LITTLE ROCK — For more than 30 years, Dana Marie Minton saved people from their bad spending habits.
“As a [certified public accountant], it’s not like a firefighter where she went into a fire and saved some little kid, but saving someone $100,000 by dealing with the IRS is something she did every day,” said her son, Micky Stuart. “It touched a lot of people in their pocketbooks.”
Minton died Sunday at her Little Rock home from melanoma.
She was 55.
In the early 1980s, Minton began her own CPA firm, working “18 hours a day for three months” every tax season, her son said.
She went above and beyond for all of her clients, her son said. “If she felt sorry for them, they’d get charged less. Military personnel don’t usually get charged, police officers get a discount.”
Minton went about her life with a sense of enthusiasm, giving “500 times over” to others, Stuart said.
For several years, Minton organized an annual Christmas hayride for about 50 people with The Arc Arkansas, an advocacy group for people with disabilities.
What people didn’t know, her son said, is that before the hayride, she would go to four to five houses along the route and give the residents cookies and hot chocolate so that they could later emerge from their homes and hand it out to the folks on the hayride.
In 2007, her love extended to a 7-week-old boy named Zane, who she fostered until he was 11 months old.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got this huge house. What can I do? I can save a baby’s life,’” Minton said in a 2008 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article.
However, she was barred from adopting him because children under a year old in the state’s custody could not be adopted by someone older than 40.
Though she was active in getting the law changed, Minton did not get the boy back from the custody of his new, younger parents who changed his name and didn’t return her calls, Stuart said. She was still pursuing legal action last year.
“She loved him like crazy,” her son said. “When you got her fired up about something, she wasn’t going to back down.”
Active with Bicycle Advocacy of Central Arkansas, Minton rode her bicycle about a 100 miles per week. In May 2011, she planned the two-week “Bikes, Beer and Belgium” ride in Europe with her best friend, Larry Chastain.
“We’d stop at all these little pubs. ... We’d have a glass of beer and jump on our bikes,” Chastain said. “She just always took command and was a very strong individual.”
However, Minton knew something was wrong when she had trouble keeping up on the trip, her son said. The doctors diagnosed her with melanoma in July 2011 and gave her three to six months to live.
“I fought a good battle with Melanoma and was positive to the very end, knowing that God had it all under control and would take me in his time, not in mine,” Minton wrote in her obituary. “I am in a better place and will be waiting for you on the other side!”
As a gift to her family, she left one final piece of herself in a film that she didn’t want shown until her funeral. Filmmaker Zack McCannon said the documentary I Believe is built around a list of “I believes” from Minton, which include, “I believe that grandkids are the BOMB!” and the last one, “I believe that angels walk among us and keep us safe.”
“The past couple months ... she brought up several times that she’s ‘well within her soul,’” McCannon said. “She basically said that’s become her motto. She was at peace.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 11/28/2012