Childhood

Looking back, he smiled when he referred to his senior year at Oak Glen, as the “Year of the Dead

Author’s Note: The following story is very much in dispute. Tom told us this story when we were in WV,

In tentgh grade, Daniel discovered The Beatles. He reported that he felt “saved” and that The Beatles “saved my soul.”

By age fifteen, his skills as a cartoonist were rapidly evolving, as evidenced in contemporaneous notebooks. Daniel began high school

Dick and Daniel do many creative projects together, including filmmaking. “It Must Be Monday” produced; mother having provided a film

In April 1976, ninth grade Daniel had a falling out with his “best friend,” Randy Yost. Randy Kemper related the

After practicing for a year without a teacher, Daniel told Mabel that he was going to stop playing the piano

Daniel learned about youth art classes, but said that Mabel told him he’d have to wait until college to study

For a school assignment to create commercials in April of 1973, twelve-year-old Daniel made a Sassy Fras mask (after his

Daniel began making home movies on an 8mm camera, with his friends and brother Dick. Daniel wrote, directed, and starred

Daniel had a pizza party at home, and invited all his friends. Randy Yost, Daniel’s best friend at the time,

Daniel slipped, hit his head, and had to get x-rays. Possibly the source of Daniel’s forehead scar.

Daniel was baptized, four days after his twelfth birthday.

In a letter to Margy, Mabel wrote that Daniel had received a perfect report card in February 1970, along with

Daniel began a lifelong habit of recording himself practicing and playing the piano, and then playing the recordings back. In

The siblings leaving home every few years, like Margy did in August 1968, become part of Daniel’s depression.

When he was seven years old in March 1968, Daniel discovered a Doberman Pinscher hanging by its neck from the

Beginning in childhood and continuing for the rest of his life, Daniel had a great love for each of the

He was very popular among his peers, a phenomenon he later described as feeling like “the captain of the big

From a very early age Daniel began to declare, to anyone that would listen, that he was going to be

In January of 1966, seven months before he would enter kindergarten, Daniel was enrolled in a preschool program call “Head

When Daniel was four years old in 1965, Mabel began the practice of supplying him with small three by five