He was born in small-town Indiana in January 1942, during the early days of the United States' entry into World War II. He was a Midwest child of Southern parents, the youngest of two boys. Entries in the archives of the local newspapers will inform you that he received public honors for his elementary school grades, that he played tennis and croquet, that he took a date to the high school dances. They will not tell you that he had a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, and self-medicated with alcohol in high school.
Next, you will find him in the 1960s archives of the Banyan, the yearbook for Brigham Young University. These archives reveal that he was politically conservative and heavily associated with the printing and graphic design studios at school. The photo taken above was in his junior year, when he began to go by "Dan L. Buck" rather than his given name of Danny, in an effort to sound more professional. It will not tell you that he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his early twenties, nor that he took a few years' time off from school to serve a mission for the Church in the Pacific Northwest. It will also not tell you that in the late 1960s he was set up on a blind date with a Northern California girl named Karin, nor that the date went significantly better than either of them had expected.
There is a marriage certificate on file dated August 1968, indicating that Dan and Karin were married in Salt Lake City, Utah. It will not tell you that they were actually married twice; since Dan's parents were not Latter-day Saints and therefore could not enter the Salt Lake Temple, Dan and Karin were married in a civil ceremony the day before their sealing so his parents could attend their wedding.
There are multiple California birth certificates on file starting in 1969 and running through 1978, as Dan and Karin's six children were born in the East Bay Area. They will not tell you how the family struggled to live on a freelance graphic designer's salary, how they had to live as frugally as possible; they will not tell you all the ways two inventive parents came up with fun free or low-cost family activities; they will not tell you how often during the 1970s the parents sacrificed precious time and money to cross the country with a half-dozen children in an orange VW bus, even during the throes of the gas crisis, so the kids could get to know their relatives in Indiana.
And then there's the death certificate, dated December 12, 1981. It states the deceased was 39 years old; that the cause of death was a one-person car accident. It does not state what the police believed, that the old orange VW bus slid off Bailey Road and over an embankment to try to avoid another car that might have been playing "chicken" on the dark, wet road. It does not state that Dan had been out that Saturday afternoon painting holiday windows for local businesses in an effort to pick up a little more money for Christmas. It definitely does not say how a local police officer panicked on the phone, bluntly stating "no, ma'am, he's dead," when he called my mother that night to inform her of the accident.
The obituary printed in the Contra Costa Times states that Danny Lee Buck was buried on December 16, 1981. It mentions that he left behind a wife and six young children. It will not tell you how many people, most of them total strangers, read that obituary and spontaneously decided to give his surviving family the best Christmas Day they had ever experienced.
There are all sorts of documents recording milestones in my dad's life. They can give you many facts and figures, and they're helpful for determining where he was living and what he was doing at various times. But they cannot tell you about how gentle he was, how much of a mental burden he placed on himself to excel, all his goofy dad jokes and extemporaneous parody songs, how many times he took his children for hikes along Lime Ridge, or the glorious mess that was his design studio. They cannot tell you how essential his faith was to him, how spiritually sensitive he was, how he would come home and swing his kids around by their arms in a dizzying circle in the back yard, how he could barely cook, but had the ability to eyeball a design paste-up to within a sixteenth of an inch, how he couldn't write legibly, but created the most beautiful hand-drawn calligraphy, how much fear and stress he kept bottled up over the years. Documents can give you facts about a person, but they can't give you essentials about who that person really was.
And there is no document anywhere that can tell you how much I miss him.
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