Dean Petrich
  unique self-employed environmentalist
Background
Businesses
House
Family

Background (Dean's life condensed):
.

Elementary School
     Dean Petrich was born September 15, 1950 in Seattle.  He started piano lessons in kindergarten.  Every week for the next six years Dean and his sister Dawn took swimming lessons. His second grade teacher taught square dancing.  In third grade he won a crossword-puzzle-making contest and began cutting out articles from the newspapers on pollution and transportation issues.  By fourth grade Dean was in cub scouts, began playing the violin, taught himself how to type, and wrote, directed and starred in his first play.  Starting from a library book, he performed his first of many magic shows.  By fifth grade he was first violin in the orchestra and had learned to play the violin on his head, behind his back, under his leg and in his mouth; he sang soprano in the choir; wrote and produced another play; had developed a keen interest in the weather and had developed the knack of correctly predicting it; and was performing magic professionally.  In sixth grade Dean wrote yet another play, did more magic, continued with both piano and violin, completed all his cub scout achievements, and began downhill snow skiing. By now he could type over 80 words a minute.  He also was a loyal member of the traffic safety patrol, was a dishwasher in the lunch room, and ran for student body president.  From the age of eight to sixteen he spent his summers at Hendersons' Camps, where he learned archery, riflery, horseback riding, swimming, woodworking, camp crafts, folk dancing, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, theatrics, story-telling, baking, Indian lore, pottery, and the skills of comradeship.  During the summer between sixth and seventh grade Dean worked at a musical summer camp. His job was to tune 78 violins during each recess, to assist the school director with set-up, and occasionally he got to conduct the orchestra.  At the end of the camp he performed in front of the everyone there by playing his violin in various positions.
.
High School
     From seventh to twelfth grade he attended Lakeside School.   In seventh grade he produced a prolific amount of line mazes, performed magic before the entire student body, took up judo and art, and could type 80 words/minute.  He played violin in the Seattle Youth Symphony, held several offices in DeMolay, and was President of the Junior Magicians' Club of Seattle.  From 1958-1968 he frequented the Washington Athletic Club weekly where he took judo and swimming.  During these years at Lakeside Dean immersed himself in art, drama, music and publications.  He even took private lessons in acting, magic, and ballroom dancing. He was a photographer and writer for the school newspaper, year book, and literary magazine. The sports he most excelled at were fencing (state champion team),  diving and swimming on the swim team, and he lettered in both cross-country and track (the mile: 4:49).  He was a junior ski patrol during the weekends at the Mountaineers Snoqualmie Lodge.  At fifteen he took the Mountaineers Basic Climbing Course and climbed several peaks, including Mount Baker.  He made two movies, acted in every play and musical, sang in the choir, and formed his own barbershop quartet.  His sixteenth summer was spent at a horse and mountaineering camp in Colorado where he climbed three peaks in one day, rafted down the Colorado River and was the champion of the obstacle course.  During his seventeenth summer he was the counselor for the youngest boys at Camp Nor'wester.  After studying Latin for four years, he went on to take two years of French in one year.  He was chosen to be the exchange student, learned Swedish and spent five months in Sweden.  At eighteen he returned to America where he graduated with his classmates, having earned a list of honors and credentials which got put in a little box somewhere.
.
     College
          The University of Washington offered Dean a scholarship in photo-journalism, but he opted to live farther from home and decided to go to Willamette.  Had he taken that offer, his life might have gone a totally different direction.  His four years of college at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, were even more prolific.
    As a freshman, he took a double load of courses.  For the first day physical fitness test he did 32 consecutive pull-ups.  He continued with French,  played a comedy violin routine in front of the entire student body, and joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity.  At Willamette at that time, Kappa Sigma was a group of intellectuals -- the key school leaders in politics, publications, drama, art, music, and high grades.  Throughout his four years there, Dean sang tenor twice a day in two different choirs, a madrigal group, and his own barbershop quartet.  He performed in every play, musical and opera.  His freshman year he was Stage Manager.
    During his sophomore year he  excelled in  astronomy and public speaking -- two of  his most favorite classes -- choreographed and performed several modern dance pieces, and took two year's worth of German in one year.  As the Yearbook Editor, he not only personally shot and developed almost every photograph in the book (and got almost every professor to smile), typed the majority of the text and layout (no computers back then!) and designed the format, but he also compiled one of the most complete archives of the year's events, including groups who were normally never considered for inclusion in the yearbook.
    That summer the Willamette Choir toured Europe for five weeks, and Dean could speak the language of every country they visited.  After they went home, Dean stayed and hitch-hiked around Europe on his own for another month, ending up in Sweden where he revisited his host family.
    During his junior year he was the Darkroom Manager.  Between his junior and senior years he attended summer school at the University of Washington, where he took 25 hours of classes on elementary education, psychology, 19th century English literature, Shakespeare, and teaching elementary science.  During this summer of total immersion into academics Dean began a prolific journal of his thoughts and comments on life, which now is the first of many volumes of writings.
    As a senior, he took a year's worth of Russian, graduated a half year early, and spent the second semester teaching five separate and totally unique classes of high school English at McNary High in Salem, OR.  Also during these four years, Dean always had a camera around his neck, knew every person on campus by name, and was very active in the Big Brother program, having not one but two little brothers himself.  Five of his summers were spent as a staff member at Camp Nor'wester on Lopez Island.  As vice president of Omicron Delta Kappa, a very selective leadership fraternity, he conceived of and instigated the first recycling program the school had ever had.  Every year he won the intramural cross-country race.  He marched against the war on Viet Nam and joined Ralph Nader's ORSPIRG, The Nature Conservancy, and Greenpeace, and many other environmental organizations.  He got all the way through college without ever having smoked a cigarette, without drinking any alcohol, without doing drugs, and without swearing.
.
Adventures
     After college his life began getting interesting.  For the next year he had to decide how to make money, and started seventeen different businesses simultaneously to see which would take off.   Then he got a job as a door-to-door salesman selling home portraits all over the state of Washington.  After knocking on doors six days a week for half a year, he eventually worked his way up to being a photographer and finally became appointed as the head photographer in charge of hiring and firing the others.  He wrote a fifty page manual on how to run the photography portion of the business and then quit.  Dean packed his backpack, stuck out his thumb in front of his parents' driveway, and began another of his biggest and most memorable adventures:  hitch-hiking around the United States -- a fascinating trip that is now written as a book on his computer.  One highlight was visiting Twin Oaks' annual national commune conference and visiting a number of communes thereafter.
     The only reason Dean returned home was to prepare for his next adventure: a summer at Arcosanti.  While at Arcosanti, he read, studied and led discussions on Paolo Soleri's writings and concepts.  He stayed beyond his workshop date and became an active leader, tour guide, and construction worker.  On his way home, he arranged to speak on Paolo's arcologies at a number of Universities, for pay.
.
Career Beginnings
     Once back, Dean had a job lined up as a preschool teacher at a day care center, where he literally lived in the 4' attic and spent his days with children.  During his off hours he played violin in the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra.  Living with children seven days a week, he was inspired to learn more and to become more qualified, so he took a heavy load of early childhood education classes at Bellevue Community College.  In one of these classes one of his fellow students came to class one day in a clown suit to demonstrate some puppets she had made.  Dean asked if she would make him a clown suit in exchange for his taking her portrait.  The idea of being a clown was that someone somewhere was having a birthday every single day.  If this worked, there was potential.
     The next call that came for a magician, Dean suggested coming as a clown, not really knowing anything about what to do; he just knew that he had always been good at being silly and making children laugh.  At the party they played jump rope, walk the tight rope, tie up the clown, he told a story, helped with the cake and presents, and an hour and a half later the mother happily paid him the $5 he had asked for.  It worked!  Deano the Clown was born.
     Now he realized he needed to learn more skills and to find more customers.  Subsequently, he joined the New Games Foundation, the Seattle Story Tellers Guild, The American Unicycling Society, the Uniques (a local unicycling club), the Cascade Jugglers, the Puppeteers of Puget Sound, he took up tap dancing, roller skating and ice skating, and got his "D" license in sky diving so he could jump into picnics and large events.  Deano took a class in doing voice-overs, and took private lessons from "Dave the Balloon Man", who at the time was by far the best balloon twister around.  Dean attended several week-long games training sessions sponsored by the New Games Foundation; his four favorites were in Vancouver, B.C.; Colorado; Carmel, CA; and Redmond, WA.  Also during this time Dean passed his Associate and his Freestyle status with PSIA,  had a special ski clown suit made, and spent several seasons as a ski instructor at Mt. Pilchuck.  He was in high demand for teaching children to ski.
     Living in the attic in Bellevue was getting a bit cramped, so he quit,  got an apartment in Seattle, and  worked in a portrait photography studio on Pier 70.  Here his job was to take small photographs that were mailed in from all over the country and to blow them up into large 3'x5' posters by photographing, developing, printing and mailing them to the mail-order customers, as well as photographing walk-ins and printing up poster portraits for them while they waited. After a half year working for someone else, Dean decided to be 100% self-employed.  He systematized his photography equipment and supported himself primarily as a freelance photographer, shooting mostly portraits, as well as weddings, daycare centers, and occasional models.  He was unusually good with children and animals.  To augment his skills, he took special classes from professional studios on the fine points of portrait photography.  During these next couple years he was also a manager at the Capitol Hill Food Co-op on 12th in Seattle.
    The brakes went out on the car his grandfather had given him as a graduation present, and he decided to go for an entire year without driving a car.  He bought a second-hand bicycle and trailer, joined the PAC of the Cascade Bicycle Club, and successfully did all his travel for an entire year by bicycle.  He initiated the "bicycles on buses" program, did several talk series on KRAB radio, and submitted numerous designs and had many meetings with METRO until the bike racks actually materialized on the buses.  He was also active in the expansion of the Burke-Gilman Trail, Rails to Trails, and mapping bicycle routes.
.
Environmental Commitment
      There was a series of fascinating presentations occurring at the Spokane World's Fair, to which Dean hitch-hiked each month.  Also Dean attended an "Alternative Agriculture" conference and many conferences on "Alternative Waste Disposal."  From these gatherings the seeds of many environmental organizations were planted, such as Tilth, The Abundant Life Seed Foundation, the concept of Living Lightly, Ernest Callenbah's Ecotopia, the master composter programs, the recycling programs, the OREplan, SeaNet, and more. Together with others at the Spokane conferences, Dean organized several Living Lightly Fairs, equivalent to today's eco-trade shows, but on an educational rather than commercial basis.  It was these conferences in Spokane that inspired Dean to buy a pedal-powered vehicle, wear only natural fibers, bicycle, recycle, conserve heat and energy, and to find out how purely eco-sensitively a person could live in the city.
     While living in a group house in Seattle, Dean became a member of the extreme "Zero Garbage Club," refusing to pay the mandatory garbage bill because his house produced no garbage.  By gathering free wood from city dumpsters, his house was heated by burning wood in the old central coal furnace in the basement.  He continued as a manager at the Capitol Hill Food Coop, and grew part of what he ate in his own back yard.
    The summer of 1977 he was the music director at Camp Nor'wester, and on his way home he stopped to visit two different friends on Whidbey Island.  At the first friend's house he spent an afternoon sitting on the porch with his journal, designing the ultimate bathroom and how it would fit into a totally environmental house.  Little did he realize at the time that this design would become reality  At the next friend's house where he sat playing his fiddle around the fire with two other fiddlers, the other fiddler told him about a piece of land for sale.  Taking all his earnings from working at the camp, he made his down payment the next day and had plans of putting up a tipi there.
    Back in Seattle, Dean partnered with a man who was building composting toilets out of ferrous cement on Indian reservations.  From this experience, Dean wrote Clivus Multrum and became a distributor.  In 1977 he bought his own Clivus Multrum for the main waste system of his future house on Whidbey Island.
.
Fun Work
     Simultaneously, Dean was beginning to learn to tune pianos.  He joined the Piano Technicians Guild in 1973 and was elected president of the Seattle chapter for two consecutive years, during 2000-2002.  In 1973 he went to an auction with a friend and bought his first piano for $15.  Now he owns over 150 pianos, most of which he has obtained for free.   By now he was becoming quite well known both as a photographer -- taking portraits, shooting weddings, day care centers, filming models, and specializing in children and animals -- and as a magician.
    From 1972 through the mid 80's he taught classes at the University of Washington Experimental College every quarter.  Some of his more popular topics were: "Improve Your Memory," "How To Improve Your Conversation," "Paolo Soleri's Arcologies," "Why We Laugh," "The Joys and Woes of Being Self-Employed," and "New Games."  Also during this time and for the next eight consecutive years he spent every Sunday evening dancing Israeli and Greek circle and line dances when he returned home from skiing.  To get around, his favorite mode of transportation was to drive his PPV (people-powered vehicle) which had adjustable bucket seats, stick gear shift, rear view mirrors, and pedals for both the driver and the passenger.  There was space in the back for fuel -- a bag of groceries.
    Also during this period he spent a year seriously studying Swedish massage, which for a while seemed as if this would become his calling.  In addition, he took an in-depth class in foot reflexology.  Although he was qualified to take and pass the Washington State exam for a professional massage license, his clowning career was beginning to bloom and whisked him off in other directions.  Because of his energy and talent and his interest in social, political and environmental issues, Dean became the host on a weekly KING TV quiz show called "The Great American Game",  in which two teams were pitted against each other to answer questions on local issues.
.
Land for a House Made out of Garbage with a Waterless Toilet
     With his acreage on Whidbey Island and began designing and building an idealistically 100% environmentally conscious house using all recycled and reused materials.  He called it Huckleberry Hill.  Board by board the house slowly materialized out of his vision.  The goal was to prove that so much garbage is thrown out in the city that an entire house could be built from other peoples' waste, and that is exactly what Dean did.  The house is a cluster of hexagons with over 4000 square feet of floor space.  Some of the unique features are a 60' tower, a 40' underground tunnel, concrete slides, three play houses, a zip line, two trampolines, solar water heater panels, exclusively composting toilets, compact fluorescent lighting, and all non-toxic household products.
    For the next twenty consecutive years he envited everyone he knew (and that's a lot of people) to his famous annual week-long birthday bash. These parties became quite famous.  Each year something different was highlighted, such as swimming, musicians, jugglers, improvisational theater sports, marionettes, stunt fiddling, unusual inflatables, woods games, story   telling, waking to live harp music, and even a pie fight.  One year Dean sky-dived into his yard ten times in one day with some of his sky-diving friends.
.
Russia & Sweden
    At the age of thirty-eight he decided to relearn Russian in order to go skiing in Armenia.  While in Moscow he performed in Russian for an elementary school.  In what was then Leningrad he spent an afternoon conversing with a controversial painter who spoke only Russian.  In Armenia he was personally invited to partake in a private wedding feast, he played parachute games with children in a park, and he spent several days snow skiing.  During this time he spoke only Russian.
    Then he returned to Sweden for his third time, where he visited the Clivus Multrum factory in Stockholm and met Mr. Lindstrom himself, the inventor of the Clivus Multrum, at his house on his 81st birthday.  He gave Dean a personal tour of all his original inventions.  He was quite excited to have any visitors at all, let alone an American who could speak Swedish and who knew about his toilets.  From there Dean revisited his exchange family in Sweden, went sky diving and snow skiing in Sweden, and realized that the one thing he still hadn't done was to marry and have children.
.
Marriage
     After numerous relationships with many wonderful women, Dean finally chose his life partner.  Shortly after returning home he married Lynda in 1987.  Micah was born a year and a half later, and so began Dean's family life.  Lynda sold her house and the three moved from Seattle to Whidbey, where Lynda already had many friends and associates.  The marriage lasted until 2010.
  Lynda opened her own store, called Llynya's in Freeland.  Her dream was to own her own store, and now she has it.  She surrounds herself with all of her favorite things and attracts wonderful people into her life.  Her store has become a focal point on south Whidbey for personal and spiritual growth. She has been trained to perform  Aqua Chi, a unique type of foot therapy that removes toxins from the body.  Lynda is extremely honest, dedicated, and is a phenomenal listener.    She is dedicated and committed helping others, and consequently she has gained much respect in the local community and receives countless compliments on herself and her store.  She is so artistic that everything she touches becomes beautiful.
   Micah has put time into learning to skate board, to snowboard, to ride a unicycle, to play the piano and to play the electric guitar. During June of 2003 Dean and Micah traveled together to Sweden to visit the family Dean had lived with when he was 16.  Micah attended the Langley Children's Center (preschool), Wellington Montessori School, Langley Intermediate School, Langley Middle School,  Langley High School, and Bayview Alternative School.  He attended Camp Nor'wester on Johns Island for three summers.  Micah is thoughtful and perceptive, uniquely creative, easy-going and congenial, has excellent eye contact, and shares a positive sense of humor.  Now he is out of school, living with Lynda, and is starting his own pressure-washing business.  He has many friends.

Businesses

    During the 80's and 90's Dean continued building his house out of found recycled materials, expanded and streamlined each of his businesses, and continually improved on the quality and professionalism of everything he did.  All of his businesses evolved and thrived, and because of them Dean has been on TV, the radio, and written up in the papers many times.  These businesses expanded and branched off in several directions.
Books
    Ever since he was little, Dean has wanted to write and be an author.  In grade school and high school he excelled in creative writing, and he majored in English in college.  Although he began keeping a diary in elementary school, he started his first journal while attending the University of Washington in 1971.  Over the years he wrote over twenty journals.  His writing stopped when he got married and had someone to tell everything to.  However, his mind did not stop and moved in the direction of writing books to help other people.  In the midst of everything else he has been doing, he has slowly been managing to contribute to eight specific books that he would like to complete and publish.  Purchasing a laptop in 2002 at last accelerated his ability to write, and now he is writing weekly.  These are the books he is currently working on:
Goals
     Dean is extremely goal-oriented and has achieved nearly every goal he has set for himself.  Probably his best attributes that have led to these achievements are that he is creative, energetic, patient, and sincere. He is intense and passionate in work, play, and politics.  Some of his global goals to help the world to be more livable are: to encourage tolerance; to increase organic local food production; to reduce population growth; to redesign the transportation system; to preserve the few remaining natural habitats; and to increase the number of individuals choosing to leave smaller global footprints by going solar, bicycling, recycling, non-toxic, etc.  Among his current personal goals are the following: to complete the eight books he has in process; to share his knowledge by writing, speaking, giving tours and teaching; to finish building his house; to return to being 100% debt free, as he has been three times previously; to travel; to share agriculture produce from his land with the local community; and to play more music.  Currently his primary goal is to create his retirement income with his favorite home business.
 
    Mark Twain once said that the best investment a person can make is a friend.  Please feel free to contact me and keep in touch.  Dean's email is petrich@whidbey.com.
 See businesses.
Click here to return to the TOP.
 Click here to return to the HOME page.