In Memory of Dean Laux

10/26/1932 – 3/26/2024

This January 22, 2021 article we published is a fitting tribute to Dean.

We at the Englewood Review are saddened with the loss. We will certainly miss Dean.

–Tom Newton, Publisher

A couple of years back, writer Dean Laux originated the “Notable Neighbors” column for this newspaper, and we’ve published around 60 columns of his since then. He frequently gets asked why he doesn’t interview himself for the column, but he says, “Who–other than a certain U.S. president–feels comfortable trying to say nice things about himself? I’d much rather brag about the lives and achievements of the interesting folks around here. They’re truly amazing.”

Well, it happens that in 2016, reporter Sue Erwin of the “Boca Grande Beacon” did a profile on Dean, and we’ve received permission to print a version of the profile that we’ve updated and expanded. Here it is:

Dean and Micki Laux

 

Now retired, Dean had a busy career as an educator, author, editor, publisher, hospital volunteer … and counterspy, not necessarily in that order.

He was born in Evanston, Illinois, a university town just north of Chicago. His father was a prototypical Madison Avenue “Mad Man,” at one time or another chief executive of two different well-known ad agencies on the Avenue and later president of Sports Afield magazine. When Dean was 4 years old his parents divorced, and his mother moved with her four children to the small mill town of Dalton, Massachusetts (the home of Crane & Company, makers of fine writing papers and sole provider of our nation’s currency paper for the last 100 years or so).

Dean went through grammar school and high school in Dalton as the top male student in his class (“It was a small school,” he says), and he went on to Amherst College, a “Little Ivy League” school in Massachusetts. Majoring in psychology, he was a Dean’s List student and finished near the top of his class, though he cut so many classes that his fellow students would often clap when he showed up for a lecture. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he admits, “and I only penalized myself. I never missed a class in years of graduate school after that.”

When he graduated from college in 1954, the Korean War was winding down and the Cold War was cranking up. “I went with a friend from Dalton to check on our draft status, and we were told, ‘Don’t worry, gentlemen. You’re both scheduled to be drafted in September.’ And darned if they didn’t follow through,” he muses. They were sent to Ft. Dix, N.J. for basic training, and during that training Dean was selected as one of two soldiers from a draftee class of about 5,000 to enter into the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) program at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, Maryland.

After completing agent school, he was sent first to the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif. for German language training and then to CIC headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany in 1956. “The Cold War was in full bloom then, and I got lucky. I ended up at the American Embassy in Bonn and worked as a civilian with a special group of U.S. intel operations that advised U.S. Ambassador James B. Conant on intelligence matters,” he says. “We worked closely with the German equivalent of our FBI, their Defense Department and their Kriminalpolizei. I was just a young draftee, but they gave me a much higher civilian GS rank as an assistant liaison officer. It was a heady experience, working mainly on counterespionage matters and obtaining clearances for German rocket scientists from Peenemuende to join our young U.S. space program.”

When he was given his honorable discharge in September of 1957, Dean went back to Amherst College as a graduate student in geology. By the end of his first year he was married, had a young son and needed to find a job. His sister Joan was a teacher in New Jersey, and she knew of a good junior high school in Glen Rock that was looking for someone who could teach science, math and German. That sounded like a good fit, so Dean applied for the job, got hired, and took some graduate summer courses in education at the University of Massachusetts before reporting for his teaching assignment.

His first year of teaching counted as his state-required “practice teaching” commitment, but his duties went beyond that: The science classes were for a new program for gifted children, and there was no curriculum plan in existence, no lesson plans and no textbooks to use. He had to create them as the year unfolded. But it went well, and Dean was named head of the science department his second year. In his third year he was made assistant principal of the school, and the year after that he made a giant leap to become state supervisor of science and mathematics for the New Jersey Department of Education.

“I visited schools throughout New Jersey and worked with their teachers and administrators on curriculum development,” he says. While working as a state consultant, he was also working on a Ph.D. at New York University. “My job was a pretty visible one in the education field, so I did quite a bit of writing and speaking,” he says. That caught the attention of Science Research Associates (SRA), a publisher of tests and programs for elementary, secondary and college students, and they convinced him to come to their headquarters in Chicago in 1963. 

His career quickly soared from there. During his first year he served as assistant science editor, then became the science editor his second year, head of science and mathematics the next year, and executive editor in charge of the Materials of Instruction division the next. IBM, which had acquired SRA in 1963, sent him to their Advanced Management School in Sands Point, L.I., and he learned a great deal about business planning and management in that program that would later stand him in good stead.

In 1968 Dean was recruited by Raytheon to take over the presidency of their struggling subsidiary, D.C. Heath & Company, a publisher of textbooks for schools and colleges and noted for its programs in foreign languages and science. Over a five-year period he orchestrated a series of changes that led to Heath’s entry into the reading and math markets as well as books for the professional marketplace. Heath went on to attain annual sales of over $100 million under the stewardship of his good friend and successor, Loren Korte.

“The first day I went to work in publishing, I knew I wanted to be in business for myself,” Dean says. “But I wasn’t ready. It took me nine years to get the knowledge and experience to do it.” In 1972 he left Heath and started Publishing Sciences Group, Inc., which was in the business of acquiring companies and publications in professional fields and handling their administrative, marketing and financial responsibilities. That company did well–so well that Dean’s chief lender, a Wall Street broker, decided to take over the company for himself. After a lengthy and ugly hassle, Dean was bought out and started a second company without any investor loans. “We were basically medical publishers producing newsletters and journals for physicians in practice,” he says.

That company prospered and branched out into two other fields: sports and travel. “The Boston Celtics basketball team of the NBA had contracted with me to write short biographies of two of their players, Kevin McHale and the late Reggie Lewis, and after I did so, the team asked me to buy out a publication that covered their activities. We made it the official publication of the team: ‘Celtics Monthly.’ As the owner and editor-in-chief, I got to spend a lot of time courtside, in the dressing room and at the practices of my favorite basketball team,” he recalls.

But soon his publications in the travel field outgrew all the others. The Laux Company, Inc. became an industry leader with five different magazines for the travel and meetings business. He sold that business and retired in 1999, when he moved to Southwest Florida … and promptly discovered that he had advanced colon cancer. After having life-saving surgery and six months of chemotherapy, he’s been cancer-free for 22 years. Dean is realistic about it. “Let’s just say so far so good,” he’ll venture when asked.

Dean and his wife Miryam, who is known as “Micki” to their friends, have been married for 32 years now. “But we didn’t rush into it,” he says. “We went together for 11 years before we tied the knot. At our wedding reception, my brother David announced that I had finally found someone who really knows how to handle me. How true! I am lucky to have her as a wife, and I don’t know what I’d do without her.” They are also “blessed with seven wonderful kids, 11 wonderful grandchildren, and our first, amazing great-grandchild, Ezra,” Dean says. That’s not to forget Chickie, their adorable rescue dog, a Jack Russell/Chihuahau mix who rules their household.

Dean hasn’t been idle in his retirement. He’s done some business consulting, written a book-length memoir about the trials and tribulations of a Jewish holocaust survivor, collaborated on two pictorial publications with noted nature photographer Mary Lundeberg, and for several years was a board member and Chairman/Communications for the Hospital Volunteers of Venice. A former single-digit golfer who once partnered with Astronaut Alan Shepard in a week-long tournament in France (“We lost, but we had a great time”), he’s given up the game for health reasons. “My wife carries on for me,” he says of Micki, who won the Ladies’ Championship at Boca Royale a few years ago and still likes to hit the links with friends.

In his “spare” time, he’s an avid reader of books on English history and cosmology–rather disparate topics. “I also like proofing manuscripts at the Boca Beacon and writing an occasional column for them,” he says. “But nothing tops interviewing the interesting folks I’ve met. You know, there’s something special in all of us. I like to be like the guy in the song ‘The Old Lamplighter,’ who makes the night a little brighter. I just raise the lamp so people can see what’s so notable in their neighbors.”

You could say that makes him a Notable Neighbor as well.