Dean C. Williams, 81, a resident of Springfield, Riverton, and Litchfield, IL, lived a long life of care, craftsmanship, love, toil, and laughter. He died at peace on January 13, 2017 in Montgomery, TX at the home of his daughter Marian, who served as his primary caretaker for the last two years. Visitation will be from 9:00 am until 12:00 p.m. on Saturday January 21st , at Bisch & Son Funeral Home, 505 E. Allen, Springfield, with a special tribute at 11:30 am. The visitation will be followed by a private family internment. The family is being served by Williamson Funeral Homes, Ltd. He was born on August 5, 1935 in Chicago Heights, Illinois to James Clifford and Fern (Adams) Williams. He married Barbara Ann Forsyth on December 9, 1955, and she preceded him in death on July 1, 2016. He was also preceded in death by his parents, his brother David Williams, and his sister Doris Criminger. Dean is survived by his children Dean (Cindy) Williams of Delavan, WI; Josephine — Josie (John) Negro of Springfield, IL; Marian Williams of Montgomery, TX; Gerald — Jerry (Jodi) Williams of Litchfield, IL and Melinda Williams (Ethan Bumas) of Jersey City, NJ, and his grandchildren Jamie, Maj-Britt, Keegan and Schuyler Williams; Jaclyn (Negro) Virant and Justin Negro; Madison and Meagan Williams, and Greta Bumas. Dean also leaves behind his baby sister Deanna (Stan) Pierce of Princeton, his older brother Donn (Linda) Williams, his sisters-in-law Julie Kennedy and Nancy Williams, his brother-in-law George Criminger, and a host of cherished nieces, nephews, and cousins. Dean worked for various incarnations of Illinois Bell for thirty-eight years, first as a cable splicer who climbed the tall telephone poles. He was often sent for weeks on end into midwestern communities devastated by tornadoes to help piece back together the telephone system. He was a proud member of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). He was promoted into managerial positions, chief among them was Fiber Optics Manager for downstate Illinois. Throughout his life, he and his wife Barbara were active in many organizations, most involving kids. Dean played Santa at local hospitals, was a baseball coach, and led Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops. He served on the Boy Scouts Council. And he led or helped lead three different Drum and Bugle Corps, the Falcons, the Capital Chargers, and the Statesmen, the last two of which he was instrumental in founding. He had a talent for strategic planning, insisted on democratic decision-making, and ferociously tackled fundraising drives. Kids were important to both Dean and Barbara, and not just their own five children. They shared values in their disgust for cruelty and their empathy for the powerless. Their home was an open house, and often a full one. They were a great match, with personalities more complimentary than similar. She was excitable; he wasn't. She was quick to anger; he was a slow burner. In a crisis, Dean was unflappable. No patriarchal authority figure, he was not moralistic, but he had a strong sense of fairness. While reserved, Dean had a big personality. If you were trying to invent the perfect dad, the first prototypes might not resemble Dean, but the process of market testing would land you pretty close. Like all of us, he was imperfect in his own way. He was not a wildly articulate person—he didn't speechify, tell his kids how much he loved them, call his wife by her first name in public (it was too intimate), argue against injustice, tell funny stories or recite elaborate jokes. Talking about emotions was hard for him. Instead, he had a thousand nuanced ways to be blunt. You could call it pithy or terse, but never crass or cruel. The notion of bluntness, though, gets at the sheer shock effect of some of his expressions. When a teenager told him, laughing like he'd gamed the system, "I dropped out of school," Dean laughed too as he said, "You dummy. You just messed up your life." When his teenage daughter asked him, philosophically, "Do you think people are basically good or basically evil?" he gave a startled double take, a trademark Dean look, and answered without heat but with conviction, "You better believe they're basically good." When his wife cheerily told the story of Dean's mother's Friday night ritual of slicing and frying up a five-pound bag of potatoes into French fries, then leaving the kids to eat it for dinner while she went out with their father, a tale befitting a lifetime movie network family tragedy, he listened without betraying a single emotion. "How did you feel about that?" he was asked. He peered off into the distance and muttered fiercely toward the past, "I loved it." When his wife was in the hospital and he was cooking pancakes for the umpteenth night in a row to five greedy kids, his preteen son complained (not without extreme justification), "Don't you know how to cook anything else?" he didn't speak at all, just gently picked his son up and put him in the garbage can. "Why'd you do that?" Barbara asked later. He said, "Because I didn't want to hit him." And he never did. When he got off the phone with his fastest talking son or daughter, Barbara would be moved by the long series of okays and uh huhs and yeahs that she heard on his end of the conversation to ask the pressing question, "What did he [or she] say?" With saucer eyes, in the parody of a desperate parent, he would declare, "I have no idea!" About serious stuff, he was a man of a few, choice words, but the lighter side of him usually prevailed. Kids loved him because he had a sense of adventure, an infectious curiosity, a mischievous mind that turned problems into mysteries to be puzzled and solved. Because of this confidence in the process, he was a supremely capable man. He routinely tossed aside the assembly instructions for kit furniture because he wanted to investigate the way it was designed as he built it, and he knew whatever kid was hanging around would pick them up. He was a good mimic, and delighted in the absurd. He kept up a running patter, his own personal patois. Which consisted mostly of snatches of dreadful songs performed with inappropriate gusto and groaningly bad jokes that he had told a million times. Like this one, "You know why they put fences around cemeteries? Because people are dying to get in!" Or this one, "All right. What do we do now? We'll have to check out section 1, page 2, column 3, paragraph 4, sentence 5." And this one, "Wha'd you do with that money I gave you? What money? That money for singing lessons." It didn't matter if you rolled your eyes or laughed in derision, his bonhomie didn't slip. He knew the jokes weren't really funny after the third time, but he seemed to think that they got funny again eventually. It's hard to express how charming this failing comic routine was. It was kind of like the irresistible flirt who is charmed by rejection. More than once when the family was driving home from some outing or other, one of his children would cover the eyes of another and say, "Tell me where we are." In the midst of the blindfolded kid's recitation of the streets that he thought the car had turned onto, the car would suddenly take an unreasonable left turn into a dead-end neighborhood. Dean was at the wheel, and he'd joined the game. Turn by turn in a mapping of huge geographical circles and rough figure eights, boxes and triangles and giant z-shapes of road patterns, the car would wind through random streets as the kid with the covered eyes got more and more confused about where the car was. There was magic in that silent madness. The soft giggles would grow until the blindfolded kid ripped the hands from his eyes and yelled in triumphant outrage at the conspiracy of cheating—while everybody laughed. It was raucous joy. It was Dean. He made time for that kind of inspired play, but his greatest gift to his kids and other kids was to share his lifelong passion—building houses. A homely, half-built house, solidly structured with dusty, naked plywood subfloors and skeletal, stick-built, see-through walls, its roof trusses overlaid with plywood and black tarpaper for protection from the rain, was a thing of beauty to him. It was native ground. When Dean wasn't working, he was working. As a teenager, he had learnt master carpentry while summering with his favorite uncle, Jimmy, an expert in the building trades in Northern Illinois. In between his teens and retirement, a construction autodidact, he had taught himself all the skills of contracting a house. Behind the walls of every house, he knew, were the modern systems that secured our private access to the community resources: water, power, air, heat, light, and sewer. Each system was composed of different parts. Each had a different rhythm, structure, and syntax. He learned them all. He wired his brother-in-law's house; he opened the walls of his dining room and inserted a sliding glass door; he converted his garage to a family room, installing a two-story wall of solarized windows. He reran plumbing lines, replaced an electrical main, and reconfigured roof angles. He did a lot more. To friends and family considering changes to their homes or buying new ones, he was the man who could read architects' plans and draw his own, who brooded on door placements and window codes and electrical schemes. When his union went on strike, he made up for lost pay by contracting houses for his brother-in-law Gene. When his kids wanted to build or renovate, he did it for free. He did it for others too. He loved it. He pondered the layout of every home he ever entered. In the midst of a conversation he would suddenly cock his head to better query the placement of a window or the extrusion of a pipe from a wall. "Huh," he would muse, "I wonder why they did that." This wasn't an idle question. It was a consideration of design and craft. He could see into opaque walls. He could feel underlying structure in the tips of his fingers. His tools—he loved his saws and hammers and nailguns—were an extension of his body. You could call it an art—he was exacting—but he didn't make monuments to human genius. He made things people could use and use up. But he practiced his craft at an uncommon depth of self-challenge, a depth that we can all reach but seldom do. He felt a deep kinship with other builders and loved to walk through houses under construction. He was patient with unskilled laborers whose ambitions outstripped their talents. He could afford to be generous. He was in his element. He dreamed into being an entire philosophy of habitation, but it was never put into words. It was put into concrete, pvc pipe, electrical cabling, steel, wood, and drywall. It was put into the complex configurations of sheltering machines, into homes. He dreamed and built houses. He never built his own house, but he lived his dreams. After retirement, he and Barbara took RV trips throughout the US. They weren't real tourists because the trips were always motivated by people they loved and missed, whether it was indulgent grandkids who travelled with them or old friends in distant locales. They moved to Riverton, IL, where Dean worked for his entrepreneurial nephew Mark. They built houses, including a new neighborhood on the edge of town. In the small community where Dean and Barb lived, he served as the handyman for both minor household crises and big repairs. And he was handy. They called him "Do-it-all-Dean" because his skill set was so varied. The man was good to have around, not just for his skills and his amiable personality, but because he was absolutely iron-clad reliable. When you called to tell him you needed him, he answered, "Okay, where are you?" not "Why are you calling me at this hour?" He always came. 

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