Friends and family are mourning the death of longtime City of North Vancouver councillor and Order of Canada recipient Stella Jo Dean. She was 95.
A painter in her youth, Dean opened #7 Gallery amid the boarded up buildings of Lower Lonsdale in 1966.
“If you bought anything in Lower Lonsdale at that time, it was a risk,” Dean said in a 2006 interview with author Warren Sommers, recollecting how she paid about $6,000 for the property.
“The artists had nowhere to go and I had a dream.”
The gallery – which exhibited work by Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith – was adjacent to an enclave for North Shore politicians.
“They never had any alcohol there but they used to have little political meetings,” Dean said.
It wasn’t long before Dean entered politics following considerable prodding from newspaper editor Ralph Hall.
Hall published a column alerting readers that a Dean campaign was imminent despite the fact she was in the midst of exam season at SFU and had no interest in running, she said.
At the time, rumours abounded the city was about to install parking meters in Lower Lonsdale.
Discussing the issue with a merchant, Dean said: “Forget about it, there’s all kinds of parking especially in Lower Lonsdale.”
She won a seat on city council in 1969, due to the support of Lower Lonsdale merchants. “They all backed me and I didn’t spend a cent.”
Speaking with Sommers, Dean recalled putting forward a motion to ban sulphur from North Vancouver’s inner harbour just before a major shipper was going to put a pile of sulphur on the waterfront.
Dean was a council mainstay for 30 years, conducting business at her Lower Lonsdale Christian bookshop and out of the family home in Upper Lonsdale.
“We used to joke that if they phone our house and the phone rings it means Stella’s not in,” son Tony Dean recalls.
“She could sit on the curb and talk to a homeless person or she could be dining with the prime minister,” friend Vivian Kranenburg says.
The mix of affability and resoluteness allowed her to turn B.C. Mills House into a repository of local history. Tony recalls his home filling with developers, engineers, movers and other stakeholders hoping to preserve the 1908 home.
“She did not let that meeting end until everyone was onside.”
Tony also remembers the site of a taxi pulling up to the house with a stack of city reports “a couple of telephone books thick” that Dean would methodically pore over before Monday council meetings.
Seated beside Dean for his first six years on council, Mayor Darrell Mussatto remembers glancing over and noticing Dean had readied notes and speaking points for every issue on the agenda.
“She never missed a meeting.”
While committed to heritage, Mussatto also recalls Dean favouring taller, thinner buildings in Lower Lonsdale that would offer waterfront views to more residents.
“She was ahead of her time,” he says. “We’re not going to see too many more Stella Jo Deans, and that’s not a good thing.”
Dean was vital in her retirement, Kranenburg recalls.
“Her gardening efforts went beyond her own backyard.”
“She just wanted to make North Van a better place,” Tony says.
A celebration of life is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Jan. 17 at Holy Trinity Church at 27th and Lonsdale.
