Obituaries

Edgar H. Dewell, 76, Passed away at his St. Charles home unexpectedly on April 21, 2021.

Ed was born on April 3, 1945, in St. Louis, Missouri to Betty Jane and Edgar H. Dewell, high school sweethearts from Omaha Nebraska.

He is survived by Diane, his wife of 46 years, sisters Arlene (Andy) Bible, Janet (Mark) Edwards, and Edie (Gary) Postiglione, niece Cindy (Mike) Quinn, and nephews Charles (Paula) Coleman and Nathaniel (Katie) Edwards, five grandnephews, one grandniece, and four kitties.

Ed’s father’s work as a physical chemist at nuclear laboratories and power generating facilities at locations in many states, meant relocating his family every few years. They lived in Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia. He went to E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, Virginia and graduated from Proviso West in Hillside, Illinois.

Ed was a very talented overachiever.  While growing up,  his father constantly taught him about everything from poetry and science to woodworking.   That love of learning and natural curiosity was the core of his life and his passion was learning new skills.  Welding, engine building, auto repair, electronics, computer programming, surveying, woodworking, plumbing…  He was the consummate do-it-your-selfer.
Hard working, intelligent, articulate, compassionate, with a great sense of humor, he was always the smartest guy in the room, but nice to everyone.  Friends sought his advice on everything from matters of the heart and financial problems to computer, house, and car repair.  He always knew the answer, or he would help people find it.

As a young boy in Iowa,  he worked in the fields de-tasseling corn, baling hay, and learned how to drive a tractor.

At age 11, he got his ham radio license and built his own radio station – he loved the electronics and wanted to talk to people all over the world.

As a teenager, he had a business mowing lawns in summer, shoveling snow in winter – he sold his clients a complete outdoor maintenance package for a monthly fee.

In high school, he worked at a nursery planting trees, at the camera counter at Walgreens, and one summer he worked with his father at Argonne National Laboratory on nuclear reactor designs.

Excelling academically, he was an honors student, and a member of the National Honor Society.

He competed in gymnastics on the still rings, in wrestling, football, and chess.

He was the leader of the Youth Group of the Chicago area for the Presbyterian Church.

At the Lynchburg, Va. newspaper, he worked in the darkroom, and then became a press photographer,  enabling him to move up to be an Associated Press photographer in Washington D.C. & Chicago, his favorite job of all time.

At the University of Illinois in Champaign he was a James Scholar, with a triple major in math, physics & chemistry, and a minor in English.  After a couple of years, he realized he did not want to be a physicist, and transferred to The Institute of Design at IIT, where he earned a Bachelor=s Degree & Master=s Degree in Photographic Science.  He paid his own way through school, and in graduate school he was personally granted a special scholarship by the Dean of IIT.

While still in school, he started his own commercial photo lab, specializing in high end color studio prints and transparencies.  Going to school in the daytime, he did the lab work for the studios at night, delivering the orders the next morning.  This was a new concept in film processing that quickly brought him a great deal of work.  The business model, combined with his technical and sales skills, made him highly successful.

He taught photography part time at University of Chicago and YMCA College.

When he sold his photo lab, he spent a month in Germany, where he enjoyed speaking the German that he learned in high school and became interested in wine.

At age 24, he founded the College of DuPage Photography Department, where he taught for 15 years.  Teaching extemporaneously in a casual style, he taught everything from beginning to advanced classes, but as the department grew,  he was able to concentrate on color photography, darkroom techniques, photo chemistry, and art classes.  He loved to share his knowledge, and particularly enjoyed teaching science and chemistry to students who thought they could never understand the subject matter.  He served as faculty advisor for a student group producing an annual portfolio project, which won many awards including one from the printing industry, and he illustrated a college textbook for a creative writing class.

In 1972 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and spent a year traveling across the country interviewing famous photographers about their contribution to photography as an art form.

Fascinated by automotive technology and history, Ed restored and drove vintage race cars, a hobby which grew into a race car restoration business.   In 1980, Ed & Diane restored a 1959 Cooper Monaco which they sold to racing legend Stirling Moss. They flew with the car to England and spent the summer living and racing with Stirling and his wife Susie.

In 1981 the Dewells bought a five-acre lot with an 1876 barn in Batavia and designed and built the home that they lived in for 36 years.  Ed did the engineering and drew the plans. They rebuilt a tractor with a backhoe to dig the foundation, then built the forms, poured the concrete, and built an 1800 square foot two story house with the aid of a 100-foot telescoping crane that they purchased from a local tree service.  Side by side, they did everything from the plumbing and electrical work to the shingles on the roof.

Meanwhile, Ed & Diane changed the focus of their business to commercial asset liquidation, buying and selling a wide variety of products.  They bought and sold whole companies, liquidated contact lens manufacturing equipment, electronics, laboratories, printing and packaging equipment, office furniture, auto parts, an RV Dealership,  wine,  shoes,  and more.  They sold some of the products at auction, first hiring an auctioneer.  They concentrated on high tech and computer gear from finance companies,  Midway Airlines, and United Stationers.  After the first couple of auctions,  Ed took over as auctioneer.  He wrote a computer program to automate the cataloguing and billing, and supervised the setup,  getting everything that he could under power.  For a Zenith TV liquidation, he had a display of 100 TV=s playing the movie Top Gun.   For computer auctions, he would advise people about what systems would suit their needs and help answer their technical questions.  With his teaching abilities, and sharp memory skills, he was a natural at auctioneering.   Using a laid back, understandable style, he made buyers very comfortable.  He found the flexibility and variety of the business fun and interesting.

In 1992, the Dewells were approached by a business associate with an offering of sophisticated military transponders and computers that had been stolen by a soldier in the first Iraq war.  In the wrong hands, the transponders could have been used to redirect our weapons to hit our own troops.   Ed acted as a confidential informant for the FBI.  He wore a wire and met the seller with a briefcase full of cash for the arrest.  The high-tech gear was recovered, and the perpetrators were convicted, and sent to federal prison.

For several consecutive years, the Dewells volunteered, holding auctions to raise funds for the Batavia Riverwalk, which was entirely funded by donations from the community.

In 1997 the Dewells bought the historic Lindgren foundry building in Batavia, which housed their liquidation business until the adjacent foundry burned in 2014, heavily damaging the entire complex.

In 2008, Ed was stricken with encephalitis which left him with memory problems, constant headache, and fatigue, forcing him to retire.  In keeping with his love of learning, Ed donated his body to science for medical research.

A Celebration of Ed’s Life will be held on Saturday, May 15^th, 2021, at the Peg Bond Center on the Riverwalk in Batavia, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.  Friends and family are invited to join us.
Family members and most attendees are fully vaccinated.  State of Illinois and CDC Covid protocols will be followed as recommended.

For those of you on Facebook, please look for our Facebook group “Ed Dewell Friends and Family”  where we can all share photos and memories.

• Send Flowers
• Guest Book
• Share
• Email
• Print