When Chuck Karr called and asked if I ever knew a WHS classmate by the name of Edward Daniels, I told him that I did, but the person in question went by the name of “Danny”, not Edward. 

Chuck was following up on a message from one of our classmates that an Edward Daniels had passed away in 2018. Furthermore, he indicated that this person had been a professional wrestler at some point in his life and had dabbled in music. The statement about wrestling was not consistent with what I remembered about Dan who came from a family devoted to the world of fine arts and the theater. I told Chuck that I thought he had the wrong person. There had to be a zillion Edward Daniels in the ’69-’71 age range. I really had my doubts. 

Chuck said: “You seem to remember him better than anyone I have talked to.  See what you can do”.

I told Chuck I would give it try and see what I could find.  After all, Chuck and his team had performed such a Herculean task over the past ten years in locating so many classmates, I thought it was the least I could do---even though the pursuit would put my memory in overdrive. After all, it was some 60 years since I had interacted with Dan. Never did I realized that the search would get out of control.

There were some other factors that contributed to my volunteering. At the time of Chuck’s call, Covid-19 was in full swing. The Dow had dropped 40%, every other person in NYC seemed to be infected and every conceivable place that I frequented in Minnesota was locked down. No tennis; no Pickle Ball—no nothing. Ten to fourteen mile a day walks became the norm, and every day those hikes in the warrens of rural Minnesota became less and less gratifying. I found myself holed up, for the most part, in my basement.  I did, however, have a computer, cell phone and lots of time. The perfect storm for an investigation.  I started to put my memory to work and cull the internet for information.

I was a good friend of Danny’s when we were in 8th and 9th grade at Franklin. I do not remember the reason for our connection, but I remember him as extremely outgoing and good natured. However,  I do not remember him during our matriculation to 7^th grade.  There are no class photos where he appears at either Franklin or McKinley. I later learned that his stepfather had taken a job in Hawaii from 1959-62 and that is the reason for my poor recollection of him.  After returning from Hawaii, Dan lived on Second Avenue SE where Second Avenue and Crescent Street intersect. The street was semi-circular and most of the houses sat at the bottom of the hill where the Cook mansion was located. 

Danny’s stepfather was Don Tescher. He maintained a  patriciate status, locally, in the world of theatre. He was the producer/director of the CR Community Playhouse in Cedar Rapids. Dan’s mother, Earlita, was an actress and former photo model. I distinctly remember my first visit to their home.  Don was dressed like the consummate director right out of Central Casting, donning a Harris Tweed coat and ascot, and smoking a pipe. His mother reminded me of the actress, Julie Andrews. There was a physical resemblance, but it was her poise and manner that struck me.  She was so refined and sophisticated that I thought she could walk on air. There were not many moms in my neighborhood that carried themselves like her.

Dan’s birth father was Edward Daniels. He was a Harvard graduate whose family heritage can be traced back to the Mayflower. He was a Comptroller at WR Grace @ Co. They lived on 3^rd Avenue SE in the 800 block in 1957. According to my limited geographical recollection of grade school boundaries, Dan would have attended Tyler grade school. I had always assumed, for some reason or other, that Dan had been an out of town transfer to Franklin. Not so.

He spent his summers in Camden, Maine. He had several relatives, on his mother’ side,  who lived there. I gave him a hard time about that. The thought of spending  summers outside of Cedar Rapids was unfathomable to me. Maine, it seemed, was a million miles away. The idea of meandering around on a rocky coastal beach was anathema to many of us who lived and breathed summer baseball, and the idea of jettisoning all of that--and leaving our friends—was a total non-starter in my mind.  I do remember receiving some correspondence from him during the month of July ’63. From a PO Box, no less, which confirmed my suspicions as to how rural an area he was living in. 

For some reason or other, I lost contact with Dan after 9^th grade and at WHS. Friendships during that period were quite fluid, and with 400+ students joining the Franklin crowd at Washington in the fall of ’64, just increased the likelihood that old acquaintances would drop off and new ones would surface. I just chalked up my lack of remembering Dan to that fact. 

The whole story might have ended right here but I wanted to either affirm or discredit this notion of a career in professional wrestling. My first thought was to follow the obvious. Many of our WHS classmates had been a member of a band while in school and Chuck Karr had indicated that Dan was a guitarist. This led me to phoning my old baseball teammate, Ken Cook, who played guitar extensively in high school and college.  I thought he might have some insight.

Ken, through high school and college, had played with the King Bees and Jerry and the Jesters. Ken remembers Dan and had, on one occasion, lent him his Gibson ES 335 TDC guitar for a gig in the Quad Cities. In talking with Ken, he indicated that of all the guitar players that he had witnessed in high school and college, Dan was the one he thought would make “the big time”. He said he was an extraordinarily accomplished “Blues” guitarist. 

Dan’s first group went by the name of the Invaders. The ensemble included Mark L. Shepard, Dave Valenta and Steve Gross (Regis). In the fall of ’67, he was playing in a Blues Bar in downtown C.R.  After that, it appears, according to Mark  Shepard, that Dan had played for a number of groups in town, including the “reformed” Odysseys with Jimmy Carroll who was the lead guitarist for the Wanderin’ Souls,  with members of the old Odysseys and the Untouchables. 

Enter Tom Hankins. If there ever was a character out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel, it was Hankins. A very accomplished bass guitarist who played with the Untouchables, he thrived in a subterranean world where most people would never tread. His book, The Mat, the Mob, & Music chronicles his life as a  musician and wrestler. His story dives into some of the darker corners of the post 60s drug culture, including a run-in with the FBI. Physically, he could have been John Belushi’s twin brother.

Dan met up with Hankins in late ’67 and formed a power blues-trio. In his book, Hankins acknowledges that Dan had become “an amazing blues guitarist by studying and copying B.B. King”. They became the house band at the notorious Cougar Lounge in Cedar Rapids. Hankins describes the bar as “scary” particular for “farmers and racists and that no white people ever saw the inside of the building except us”. 

In 1969, Hankins, after attending several pro wrestling matches with his girlfriend, decided to leave music and pursue a career as a professional wrestler. When he returned to C.R., he told Dan that he was quitting the band. To Hankins surprise, Dan told him that he, himself, had been, for years, a big wrestling fan. Interestingly, they had never discussed the subject prior to that day. 

Dan told Hankins that he had lived next door, while living in Honolulu as a pre-teen, to Ed Frances who was the local wrestling promotor who had once been a professional wrestler. Dan had been good friend with Ed’s two sons. According to Dan, all three of them would wrestle in their backyard and, on occasion, the actor, Broderick Crawford, would referee.

Almost immediately, Dan wanted to jettison his life as a guitarist and became the second member of the Hankins’ tag team. Unfortunately, Dan only weighed 145 pounds which was a non-starter. For the time being, they recruited Dan’s brother-in-law, Jack Reid Mahacek.  Dan became the manager and promoter for the Reid Brothers (Chopper & Hogg), According to Hankins, Mahacek was not a hard-core enthusiast of the “sport” as the two of them, but at 280 pounds he had the requisite size. Mahacek was an ex-biker who belonged to a gang called the Chosen Few. According to Hankins:

 “they were a violent, savage bunch of thugs on a tear. I was not my usual loud-mouthed self when I was around them because I did not want to be the one to get torn. Those fun-loving thugs would pistol-whip each other just for kicks. They lived for the moment when they could get involved in an old fashion brawl, Years later most of them wound up in prison for destroying a small town in northern Iowa”

At some point, Mahacek decided that wrestling was not for him. According to Hankins, Dan had been lifting weights and taking food supplements and had gotten his weight to 200 pounds. At that point they formed a new team, The Reid Brothers, with Dan being known as “Psycho Perry”. Later  in their careers  and under a different agent, they went by “Hitman and Roughhouse Reid” Getting matches was not easy and it was not until 1972 did they finally land a match in Waterloo. From that point forward, they toured the country.

Dan’s tenure in wrestling, it appears, lasted a decade. The last reference to any of his matches was in San Bernardino, California where he proceeded to blow out his knee. Hankins went on to pair up with someone else while Dan recuperated in norther California, but the trail pretty much goes cold after that.

According to his son, Matt, Dan spent the rest of his working life, after wrestling, in the wholesale floral business in Texas, California, and Florida. Two remarkably interesting pivot points: music to wrestling to flowers. Dan life, it seems, came full circle. 

In the fall of ’71,  I was in graduate school at ISU, and as I sat in a movie theatre in Bloomington, Illinois, watching the Summer of ’42 with all the beautiful shots of the coastal landscape of Maine,  my mind wandered back to those summers of the early 60s when I berated Dan for leaving Cedar Rapids for a three month stint out east.  As I was musing to myself, in a joking sort of manner,  I wondered if the real reason he left C. R. for Maine was to audition for the Gary Grimes’ role of “Hermie”, the fifteen year old teenage protagonist in the film.

 Despite being obsessed with baseball as a teenager,  I could not help wondering that I might have given up Van Vechtan park, my baseball mitt, and all my friends if it meant I could sidle up to Jennifer O’Neill on the sand dunes of Camden. That would have been an August to remember.

Dan might have been on to something……….

Special thanks to Ann Duggan for locating some links and contact information. We were often on the same trail, but she usually beat me to it.

Thanks to Dan Hampton for his research on Danny!