America lost a patriot last week as I lost a father-in-law, Marcus Dean Williams, the father of my wife Rita Jean and her sister Betty Gail Kalich of Greenwood and husband of Marguerite.

Marg and Dean  lived the American Dream. Both from rural Mississippi towns and agrarian roots with one being from the Hills and the other from the Delta, they would meet while in college.

He attended Mississippi State and she the “W” (Miss. University for Women). When a group of “W” girls had blind dates set up with several State boys, Marg exclaimed  she wanted to be paired with the one who owned the car. She was and that courtship led to 65 years of marriage lasting until “death did they part.”

The family agrees that it was Marg’s loving care that kept him going following a serious heart attack in 1995 when we thought he would never leave the hospital.

They would eventually wind up in Batesville in the late 1940s, both because of opportunities afforded them through their education—she a home economist and he an engineer with the MDOT.

Like so many of the “Greatest Generation,” his opportunity came through the G.I. Bill that would assist with his college after he served his country piloting a B-17 over Germany. He would later serve in the National Guard and twice moved his young family, once to the Washington D.C. area and again to Lousiana, while again serving his country during the 1960s when the Cuban Missile Crisis and Berlin Wall were giving the world shivers during the Cold War.

Both would later wind up in the teaching profession, she in elementary schools and he at Northwest. He would later move to Jackson when appointed State-Aid Engineer for MDOT during the Cliff Finch administration.

His faith was firm but his unending love of family struck me as almost uncanny throughout the years since I found favor with his daughter.

While courting my soon-to-be wife, I found him one evening overhauling the motor of her car, in his driveway with snow on the ground.

“You know I love you,” I would tell Rita Jean, “But I can’t compete with that.”

Those acts of love for his wife and daughters would pass on to grandchildren and in-laws and we believe may have contributed to his longevity as in the last days he told his daughter Betty Gail, “But I want to be with y’all.”

In the final year of his life he was quick to agree to go the doctor and several occasions the ambulance was called when there were medical “incidents.”

But he was always ready to go home before the doctors’ orders arrived.

Last Thursday we brought him home from the hospital late in the afternoon. Trying to humor him, I asked if he wanted to stop by Wal-Mart, usually one of his favorite outings, on the way home.

An emphatic, “No”, let me know all was not well. Nearly blind from macular degeneration he would then instruct me to turn left when we topped the hill near his driveway. As a civil engineer, he had laid out and worked on many of the roads and highways he frequented and would always know his approximate whereabouts even though he couldn’t see.

The helpers whisked him into the house, his home, where he died within minutes. He made it “home,” in every sense of the word.