In January of 1966, seven months before he would enter kindergarten, Daniel was enrolled in a preschool program call “Head Start,” at a public school in Pughtown, where he attended grammar school. Pughtown was about 4 miles from the family home and Daniel took the school bus there.
Daniel was an energetic, bright, and unusually creative student. He placed first in each program he was in, and teachers and school administrators took notice of the special kid in their midst.[1]
Mabel looked after two neighborhood children, David and Sherry Cowey, who were close to Daniel in age. After school, the three children rode the bus to the Johnston home and played together until Mrs. Cowey got off work and retrieved her children. Beyond that, Daniel fills his time in play and by drawing.
Daniel, like each of his siblings before him, repeatedly described his childhood as “very happy” and said he “always wanted to return to the happiness I had in my childhood.”[2] [3] In high school notebooks, again and again, he wrote the phrase, “I was thinking about when I was a little kid. I’m always thinking about when I was a little kid.” Only a few years later, he included that phrase in a spoken intro to the song “When You’re Pretty.”[4] In 1983, in the course of reading a 1973 letter from his mother to his sister Margy, he again recalled his idyllic youth and said, “That was the Danny, that was the real Danny. You never knew that guy. That was the me that I was always trying to remember.”[5] This desire to return to a childhood he remembered as being purely idyllic, is a prominent theme in his songs and artwork.
[1] Mabel’s recollections
[2] CS0383a 01 Daniel Interview with Himself, 1988
[3] The lyric in “Going Down,” “To think that I once had it all” can only have referred to the idyllic nature of his childhood, a carefree time that was uncorrupted by depression or other emotional difficulties.
[4] “When You’re Pretty,” The What of Whom, 1982
[5] 9:00, DT001_1, September 1983