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There was the night in 1988 when Bob Dylan came to town in search of James Dean.

"Yeah," said Marcus Winslow Jr., "he came in late one night. It was 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning. He'd had a concert in Indianapolis, and he came with a bus to Fairmount. He came out here for a few minutes. . . ."

Marcus Winslow Jr. is James Dean's cousin.

Now, if the name "James Dean" doesn't resonate with you—if you've never seen "East of Eden" or "Rebel Without a Cause" or "Giant," if you don't know even a little bit about the guy—you might as well turn right to Toni Stroud's always enlightening column on Page 3. Because unless you're with the program, Fairmount is just another one-stoplight Indiana town.

Okay . . . so what did Dylan say that night?

"I don't even remember. He had a group with him. My wife recognized one of the ladies with him. The others were just band members, I suppose. They seemed nice enough . . . "

James Dean and Marcus Winslow Jr. grew up on the Winslow farm just north of Fairmount, near the Quaker church, in the house that belongs to Marcus Jr. now.

You can go there, turn into the barn's driveway and take a picture of the house, but please don't knock on the door.

Dean is buried in Park Cemetery a little south of the house. Bring the camera. Everyone does.

James Byron Dean was killed in a car wreck on Sept. 30, 1955—50 years ago, which explains this visit. He made those three movies people remember—"Giant," "Rebel" and "East of Eden"—over a period of 16 months.

"And then he's gone, just like that," says Karen Niverson, director of the tourism office at Marion, Ind., an office a short walk from where Dean was born on Feb. 8, 1931.

"He's there, and he's bright, and he's brilliant—and then he's gone."

James Dean was 24.

"Oh, James Dean," the Eagles would sing decades later, "too fast to live, too young to die."

Die?

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