Catching Up With . . . David Shahan
Mind and Body
by Brooke C. Stoddard '69
Dave was born and grew up in St. Louis. His father was a doctor from a St. Louis family – in fact, Dave was born in the same hospital room in which his father had been born. His mother was from Chicago; his parents met as teenagers on Mackinac Island and married when Dave’s mother graduated from college. She became a pastel portrait artist of children, painting more than seven hundred portraits of St. Louis children.
“In a way, we were not like other kids in St. Louis,” Dave says. “When you are the child of a physician, you are slightly different. My father had gone to Harvard and was completely non-bigoted. In fact, the only time he became angry was when he heard someone say something bigoted. That was a little bit different from run-of-the-mill St. Louis.”
Dave’s home was near the campus of Washington University. He went to public school until 7th grade and then to a private co-ed day school. A pleasant pastime was to take (for 25 cents) a street car to the Mississippi and sit along the bank. “This was before the Arch,” he says. “It’s a trendy place now but then it was a warehouse district and nothing on the river but barges. Still, it was my happy place. Summers I canoed Missouri rivers. Another thing I liked to do was go to Cardinals baseball games with my brother. We’d sit in the bleachers, drink 3.2% beer and talk and talk. I loved it.”
Dave played a variety of sports and was an all-league soccer player. Senior year he was president of his class. He wonders to this day how it came about he applied to Princeton. “What I really wanted to do was join the Marines,” he says, “but my parents ruled that out swiftly. My father’s only rule was that I had to go to college but not to Harvard or Yale. When I was a junior my mother showed me Dartmouth, Princeton, and Duke. I applied to Princeton and was accepted.”
He didn’t like it. “All of freshman year, I tried to transfer out,” he recalls. “I had gone to a co-ed high school and I thought an all-male institution was crazy. I succeeded in getting a transfer to Duke but in the spring, enduring a sleepless night to study for my Physics final, I decided to stay; maybe it had something to do with the way the campus looked in May, or maybe the realization that I had made a lot of friends without knowing it.”
Dave played soccer freshman year; he worked at the student pizza agency; he dabbled with the Outdoors Club. He considered Philosophy but majored in English. Junior year he visited his older brother in Cambridge, Massachusetts and watched him teach a high school history class. “That’s where I caught the teaching bug,” he says. “I still regard teaching as the highest profession.” He wrote his thesis on Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. The night before English Comprehensive Exams, he needed to relax, so walked around the entire town of Princeton – “You probably can’t do that anymore,” he surmises. Anyway, he passed the Comprehensives.
When Dave returned home to St. Louis, his draft notice was waiting for him. “So I joined the Army,” he recalls, “but didn’t have to report for four months. In those four months, I worked at a savings & loan, got married and got an ulcer. My doctor wrote a letter to my draft board, which reclassified me as 1-Y and never called me up. Meanwhile, I was radicalized by an elementary school friend of mine. Up to that time, despite being a roommate of Doug Seaton [prominent in the SDS], I really was clueless about the Vietnam War and politics. But my oldest friend from St. Louis got me going, and I began reading everything I could lay my hands on. It made me the Progressive that I still am today.”
Dave dropped his job at the savings & loan and took night courses in education at Washington University with an eye to teaching high school. He took odd jobs to pay bills and snared one at a company that leased cars. “So I washed cars,” he says, “and drove them from office to office where they needed to be and before long the company made me the manager of the Orlando office. Then they changed their name to Enterprise Rent-a-Car and put me in charge of all their offices (two at the time) in Florida. All the while I was applying for teaching jobs around the country. Then astonishingly I was accepted at a junior high school in my own neighborhood. So I quit the car business for good (reacquiring to some extent my morals) and became a high school teacher.”
At first, it did not go well. “My first day I read the class my 150 rules,” he recalls. “The students totally ignored me. After Thanksgiving I was given a new set of kids, and I read them my two rules: You can’t sit on your desk, and you have to be in your seat when the bell rings. That worked. The class was much improved and I had a great time.
“Actually, the kids made me so honest,” Dave recalls, “that I decided I didn’t want to be married anymore, so I divorced and moved to Colorado. Admittedly, I had a fantasy – that there was a whole new world out there. I religiously read The Whole Earth Catalog; I grew my hair long (admittedly a little behind the curve), bought a pickup truck and moved the Denver.
“Well, of course there really was no ‘whole new world,’” he says, “but I stayed in Denver for 11 years. It was there in 1979 that I started my first real career. I got a job shelving text books at an interesting Denver book store that supplied three campuses. The job was supposed to be for two weeks – for a semester rush – but I stayed 11 years. I loved that store. I love the book business; it doesn’t hurt anyone. You make a lot of friends -- though many who get into selling books move on to other things after a few years -- and you have terrific conversations. If you know a little bit about a lot of things, the book business is wonderful. ”
Dave moved to Seattle for five years where he took up at another book store – it served the University of Washington -- and he ran the general book department.
“A typical day would go like this: When the doors open there are usually a few people outside – or lots, if there is a sale on. The first hour goes by tremendously fast, and the last half hour tremendously slowly. Every employee is in charge of a certain category, say, sociology, and so you are bringing out books in that category, applying price tags, and continuously rearranging your section. Everyone takes a turn at the check-out counter. There’s answering questions, searching for books, placing orders, answering the phones . . . and conversations.
“Retail trade books make money; there’s generally a 45% margin,” he says. “New textbooks lose money because they are more expensive to handle than they contribute to the overall bottom line. That’s why stores add in t-shirts, coffee mugs, notebooks, and so forth to make up for the textbooks. The money in textbooks, though, can come if you buy fair copies back and then resell them; that does make money. But it’s an art – knowing which ones to buy back and resell.”
So what are a bookseller’s favorite books? Dave is partial to Sometimes a Great Notion and to Lonesome Dove (outdoors books both). But his favorite is Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It. Could it be a coincidence that McLean was both an outdoorsman and a teacher? Dave cautions that the Robert Redford film of McLean’s novella is a very weak imitation. Dave also favors writer/poet Gary Snyder, sometimes described as “the poet laureate of Deep Ecology.” Dave says, “his prose is a refuge from today’s acute madness and his poetry takes you exactly where he is, observing.”
Dave’s final bookstore was a small independent in Colorado Springs. There he fell in love with another employee, Linda Joyce; they married and looked for a new place to live. They settled on Tucson, where Dave went to massage school and became a certified in massage therapy. “It was great,” he says. “I was older than most of the other students, but I had a blast because I was learning things I had never studied before.” He became certified, developed clients and eventually began to teach subjects at the massage therapy school where he had studied.
“I taught the nervous and endocrine systems,” he says. “Really, I should have taken biology instead of physics at Princeton. I was learning all about the body, and then teaching it to persons who really wanted to learn. Junior high school teaching was really not what I was built for, but teaching adults was. My students were 18 to 63 years old. By the way, a great text book is “Trail Guide to the Body. Another is Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual by Janet Travell, the woman who was JFK’s back doctor and prescribed to him the rocking chair."
Dave began his massage therapy career in 1995 and is still at it – having resettled in Colorado Springs with Linda and where their two children Ethan and Mia were born. “I only see seven to ten people a week,” he says. “My longest-term client -- I have about 30 – has been with me 28 years. I love my clients, with whom I work for an hour at a time. We talk and talk, have great conversations. Some, of course, want silence, and that is fine. I prefer the talking ones, because I like to talk myself; with the silent ones, I do my talking through my hands.
“Massage therapy is good for people,” Dave contends. “In Europe it is more accepted and there is a massage therapy section in every hospital. In this country the medical community is more hesitant, but there is high value in the practice. One of the beauties of massage therapy is that a patient spends time with you. In a normal doctor visit, the doctor spends five minutes, makes a diagnosis and is gone. But in my work you’re full on for an hour. So I am assessing the whole time. It’s a better fit for me. (Remember that my father was a doctor.)”
Dave’s favorite book about massage therapy is Job’s Body by Deane Juhan, who taught at the Esalen Institute for years. “It speaks to the deeper level of bodywork I do, although it might be boring to persons who have not studied physiology. It’s a book about finding ways to take care of ourselves, about body awareness.” Dave’s own view: “What bodies like to do is move. At our stage of life we should find movement we love and keep at it – that’s the best tonic. For me, it’s walking, as I used to do in downtown St. Louis. For others it could be swimming or biking. But however you like to move, do that. Do it every day. One thing I do every morning is simply hanging over, touching my toes, which frees up the whole back side of me, calves to neck.”
Colorado Springs suits Dave’s love of the outdoors. “I’d rather be outside than inside,” he says. Besides lots of canoeing on Missouri rivers, Dave ran 10 miles a day in Denver. In Colorado Springs he took an Outward Bound course, and for a long time he made an annual solo-hike up Pike’s Peak. He dabbled in downhill and cross-country skiing. A knee replacement nixed some of that but now generally he walks two miles a day with Linda – his “best conversation partner” since their marriage 30 years ago -- and Mia, who has Down syndrome and attends a behavioral center which she loves. Ethan is finishing college at the University of Rochester.
Dave has been all over Colorado since his first move there in the ‘70s. “It’s still beautiful,” he says and mentions as an example Garden of the Gods park outside Colorado Springs. “The mountains to a certain extent thwart development.”
“What’s stuck with me from Princeton? What I liked best, I think, were the conversations. I had great conversations each of the four years. By senior year, Princeton really took hold. I wished I had one more year. I finally really understood why I was there. It was the good conversations.”
