Dan McQuade

My friend — and yours, and his, and hers, and hers, and ....

We shared a love for the bad lede.

You know the kind: the tortured metaphor that died on the rack, the analogy that doesn’t quite match up, the writer who’s trying to do too much. Dan McQuade loved to reference my first ever story for The Daily Pennsylvanian, the college newspaper where we both got our starts, written when he was still in high school¹:

“The lyrics of the Bob Dylan song ‘Rainy Day Women’ are totally unrelated to track and field. The title, however, fittingly describes the Penn women’s track team as it attempts to repeat last year’s performance this weekend.”

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Or this one, which he sent me more recently:

Dan died at the end of January, the day after his 43rd birthday. His funeral was last Thursday, in Philadelphia, the city he lived in, loved, laughed at and with. The outpourings of grief and memories of an impossibly kindhearted and generous friend and coworker are legion. This one is mine.

Two Philadelphia icons.

My mental picture of Dan bears little resemblance to the pictures going around or the one just above. Yes, of course, those pictures are what he looked like. But, as happens sometimes, the headshot in my mental file for Dan is fixed to the time I met him: a fresh-faced, short-haired, rail-thin rookie sportswriter. I was a veteran, meaning three years older. We should have barely overlapped. I should have graduated just as he was getting his feet wet. But I didn’t (ever, if we’re going to get technical), and he became my editor, yet another who had to be trained that, in my lexicon, “deadline” meant “suggestion.”

We first identified our shared appreciation of the cringeworthy journalistic opener in the conference room at the paper, where we happened to catch this lead-in to a local news report of some tragedy : “Little [Name Redacted] wanted a pony for his eighth birthday. Instead, he’ll get a funeral for himself and his mother.”

I assume the rest of the story was macabre, but we didn’t hear it. We were both cackling. “A funeral for himself and his mother” — In the reporter’s setup, this is the surprise gift the little boy got instead of a pony! It’s so wildly off base.

We’ve referenced it to make each other laugh for the last nearly 25 years.

Over those years of email and text correspondence, Dan added many more to our trove:

This is not a thing one generally expects.

Most of these are absent-minded or hastily-written — the journalist attempting a shortcut to empathy or connection that ends up reading as callow and oblivious.

They weren’t always tragedies. In April of 2020 he emailed me a video file with the subject line “local news clip.” By way of introducing the attached mp4 he wrote only “Please watch.”

It’s a New York Channel 7 clip in which the anchor reminds us that last week they brought us a “story about 26-year-old Jack Allard.” He’d spent time in a medically-induced coma and on a ventilator. The anchor updates us that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is “today announcing that Jack has died.” What makes this odd is that the anchor’s monologue is delivered over grainy footage of a seemingly-healthy young man walking out of a hospital. Then it cuts to Governor Murphy announcing “last Thursday he was clapped out, by the doctors and nurses who saved his life, as he walked out of the hospital.”

Coming back from that clip of the governor, the anchor’s first words are “I feel horrible. Jack is very much alive. Jack, we love you … again, Jack is alive and back home. He has come home, not in the figurative sense, but in the quite literal sense, and my deepest apologies for that. I just misread everything and I apologize…”

It’s fantastic. And, while the video is too big to attach to this email, I’m happy to send it along to anyone who wants to check it out.

Unstated but almost always present in our shared laughter at these foibles was an empathy for the writer. Sometimes you try to do too much! It happens to everyone!

Also we learned that lesson that all budding journalists, and most college students, should learn — the people making the decisions are just dopes like you. Sometimes people are just out here making stuff up!

In his homily, the priest at Dan’s funeral referenced both the 1990 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie Joe Versus the Volcano, and the Leonard Cohen song “Anthem,” and I found myself thinking “Dan would’ve loved that” — just the kind of random, slightly out-of-place references that don’t quite meet the moment.

There were lots of those “Dan would’ve loved that” moments this week: a travel snafu, a dumb sign you saw, my kid roasting me for where my Dad-coded New Balances to the great sneakerhead’s funeral. And none of those moments felt like we were protesting too much. If there’s one thing a Dan was a connoisseur of it was the comedy of life’s inconveniences and absurd juxtapositions.²

—

When I saw that the Sixers had (rightly) held a moment of silence for one of Philadelphia’s great chroniclers and champions — with Dan’s face up on the Jumbotron next to a still-not-believable span of years — I texted several old colleagues “Dan would have both thought this was ridiculous and deeply loved it, which is perfect because it’s how he felt about the city.”

We attended at least one of those now-defunct orgies of bad taste and light blasphemy known as Wing Bowl.

Even as we bonded over our love for Philadelphia characters, my outsider’s appreciation couldn’t approach his bone-deep, born-here empathy, nor was I able to realize until just recently that my friend was one of the brightest Philadelphia characters around.

He always liked a story I’d written about Kenn Kweder the (still?!) Tuesday night headliner at Smoke’s who had and missed his big time shot in the 70s. And he would update me with his Kweder sightings. On the day of the first Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl (the one the good guys won) he sent me a video of Kweder playing at his local Acme.

I don’t seem to have the video, but the flyer announcing this “live” performance from our “rock star” is, thankfully, preserved.

The Eagles aren’t in the Super Bowl this year, of course, so I don’t know if Kweder’s playing today. I do know that, when I see a dumb commercial, or Cris Collinsworth’s son Jac makes an embarrassing flub, I’ll reach for my phone to text Dan, and I’ll be sad again.

1. And in which a shorter version of this piece appeared last week.

2. Dan was also capable of schadenfreude. We both hated J.D. Vance, like most of the rest of the world. And we enjoyed carping about CBS News editor-in-chief/University of Austin founder/Grifter Supreme Bari Weiss.