Sandra Deal remains true to her core values

It was close to 11 a.m., an hour before the lunch crowd will start to trickle into the local Dairy Queen when in walks Sandra Deal with her youngest grandson, Ethan.

The two of them had spent the morning at a Gainesville beauty salon where Deal has been a regular since 1969. Now the wife of Georgia's governor elect, Nathan Deal, is taking a break from her busy schedule to talk about this new chapter in her life.

That in itself is not all that unusual for a first lady, though the fact that she chose a fast food restaurant to have a one-on-one conversation with a reporter might be considered so.

But maybe not. Sandra Deal, friends say, is the most unpretentious, down-to-earth person they know.

Not only is she not  eager to grab the limelight, but she isn't likely to change who she is at her core.

"It doesn’t matter if it's somebody that is not in the society world. No matter how low on the totem poll they are, she treats them all the same," said Terra Manton of Cummings and a friend of Deal’s since 10th grade.

“Honey, that tells you," said  Manton.  "She never got wrapped up in that Washington society."

One friend said Deal had to be talked into buying new clothes during her husband's gubernatorial campaign.  Deal, herself, confessed she bought her inaugural gown off the rack of a Commerce dress shop.

"I shop at Belk and J.C. Penney," Deal said smiling. "I'm not a fancy person."

She slides into a seat close to the window and positions herself so that she has a clear view of 4-year-old Ethan who quickly exits to the play area.

“I want a cheeseburger with nothing on it,” he tells grandmama.

In just a matter of days, Sandra Dunagan Deal would be moving into the governor’s mansion.

While Nathan Deal served 12 years in the Georgia Senate and 18 more in Congress before being elected governor in November -- Sandra Deal had been content flying below the media spotlight and making her life at home as mother, grandmother, school teacher and community volunteer.

Indeed this will be the first time she has actually packed up their home and moved where her husband’s politics have taken him.

“When I chose to marry him, I pledged to support him, but I thought politics was a terrible life to thrust on a child,” she said.

Unexpected outcome

Truth is Sandra Deal figured she’d be a military wife.

“I knew he had leadership qualities, but I hadn’t anticipated that he would be in politics,” she said.

She met Nathan Deal in 1962 on a blind date arranged by Bonnie Kesler, one of Nathan’s former classmates.

Sandra Deal was a student at the Women’s College of Georgia, now Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, and Nathan was attending Mercer University in Macon with plans to become an attorney.

Kesler invited Sandra down for a weekend, but when some plans fell through, they went on a double date instead.

Sandra and Nathan were introduced that Thursday evening at the First Baptist Church in Sandersville, Ga., where Nathan and Kesler had choir rehearsal.

That Nathancould sing impressed Sandra. She’d grown up singing all over Hall County with her siblings and parents, George and Ida Lou Waldrep Dunagan, teachers and Hall County Republicans whose home life centered on music and the Baptist Church.

After choir rehearsal, the young couples headed to the local drive-inn where they sipped Coke and talked about religion and life.

“He had a depth about him,” Sandra Deal recalled. “He could talk about more than cars and ball games, and we both thought service to humanity was important -- that there was more to life than just making money.”

It was the beginning of a whirlwind of activity that ended with cake and ice cream at the Deals' home on Sunday.

“I went home the next day and told Mom and Dad I’d met the man I was going to marry,” Sandra Deal recalled.

Love and marriage

Less than a year later, they pledged their love to each other but decided they would wait until Nathan finished law school to marry.

In August 1963, Sandra earned her Bachelor of Science degree in elementary education and taught in the Griffin-Spalding school district before heading to Macon for a one-year stint at a school called Fort Hawkins.

On Christmas Day 1965, the couple became officially engaged. On June 5, 1966, Nathan graduated law school. The couple married the following Sunday, June 12, in a simple ceremony at New Holland Baptist Church in Gainesville, where Sandra was born and raised.

Just as Sandrafinished work on her Master’s degree, the Army summoned Nathan for duty at Fort Lee in Virginia. They were at Fort Gordon near Augusta when Sandra gave birth to Jason, now a 42-year-old Superior Court judge.

Three girls would soon follow, and Deal would begin practicing law in Gainesville. By then Sandrawas a stay-at-home mom, occasionally substitute teaching up until the last two children were in middle school.

In 1992, she returned to the classroom full time, the same year Nathan Deal, who by then had served eight years in the Legislature, was elected to Congress.

Family first

As Deal’s legal and political career took off, Sandra balanced her career with the demands of rearing four children and managing a farm.

"I did what I had to," said Sandra Deal. "I drove hay trucks. I fed pigs with  children on my back in a backpack.  I once cut wire from a horse's foot and pulled the birth sack off a colt's face so it wouldn't suffocate."

Her husband came home on weekends.

Longtime friends, Pat Oliver and Susan Jessup, said they have long admired Sandra for eschewing Washington and its high society ways.

“She made the sacrifice for her children,” said Jessup, who met Deal nearly 40 years ago when they both volunteered for a First Baptist Church missionary group. “I never heard her complain. ”

For her part, Deal said she was just putting into the practice what her own parents did for her.

The Dunagans, she said, reared her and her siblings mindful of a biblical proverb: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

“When I grew up, there was an honor code," she said. "You tried to do the right thing all the time because if no one else knew what you were doing, God knew, and that's what  I tried to teach my own children."

By the time all four children had entered college in 1998, the couple's parents had become unable to care for themselves. The Deals moved them into their home.  After her mother's death in 2002, Sandra retired to care for her father and mother-in-law.

"It really bothered me that Daddy at 90 was chasing cows out of the road," she recalled. "We sold the farm and moved everybody to a smaller piece of property in Hall County."

Taking on causes

After the death of her father and mother-in-law in 2006, Sandra could finally focus on herself and Nathancould finally heed the call to run for governor.