Eyvonne “Cookie” Dean was many things to many people — a devoted wife and mother, a talented singer and musician, an avid NASCAR fan and a drag racer herself, a successful saleswoman, a skilled seamstress and makeup artist, an adventurous traveler, a tender-hearted animal lover, and a fun companion for lunch or dinner or bingo or playing slot machines at casinos.
But the adjective most often used to describe her after her death December 18 at age 82 is “sweet.”
“Cookie was a very sweet person, always wanting to do whatever she could to help anybody,” says Barb Dean, who sang with Cookie for several years in a local unit of the national Sweet Adelines a cappella chorus organization.
Although they shared the same last name and roomed together when the Adelines went on the road, the two women weren’t actually related — but Cookie enjoyed introducing Barb as her sister. “Of course,” Barb recalls with a chuckle, “we didn’t exactly look alike. (Barb is Black, Cookie was white.) She was a fun person to be around.”
Cookie was born in the state of Washington, where her father, Cline Russell, worked as a welder in shipyards during World War II. But her dad and mother, Edith, both from the Gainesville area, returned to their Ozarks roots following the war and settled near Republic, where Cookie went through elementary, junior high and high school.
Almost.
She met and fell in love with Bob Dean and, a couple of years later, they eloped and got married in Miami, Okla., before graduating from high school — although they both later earned their General Educational Development degrees. Bob went on to earn college credits in law enforcement courses, and spent 31 years as a Springfield Police Department traffic division officer.
The Cookie nickname came from Bob because, he said, Eyvonne (pronounced e-VON) reminded him of Cookie Bumstead, the daughter of popular comic-strip characters Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead.
The young couple had two children, son Greg and daughter Kim. “She was a very supporting, loving mom,” Kim says of Cookie. “When I was a kid, she was an ally, always on my side.
“My parents always supported me and my choices, like being part of Camp Fire Girls, buying a horse and going to horse shows and parades, and later supporting my various career goals,” adds Kim, who is retired from work in the high-tech industry.
When the kids reached school age, Cookie was able to join the workforce, holding down a variety of jobs at businesses including Pizza Hut, Hertz car rental, JCPenney and Sam’s Club
Cookie was a jewelry saleswoman at the latter two, and Kim remembers her mom telling of dealing with frantic boyfriends and husbands buying last-minute gifts at Christmas and Valentine’s Day.
“She would shake her head and say, ‘Oh, those men — they’d buy anything!’ Then she would wait to see if they returned it.” However, Bob didn’t have to wonder what to buy his wife because Cookie schooled him. “She let it be known what she was eyeing,” Kim says. “There wasn’t a whole lot of guessing required on his part.”
For several years Cookie was the photographer who took pictures of children with Santa Claus in the basement of Heer’s department store on the Square. “She gained a lot of experience wrangling children, some happy, some terrified of Santa,” Kim recalls.
Cookie and Bob both enjoyed high-performance vehicles. “They always had hotrods, the best that they could afford while raising children,” Kim says. Greg fondly remembers riding a 1962 Chevrolet Impala with a powerful V-8 engine and urging his mom to “Hit it!” However, with Bob being a police traffic officer, stomping on the gas pedal mostly was confined to local sanctioned drag strips.
Racing at local drag strips
“My dad raced, and then my mom — she was not afraid — announced that she wanted to drive, too. And, she said, ‘I want to take the dog.’” So Jake, the family’s mixed-breed canine pet, became a crowd-pleasing front seat passenger as Cookie piloted such machines as a 1975 Chevy pickup truck or a 1978 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am down the quarter-mile track.
Cookie also joined Bob in enthusiastically following NASCAR racing. “They went all over the country to see races,” says Kim. “When we were kids, they took my brother and me. We always had some sort of camper on a truck, or a trailer, and we would park on the infields of big race tracks like Talladega (in Alabama) or Daytona (in Florida).”
There also were weekend camping trips to Table Rock Lake, and major summertime vacation journeys out west to Colorado and to national parks such as Yellowstone in Wyoming and the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
“Mom would do a ton of work to prepare for us to go camping,” Kim recounts, “getting together all the food and packing all the clothes. And then off we’d go.”
Music played a large part in Cookie’s life from an early age; she performed her first piano recital at age 6. She taught Kim how to read music and the basics of the keyboard. She similarly taught a grandson, and he went on to minor in music in college. And she tried to do the same with a niece, Rebecca Flynn.
“I took piano lessons from her when I was growing up, but I never would practice,” Rebecca admits. “So she finally had to tell my mom and dad that she didn’t think that it was for me.”
However, as an adult Cookie introduced Rebecca to another form of music, with better results.
“She got me involved with the Sweet Adelines, and it was fun — a lot of fun,” Rebecca says. “I met a lot of wonderful people in the Adelines, and Cookie had many, many wonderful friends in that group.”
Cookie was a member of the Adelines’ Ozark Showcase Chorus, a barbershop-style singing ensemble, from the 1970s to well into the 2000s. Membership was a serious commitment — weekly rehearsals, entertaining at local club meetings and other gatherings, yearly regional competitions with other Adelines units in Oklahoma and Texas and a major public show in Springfield every autumn.
“Cookie was a good singer, a very good singer,” confirms Barb Dean. “She sang lead on the front row. And being on the front row was pretty special — you had to try out for the front row, and Cookie made it.”
Cookie’s skills as a seamstress and her deft touch with cosmetics also came in handy with the elaborately costumed Adelines. “Mom was in charge of makeup for many years,” says Kim. “She would help the ladies who needed assistance.
“It was pretty much an all-consuming hobby. There was always something going on with the Sweet Adelines.”
Always ‘put together'
On her own time, Cookie still always looked “put together,” her daughter says, with nice clothes, shoes and accessories, and carefully applied makeup and neatly coiffed hair.
“We never went anywhere without getting our faces on and our cool clothes on,” agrees niece Rebecca. “She definitely wanted us to be dressed up when we went somewhere.”
And as the years went on, Cookie went to many somewheres.
When the kids were little, the family’s camping gear at first consisted mainly of an old canvas tent purchased for five dollars at a garage sale. Early vacation trips were taken in a 1965 Corvair, with the family sleeping occasional nights as best they could in the car’s seats.
Cookie and Bob managed to steadily upgrade, culminating in more recent years with a sleek, well-equipped Airstream motorhome — with another dog, a black Scottie named Tipper, perched up front helping to navigate.
Cookie and Bob also enjoyed riding motorcycles on cross-country trips with friends. And when the bike gave Bob fits with his back, he and Cookie would follow their biking buddies in a dune buggy.
After Bob retired from the police force, he and Cookie tried their hands at raising cattle — and even buffalo for a time.
“At first they named all the animals. The pair of buffalo were Bud and Babe, and they had a baby named Buffy,” Kim says. “They named the cattle, too, until they found that wasn’t a good way to do business — you couldn’t keep a cow forever, and it was very hard to eat Blackie.”
The cattle and buffalo were raised on Cookie’s parents’ land near Republic before they expanded their cattle business and bought land in Ozark County near where Bob grew up. But in addition to dogs, other animals such as cats and rabbits shared the family’s home and yard in southeast Springfield. Cookie couldn’t resist critters — at least most of them.
“For a while we had a goat,” recalls Kim. “But it was a nuisance, climbing onto the picnic table and looking in the house window, doing its business on the patio, chewing on the screen door. So my brother took the goat to a distant relative out in the country. He visited a couple of weeks later and asked where the goat was. The relative said, ‘He ate my flowers, so I ate him.’”
‘We loved to shop, we loved to eat, and we loved to gamble'
Bob died in 2020 after 63 years of marriage. But Cookie was not alone. She had many friends, and one of the closest was her across-the-street neighbor, Janet Allen. They’d already been palling around for many years.
“Oh my gosh, we went to lunch or dinner almost every day,” says Janet. “We went shopping together. We’d go to Branson on a whim; we had annual passes to Silver Dollar City. We’d play bingo two or three times a week, at the Knights of Columbus hall and other parlors. And we’d run to the casinos, in Kansas City or Oklahoma.
“We loved to shop, we loved to eat, and we loved to gamble.”
Janet says that over the years she and Cookie ate at “about every restaurant in Springfield at one time or another,” including Mexican Villa at least once a week. “Cookie loved Mexican Villa,” Janet emphasizes. “She would’ve eaten breakfast there if they served it.”
The women also favored restaurants that had a bar. “We liked to have a drink. Cookie liked a Moscow Mule (a cocktail with vodka, ginger beer and lime juice). But the real reason was that we found out that if you got into a restaurant and there was a long waiting line, if they had a bar you could go in there to wait, and even eat in there. It was a lot quicker to get your meal that way.”
Janet is among those who describe Cookie as sweet.
“She wouldn’t say a bad word about anyone. She was a dear, sweet friend. I miss her.”
Barb Dean says she, too, misses Cookie.
“I loved Cookie very much. She was such a sweet person.”
