About Daniel Gracely

Book Author

My Story

What to say? I was born and raised in South Jersey about 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia and an hour from the Jersey shore. I’m the youngest of four children, three of whom survived infancy. I accepted Christ as my personal Savior when I was four. I grew up in a typical Christian-family home, and had the added benefit of living next door to my aunt and my Dad’s twin brother, Elwyn, who was like a second father to us kids. (Yes, we were spoiled every Christmas with two Christmas trees and presents under each.) Otherwise, the daily grind saw my father and uncle running their plumbing and heating supply business, in which all of the family worked at one time or another.

I began college at 20 at the Philadelphia College of Bible (now Philadelphia Biblical University), transferred to Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), then finished my B.A. (Music Composition) at Reform-founded Geneva College in western Pennsylvania. To stay sane during these years I played college tennis at PCB and Geneva, which generally was fun. Also, around this time (1983) I made an album of contemporary music as a singer songwriter and did some regional coffee houses. I moved on to get my Masters at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where I studied under my favorite professor, Dr. Joseph Wilcox Jenkins (I still remember his golden-nugget sayings, e.g., “The secret of Stravinsky is that he moved harmony slowly;” “Bartok learned to relax at the end of his life,” “Some people even object to God; why shouldn’t they object to you,” etc.) As part of the Masters requirement I wrote a large-scale work (The Winter Piano Concerto), and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to play excerpts of it in concert with the Duquesne University Orchestra. I then went to SUNY-Binghamton where I became a Ph.D. student in art history. After 36 graduate hours I left the program, discouraged about finances and the small but strongly socialist-minded department that concerned itself more with the moneyed sponsors behind “visual culture” than it did about the connoisseurship of art. In other words, I didn’t want to do any more papers like the assigned one on Third World housing in Kingston, Jamaica, because some art history professor had made a tenuous connection between architecture and ‘land allotment.’

Having finished as much college as I was going to, I moved out to the Chicago area for a year, where I taught a few art history courses at Judson College, a Christian college. I also worked at a home improvement center that year. Afterward I returned home to New Jersey to run my Dad’s plumbing business with my brother David. Unfortunately, like every other small plumbing, hardware, or electrical supply in town, we eventually folded up in the war with the big box stores (Home Depot, Builders Square, Hechinger’s, Grossman’s, Sears Hardware, Channel’s, et al. Years later on a Home Depot application for work, I was confronted with the question of why I left my employment. I simply wrote in, “Home Depot.”). After we closed the plumbing supply I decided to rehab the old building, and finally opened up a used bookstore. Eventually, I added custom picture framing to my business. After 7 or 8 years my family sold the building and I moved the books offsite for online selling; some months later I opened up a small picture framing business in a nearby town.

Over the years I’ve self-published a few Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and written another book called BOTTOM-FEEDER: How I Survived Family, Trashpicking, and Dubious Yard Sales. And all that formal education? Well, I’m probably a better composer than writer, but I remain discouraged about the low demand for new Classical music, and since I find composing much more intense and difficult than writing, I pretty much avoid it. I do have a simple, short piece (“Monet Sky”) you can hear online at SeptemberRoseStudio.com. (The tempo runs somewhat slower than intended in order to accommodate the slide presentation.)

And now for my better half! I met a Christian woman named Alison some sixteen years ago, and we got married ‘afore long. I’ll admit it took me a while to realize she was quite a gal, until, of course, I figured out she was putting up with all my shenanigans instead of kicking me to the curb (and making good on her threats). We have no children but over the years have had one dog and three cats.

As for the book which is the attempted justification for this website, I began it later in the year of my father’s death. I had never intended to write such a book, but I’ll leave those details to the Preface, and to the Interlude between Chapters 6 and 7.

So then, as Porky Pig would say, having run out of segues (but whose main attribute I am somewhat resembling these days), “That’s all folks!”