Dan Affeldt gave a Classification Talk at today meeting. Dan began his story from when he lived in Minnesota.
Dan did some voice-over work in grad school. His Uncle Bill created the first 24-hour WAMD radio station in St Paul. The station was a box built up in the rafters. His uncle would be up there and just hand the microphone down to pick up the orchestra.
Dan started at pre-med and pre-law which helped him so quickly to “get it” when he came across Rotary. The voice work allowed Dan to help other students.
Dan’s father was a physician and surgeon, a country doctor who would have been 122 this year. Dan’s siblings were gone from home so Dan provided the second set of hands to help his father in the doctor’s office. Dan once delivered a baby out behind the office. His father said, “Take a lot of towels and just don’t drop anything.” It was her 7th baby, so the mom was in charge.
Dan once served as deputy coroner after a large building burned and 17-18 tons of hay fell on a building (just outside of Rochester, MN). He made the phone call verifying an individual’s death. Also helped with extrication. Dan once had to ride in the back of a hearse serving as an ambulance. When they arrived, the EMTs thought Dan was the patient.
Dan’s high school class of ’65 came to visit Dartmouth, but he picked Carleton College in MN which was celebrating its centennial. William Webber, president of Union Theological at Columbia, came there to speak about a new program. In his college junior year, Dan had been accepted at a medical school, but he realized that he didn’t love the science – he loved the caring and the help. Instead of going to medical school, he called William Webber on the day of his graduation and then attended the new program.
The program was located in NY City in the same building near the UN as the Environmental Action Coalition’s offices were located. They were doing Earth Day and working with the City and the UN. Dan offered to help – they figured out he would be good in the speaker’s bureau. On the first Earth Day, he spoke in the Nassau Colosseum to telephone workers.
The Metropolitan Urban Services Training program – MUST – was housed at Union Theological. Also involved studying with National Council of Churches and New School for Social Research on ways to improve organizations that serve their communities. Dan developed 60 community-based reclamation/recycling centers.
Environmental Action Coalition chose solid waste as their major effort. Dan headed it up. Published “Eco News” for 5th grade and other levels. MUST also worked with a day care sponsored by emergency psychiatric unit with families having drug usage problems. Worked with Robert Blue, an amazing singer, who asked Dan to work with him on a musical PSA – “a checkup and a check”.
On Dan’s firsr day in NYC, he met a fellow who offered him a job in his restaurants; the guy’s father was a tailor in the neighborhood. Dan learned the restaurant business while doing his schoolwork. He and friends started a restaurant called “The Other End,” next to the nightclub “The Bitter End” in Greenwich Village.
Dan was offered at job at an institute doing research for the executive and legislative branches of NY State. Their work proved that “redlining” was real. They published their findings in the Empire State Report; in 1979, the NY Times printed an article showing that redlining did exist.
That experience started Dan down the road with people who had the technology and the sass to work with data in exciting ways. Now he sits at the intersection of information and technology.
He began working with Churchill, a firm in NY on information he was gathering with a foundation focused in Westchester. They managed membership for 5,000 service credit unions, generating mailings and communications for insurance companies. Kept meeting more people.
Dan got involved uncovering the Hunt Brothers’ manipulation of the silver market by gathering all the data for the lawsuit. All this while working in the Greenwich Village restaurant and music scene. They started the Bleeker Street Parish upstairs as a safe place for kids.
More and more contacts came into Dan’s life. Laurentian Capital Corp in Canada purchased some insurance companies in the US and hired Churchill. Churchill also managed the Tylenol recall. Law firms began calling them after the Hunt trial.
Dan continued on doing similar work with other places – “Have Dan go in and find out what to do and we’ll tell them how to do it.”
Worked with Seaside Industries during deinstitutionalization from mental health hospital confinement. Got into transcription, printing, vending machine maintenance – lots of training. Able to get some housing going. Almost 11,000 people went through the program.
Dan thinks it’s pretty neat to be a Rotarian, especially after how he was able to help with NEPETS this Covid year.
QUESTIONS
Paul Tierney: How did you meet your wife, Rosemary?
Dan – I knew a fellow in grad school who was working in Ft. Apache area in Bronx. He had been dating Rosemary. We brought folks from other countries to see how folks lived up there. Rosemary and others would come down to the club in Greenwich Village. One night, the head of the waitstaff came in and said, “Rosemary is here alone for the third time this week, so maybe you want to go out and say, “Hi.” They were married in Brooklyn; and went to Fisher’s Island (in Southold, NY at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, 2 miles off the southeastern coast of Connecticut across Fishers Island Sound.)