DANIEL VICTOR KNEPP

"PAW"

Daniel V. Knepp was the namesake both of Daniel D. Adams and another grandson named Daniel Carpenter; and he in turn was named after his father, Daniel (no middle name) Knepp.

He grew up a few blocks away from a young vaudevillian couple named James and Marion Jordan, who would later leave Peoria behind and become famous under their radio and stage names, Fibber McGee and Molly. (He showed me both their house and his childhood home during a June 1983 trip to Peoria.)

It would be an understatement to say that Paw's father, Grandpa Dan, was harsh. Iron-fisted discipline was the rule in the Knepp house, and punishments would be swift. Paw grew up hating his father, and Grandpa Dan was one major reasons that Paw never joined the Apostolic Church (yet another point of contention between them when Paw was older). Paw also started contributing to the financial household when he was nine years old. He took on several jobs, one of which was a milk route that paid five cents a day. As soon as Paw would get home from the route, Grandpa Dan would hold out his hand waiting for the money. Every now and then, though, Paw's mother would take sympathy on him and give him back a little bit of money, or buy Paw some ice cream when they were out together.

Grandpa Dan wasn't particularly interested in teaching Paw how to drive when Paw hit his teens. The volunteer for that job was the next oldest male in the Knepp household, Paw's brother Walt.

Even into his eighties, Paw would only talk about Grandpa Dan when prodded. Nevertheless, seven months before Paw died, I asked him if he had any happy memories of Daniel Knepp the elder. Paw thought for a moment, and finally said that he did. When he was a boy, their church in Peoria would normally hold a long Sunday service with a one-hour break in between each halves; during that intermission, Grandpa Dan would take Paw and Paw's brother, Walt, on walks along the Illinois River to talk...or just say nothing at all. That, Paw told me, was a good memory of his father.

Our cousin Art Moser told me the following story about Paw: "He was probably 10 years older than I was, so when I was growing up, he was one of a couple of cousins who were my idols. Just for clarification, my mother was Marie (Bechtel) Moser and her older sister was Sophie (Bechtel) Knepp who was married to Dan Knepp. So your grandfather and I were first cousins.

"We lived on a farm about 25 miles east of Peoria, just outside a town called Roanoke. It was a small farm, 26 acres, and my father grew a lot of fruits and vegetables for sale in the town. This is pretty much how we survived during the 1930's. One of the things he would do was to graze a mule or two during the summer. In the town was a coal mine (you can still see the mound of mine tailings) which used mules underground to haul the coal carts. In the summer, the mine closed down and the mules were loaned out to farmers who wanted to use them for draft animals. My dad would use "Dutch", the mule we usually got, for plowing.

"During his teen years, your grandfather would often spend some of the summer time with us on the farm just as, later, my sister and I would stay at Aunt Sophie and Uncle Dan's for a week or two. One summer, when Dad had Dutch and another mule, your grandfather decided it would be fun to ride the mule around the countryside. Of course, since we never used the mule for riding, we had no saddle, stirrups, or other gear. So Danny rode bareback. Now mules tend to be much bonier than horses and significantly less comfortable to ride bareback. But your grandfather was undaunted and spent most of the day riding around the neighborhood. But the next day, he didn't ride. In fact, he didn't sit. He stood up or laid down most of the day. His bottom was so sore from riding the bony mule that the only time he sat down was for supper. I don't think he rode the mule any more that summer!"

As far as marrying Ruth Andre (Nana) was concerned, nobody later was ever quite sure who proposed to whom. Paw always claimed that Nana did the proposing, while Nana insisted that Paw was the one who did the deed. Nevertheless, they both agreed on one detail: that the proposal happened in his car while they were parked in her driveway!
He also told me that his father wasn't the only one unhappy with him marrying Nana. Not long before their wedding, Paw ran into an old girlfriend at a street corner and told her that he was marrying Ruth Andre. "Ruth Andre?" the girl replied, shocked. "But she's a snob!" Be that as it may, Paw told her stiffly, he was still marrying her. He turned his back on her, walked across the street, and never spoke to her again.
His first date with Nana wasn't exactly auspicious either. He asked her if they could go to a cheap 25 cent matinee instead of doing their original (more expensive) plans--because Paw had spent most of his money the night before on a date with another girl! (Nana never let him live that down.)

Here you can read a love letter that Paw wrote to Nana just a few weeks before they got married--when even then it didn't seem their marriage was a sure thing. As far as I can tell it's the only surviving letter one wrote to the other before the birth of their children.

He was, among many other things, an engineer for the Manhattan Project. During the Second World War, while teaching tool design part time at the University of Iowa, he also worked on a team that operated behind locked doors, with armed guards, on the first atomic bomb. It was his team that invented the proximity fuse, allowing the bomb to detonate in mid-air instead of when it hit the ground, telling the bomb when it was close enough to the target for the target to be destroyed. It would only be 45 years after the war's end that he would tell me this--partly due to much of it still being classified, and partly due to his lack of desire to talk about it.

One thing that his children especially remember about Paw was his sense of humor, fun, and occasional wackiness. When mom was 11 years old and they were in a little store at the bottom of Salt River Canyon, she found a cup on the front porch that, she announced for all to hear, looked like the cup Paw put his teeth in. Paw laughed just as much as everyone else. When Aunt Deedee was 15 and they lived in Burlington, Iowa, Uncle Jim was a 19-year-old Navy man stationed at the Great Lakes, and he would come and visit them on weekends. The Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons were popular then, and once Paw started chasing Jim around the apartment with a can of shaving cream, yelling "Mee Mee Vroom!" Then it was Jim's turn to chase him. As Aunt Deedee wrote to me, "No one could accuse us of having a dull family! We never knew what Dad would do next."

Paw was also well known for his love of dogs--especially Shetland Sheepdogs. He was broken up when he had to put their 15-year-old Australian Shepherd, Brownie, to sleep, skipping church to do so. And when their Sheltie, Dolly, died in October of 1985, Nana told me that Paw was grieving for her a lot more than he was letting on to anybody. Shortly after Dolly died he went out and bought another Sheltie named Missy, who needed his extra care and gentleness because she had apparently been abused by her last owners. When he took her outside he would smoke and watch her as she explored the yard, ran around, and chased squirrels to her heart's content. Later we would keep Missy when Paw moved to the retirement home in October of 1997; she died the following summer, but Paw didn't want to see her immediately before we had to put her to sleep. He seemed to prefer remembering Missy as she was before she got sick, though he had visited with her the last couple of times he was at our house before Missy died.

The very first time I stayed overnight at Nana and Paw's house was when I was five years old, and I was having a bit of maternal separation anxiety...to say the least. While I was crying and asking mom on the phone to come take me home, Paw went down to his basement workshop and brought an outlined map of the United States I could color and play with. While I was coloring I started thinking that spending the night there could be fun after all...and I would spend almost every Friday or Saturday night there (Friday as a kid, Saturday as a teenager) for the next twelve years.

Paw was as close as you could get to being a "professional nomad" (as mom put it). They lived in over a dozen different places as Paw would migrate from job to job: Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Arizona, Virginia. The move to Arizona became necessary when both he and Aunt Deedee came down with polio, and their original move to Burlington was at Nana's request to live in her hometown again. But usually he would find something better, or sometimes he would get mad at his boss and quit. Nana hated the frequent moves (not just because of how unsettling they could be, but also because many of them forced the sale of furniture and other personal items so they could afford to move), but she always counselled him to have another job ready before he left his current one. And he always could find another job--even during their rough times together, Nana would admit that Paw was an engineering genius. Companies wanted to hire him because they could tell him what kind of tool they wanted made, and he would design it for them...along with designing the machine needed to make the tool he'd designed!

Finally in the summer of 1961 they moved to a house on Maryland Avenue in Salem, Virginia, and there they stayed. That was still Nana's home when she died in November of 1996, and Paw would remain there for almost another year before moving to the Richfield retirement home in Salem.

Paw's engineering abilities and careful attention to detail manifested themselves outside of his work, too. To me, the most memorable example of this where his engineering was concerned came when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986. Paw took one look at the video and determined, several months before the official announcement, that an o-ring had failed. One legacy of his attention to detail are the model sailing ship Cutty Sark and two Robert E. Lee riverboats he constructed, each of which he spent months pouring over on his drafting board. (The second Robert E. Lee he kept for himself and gave a flag that read KNEPP. Ironically, when I went to Paw's apartment the day after his death, I noticed that the Knepp flag had slipped down to half mast.)

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