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Lion Dan was born in Kansas City, Missouri,
in the waning days of World War II, and grew up in a different America
than we live in today. “My mother
allowed me to take a bus to downtown Kansas
City for swimming lessons at the downtown YMCA when
I was only 8 or 9 years-old. I don’t
think I would have been comfortable allowing my children to do that today,”
he recently observed.
He attended the local
neighborhood public school, Marlborough Elementary through the seventh
grade. Upon completing elementary
school, as his brother, Roy, left home for the United
States Military Academy, his father was transferred to Wichita, Kansas, and
later to St. Louis, Missouri,
where Dan graduated from Hazelwood
High School. He attended Kalamazoo
College, Kalamazoo, Michigan,
where he graduated in 1966 with a B.A. degree in History.
He then attended Colgate Rochester
Divinity School
in Rochester, New York, where he was ordained into the
ministry of the American (Northern) Baptist Churches. While in seminary, he met and married Linda
Bell. After graduation Dan and Linda
moved to Meriden, Connecticut,
where he became pastor of the Grace
Baptist Church. He also served briefly as pastor of a
church in New Jersey before serving as
bookkeeper/administrator of a synagogue in Brooklyn, New York.
Then the opportunity came to
move to Texas! Dan was called to be associate minister of
Northway Christian Church in Dallas
in 1979 (just before the heat wave of 1980), where he served for seven years,
then becoming pastor of Irving North Christian Church. He has lived in Irving for over 20 years.
He left active church
ministry in 1994, when he went back to school, to learn computer programming,
graduating just in time to participate in preparing for the Y2K bug.
When he first moved to
Irving, Chaplain Ralph Smith, chaplain at the (then) Irving Community
Hospital, invited Dan
to attend a meeting of the Irving Noon Day Lions Club. Thinking he had enough to keep himself busy
at a new church, Dan declined the invitation.
Almost ten years later, Dan was working as an assistant chaplain at
the same hospital. When he got off
work at noon, one Wednesday, Chaplain Smith renewed the invitation. It’s harder to turn down such an invitation
when it is offered by your boss. So
Dan went. The next week he went
again. The following week, one of the
members said, “You know, if you come three weeks in a row, you have to
join!” So he did. “I only wish I had accepted that first
invitation, ten years before. I feel
now that I missed out on ten years of Lions experience.”
After eleven years of service
to his club and District 2-X1, Lion Dan is now presenting himself as a
candidate for First Vice District Governor for the Lion’s year 2009-2010.
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