Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Snyder
This section highlights a local person of interest and admiration, a person whose achievements, manner, leadership, and/or character distinguish them. If you know people we should include, please apprise us at editor@candor.news, and we will interview them for future issues of Candor. In your submission, include the person’s name, noteworthy traits and accomplishments, and their contact information.
In this issue, we are highlighting Daniel Snyder.
1. Dan, what established you in Wichita and now keeps you here?
My wife and I moved here from New York City in 2013 to take a position at the Classical School of Wichita, teaching high school logic and rhetoric. We had been living and working in Manhattan, I as an opera singer, and she as an accompanist, both involved with the International Opera Alliance. My work had drawn me to many cities in the United States, and I had the opportunity to travel in Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and even to Mozambique in the pursuit of a singing career. It was my habit when I traveled to walk around the environs wherever I found myself, walking rather than driving, preferring to live in a populated center, hopefully near the performing venue. Usually being alone as a solo artist, I would study a place and people, spending significant time at libraries.
I could tell you about some wonderful libraries hidden in the center of cities, such as the Eudora Welty Library in Jackson, Mississippi, or the Toledo Public Library, both having largely escaped the purgative book sales that thin the under-browsed shelves of their time-bound volumes. Strange old books on back shelves gave me much to think about, especially in the light of where I found them.
Living the life of homeless traveler, albeit episodic and remunerated, I would find myself wondering how I could perhaps settle in to one of the places I found to be beautiful (yes, some were impermeable). As the fortunes of regional opera waned and symphonic organizations declined, an abiding interest in classical Western literature and music soon answered .
My father, a Western Civ professor (now retired) in Tennessee, suggested that I should look into teaching at a classical school. Familial connections at the time running into Wichita, I followed the thread and fell in love. It is my privilege, a word that I embrace, to pass on what I understand as a treasured inheritance to my young friends and budding colleagues -- my students and fellow faculty. Imagine reading and discussing the often referenced but seldom read ‘back shelves’ of the world day after day, all the while living in a city that retains its heritage in working order, having not succumbed to the gentrification and false bohemianism of so many once-vital places.
This is my experience of Wichita, a place full of book clubs, book stores, discussion groups, vital churches and great restaurants and bars. Tracee and I have been enriched by the symphony, the opera, and not least the hockey games. We have been made to marvel at this city, living as we are in College Hill and delighting in the variegated architecture that is still working for those of a working wage, a group that included – a surprising discovery, thanks to the efforts of one of my sisters in California -- my maternal grandfather and grandmother, who had met and married in Wichita during the depression. They moved since to Chicago. This was a stunner. We learned that she had been a teacher in Newton, and he, Peter Tanis, with his brother Klaus, had run a trucking company out of Wichita called the Tanis Racket.
Soon, our report of all things Wichita led my wife’s sister, and both of my sons, who are former Marines, to move here. One son is also a teacher; the other, serving with the Wichita Police Department. Recently being blessed by the birth of a grandson, we now include a Wichita native!
2. As you look back over the course of your life, highlight a couple of your most satisfying accomplishments -- and explain why they are highlights.
I am happy to have retained the love of my wife through all the many windings of our life together.
Looking back, the track meets of my high school days are some of my fondest memories, running at the Drake Relays, competing in Sioux City where I grew up, and making it into the sports pages of the local paper. Returning there once as a soloist for the Sioux City Symphony, people at a local hangout famous for tavern sandwiches, The Miles Inn, remembered me for that.
I’m also happy to think back on my stint in the Marines and my friendships in that tight brotherhood. Singing the music of Kurt Weill in Berlin, staying on Heinrich Heine Strasse seemed like a culminating event, since I had spent so much time performing German art songs along the way.
Getting my work as a video game designer on the cover of Wired magazine back in the heady ‘90s was trippy, the same year I did an interview for Playboy magazine.
Recalling the events of a single day -- singing for the dedication of the World War Two memorial in Washington DC, singing the Frank Martin “In Terra Pax” at the National Cathedral, and hanging out with Bob Dole in the vestry as he narrated a commemoration of the cessation of hostilities those many years ago in 1945 -- I get a bit of vertigo thinking of the many things I have to be thankful for.
I’m afraid this is all a bit like Herodotus, with many tangential stories that confuse rather than clarify.
3. In this difficult year of international pandemic and inflamed national, election-year politics, what can you forecast as a "coming attraction," or an ameliorative of sorts?
The worst part of the “pandemic” is that it is “international.” What an intrusion on the quiet introspection that is needed to build careful awareness. What is now an hysteria, made manifest in so many ways, is a colossal distraction and illusion, and points to a general tendency among us in this century toward frenzied fixation on petty accessories rather than grounding nourishment. We need more local news, more concern with our actual neighbors, less international policy, more involvement at the most local levels in the democracy we have inherited. Think of it: “Everyone isolate and await the next proclamation from the megaphone!” Of course people are attracted by the biggest things, me included, but enjoyment of each other in the flesh and in real proximity is the basis of healthy politics, and not global manias, social, medical, economic, and so on. Idolatry has constantly been cast down in our history, and I hope that the energy remains in the old body to lop off this latest bronze giant.
I suppose I’m afraid that as the existential threat wanes and is increasingly revealed as a mirage, we will be ashamed to look each other in the face, and so will continue on as disjunct participants in a national drama, rather than committed citizens of a real place.
4. Life is full of lessons. What is a valued lesson a parent or mentor instilled in you -- and to what effect?
My father made it clear that education is its own reward, and careers are things that happen when you live life, not the goals of life. The Marines taught me that habits are either parasitic enemies or valuable servants, and there is no middle ground.
5. Do you have a piece of advice for the young? And for the aging?
When you are young seek wisdom. As you age, you will either become set in your ways, a cartoon of yourself, or you will grow; keep your antennae out.
6. What will be a hopeful path to Wichita's future well-being?
Wichita should continue as a place of strong commitment to industry and balanced economy. Economy includes much more than the flow of money and real estate. Economy is the engagement of all in fulfilling work that benefits the family, the city, the county, the state, and somewhere way down the road, the world. This includes necessarily the arts. There seems to be a tension in this, but abstractions of real relationships can cause very large and unforeseen consequence
I like to see the Wichita flags flying.
7. A question of your choosing, should you have more to say:
Are electric cars better than combustion powered cars?
Since man began to dominate space, creating in effect “time machines,” our historic path has been toward dispersion. We move farther away from each other. One compensation is the romantic noise and fume of the snorting beasts we ride, and I view any softening of that effect as a movement toward the subconscious assumption of a vice rather than the enthusiastic embrace of a virtue. An electric car could actually be a vice of the soul, and should only be considered in consultation with your pastor. Also, Mopar is the quintessence of the American automotive romance.