April 8, 2008...6:00 am
May Ralph Deadman Rest in Peace
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I was sorry to see that Ralph Deadman died Saturday at the age of 91. He was the neighbor of my wife’s mother in Iowa City which led me to his basement one cold winter day to look at his collection — of skulls.
Of course, they weren’t real skulls. But Ralph loved how it played on his last name which made for one of my favorite Ramblin’ columns that ran on Feb. 4, 2001, in The Gazette in Cedar Rapids.
Some excerpts:
- “It took me a long time to find somebody this size,” Ralph deadpans as he holds a life-size human skull that is really a plastic bank.
- “I haven’t killed anybody lately,” says Ralph, 84, as he leads an expedition of his basement artifacts. There are neckties decorated with skulls, key chains with dangling skeletons, coffee cups in the shape of skinless human heads. The collection began with the acquisition of swizzle sticks topped with miniature skulls nearly 30 years ago, sometime after Ralph and his wife, Mary Emma, moved into their home on Court Street.
- His father, Harold, tried to make him proud of the name. “My dad was born in England,” Ralph says. “I can’t tell you much except he was born in Hastings, England. He used to tell me he fought in the war of 1066. I believed him until I got older and realized he wasn’t that old.”
- Ralph moved to Iowa City in 1960 to work as a supervisor for the University of Iowa in its administrative data processing department. Upon retirement in 1979, co-workers presented Ralph with a special booklet titled “Funny Stories as Told to Me by Ralph Deadman.” The inside is empty.
- By this time, friends and family were helping Ralph increase his skull collection with one gift after another. Only two real skulls reside in the collection, one that might be a goat’s and the other that’s large enough to be a cow’s. The cow skull hangs on a wall in Ralph’s University of Iowa memorabilia room, where it serves as a hat rack.
- An elaborate “family” crest has a skull and crossbones in the center. A glass ice bucket with skull and crossbones and the message “Ice your own poison,” indicate this is all in jest. Of his toy animated skulls, one sings “Soul Man,” another rolls its eyes and a third cackles whenever you clap your hands.
- On the wall, below other skulls, hang plaques commemorating Ralph’s service in the local Optimists Club. Sure, you can be a Deadman and still be an optimist.
- One sweat shirt reads, “Deadman don’t lie.” Ah, but they tell stories. When the Deadmans’ oldest son, Robert, was caught playing hooky in a cemetery, he replied, “I was looking for my relation.” “The principal didn’t think it was funny,” Ralph says.
- Ralph’s father was once mentioned in ”Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” He was singled out as “A Deadman sells life insurance in Chicago.”
- Also stranger than fiction is the story Mary Emma tells about the double plot they bought at least a decade ago at Memory Gardens Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum in Iowa City. It seems a few years later the cemetery was sold and, as the Deadmans stopped to sort out paperwork, they found the new owner chuckling to himself. A man he had just talked to had spotted the metal plaque marking their burial plots with the word “Deadman.” “That is the worst advertising I’ve ever heard of,” the angry customer said. “I think that’s their name,” the owner calmly explained. “And I don’t think they’re going to change it.”
May Ralph Deadman, a genuinely nice guy with a fantastic sense of humor, rest in peace.
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