Dick Dean
American automobile designer (1933–2008)
Dick Dean (February 9, 1933 – July 10, 2008), born Richard Dean Sawitskas [Sa-WITS-kas], was an American automobile designer and builder of custom cars.
Biography
Born in Wyandotte, Michigan, 20 miles south of Detroit, the heart of the automotive world, Dean studied art and drafting at Theodore Roosevelt High School and also attended the Ford Trade School because his life's ambition was to be a model-maker at Ford Motor Company. His father, Vic, owned a Nash dealership and Dean worked in the body repair shop. He learned the technical aspects of auto body repair, but was frustrated with the lack of creativity.
Dean recalled, "Dad's body men could remove and replace fenders, bumpers and anything that unbolted, but little else. He used this outside fellow, who owned a tin building with a dirt floor, to do the serious repair that called for replacing quarter-panels and lead work, and his name was Bill Hines. Bill let me hang around and watch him work, and he taught me how to work lead and do other neat custom tricks." Dean mastered pin striping and began earning extra cash. He also started chopping tops, which very few people were doing at the time. He was a member of the Down River Modified car club. After high school, he went to Pasadena, California and studied at the Art Center College of Design under famous automotive designer Strother MacMinn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5272820. The first chronological checks are 1933 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dick Dean” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.