Former Daily Pilot society columnist and editor remembered by family as trailblazer
The first thing readers should know about Vida Dean is that she went to more parties than most people.
“People always tell me about things they would do for their parents,” said daughter Victoria Hernandez. “They’d take their parents to nice dinners or things like that. But I could never take my parents to all of the nice parties that they went to. They opened up everything during the 1980s. It was a great time to be a society writer.”
Dean, 95, was the editor at the time for the Daily Pilot’s society section and a common fixture of the Orange County social scene.
She talked to actors and musicians, and her three children — Victoria, Major and David — still balk when they think about the celebrities she acquainted herself with. Dean retired from newspapering in the early 1990s but continued to write in her free time for a community newspaper until she died in hospice at her Newport Beach home on Dec. 3.
She was making jokes until the end, Hernandez said.
“Even in hospice laying there, she’d be like, ‘Is this what dying feels like? Am I dead yet?’ and my brother would go, ‘No, you’re in Newport Beach.’ It was a strange time, but it was just so sad,” said Hernandez. “She had an amazing life. Her and my dad came from such small Texas towns. Thank goodness they got out of there and they traveled everywhere. It was really cool.”
Dean was born in Onalaska, Texas, on Sept. 10, 1926. She was one of three children, and her family had enough money to put her two brothers through college, but not for her. So, she decided to put herself through school and headed to Missouri at 19.
“She’d never been out of the town before, but she got on a train out of there and went to school,” said David Dean.
She would eventually marry her husband, Jim, and the two would move to Ohio, where Jim worked at the Lima News. They’d eventually move back to Houston, where Jim worked at the Houston Chronicle, according to David. Dean worked at both papers.
Eventually, the family would move farther out west to Santa Ana in the early 1960s, where Jim got a job at the Orange County Register. The women’s department had an opening to cover social events throughout the county and Dean took it.
She worked there until 1981 when she came to the Daily Pilot and was the society editor and beauty columnist, writing at a time when most women weren’t allowed to, said David Dean.
“She had so many memories. I remember asking her one time. ‘You’re a Roaring ‘20s baby and you’ve seen world wars, but what’s the most amazing thing you’ve seen?’ She said the most amazing thing she’s seen is communication,” said Major James Dean, Jr.
“She said, ‘Nowadays, someone sneezes in Thailand and you hear about it five minutes later.’ Communication is just amazing nowadays,” said Major Dean. “It used to be you’d hear something eventually, not like now. Plus with her being in the newspaper business, communication was a big deal for her.”
The siblings said they plan to take Dean’s ashes back to her hometown in Texas, where they say she’s always wanted to return, to be interred in a family plot.
Her three children remember her with fondness.
She loved the color orange. She never really lost her Southern accent and liked to joke about how people could tell she had one. She had a dry sense of humor and was an excellent Southern cook, but David Dean said he remembers when she would try to remake at home the foods she’d eaten at parties.
“She’d never quite get it right. When I was younger, it was like, ‘Oh my God, what have you done?’ I didn’t really want to be a guinea pig, but she’d try her best,” said David Dean, laughing.
She had an amazing sense of smell. She was a talker and loved asking questions. Hernandez said she remembers when her mother got a facelift and willingly documented it in her beauty column called “Looking Good.” Major Dean said he remembers the way his mother cried when he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War.
When he came back, she joked if he’d been fed at all — “You’re skin and bones!” — because he’d lost so much weight while serving.
Major Dean said he loved her chocolate pecan pie. She was never the type of person to really get into arts and crafts. Her life, he said, revolved around the news and beating deadlines whenever possible.
“That’s why I said to my siblings, she’s up there in heaven right now with our dad,” who died in 1998, “and they’re working on the ‘Heavenly News.’ My dad’s probably saying, ‘We gotta get this paper out. There’s new arrivals everyday,’” Major Dean said.
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