The first time I remember meeting Dean Weber (as an adult) was in the nearly empty parking lot of a restaurant I’ll leave unnamed. It was September of 20something and for the most part, Fayetteville was still shut down amidst the confusion that was a self-imposed lockdown in Arkansas. The social distancing requirements between seats limited football attendance so the usual crowd I had come to expect on game weekends in Fayetteville was significantly less. So the fact that this particular restaurant’s parking lot was not very full, even in the designated pick-up spots, was in no way unexpected. 

My apartment had ultimately turned into a hotel room for my parents, I had gotten used to just jumping in the car with them each game day and heading off to do whatever they wanted without many questions asked. As I was receiving free meals and didn’t have to deal with the student section line with this arrangement, I stopped asking why we did anything. My parents would argue heavily with this statement though.

That’s to say that asking what we were doing in a near-empty parking lot of a restaurant that was pick-up only was not something I had done until we were getting out of the car. In the parking lot, we (my father, mother and myself) met a man I assumed was my parents’ age. As my father knows everyone under the sun,*** I did not question who we were meeting with until we walked to the back of the restaurant and through the kitchen. 

Now just to remind you, this restaurant was not open to the public at the time and no matter how long we had been going there I was not expecting to be brushing past the dishwasher to go sit for lunch. I will leave this fairly well-known restaurant unnamed, as I proceeded to have my graduation dinner there in 2022 and continue to frequent the establishment. It is the one memory I have from the pandemic where I understood the power of community. 

I would later remember this man’s name as the aforementioned Dean Weber, and that was not the last time I would see him. The next football season I would cross paths with him nearly every home game in the A-Club lounge or at the tailgate. He was an integral part of the Razorback (and larger Fayetteville) community. You couldn’t talk to anyone who had interacted with the Razorback Foundation or Razorback Athletics who didn’t know, and more importantly love, Dean Weber. 

My favorite statement regarding Dean Weber was from former Arkansas player and coach Houston Nutt on X (Twitter). Coach Nutt, who met Dean two years after my father did, reflects fondly on his time with Dean just like so many others are doing. 

So thank you Dean Weber for everything you did, both for the University and everyone you ever met. Rest easy.

***This statement is backed up by the story of when my family was in Amsterdam, NL just after my brothers’ graduation ceremony from a Dutch university we bumped into someone my father worked with decades ago while walking from the Anne Frank Museum back to our hotel. This former coworker did not know we were in the country. This was not the first or last time it would happen. That same trip, while I had been solo backpacking in Budapest six weeks prior, I had stayed in his former coworker’s daughter’s flat.