We digress in this blog to shine a light on the woman who wrote the biography of  Christopher Alexander Fleming of Owen Sound, Ontario.  C.A. was a much loved and distinguished educator, auditor, and publisher in Grey and Bruce Counties.  After he died in April 1945, the Fleming family engaged Dorothea Deans to memorialize C.A.’s life and character. Dorothea, the women’s editor for the Sun Times in Owen Sound for over 20 years, was a perfect choice: She wrote well – her prose was warm, clear, and concise;  she had known C.A. thorough her work; and she had lived in that port city most of her life.

Family members would have provided Dorothea C.A.’s writings and correspondence, along with papers he and his cousin Roy Fleming had collected on family history. She must have interviewed many family members and business colleagues, and she could research many of his accomplishments in the newspapers.  In the first paragraph of the foreword, she laid out the scope of the work and nature of her subject carefully and reverentially.

This sketch of the life of Christopher Alexander Fleming is in no way an attempt at an interpretation of a man and his period. He is too close in time for that and too dear to family and friends to need translation. Rather, it is a record of facts about his hereditary background, his youth, and his long, productive years, gathered together like the photographs of an album, the acts of a play, the blueprints of a building. Somewhere, within the facts and the intangible things they imply, love and beauty, work and sacrifice, truth and aspiration, is the immortal personality. [1]

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