October 2009

Thank you, Dan Parr

The community remembers a man who made things happen

Change-agent Dan Parr with his wife, Ellen Weiss. On September 9, Dan succumbed to leukemia, leaving a remarkable legacy behind.

by Howard Kohn

Dan Parr never held elected office, but he had a large influence on the changes that have taken hold in Takoma Park and Silver Spring during the past thirty years.

A geographer by profession, Dan involved himself in school politics and became the pivotal figure in a long campaign in the 1990’s to build a new Blair High School at Four Corners. The Montgomery County Council and Board of Education several times voted against funding the school, and the Washington Post chided Dan for his persistence, but the campaign was ultimately successful.

Historians are likely to link this victory to the stabilizing of local neighborhoods and the makeover of downtown Silver Spring, in which Dan also played a part.

Portrait of a young rabble-rouser

Earlier Dan had helped set up a local organic food store, known as the Co-op, which was a magnet for a wave of young political activists who moved to Takoma Park, had babies and gave a national identity to the town.

Later, as a board member of Casa de Maryland, Dan worked at the forefront of a second wave of newcomers, primarily from Latin America, with new challenges of social integration.

In the past decade he became a type of political godfather, always genial, putting his considerable organizational skills behind favorite candidates but rarely alienating their opponents. Two close friends, Tom Perez and Marc Elrich, were elected to the County Council, Tom as the first Hispanic member and Marc as the first member of the Takoma Park City Council to get elected countywide. During Tom’s four-year term Dan served as his chief of staff, and then three years ago, working again with Tom at the Maryland Department of Labor, Dan was diagnosed with a rare leukemia requiring a bone marrow transplant.

Earlier this year Dan and his wife Ellen moved temporarily to Seattle so he could undergo the transplant at a special cancer center. From the beginning there were complications, difficulty finding a donor, an overtaxed spleen that caused delays, but the transplant seemed successful. In the late spring, his sons Adam and David joined him for long walks amid the blooms of Seattle.

On July 4, the day he had been scheduled to return home, his heart stopped and a crash-cart had to be called. He came back to life, but his body had begun to reject the transplant. Doctors gave him essentially no hope of surviving. Through the rest of the summer he defied those odds, but on September 9, having been flown to a Baltimore hospital, he died in his sleep. He was 58 years old.

Marlana Valdez
Community Activist:

“Dan became my good friend when we worked together to replace the dilapidated Blair High School on Wayne Avenue. Montgomery County typically approved new schools for our wealthier neighbors, but the County said no to Blair. The largest school would remain situated on the smallest plot of land.

“Dan came up with the slogan, ‘Be Fair to Blair.’ He gathered some friends, formed the first neighborhood political action committee in the county, Voters for a Better Blair, and started pressing for a new school. We met every Sunday morning in Dan and Ellen’s dining room.

“The political experts said we had no chance, but for the next two years we plotted and organized and visited lawyers and held rallies. Eventually we turned out 2,000 people for a critical School Board hearing. The County Council saw that we would not give up. Votes on the Council were recast, and our kids got their new school at Four Corners.

“Dan always said that a new Blair High School could be the gateway to smart urban renewal in Silver Spring. With County Executive Doug Duncan at the helm and multiple citizens involved, the revitalization of Silver Spring turned into reality.

“It became mandatory that any local political hopeful had to pay a visit to Dan’s house. Voters for a Better Blair; strongly organized and networked, was able to deliver elections to progressive candidates.

“Dan inspired us to believe we could accomplish anything we set our minds to, and no matter what the challenge, he always had a smile on his face. Dan worked tirelessly for the less fortunate, and I don’t believe anyone who ever met Dan didn’t love him.”

Tom Perez
Assistant US Attorney General

“In the past month, I have taken my three children to memorial services of two people who were my heroes, friends and mentors. First, we stood at the steps of the Capitol with other former staffers to bid farewell to Senator Edward Kennedy, an iconic figure whose lifelong commitment to the underdog and the underserved is an example to millions.

“More recently, we lost Dan Parr, one of my best friends, as well as my right hand, my left hand, and my conscience during my service on the County Council. I have been struck by the parallels between Dan and Senator Kennedy. Both were eternal optimists who believed in the power of government to provide opportunities for those in need. Both believed that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Both believed that Tip O’Neill was correct that “all politics is local.”

“But Dan took this adage to new levels. He became a serial activist committed to building an inclusive, vibrant community in which everyone could realize the American dream. Thanks to Dan, so many children, including mine, are able to attend a state-of-the-art Blair High School. Thanks to Dan’s long tenure with Casa de Maryland, Casa is now a national model of immigrant empowerment. Thanks to Dan’s service with the County Council, countless residents received critical services.

“Dan was not afraid to take risks for progressive causes. He believed there was no such thing as failure, and that it was a far greater sin not to try than to try and not succeed.

“Nowhere was Dan’s courage and abiding optimism more evident than during the final year of his life. He confronted his cancer with his trademark sense of purpose and humor. When I visited him in Seattle in late spring, he convinced me he was going to recover fully. When I visited him in what turned out to be the last week of his life, I again returned to my office and told my colleagues that Dan would be back. I will always carry Dan’s optimism and courage with me.

“My seven-year-old had a homework assignment in which he was asked to write about an important recent event in his life. Without prodding, he wrote about Dan’s memorial service, and what Dan meant to him. For someone like Dan whose core passion was our children, I could not think of a more fitting tribute.”

George Kohl
Community Activist

“Our intertwined lives started with 40 families at a cooperative nursery school, and from there we moved on to the public school system with Dan

and my wife Maureen following one another as PTA presidents.
“Dan was eloquent with the written word and fearless in his actions. Our kids attended the overcrowded Blair high school where ceiling tiles fell down on their heads and lunch had to be eaten in the hallways. Dan set out to expand the work of a group of school activists into a broader political coalition.

“Dan’s thesis was simple. The Old Blair was undermining our community whereas a new Blair would anchor our community, help resurrect Silver Spring and allow for the kind of vibrant diversity we wanted. He saw Blair as a dagger point at the heart of the County, an injustice that affected us all. The sense of mission, morality, and justice rolled into one cause was vintage Dan.

“The powerful school superintendent of the time, Paul Vance, took offense at our description of latent racism and discrimination that seemed obviously to be at work in denying us the resources common in more affluent and homogenous school clusters. The superintendent insisted on a Saturday meeting with Dan to discuss the “slander” of a particularly eloquent letter to the editor Dan had penned. It was a tense hour of subtle threats as well as a debate about race and class.

“During the long fight for a new Blair and for a transformed Silver Spring there was a pivotal hearing in Rockville, a long evening ride away. Dan mailed out postcards and put it on the line that attending this hearing was the one thing everyone had to do to win a new school.

“The School Board sat on a stage in the largest auditorium in the county, expecting, it seemed, to intimidate us. No way could they have imagined we would fill the entire auditorium and spill out into the hallways, but 2,000 friends of Dan trooped to Rockville, turning the tables of intimidation. Dan was absolutely giddy as people streamed in. “We’ve won,” he said, and he was right.

“And then there was the Dan who enjoyed a leisurely meal. At Dan and Ellen’s first house, there was a hillside of raspberry vines. Each June like the swallows of Capistrano we could expect a call that the raspberries were ripe and Dan was ready to bake. Although he experimented with many recipes, he settled on a 15-layer cake alternating raspberries, raspberry cream, raspberry jam and light chocolate cake. “Of course, it’s good,” he would roar with laughter. “It has five pounds of butter and two pounds of raspberries.”

“Three years ago Dan and Ellen invited us to a small dinner party. It was wonderful as always, but it wasn’t just social. Dan had called us together to discuss a problem that was going to change his life. This time it wasn’t about careers or politics. He had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. Over dinner we explored what was known about this cancer and discussed the potential time frame. We talked of death and how to live.

“In the face of that disease, Dan never lost his bearing. He continued to travel, work, and love. In his last weeks Maureen and I were privileged to visit him. We gowned up and sat and chatted for a while. Dan lay in bed swollen, dying, but fighting, able to laugh at an ironic story.

“Later I caught him at a better time. He was reading on the computer. Our conversation ranged from our kids to national politics. As I left, he said, “I am going to beat this.” And he did. He beat it by living optimistically and lovingly until the end."

Marc Elrich
Montgomery County Councilmember

“I met Dan almost 30 years ago when we helped found the Takoma Park Silver Spring Food Co-op, then a focal point of social change. We were a lot younger, and we operated by consensus, a process that is essentially impossible. But Dan was singularly committed to making it work. All the patience, persistence and hope that he brought to his later endeavors he already possessed in his Co-op days.

“Dan had roots in the counter-culture of the Sixties and yet understood business. One time the budget numbers for the Co-op were less than favorable, and someone suggested just changing the numbers. I remember Dan’s good-humored but serious response that financials weren’t simply numbers but had to reflect reality. In his own business he traveled around the country to help them map out local infrastructure, and his tales of local governments were pretty amusing.

“We talked a lot over dinners, with Dan and Ellen as hosts. Dan was the master of desserts, and we also sampled the excellence of his garden. It’s fair to say he fully enjoyed life, and in Ellen he had the perfect partner.

“Dan’s political side played out with the same zest and sophistication. He understood that the Co-op wasn’t just a food store but a statement about an economic model that emphasized worker and community involvement. Dan is best known for throwing himself into the battle to get Blair students a first-class facility after years of neglect. Dan understood that school conditions were a critical part of the educational environment and recoiled at the idea that down-county and second-class had become synonymous.

“He also knew that the official up-county attitude toward Blair reflected a larger attitude toward the changing demographic of the down-county. Before it was fashionable to talk about the “gap” Dan did, and he was among the first and loudest voices calling for education reforms that would close the gap.

“Dan never abandoned hope that the putting the right people in the right place could make change possible. When Tom Perez got into the County Council race, Dan helped marshal the core of citizens to make Tom’s victory possible. When Tom won, Dan went to Rockville with him and, finally, found himself on the inside and able to shape policy. He flourished. Ellen said it was the happiest place he’d been, which is why she held his memorial service in the County Council chamber.

“Dan was a special person. He might lose a battle, but he was not going to be stopped. He’d fight again, find another way, and always assume that the right outcome was also the ultimately inevitable outcome. It’s a great outlook.