When the Light Dimmed
Loss comes like a cold wind—sudden, disorienting, and silent. And when it arrives, it doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait for you to prepare your defenses. It simply takes.
When tragedy touched our family, it was more than a death—it was the collapse of a pillar. Cindy Mathias had built her life around love, only to find herself suddenly navigating a new world of grief and responsibility. She was strong, always had been—but strength still needs support. And sometimes, when a storm is too big, even the strongest ones need someone to stand beside them and hold the roof up.
That someone was Dean A. Robb.
He didn’t come in with loud declarations. He didn’t posture or promise. He simply arrived. He carried not just the wisdom of a seasoned attorney or the conviction of a civil rights warrior—but the presence of a man who knew how to hold space for pain, and rebuild in the aftermath.
Dean didn’t replace. He reinforced. He didn’t erase. He honored.
He didn’t just join the family—he became one of its most defining figures.
And as the nation fought its battle for civil rights, our family watched him walk both battlefields at once: the one inside our hearts, and the one playing out across the country’s conscience. Dean Robb stood not just for justice in courtrooms, but for healing in our living room.
He became the torchbearer—not just for the movement, but for us.
The Advocate Born
Dean was born Feb. 26, 1924, in Lost Prairie, Southern Illinois—where the land was humble, and the people even humbler. Life was hard, but honest. That land raised strong backs and stronger principles. And in that soil, the seeds of justice were planted early.
He didn’t come from power. He came from people. Real people—farmers, tradesmen, veterans, mothers with callused hands and fathers with worn boots. People who didn’t ask for much but expected the truth.
As a boy, Dean watched how unfair the world could be. He saw neighbors thrown out of their homes, workers paid unfair wages, Black families denied basic dignity. It stayed with him—not as a wound, but as a compass.
He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, serving as a navigator and seeing the world from above. But when he returned, he wasn’t done fighting. He traded his uniform for a suit and a bar license. He would fight, now, with words, with strategy, with law.
Dean graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law and immediately aimed his sights at where help was needed most. In the 1950s and ‘60s, that meant marching into the deep, segregated South—and refusing to back down.
“There is no law too sacred to question, and no injustice too small to confront.”
— Dean A. Robb
He defended protestors, clergymen, students, and those beaten simply for daring to vote. Where other lawyers feared to go, Dean went gladly. He believed America should live up to its own promises. And if it took a northern white lawyer with nothing to gain and everything to lose, so be it.
But even as he stood in packed courtrooms and walked beside civil rights icons, Dean’s heart remained focused on something deeply personal—the people he loved, and the family he would later anchor.
He didn't yet know that life would one day place him in the path of a woman named Cindy Mathias, or that he would become part of a family already shaped by brilliance, tragedy, and reinvention.
But already, the torch was in his hand.