Steve Dean is a lean man with a mustache, a ready grin, and a polite and comfortably down-home way of speaking. He’s dressed, on a Scott-and-Amundsen kind of day, in a heavy brown jacket and overalls (the sort duck hunters favored in the days before the invention of Day-Glo orange) and a Pioneer Seed Corn hat and gloves (“You buy the corn, they give you the hat”). His face is lined beyond his 41 years, but there’s a boyish spring to his step. His clothes are saturated with stale cigarette smoke from the long drive in his big, lumbering red truck–it holds five full cords of wood, about ten tons–and his tall rubber boots are muddy from the farm. “I walk ’em clean in the city,” he says.
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His family has been farming on 1,000 acres of rolling country in Astoria–25 miles from Macomb, and close to the Illinois River–for the last century. They still have the grease buckets from the covered wagons in which Dean’s ancestors made the journey from Virginia. He and his brother, Scott, grow corn, hogs, and soybeans. On a recent frozen morning, Steve Dean drove to Chicago to hawk a load of his latest cash crop: firewood.
It was chance that brought Steve Dean into the firewood business. In 1980 a cousin living in Chicago admired his woodpile, and when Dean found out the prices that a load of lower-quality firewood commanded in the city, he decided to diversify. He asked his cousin to help, and she garnered enough orders to make a first trip to Chicago feasible; now, firewood is an important part of the Dean financial equation.
Dean and his helper deliver firewood in early and late fall and through the winter; in October and November, they’re busy with the row crops. They leave the farm around 4 AM on a Saturday, hit their first destination by around 9, and make deliveries–and ring doorbells in neighborhoods where they’re making deliveries–all day. They crash in a motel for the night, keep going on Sunday until the truck is empty, and then go home.
