Been thinking a lot about Dan lately, as I prepared my leftover inventory from the Superceder adventure for selling. I've had about 200 dozen stored away since the business closed.
I met Dan in 1988 after a house fire destroyed all of my archery equipment (along with everything else). I had been shooting a compound for about 10 years, which I never really liked, and had decided on a take-down recurve that I saw in one of Dan's ads. I found that Dan wasn't too far away, so I drove up to his house to look at his recurve. He was still working from his home then, and what a sight! He had a pile, literally, of longbows and recurves in the middle of the living room floor, from which he commenced to pull out a Longhunter for me to try. We went out beside his house, and I was hooked.
Dan found out I knew something about wood, and began to talk to me about the need for a new arrow wood, which would be stronger than the POC that dominated the market, that would be strong enough for modern laminated high-poundage bows. Again I was hooked, and a couple of years later marketed the Superceder shafts. Dan was my mentor as well as sales manager, even though I had been shooting for 30 years before I met him. He taught me more about archery in the first year than I'd been able to figure out for myself in all that time. My life was totally changed, for the better, from the first day I met him. All those stories are true, and then some. I could go on for days, like the time my brother, who has also passed, and I went to Athens for a visit, and he invited us to stay in his Airstream. We were about to move in when he remarked offhandedly that he hadn't yet found the copperhead that had escaped in the trailer, but not to worry- copperheads aren't that aggressive.
I made several trips with Dan, and each one was a trip indeed! He refused to stay in a hotel, always traveling with his trailer. When we did the archery trade show in Indianapolis, I woke up one morning to see a snowdrift next to my bed, from the door that didn't close tightly. Nothing fazed him- he would wear the same clothes for days at shoots, never backed up from a confrontation, always had an opinion, and was nearly always right. I loved him deeply, and am greatly saddened at the world's loss. He lived and breathed archery, and knew it inside and out. He raised a fine family, too, and his wife Sue must have been a saint! She was always gracious and a lady, in spite of Dan's excesses.
I tried several times to get Dan to write an autobiography, and I still regret not trying harder. He lived life to a degree that most of us can only imagine. As a youngster he raised birds and animals, had pet owls that he would ride on his bicycle handlebars to the outskirts of town and use to call in crows, which he shot and put in the freezer to feed the owls! He knew more about snakes than any professional herpetologist, and once had the feds try to put a sting on him to catch an endangered indigo. He saw right through it. He was a king-hell mutant of the kind that only comes about once in a century, and I surely do miss him.
Don Stokes
Topic: Dan "the Man" Quillian has left us (Read 28885 times)
