By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
In past decades, it was the practice for a community’s newspapers to collect and regularly publish birth announcements. Before changes in medical privacy laws, lists of daily births would be provided to newspapers by hospitals or public health departments. These announcements would often be printed on a specific page set aside for community or “society” news, but depending on the period of time and the place when the baby was born, a newspaper might run a birth announcement almost anywhere – even on the front page.
One such announcement provides us with the topic of this week’s “From the History Room” column. On Dec. 10, 1952, at the bottom of the rightmost column on the front page, the Pekin Daily Times published the following birth announcement, giving it the unusual and humorous headline, “Another Dey Today” —
“A baby girl, weighing six pounds, four ounces was born this morning in Pekin Public hospital to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dey, 701 S. Sixth street. The baby is the second daughter of the couple. The father is the city editor of the TIMES, having joined the editorial staff about nine months ago. ‘No name yet,’ says Bob.”
The baby girl was given the name of Susan Hallock Dey. She is one of several entertainment celebrities whose stories began in Pekin.
Her father, Robert Smith Dey (1925-2016), was a native of New York State and son of an immigrant from Switzerland. With the help of the G.I. Bill, Robert graduated from the New York University School of Journalism and began a three-decade journalism career as a reporter in his home state, later taking a position at a paper in Pennsylvania before joining the staff of the Pekin Daily Times in March 1952. (The 1952 Polk City Directory of Pekin lists Robert as a newspaper reporter living at 701 S. Sixth St.) Her mother, Ruth Pyle (Doremus) Dey (1925-1961), was an Indiana native and a trained nurse. After Susan’s birth, Robert and Ruth had two more children.
The Deys did not remain in Pekin – about a year or two after the birth of their daughter Susan, Robert was hired as a city editor for the Gannett Company in Westchester, New York. He later became the editor of the Standard-Star in New Rochelle, New York. His daughter Susan was only eight years old when his wife Ruth died. Robert later married Gail Shellenberger (1920-2008), who had been born in Ohio.
In 1968, when Susan was 15, her stepmother Gail sent Susan’s photo to a New York modeling agency. Susan Dey did not work as a model very long, for in 1970, at the age of 17, she was hired to play the role of Laurie Partridge in the television series The Partridge Family – one of her best-remembered roles, even 46 years after the show was cancelled at the end of its fourth season. Her role of Laurie Partridge launched a very successful career both in television and in movies, with her greatest success due to her award-winning role of Grace Van Owen on the 1980s television drama L.A. Law.
Susan Dey has been retired from acting since 2004. The house at the corner of Sixth and McLean streets in Pekin, where she lived as a baby and toddler, is still there.
