WHEN Joy Anderson's sweetheart, Eric Williams, was killed in action over Germany, she was motivated to do her bit for the war effort. So on April 29, 1943, she enlisted in the RAAF.
She was sent to Melbourne on a troop train. When she got there she was addressed not by her name but as "ACW", her aircraftwoman's rank.
She slept on a hessian-and-straw mattress on an iron bed in a pavilion, and worked as a telephonist and on other clerical duties.
She was inoculated against all kinds of diseases and, like many service personnel, made the most of the bustling war machine that Melbourne became in the mid-1940s.
She met Bill Dean, an RAAF warrant officer in the Air Force Catering Corps, who had signed up from his home town of Launceston and served in Melbourne.
They were married after the war and lived in Epping, in a small house built by her father.
Mrs Dean, born in Kogarah, learned to drive a car and kept her licence, with a perfect record, until she was 92.
She also coached Bill in the evenings in his retail examinations while raising three small children.
Bill became an executive and later director of a retail company, helping to pioneer the Big W discount stores and the fresh food concept in Woolworths supermarkets.
From the early 1970s, Mrs Dean built her own successful stock portfolio from her kitchen table.
She kept handwritten notes in small exercise books, did her own tax returns until 95, and took no accountancy or financial advice.
When Woolworths closed its London Buying Office in 1977, she became involved in Bill's attempts to open up China to the supermarket's buying requirements.
She went with Bill to China twice. The Deans visited Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia in similar dealings to promote business.
Joyce Mary Anderson was born in Kogarah on October 16, 1918, the middle girl of three to Andrew Anderson and his wife Florence (nee Marx), who were shopkeepers at Rockdale and Burwood and later owned a few hectares of small market and poultry farming in Epping.
Joy took elocution classes in her youth as she could see that speaking well was a pathway to a successful life for a young woman with aspirations.
As a hangover from growing up during the Great Depression, she always wrote her shopping lists on the back of used envelopes and saved pieces of soap to make new bars.
Mrs Dean loved the bush and spent many days walking in Blackheath, Leura and Katoomba, and following bush trails around Sydney Harbour, often during fishing trips with Bill and later in sailing boats at Pittwater near their home at Palm Beach.
She believed, or so she told her grandchildren, that fairies and bush sprites were real.
She also renovated and decorated selected properties as a family business and strongly believed in the freedom of women to run their business affairs.
She did her best to make her share portfolio prosper and it sustained her in the pre-superannuation era.
After Bill died in 1998, she continued to attend to her business interests, listening daily to the stock market reports on the small radios she had scattered around the house.
Mrs Dean also played croquet, mah- jong and bridge and was known for her gardening and mulch-making skills right up to the end.
She kept her daily banana peelings to dig back into the soil for mulch. She took no medicines, except for a daily glass of good whisky.
When her mother Florence became blind at 86 from macular degeneration, Mrs Dean began fund-raising with the Lantern Club, which aided the Royal Institute of the Deaf and Blind Children.
Joy Dean is survived by her children Patricia, John and Robyn and their partners, grandchildren Christina, Alexander, James, Benjamin, Katelyn and Glen and great-grandchild Arlo.
