Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and the California State Park Rangers Association have lost a passionate friend and supporter. Harry Daniel, presented with a Stetson as a CSRPA Honorary State Park Ranger in 1988, passed away on March 24th in his Borrego Springs home at age 95. Harry was instrumental in the quest to build the Anza-Borrego Visitor Center. Without Harry, the building would not have opened in 1979---it no doubt would have had its day, but it was Harry, along with his compatriot Bud Getty, who made the miracle happen.
Harry Daniel and his loving wife Julia had quite a life for themselves at their Deer Lick farm in Tennessee. They oversaw a TV broadcasting company, had a couple of horses and raised great Danes. It was in 1970 that Harry and Julia retired to Borrego Springs, to live the quiet life. The desert beckoned, friends took the Daniel's into the badlands of Anza-Borrego and a dream was born. In 1971 Harry joined a gathering of Borrego enthusiasts in the old CCC residence in Borrego Palm Canyon to form the first cooperating association in the State Park System, the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association. The new group's sole mission was to raise funds to build a first-class visitor center for their first-class Park! They wanted to share the treasures of Anza-Borrego with the world.
E. Alec Spencer stepped forward as ABDNHA's first Chairman, and soon the reigns were turned over to Harry, for what would be a commitment for the next twenty-five years. Fundraising was Harry's number one job, along with bringing others into the cause, including William Penn Mott, Jr. “Mr. Mott”, as Harry would always call him, smoothed the way for the association's non-profit status, and carved out some State funding to match ABDNHA's growing funds. In March of 1979, the Grand Opening day arrived, but still not a single State employee to run the new underground visitor center! Harry joined a score of hardy soles, which became the first corps of trained park volunteers, ably put to the test by State Park Naturalist Paul Johnson. Bud Getty, Alec Spencer, and Harry Daniel presided at the dedication, and then Harry went inside to assume his first shift as a Park Volunteer.
Harry and Julia fast became ambassadors for State Parks and the numbers of Borrego residents volunteering swelled. All the while, Harry and Julia were spending their spare time attending college classes searching for Pleistocene fossils in the Borrego Badlands. Julia had a small paleo lab built in her home so their avocation could fill more of their lives. Harry worked tirelessly to support the Park and the paleontology courses and these passions became his life.
Summers found Harry and Julia plying the Atlantic on the QE 2 or experiencing the Concorde on its fastest commercial flights to Paris. Cruises took them all over the world, but Harry could only stay away from his desert for so long. Harry eloquently stated in the forward of a spectacular coffee table book he put together with Paul Johnson that when he's away in the far corners of the globe “the compass of my being swings unerringly toward this corner of the land, toward this desert. The desert is home”.
It was the Book which brought Harry, Paul Johnson and me closest together---it became a creation we shared, a time we'll never forget. Harry sent me a wonderful letter a few weeks after the book's arrival. In it he stated, “Especially I thank you for having worked beside me apparently oblivious to the bottomless gulf of years that divide us. If anything can save me from tottering over the final dark rim into senility, it will be the continuing association with young minds such as yours and Paul's. I am more grateful than I can say. I cherish you both.”
A few weeks before he died he wanted me to have the CSPRA Stetson awarded to him in 1988---he felt it should be passed on, as he knew he was passing on to another great desert somewhere. Harry's spirit lives on in the works of his passion, in the Visitor Center, in the Daniel Discovery Lab where children learn about the Park, and in the halls of the Stout Paleontological Research Laboratory, where his many discoveries will reside forever.
I cherished Harry Daniel, and thank him for all he did to make this great Park all the better. He left the world a better place than he found it, he made life-long friends, and he left an underground monument to his passion and his dream, the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Visitor Center.
