Fall River, Massachusetts · Class of 1950
B.M.C. Durfee High School
James Dean grew up in the East End of Fall River, the fifth of six children of John and Sadie M. Griffin Dean. He lived at 2190 Pleasant Street and later 99 Walker Street, and from 1931 into the early 1940s spent his days next to the North and South Watuppa Ponds — swimming, ice skating, exploring the woods and shoreline with friends his own age. In his own words: “A great life.” That early closeness to water and open land never left him. Decades later, painting the New England coast from Maine to Westport Harbor, he would trace it directly back to the East End.
He attended the Coughlin and Watson grammar schools before arriving at B.M.C. Durfee High School in 1947. He graduated in the class of 1950. The school was the city’s singular institution — the one Fall River watched with civic pride, the one that sent its best out into the world. A book he found at the Fall River Public Library during these years, The Trail of an Artist-Naturalist by Ernest Thompson Seton, shaped him in a way he carried for the rest of his life. It taught him, he said, “to look at nature from an artist’s point of view. Something I continue to do in my painting.”
He had always wanted to be a visual artist. His first job — at about age fifteen — was behind the soda fountain at Duffy’s Drug Store on Pleasant Street, where a conversation with “Dr.” Duffy got him hired. His friend Art Caroselli — who worked at Duffy’s with him — was “like a big brother” who helped him navigate all the theatrical and artistic experiments of those years.
And there was Flash Gordon. The Strand Theater on Pleasant Street ran the serial films, and Dean was there for them. That early fascination with space — with the idea that human beings might leave this planet — would resurface years later when NASA was founded in 1958 and he joined in 1960. The line from a Fall River movie theater to the Kennedy Space Center is longer than it looks, but it is a direct one.
Rita Williams
Photograph
Rita Williams — c. 1949
At Durfee, James Dean met Rita Williams of Warren Street — his high school sweetheart, and the woman he would marry in 1952. She joined him in Panama during his military service, the first of what he called “a dozen moves during our early marriage” — from Panama to Fall River to New Jersey, where their first son was born, to New Bedford so he could finish art school, and finally to Virginia where he began his career as a graphic designer. Their second and third sons were born in 1957 and 1964.
In the questionnaire he filled out for Cream of the Crop, he described what Rita made possible in a single sentence: “During this time she raised our boys to be responsible men, encouraged me in my ‘day jobs’ — founding and directing the NASA Fine Art Program and, later, Curator of Art at the National Air and Space Museum — and managed to promote and sell my art.” He added simply: “She was never afraid to take a chance.”
Comedian, Performer, Radio Host
What the record of his career tends to leave out is that James Dean, while at Durfee, was a performer. He developed a stand-up comedy act and was voted Class Wit at graduation. He performed at school variety shows, appeared in a vaudeville production at the Empire Theater on Main Street, and — at fifteen minutes a week — had his own program on Fall River radio station WALE.
He also appeared on a Boston television talent show. He won. First prize was a case of laundry detergent. “After this,” he wrote, “I read the handwriting on the wall and decided I should try something more practical like studying art (?).”
The parenthetical question mark is his. The wit was there until the end.
Distinguished Alumni Award
B.M.C. Durfee High School Alumni Association
1989
Distinguished Alumni Award
James Dean, Class of 1950 — the 29th recipient of Durfee’s highest honor, awarded annually since 1961 to graduates who have brought distinction to their city through their life’s work.
Photograph
James Dean recalls his Fall River days while receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award — 1989
The Distinguished Alumni Award had been presented annually by the Durfee Alumni Association since 1961. By the time Dean received it in 1989, its previous recipients included a bishop, a cardinal, an ambassador, a general, a Supreme Court attorney, and a United States Secretary of Energy. Dean was the 29th honoree. The list, recorded in the Durfee Chimes alumni newsletter, places him in 1989 between Frank S. Feitelberg, Class of ’24 (honored 1988), and William H. Gaudreau, Class of ’46 (honored 1990).
The award recognized a career that had, by 1989, already included founding the NASA Fine Arts Program, serving as the first Curator of Art at the National Air and Space Museum, designing two U.S. Christmas postage stamps, illustrating Michael Collins’s book LIFTOFF, and establishing himself as one of the Washington region’s most exhibited watercolorists. He was painting from Studio #306 at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria — a studio he had held for nine years by that point, and would hold for thirty more.
“The Other James Dean”
The Cream of the Crop biography, gathered from Dean himself, names his Torpedo Factory studio as “The ‘Other’ James Dean Studio.” It was both a practical solution to a real problem and a characteristically dry piece of wit. The other James Dean — the actor, the icon, dead at twenty-four — was the most famous person to have shared his name. Letters went astray. People did a double-take. The name appeared in newspapers and people assumed the wrong person. So he claimed the distinction plainly: he was the other one. The watercolorist. The man who put artists on rockets.
The title of this memorial site — The Other James Dean — comes from the name on that studio door at 105 North Union Street, Alexandria, Virginia, where he worked for forty years.
“At the core, both art and aerospace exploration search for a meaning to life.”
— James Dean, Founding Director, NASA Fine Arts Program — Class of 1950, B.M.C. Durfee High School
Further Reading
James Dean is profiled in Cream of the Crop: Fall River’s Best and Brightest by John B. Cummings, Jr., with a foreword by Michael Martins, Curator of the Fall River Historical Society Museum. The book gathers more than 260 mini-biographies of Fall River’s most distinguished sons and daughters, alongside lists of mayors, judges, school superintendents, and military heroes.
The B.M.C. Durfee High School Alumni Association can be reached at durfeealumniassociation.com.
