibitions and demonstrations around the globe, and made numerous jumps with skydiving teams in formation. Westgaard made jumps on every continent except Antarctica, and appeared in several Hollywood films as a stunt man. His daring exploits can be seen in a sky-diving sequence in the 1980 Peter O'Toole film, "Stunt Man."
"Deano actually took part in a number of film projects," Jacobs says. "He did all the parachute jumps in Dino De Laurentis' 1976 movie, 'King Kong.' De Laurentis never actually paid him for his hard work and Westgaard was ticked. De Laurentis stiffed him!"
Westgaard once asked OCC football coach, George Mattias, to fly him to Lake Elsinore. Mattias was a private pilot, and kept a plane at Orange County Airport.
"He asked me one afternoon if I would fly him to Elsinore," Mattias remembers. "I told him sure. He took a parachute along. After we took off, he informed me that we didn't have to actually land at Elsinore. 'I'll just open the door and jump out,' he said. 'Naw, Dean,' I nervously replied. 'I haven't cleared this with the FAA, and can't take the risk!' He let me take him down to the runway. But he would have jumped had I let him."
During the 1974 football campaign, Dean eagerly agreed to skydive into LeBard Stadium for OCC's homecoming. At half time, he was to deliver an envelope to the 50 yard line. The envelope contained the names of the winning homecoming king and queen candidates.
"I went out to LeBard Stadium at 4 p.m. that afternoon to watch his practice jump," Hokanson said. "It was perfect. He landed right on the 50. I was impressed."
Five hours later, as half time approached, the wind began to gust. It was coming out of the west.
"OCC's Dean of Students, Joe Kroll, was on the P.A.," Hokanson remembers. "He was the game and half time announcer, and the stands were packed."
Westgaard dropped a couple of streamers out of the plane to test the wind. Because of the breeze, the jump had to begin west of the stadium. "Look to the west...look to the west" Kroll exhorted the crowd. He whipped them into a near frenzy.
Dean made his exit at 15,000 feet, and was wearing a strobe light so that he could be seen by the crowd. All eyes were on the heavens...to the west. But Dean began to drift...to the east. Way to the east! It became evident that he wasn't going to make the 50 yard line. He wasn't, in fact, going to make the stadium!
Dean continued to drift east...over the stadium...over the track...over the tennis courts...over Fairview Rd. Gasps could be heard from the crowd. Kroll assured the masses that everything would be all right. But would they? We all feared that he might land on Fairview Road in 9 p.m. Saturday night traffic or, worse yet, get snagged by the electrical wires. Not to worry.
Westgaard landed safely amongst the rabbit hutches on the Costa Mesa High School Farm. He gathered his chute, walked across Fairview Rd. to LeBard Stadium and made a third-quarter appearance to assure the crowd that he was okay.
"For months after that, we'd kid Dean by saying, 'Look to the east...Look to the east," Hokanson said.
That spring, at the annual end-of-the-year PE Division banquet, Hokanson gave out the first-ever OCC Lame Duck Award. The dubious prize has been awarded annually to a person in the division who was not able to "deliver the goods on the proper spot" in a given year.
"That first Lame Duck went to Deano," Hokanson said.
To celebrate his 50th birthday, Dean fulfilled his dream of jumping off El Capitan. Though I'm not certain I ever specifically asked, it was my impression that Dean accomplished his feat without first seeking permission of the National Park Service.
During a 1973-74 sabbatical, Dean visited offshore oil locations in California and along the Gulf Coast. He also visited experimental diving stations in Washington, D.C. and at the University of Rhode Island. He spent time studying at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Deano attended an international conference on undersea education in Toronto, and went on scuba diving expeditions in and near Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
He was a member of the National Association of Underwater Instructors, and the United States Parachute Association. He was an instructor and safety officer for the USPA.
Toward the end of his life, he used to tell me stories about his latest passion, "para-scuba." Dean would jump out of a plane over the ocean, land in the water, then submerge and go into full scuba-diving mode. It seemed like something out of "Dr. No" or "Goldfinger."
Dean became ill while sky and scuba diving in Indonesia in the early summer of 1982. He was forced to cut short his trip and return home. He took a battery of tests and the results came back as bad as they could possibly be. He had stomach cancer. Doctors gave him no hope. Westgaard died just three months later, on Sept. 26, 1982.
"Three weeks before his death, Dean attended the opening faculty meeting on campus," Hokanson said. "I sat with him, and he knew that he didn't have long to live. He was there to start off the academic year because he knew it would provide his wife, Juanita, with an additional year of insurance coverage.
"He'd lost weight, and his face was yellow with jaundice."
"The guy was always upbeat...in good times and bad," Skeie says. "In my early years on campus, we'd get dressed every morning in the coaches' locker room before class, and he always had a laugh and a story. I don't think I ever saw him down about anything.
"I saw him in the mail room after that opening faculty meeting in 1982. He looked thin and breathed heavily. He demonstrated a lot of courage, however. 'How are you doing, Deano,' I asked. 'I'm hanging in there,' he replied, upbeat as ever. He then told me about a trip he was planning to Hawaii.
"He used to kid me about my religious faith. We had lots of good-natured conversations. I told him that day, 'I'm praying for you, Deano.' He looked at me earnestly and said, 'Thanks, Leon.' He was appreciative. That was the last time I spoke to him."
Westgaard was soon hospitalized. Hokanson and many other OCC staffers visited him at Laguna Beach Hospital.
"I remember going there one brilliant fall afternoon," Hokanson said. "You could look out the window of his room and see the deep blue ocean. As we gazed out the window, an airplane flew by, low over the water, and dipped its wings in salute to Deano. It was a poignant tribute."
Seven days before he died, though he'd been in the hospital and could barely stand, he embarked upon his final sky diving adventure. He jumped with 15 friends – in an unauthorized jump – over Laguna's main beach.
"He was so weak that he had to be lifted off the floor of the airplane," said fellow jumper, Roy Holm, a former Laguna Beach mayor.
"Two jumpers helped him out of the plane and deployed his chute for him at 3,500 feet."
A crowd of more than a thousand waited on Main Beach, and cheered him with tears in their eyes as he struggled to the microphone after landing in the sand. He expressed his gratitude to all his friends...the residents of Laguna.
It was his last dive.
Following his death, Dean's ashes were scattered over Main Beach by several colleagues.
"Dean's loss is a tremendous blow to us all," said OCC's head football coach and athletic director, Dick Tucker, to the community. "He was a man who loved life and lived it fully. He was an inspiration to all."
A scholarship in his honor – the Dean Westgaard Memorial – was established in 1984. It's given annually to OCC's outstanding graduating scholar-athlete. Candidates are judged for their scholarship, citizenship and athletic participation. A U.S. Navy anchor and plaque were placed – during a ceremony – in Dean's honor in front of the Captain's Table on campus.
The Laguna Beach lifeguard headquarters was named after him.
Dean was survived by his wife, Juanita, sons, Guy, Scott and Kurt, and his daughter, Denise.
Dean lived an extraordinary life. He will be remembered on OCC's campus as long as people who knew him are still able to draw a breath. In fact, he'll probably be remembered long after they're gone. You don't forget a guy like Dean Westgaard, even if you've only heard of him second-hand.
I still feel Dean's presence when I stand in LeBard Stadium...and look to the east. What a memory! As Don Jacobs put it, he was one of a kind.
Thursday, May 05, 2005(Jim was an Orange Coast College student in the early 1960s. He's been Director of Community Relations for 33 years. He is editor of Coast-to-Coast. This is a regular column that focuses on OCC's history and distinctive characteristics and characters.) |
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Dean Westgaard
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He was Dean Westgaard, a professor of physical education and the college's first athletic trainer. His professional resume also included lifeguard, lifeguard supervisor and fearless man of adventure. He was known throughout the world for "pushing-the-envelope" in his perilous pursuits.
"We always called him 'The Mercenary,'" says Fred Hokanson, who was an OCC track and field coach and physical education professor for more than 30 years. Fred served his last several years as the college's athletic director, and retired two years ago. He is currently OCC's interim vice president of instruction. "We knew that if we ever had to go to war, we wanted Dean with us."
"He was an all-time guy," says Leon Skeie, who succeeded Westgaard as the college's athletic trainer in 1973, and has been an OCC staffer for 32 years. "Dean has been gone for 23 years now, yet we still regularly talk about him in the Athletic Department. That tells you something about the impact he had on this place. We retell his old stories all the time."
I'd only been an OCC staff member for a few months, in November of 1971, when I received my first introduction to "Deano."
I'd seen him around campus, to be sure, and knew who he was. But I hadn't had an opportunity to chat one-on-one with the rugged adventurer. Then, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, we sat side-by-side on a 90-minute bus ride from Santa Rosa to the San Francisco International Airport, and for another hour after that on a plane from San Francisco to Long Beach.
We'd traveled the previous morning with OCC's football team to the Bay Area to participate in a state-playoff football game against Santa Rosa Junior College. Dean made the trip as the team's athletic trainer, and I was sports information director. It was my responsibility to report the game to the Southern California media.
In a less than artistic performance, Orange Coast College's gridders turned the ball over seven times and lost a frustrating 26-22 verdict to Santa Rosa's Bearcubs.
Dean and I talked all the way down the Coast that day...well, he talked and I mostly listened. You might think that the topic of discussion was football. It wasn't. Dean spent the entire time regaling me with stories about his favorite subject...himself.I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I quickly discovered that Dean was living the most thrilling life of anyone I had ever met. People loved to hear his stories. That Saturday, he enumerated one fascinating tale after another, all the way home. I was transfixed. He'd accomplished things that I realized I could never come close to experiencing.
He told me of his dream to one day jump off Yosemite's famed El Capitan (with a parachute strapped to his back, of course!). That's just crazy, I thought. He actually ended up accomplishing that goal nine years later.
Following our trip south, I was Dean Westgaard's newest and biggest fan.
"Dean was a true daredevil," says George Mattias, who was an OCC assistant football coach and physical education professor for 30 years, from 1963-93. "He did things that most of us can only dream of doing."
Jack Fair, the defensive coordinator for OCC's football team from 1966 through 1986 – and himself a pretty macho guy – once called Westgaard "the most memorable guy I ever met on a community college campus."
Born in Minneapolis, Dean seemed as "un-Minnesotan" as one could be. He was a Californian to the core (or dare I say, Corps?).
Dean attended Ripon College out of high school, a small, private liberal arts and sciences institution in Ripon, Wisc. At the age of 21, he left school to join the United States Marine Corps. That's when he first encountered the Golden State...and became hooked. He served three years at Camp Pendleton and El Toro, and played three years of Marine football. He was a weapons instructor at Pendleton. While moving up and down the coast, he began a lifelong love affair with Laguna Beach, sitting like a jewel on the bluffs and hills above the Pacific.
Following his military service, he attended the University of Redlands where he was a star football player for the Bulldogs. He earned a B.A. degree in physical education, and went on to complete an M.A. at California State University at Los Angeles.
Dean taught history at Santa Ana High School for a year, then was a physical education instructor and assistant football coach at Upland High School for seven years. Beginning in 1955, he worked summers as a Laguna Beach lifeguard. He spent 16 years as Laguna's supervisor of guards.
A big man with a deep voice – and a demeanor that blended the best of "macho" with "cool" – Dean was hired at Orange Coast College in the fall of 1966.
"He was one of those guys that you instantly liked," Fred Hokanson said. "He was a man's man, with a barrel chest, a huge walrus mustache and a booming laugh.
"He loved to joke and he loved to laugh."
Leon Skeie refers to him as "the life of the party."
"Dean was fun to be around," Skeie says. "We attended lots of post-game OCC football parties – frequented by coaches, their wives and staff members – and he kept everyone entertained with his stories. They were mostly stories about parachuting, skydiving and scuba diving. The funny thing is, he told the same stories over and over, but that didn't seem to matter. We never grew tired of them. The more we heard them, the more fascinating they became."
Westgaard taught physical education classes and served as athletic trainer for six years.
"Athletic director, Wendell Pickens, asked me to fill in as trainer during the spring semester of 1966," George Mattias said. "I did, and that summer he went out and hired Deano to become the college's first full-time athletic trainer. We really needed him, and Dean did an excellent job. He had a great personality and the athletes loved him. He was bigger than life."
In 1971, Dean gave a first aid and CPR lecture to the entire faculty.
"That was before we'd begun to teach first aid and CPR in our division," Hokanson says. "He did a fantastic job. I remember that Jim Fitzgerald, our VP of instruction at the time, told the faculty at the conclusion of the presentation: 'As you can see, coaches aren't a bunch of dummies.' Dean made our division proud."
"Dean once gave CPR to a young drowning victim on the beach at Laguna," Skeie recalls. "He worked over the young man furiously until the paramedics arrived...then they worked on him. Finally, they looked at Dean and said, 'He's gone. There's no hope. Let's call it off.'
"Dean wouldn't have it. He kept working. They finally transported the kid to a hospital and he ended up living because of Dean's tenacity. The kid came to campus a few months later and spoke to one of our classes. He told the students, 'I heard the paramedics say that I was a goner. I heard that! Dean didn't give up. He saved my life.'"
Westgaard went into the PE classroom on a fulltime basis when Skeie was hired as trainer in '73.
The OCC hotshot was addicted to adrenaline rushes and high adventure. He was an avid scuba and sky diver. An outdoorsman, he also loved fishing and hunting, and was a river runner. He body surfed up and down the coast and enjoyed climbing mountains. And, he had a stockpile of stories for each adventure category.
"Dean was one of those guys you could plop on the highest peak in the Sierra – outfit him with just a knife – and he'd be fine," says Don Jacobs, who was an OCC public relations professional and political science professor from 1965-95. "He was self-sufficient – one of a kind."
Westgaard taught scuba diving on OCC's campus and was advisor to the Scuba Club and Sky Diving Club.
"Dean is the one who started the college's scuba classes in the 1960s," says Hokanson. "We had a thriving scuba program for years, until insurance premiums made the program prohibitively expensive."
"Dean loved to dive," Mattias says. "He went throughout the South Pacific on a sabbatical leave and dove many of the old World War II wrecks. He also dove up and down the Pacific Coast. He particularly enjoyed going after lobster. And he had a number of close shaves along the way."
In addition to teaching scuba, Westgaard trained hundreds of sky divers through his own private business, Westgaard Parachute Enterprises, Inc. He opened the company shortly after he learned to sky dive in 1969. Under his guidance, not a single student ever died or was seriously injured in an accident. He might have been daring, but never reckless.
Dean soon became an internationally-renowned sky diver...and that's no exaggeration. He ended up logging nearly 2,500 jumps. He jumped in exhibitions and demonstrations around the globe, and made numerous jumps with skydiving teams in formation. Westgaard made jumps on every continent except Antarctica, and appeared in several Hollywood films as a stunt man. His daring exploits can be seen in a sky-diving sequence in the 1980 Peter O'Toole film, "Stunt Man."
"Deano actually took part in a number of film projects," Jacobs says. "He did all the parachute jumps in Dino De Laurentis' 1976 movie, 'King Kong.' De Laurentis never actually paid him for his hard work and Westgaard was ticked. De Laurentis stiffed him!"
Westgaard once asked OCC football coach, George Mattias, to fly him to Lake Elsinore. Mattias was a private pilot, and kept a plane at Orange County Airport.
"He asked me one afternoon if I would fly him to Elsinore," Mattias remembers. "I told him sure. He took a parachute along. After we took off, he informed me that we didn't have to actually land at Elsinore. 'I'll just open the door and jump out,' he said. 'Naw, Dean,' I nervously replied. 'I haven't cleared this with the FAA, and can't take the risk!' He let me take him down to the runway. But he would have jumped had I let him."
During the 1974 football campaign, Dean eagerly agreed to skydive into LeBard Stadium for OCC's homecoming. At half time, he was to deliver an envelope to the 50 yard line. The envelope contained the names of the winning homecoming king and queen candidates.
"I went out to LeBard Stadium at 4 p.m. that afternoon to watch his practice jump," Hokanson said. "It was perfect. He landed right on the 50. I was impressed."
Five hours later, as half time approached, the wind began to gust. It was coming out of the west.
"OCC's Dean of Students, Joe Kroll, was on the P.A.," Hokanson remembers. "He was the game and half time announcer, and the stands were packed."
Westgaard dropped a couple of streamers out of the plane to test the wind. Because of the breeze, the jump had to begin west of the stadium. "Look to the west...look to the west" Kroll exhorted the crowd. He whipped them into a near frenzy.
Dean made his exit at 15,000 feet, and was wearing a strobe light so that he could be seen by the crowd. All eyes were on the heavens...to the west. But Dean began to drift...to the east. Way to the east! It became evident that he wasn't going to make the 50 yard line. He wasn't, in fact, going to make the stadium!
Dean continued to drift east...over the stadium...over the track...over the tennis courts...over Fairview Rd. Gasps could be heard from the crowd. Kroll assured the masses that everything would be all right. But would they? We all feared that he might land on Fairview Road in 9 p.m. Saturday night traffic or, worse yet, get snagged by the electrical wires. Not to worry.
Westgaard landed safely amongst the rabbit hutches on the Costa Mesa High School Farm. He gathered his chute, walked across Fairview Rd. to LeBard Stadium and made a third-quarter appearance to assure the crowd that he was okay.
"For months after that, we'd kid Dean by saying, 'Look to the east...Look to the east," Hokanson said.
That spring, at the annual end-of-the-year PE Division banquet, Hokanson gave out the first-ever OCC Lame Duck Award. The dubious prize has been awarded annually to a person in the division who was not able to "deliver the goods on the proper spot" in a given year.
"That first Lame Duck went to Deano," Hokanson said.
To celebrate his 50th birthday, Dean fulfilled his dream of jumping off El Capitan. Though I'm not certain I ever specifically asked, it was my impression that Dean accomplished his feat without first seeking permission of the National Park Service.
During a 1973-74 sabbatical, Dean visited offshore oil locations in California and along the Gulf Coast. He also visited experimental diving stations in Washington, D.C. and at the University of Rhode Island. He spent time studying at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Deano attended an international conference on undersea education in Toronto, and went on scuba diving expeditions in and near Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
He was a member of the National Association of Underwater Instructors, and the United States Parachute Association. He was an instructor and safety officer for the USPA.Toward the end of his life, he used to tell me stories about his latest passion, "para-scuba." Dean would jump out of a plane over the ocean, land in the water, then submerge and go into full scuba-diving mode. It seemed like something out of "Dr. No" or "Goldfinger."
Dean became ill while sky and scuba diving in Indonesia in the early summer of 1982. He was forced to cut short his trip and return home. He took a battery of tests and the results came back as bad as they could possibly be. He had stomach cancer. Doctors gave him no hope. Westgaard died just three months later, on Sept. 26, 1982.
"Three weeks before his death, Dean attended the opening faculty meeting on campus," Hokanson said. "I sat with him, and he knew that he didn't have long to live. He was there to start off the academic year because he knew it would provide his wife, Juanita, with an additional year of insurance coverage.
"He'd lost weight, and his face was yellow with jaundice."
"The guy was always upbeat...in good times and bad," Skeie says. "In my early years on campus, we'd get dressed every morning in the coaches' locker room before class, and he always had a laugh and a story. I don't think I ever saw him down about anything.
"I saw him in the mail room after that opening faculty meeting in 1982. He looked thin and breathed heavily. He demonstrated a lot of courage, however. 'How are you doing, Deano,' I asked. 'I'm hanging in there,' he replied, upbeat as ever. He then told me about a trip he was planning to Hawaii.
"He used to kid me about my religious faith. We had lots of good-natured conversations. I told him that day, 'I'm praying for you, Deano.' He looked at me earnestly and said, 'Thanks, Leon.' He was appreciative. That was the last time I spoke to him."
Westgaard was soon hospitalized. Hokanson and many other OCC staffers visited him at Laguna Beach Hospital.
"I remember going there one brilliant fall afternoon," Hokanson said. "You could look out the window of his room and see the deep blue ocean. As we gazed out the window, an airplane flew by, low over the water, and dipped its wings in salute to Deano. It was a poignant tribute."
Seven days before he died, though he'd been in the hospital and could barely stand, he embarked upon his final sky diving adventure. He jumped with 15 friends – in an unauthorized jump – over Laguna's main beach.
"He was so weak that he had to be lifted off the floor of the airplane," said fellow jumper, Roy Holm, a former Laguna Beach mayor.
"Two jumpers helped him out of the plane and deployed his chute for him at 3,500 feet."
A crowd of more than a thousand waited on Main Beach, and cheered him with tears in their eyes as he struggled to the microphone after landing in the sand. He expressed his gratitude to all his friends...the residents of Laguna.
It was his last dive.
Following his death, Dean's ashes were scattered over Main Beach by several colleagues.
"Dean's loss is a tremendous blow to us all," said OCC's head football coach and athletic director, Dick Tucker, to the community. "He was a man who loved life and lived it fully. He was an inspiration to all."
A scholarship in his honor – the Dean Westgaard Memorial – was established in 1984. It's given annually to OCC's outstanding graduating scholar-athlete. Candidates are judged for their scholarship, citizenship and athletic participation. A U.S. Navy anchor and plaque were placed – during a ceremony – in Dean's honor in front of the Captain's Table on campus.
The Laguna Beach lifeguard headquarters was named after him.
Dean was survived by his wife, Juanita, sons, Guy, Scott and Kurt, and his daughter, Denise.
Dean lived an extraordinary life. He will be remembered on OCC's campus as long as people who knew him are still able to draw a breath. In fact, he'll probably be remembered long after they're gone. You don't forget a guy like Dean Westgaard, even if you've only heard of him second-hand.
I still feel Dean's presence when I stand in LeBard Stadium...and look to the east. What a memory! As Don Jacobs put it, he was one of a kind.
