Now that I am nearing the end of the rough copy of the biography, I can look back and see the important turning points in Daniel’s life.
The first one was in late 1919 when Emily, Daniel’s Grandmother who was his sole guardian, made the decision to move to South Pasadena, California to be near Daniel’s uncle, Walter. Daniel would live in and around the South Pasadena area for the next 35 years and get in on the ground floor of the early rocket research which Pasadena was host to in the 40s and 50s.
The next important point was in 1949. After the war, when there were massive layoffs, Daniel had moved to the Oregon area to scrape out an existence. But because of Daniel’s work with Edmund Sawyer at Crescent and other related rocketry work, Daniel got a job with Aerojet setting up instrumentation to test rockets at the test range in White Sands, New Mexico. It was that year he would have his “Incident” with Alan and alter the trajectory of his life.
Most of the events following 1919 and 1949 were a result of the change that had happened during those years. After 1919, Daniel would turn his working knowledge of explosives into jobs with rockets, which would evolve, thanks in part to his early involvement with Crescent, into jobs with rocket instrumentation. After 1949, because of his contact with Alan, he would be a founding member of the contactee movement, form Understanding, publish 240+ issues of the Understanding newsletter, author multiple books and give thousands of lectures, interviews and talks.
The last point of interest was in 1978 when everything started to crumbled. For Christmas that year, Daniel would note with frustration the dwindling membership and see the library and kitchen at the Tonopah acreage in Arizona burned to the ground by an arsonist. Shortly before the fire, Daniel would turn over the Understanding organization to Mr. and Mrs. Sellman and move to Alamogordo, New Mexico with Florence. Less then a year later, the Sellmans quit, along with a number of other long time board members like Tahahlita, because of Daniel’s refusal to negotiate a settlement over the Tonopah acreage lawsuit related to Enid Smith’s contested will. With the Understanding organization in tatters, the publication of the newsletter ceased in 1979 for the first time in over 20 years. A year later, Daniel’s second wife, Florence, would be dead from breast cancer.
Daniel’s Christmas present for the year 1980 was to be seventy two in an empty house in a new town and already forgotten by the world at large.