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Dean C

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Bio

Dean has been a journalist his entire adult life, culminating with being on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the biggest individual bribery case in Congressional history. Among other things, he covered Central Europe’s transition from Communism as a Prague-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, wrote award-winning business columns for The San Diego Union-Tribune, and taught newswriting at such institutions as U.C. San Diego and Tsinghua University in Beijing. His specialties have included business, economics, politics, international events, religion, and legal affairs, and he’s always up for new challenges.

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As a Story Terrace writer, Dean C interviews customers and turns their life stories into books. Get to know our writer better by reading the autobiographical anecdote below!

Watching the Wall Fall

Even as a child, I was in love with history – the kind of kid who kept better track of historical dates than baseball stats. That was what drove me into journalism, where you can have a front seat at watching history unfold. And nowhere did I feel that more than being in Germany in 1989 as the Berlin Wall fell, signaling that the Cold War was ending.

As a reporter, of course, you’re supposed to remain objective – interviewing people, collecting facts, and using them to form a story without getting emotionally involved.

But in Berlin, which had gone through such a tumultuous century, I was overwhelmed. Tears came to my eyes as I watched East Germans crossing the border with such joy in their faces. In East Berlin, I flashed a peace symbol at the stern-looking guards at the Russian Embassy. “Mir i druzhba,” I said. And then they smiled and flashed a peace symbol at me. “Peace and friendship,” they said – the English translation of what I’d just said in Russian.

Walking alone in a wooded park in West Berlin one night, I saw that somebody had left a ladder propped up against the Wall. I climbed up and peered over the top to watch the machinegun-toting East German soldiers patrolling the other side. After a couple minutes, I felt somebody pulling at my leg. At first I worried that it was a cop and I was violating some kind of law, but then I saw it was simply a middle-aged man with a hammer in his hand, hoping to chip off a bit of the Wall. “Can I get up there?” he asked in German. “I’m from the East, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to do this.”

It was such a unique and hopeful time, in which the entire world seemed to be changing for the better. There have been plenty of darker times since then, of course, and I’ve had a front seat to some of those too, whether in the Yugoslav war in the 1990s or the Middle East after 9/11. And after being based in Central Europe for several years, I’m particularly concerned about what’s happening in Ukraine right now.

But I still think back to those glorious days of 1989, when rays of light shone through after years of darkness, and I hope that eventually we’ll be able to find our own version of the fall of the Wall.

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