Goodbye to Dan McQuade

The absolute Best of Philly

1. If you needed to know something about Philly, Dan McQuade was the person to ask. If he didn’t know the answer, he would connect you with someone who did. He seemed to have read everything ever written about the city. He seemed to have met everyone who’d ever lived here. Meet him at a bar and in one conversation he could easily start with some trivia about the Dick Vermeil Eagles, transition to a wild story about Frank Rizzo, tell you who used to own the bar and who they were related to, and then go, “Oh yeah, I know Boner, I’m trying to get him to do an interview.” Of course, he would be wearing a bootleg Phillies tee under a satin Eagles jacket. To talk with Dan was to learn not just the facts of the city, but the spirit of it. No person has ever understood this strange, dysfunctional, grimy, beautiful city the way he did.

2. Dan died last night, from complications related to neuroendocrine cancer in his pancreas. He leaves behind his wife and his two year old son, both of whom he loved very much. I’d always heard pancreatic cancer is an immediate death sentence, just about the worst diagnosis you can get. But he seemed to be doing pretty well for a while. Every time I talked to him, he had good news. And then he died. That’s how it happens; you start to think the person you love is going to beat the odds and then it all falls apart, much more quickly than you can imagine. I’m not going to write about what’s fair or not fair; that’s beside the point completely. I liked the world better when Dan was in it, that’s all.

3. I first encountered Dan in the early days of blogging, when someone sent me a link to Philadelphia Will Do, his perfectly named blog covering Philly weirdness and ephemera. Nobody covered Mayor John Street’s failbrother Milton the way Dan did. I was living in Iowa City at the time for grad school and I was beyond homesick. A grad school classmate still brings up how my mom sent me a care package of frozen cheesesteaks, which I have to say were much better than you’re probably guessing. I really never wanted to be out there. Everything and everyone I knew and loved was back here. Reading Dan’s blog made me feel, briefly, like I was home again.

4. Dan and I became Internet friends first, because I was blogging then too, periodically about Philly sports. I got involved in a strange kerfuffle with former NFL referee Ed Hochuli, who left some angry comments on my little-known blog, and when this strange kerfuffle went viral, I got an email from Dan telling me how much he liked my writing. I don’t remember when we finally met in person, but for the next 20 years, I was able to count on him to send me funny little stories by email or text, and to know that whatever he was doing, he was having a great time doing it.

5. Since the news of his death was posted, people have been sharing their favorite McQuade stories, and the sheer breadth and variety of work he did over the years is stunning. Even as a friend who followed him through all his various blogging stops, I had underestimated the quality and quantity of his output. He inspired the Rocky Run, set Bill Cosby’s downfall in motion, documented the bizarre subculture of boardwalk t-shirts at extraordinary length, wrote beautifully about his favorite sports teams , reported on the fake epidemic of cops overdosing by touching fentanyl, met a very fat cat, documented silly sports fan trends like #Raisethecat, edited one of the best videos of Philly fans ever made, and so much more. He himself would have rolled his eyes at some of the tributes he’s getting; most blogging is, by definition, ephemeral and silly and hardly consequential. But it’s the body of work that matters. It’s the community and the spirit he built around it. Everybody who knew Dan knew a McQuade story the moment it happened.

6. Really, the thing about Dan was he would text you on a weekday afternoon with a half-dozen updates about how he’d found a lead in the story about where Princess Diana got the Eagles jacket in that famous photo. He was just so excited to learn new stuff and he wanted everyone to know about it.

7. Dan was a frequent guest on my podcast, Book Fight. We’d been talking about him coming on during the final season, but his health and his schedule complicated things too much. I regret that we didn’t get to do one more episode, because he was always incredible prepared and enthusiastic and just so funny. When we talked about a strange 1950 young adult novel called Hoop Crazy—in which a conman becomes a hotshot high school basketball coach, enraging some folks by encouraging the players to take those newfangled three point shots, in order to pull off a high stakes robbery of some bespoke pottery—he read five additional books just for background information. He was texting me regularly for three weeks leading up to recording, and still would send me a message any time he encountered a reference to a pottery theft (which happened more than you’d ever guess). He treasured these kinds of quirky little details. By embracing them so fully, he encouraged others to do the same, to let more light into their own lives.

8. While I was typing this, I remembered a time, years ago, when he had an idea of writing something about Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie’s PhD thesis, which has been referenced many times by local media over the years. He found that Temple University, where I used to work, had a copy of the thesis, and asked me to check it out for him. He met me on the corner of Cecil B. Moore and Broad St. that same day, and I handed him the two surprisingly large hardbound volumes. He thanked me, then hopped on the next bus back to his house. A few months later, he told me he’d read the whole thing and couldn’t even wring a 600-word blog post out of it. He shared this with no regret at all; the act of having acquired and read the thesis was valuable enough for him.

9. On the podcast, I one asked him how he came up with story ideas, and he said, “You just have to be interested in a lot of stuff.” I didn’t understand at the time what a valuable lesson that was.

10. This bluesky post describes Dan perfectly as, “The center a thousand different circles on a venn diagram connecting us all.” If you were online and into Philly or sports or just journalism, you knew Dan, and you met a dozen other people because of him. Over the summer, a friend flew in from out of town for a business trip, and a group of us—all guys who have become online friends because of our shared Philly sports fandom—met for drinks at Strangelove’s in Center City. I invited Dan, knowing he might not come because of the illness and because he’d quit drinking a while ago, but there he was, walking through the door in his pink Schwarbie shirt. He was thrilled that the TVs behind the bar were showing Baywatch, a show that I used to think he loved ironically, but I don’t think he ever did anything ironically. Near the end of the night, he said, “So I guess you guys want to know what’s going on with my health.” We did, of course. And he told us it was looking good. That was the last time I saw him.

11. He was working on a book about the cultural history of shopping malls, blended with memoir, for Barrelhouse. He’d been running his pitch by me for weeks, and I kept telling him he didn’t need to be so formal about it; I loved his work and I wanted us to publish it. But he wanted it to be earned on merit. The last text I have from him, he told me he was still working on it, but it might be a little delayed.

12. My wife has heard me talking about Dan for many years, but she only met him once, when she and I went to a Phillies game and I just saw him wandering around Ashburn Alley. I don’t remember anything we talked about then, I just remember thinking that running into Dan McQuade in the middle of a sellout Phillies crowd is a perfect Philly experience.

13. Another quintessential Philly experience: Dan’s art show featuring his bootleg t-shirt collection. The entry fee was a donation to Prevention Point Philadelphia. He’d arranged an incredible array of profane, weird, janky shirts with little plaques explaining their origin as if we were at a real art show. I enjoyed it more than many actual art museums I’ve been to. I got there early, and within a half hour it was so crowded it was hard to move through the room. Everybody in that room loved him. He’d built this perfect community around horrible t-shirts, overturned shopping carts, odd historical research, and stories of Northeast Philly weirdos. What a legacy.

14. On Book Fight, we used to ask our guests when was the last reading experience that had made them cry. Instead of naming a book, he talked about the TV movie Garfield’s Nine Lives, and even in describing a particular plot line, he got choked up. He wasn’t embarrassed at all. The man loved cats so much. He loved his cat, Det. John Munch, as much as any person could. I got choked up last night thinking about how Detective is going to miss him too.

15. On my ever-evolving to-do list is an item with the heading People to contact. I go in waves of trying to maintain friendships; every person on there is important to me, but I get busy, I get distracted, and I push the contact back to the bottom of the list. You can look up one day and realize it’s been a year since you’ve seen this person you consider a good friend. The first name on the list is McQuade, who had been pestering me to meet him for a cheesesteak in Manayunk. I used to live there, he and his wife owned a house in East Falls, it was the perfect excuse to meet up. I never did follow through on meeting him there. I’m looking now at the five names below his, and I am going to send some messages. You rarely know for sure when you’ve seen someone for the last time, and I can’t bear the thought of neglecting one more friendship.

---