A Brief History about Dean

Dean Walker believes in working hard and playing hard. His adventurous spirit has led him to pursue many hobbies, from race car driving and aviation to downhill skiing and scuba diving. As a performance-oriented and competitive person, he’s always looking for ways to improve at whatever he’s doing, especially when it comes to the family lawn mower business. His children attribute the phrase, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” to him; a telling phrase, indicative of Dean’s desire to do things the right way. He’s passionate about his work, and he will persevere until he gets it right.

Dean has always enjoyed working with his hands. As Max and Margaret Walker’s third child, he had many opportunities on the family farm to do just that. Growing up next to his father’s shop, Dean had access to many tools and equipment in his youth, and he even built some of his own toys. As a 10-year-old child, Dean was intrigued by the process of blowing chopped alfalfa, hay and corn into trucks for silage. Fascinated with the blower concept, Dean built a small blower of his own with an electric motor, similar to the blower in a lawn mower. He used it to play, pretending to blow grass. It was around this time that Dean also learned how to weld, and he continued to explore working with machines. His natural curiosity propelled him to learn more about machinery, and he became self-taught through trial and error. As a teenager, Dean built his own go karts (called skateboards), beginning a lifelong pursuit of working with machines.

Following his high school graduation, Dean attended Casper College in Wyoming on a basketball scholarship, where he took pre-engineering courses. After a tough sophomore basketball season and academic year, he left school and went back home. There, he began helping his dad with the tooling for the tractor coolers his father was designing. Eventually, Dean transferred to Northwest Nazarene College (now Northwest Nazarene University) in Nampa, Idaho. Unable to continue his studies in engineering there (the school did not offer that curriculum at the time), Dean chose to study business instead. After earning his degree in business administration, he moved to Colorado to join his dad and his brother, Bob, at Walker Manufacturing. Two years later, working with Max and Bob, the three Walkers built the very first Walker Mower. Bob says that Dean inherited their father’s gift of machine designing. Throughout his career, Dean has been involved with the design and production of all of Walker’s mower products.

Dean enjoys his work and he looks forward to trying new ideas. If inspiration strikes him in the middle of the night, he is eager to nurture that idea to see if it will work, often the next day. Regardless of the outcome, Dean will often iterate an idea to make the design even better. He believes in the proven process of trial and error to reach a successful outcome, something he learned from his own father’s example. Ultimately, Dean is driven to design and build a good product, and he is pleased that the Walker Mower has benefited thousands of people. If he can make the world a better place through his work, Dean counts that as a success. His desire is to faithfully serve other people, to love them and to influence them for good. He’s thankful to do the work he loves every day, and to live so close to the shop (Dean and his wife, Suzanne, live on the property adjacent to the factory).