Don Engdahl was a newspaper reporter and environmental activist who (sort of famously) walked the entire California coast in 1970, writing weekly installments about it for the San Francisco Chronicle which he posted en route.
As it turns out, while googling his name today for another reason, I found out that he passed away in April; a notice of his death made the Washington Post.
"What did I learn?" he wrote in 1970, "One hell of a lot, I think ... our coast is more fragile than I had believed. Time is running out on our chances of keeping what is there now."
From a wonderful tribute to him in my (and his) old hometown newspaper, where he worked for many years:
Don Engdahl was quite likely the most inquisitive and audaciously adventuresome person ever to work in The Press Democrat's newsroom.
Engdahl floated aloft in a hot-air balloon that he'd made himself, enlisted his newsroom colleagues in the construction of a hyperbolic paraboloid home on Chalk Hill Road and left the PD to hike the entire California coast by himself.
The journalist, sculptor, inventor and restorer of small, French early-Sixties automobiles was 77 and had been in failing health for several years when died April 17 at his home in the New Mexico village of San Geronimo.
"He was an amazing person. He was unbelievable," said one of his five children, Santa Rosa's Jane Engdahl, the Sonoma County Fairgrounds employee charged with dreaming up wild new attractions for the fair.
"He could do anything," she said. "He brought us up to believe we could do anything, all you had to do was go to the library and get a book to tell you how to do it."
I can attest to the truth of that last statement; you see, Don Engdahl was my father's cousin. And though I hadn't seen him for many years, for awhile during my youth his family lived near us in Sonoma County and we shared holiday meals and such.
He was the first adult leftist I ever knew; he used to extol the virtues of the Berkeley Barb, once sneaking me a copy (along with a copy of Jerry Rubin's DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution), and tried to talk my parents into sending me to Cal Berkeley. (With the clarity of vision that hindsight gives, I wish they'd been more inclined to take his advice.)
Every weekend I looked forward to reading his latest installment from the coastal hike. For me, a teenager coming of age in the years just after the Santa Barbara oil spill, his influence on my thinking about the environment was profound and lasting. And I wasn't the only one:
His observations [from the coast], published in The Press Democrat and the San Francisco Chronicle, fueled public sentiment for the creation of the 1972 Coastal Initiative and the 1976 California Coastal Act, said his son, Eric Engdahl of Chicago.
His former editor at the Press Democrat, Art Volkerts,
...remembers also the big stories Engdahl uncovered and the difference he made to the region. When Pacific Gas and Electric Co. started work on a nuclear power plant at Bodega Head Bay in the early Sixties, Volkerts recalled, The Press Democrat supported the project until Engdahl reported aggressively on the danger posed by the proximity of an earthquake fault.
"Really it was Don who changed our mind," Volkerts said.
I regret that I didn't manage to stay in touch with him; but I'm happy and proud to have known him at all — and grateful for his subversive, truly mind-expanding influence on my young consciousness. I wish I could have told him so; I think he'd especially like the "mind-expanding" bit. :-)
RIP, Don.