When Dan Harrell applied to the University of Pennsylvania at age 46, he was asked to take a composition class to prove he was Ivy League material. The first assignment: write about a favorite place.
The young woman on his left chose Paris in the spring; the one on his right, the slopes of Aspen.
“I’ve never been out of Southwest Philly,” Harrell recalled, “and I’m thinking I’m in trouble. ”
He decided his favorite place was the john.
“Do you know there are 50 different names for it?” he said. “It’s a great place to check out the horses for the next race. Your boss can’t find you there. I wrote four pages, and I got an A.”
On May 22, after 10 years as a part-time student, Harrell will receive his bachelor’s degree. He will graduate surrounded by people who revere him as a Penn institution - not only because of his academic achievement at age 56, but because of the love he lavishes on a fabled floor and the students who play on it.
Harrell is custodian of the Palestra.
Once a day, sometimes twice, he mops the hardwood in one of the most celebrated arenas in college hoops. He has spent, in sum, an eternity on one knee, scraping gum. And when he does his job right, the floor sings to him with the squeak of sneakers.
With a toilet brush in one hand, cleanser in the other, he scours the locker rooms. Not once in his eight years there, he brags, “has there been a case of athlete’s foot. ”
Dan Harrell also is a custodian in the larger sense of the word. He looks out for the athletes, scribbles notes of support, gives them rides and good-luck charms, asks about their grandmothers, advises them on classes to take - and, through his pursuit of a dream, inspires them.
“I think he’s the greatest Penn success story,” said Cynthia Johnson Crowley, who played basketball at Penn in 1952 and has since been a fixture at the Palestra. “There isn’t anything he won’t do to make your life better. And in return, it all comes back. ”
Fran Dunphy, the men’s coach, calls him “kind of a hero of mine. ”
On graduation day, Harrell will dye his six-foot-wide dust mop red and blue, Penn’s colors. He will tape photographs of his mother, father, and brother Frankie, all of them gone now, to the back of the mop, and march with it down Locust Walk to collect his diploma.
“The mop,” he said, “represents where I’m from. ”
At 4:55 a.m. on a March Tuesday, the day of the big Penn-Princeton doubleheader, Dan Harrell parked his 1980 Caprice Classic with the rusted roof right at the Palestra’s back door, the best spot in the lot.
Inside, everything was dark. The only sound was Big Daddy Graham talking sports on all-night radio.
“I leave it on for the spirits,” Harrell said.
The Palestra opened in 1927; some believe that ghosts of former players and fans reside there. “I’ve seen them plenty of times,” he insisted. “Their faces are misty, and they remain in view only long enough so you know they’re there. ”
Harrell, 6-foot-1 and a husky 240 pounds, went about collecting his supplies. He carried a boom box to the scorer’s table at mid-court and popped in a CD of Irish tenors. The same lullabies his mother sang when he was a toddler filled the arena. Championship banners hung from the rafters. Dawn filtered through the skylights. The spirits retreated to the shadows.
Harrell grabbed his dust mop and started sweeping.
He lives just three blocks from the rowhouse where he grew up, near 67th and Elmwood.
His six daughters are sweet on him, but joke that he does not take his work home with him.
“He’s never picked up a towel, taken out the trash, cut the lawn, or even picked up the remote,” said his third-eldest, Debbie Cianci. “He has the remote handed to him. ”
“But,” added his wife, Regina, “the Palestra sparkles. ”
After graduating from West Catholic High School in 1961, Harrell went to the mail room at General Electric. “In those days, maybe only one kid in 10 went to college,” he said.
He worked at GE 20 years, moving up to marketing. But in 1981, everyone in his office was laid off. He dug ditches for a plumber, processed support payments for Family Court, and tended bar.
“I was down, drinking too much,” he said. “I had to get a goal. ”
In the late ’80s, he found work at the Wharton School - in housekeeping - and soon moved to the Palestra. To Harrell, who had been going to Big Five games there since he was a kid, it felt like home.
He learned that, as a university employee, he could enroll for free in the College of General Studies, providing he qualified.
Penn also would pay part of his daughters’ tuition. That is how he put Melissa and Jackie, his fourth and fifth, through Penn State.
“I owe this place a lot,” he said.
After he graduates, Harrell wants to keep working at Penn. His youngest daughter is a high school junior; the tuition benefit could be a big help. He might continue as the Palestra custodian, but, he said, “I think I have a lot more to offer. ”
He talks about working in Penn community relations, in neighborhoods he has known since childhood. He talks, as well, about sports facilities management.
“I think a natural for him is to be in teaching or counseling or mentoring,” Dunphy said. “He’s got a doctorate in life. ”
Curtis Brown, the equipment manager, said that his close friend “eventually wants to be athletic director. I think he’d like to start in operations and work his way up.
“Nothing wrong with dreaming. ”
By 10 a.m., Harrell’s forehead was pasted with sweat, and his gray Pennsylvania Athletics XXL T-shirt soaked. He put on another CD, 13 versions of “Danny Boy. ”
He waxed poetic: “When you get the floors clean, and you come in here, it’s like it was the first time when you’d walk into Connie Mack Stadium and see that sea of green grass - a beauty-ful thing. ”
The floors done, he headed for the locker rooms with a handful of envelopes.
Inside each was a jade shamrock key ring, bought the night before in South Philly, and a handwritten note. He tucked them in the lockers of the seniors on the men’s and women’s teams, for whom this would be the last home game.
Harrell has a locker, too, filled with books and papers - the sign of a man with a 3.19 GPA.
Most days, he finishes at the Palestra by 1:30, then showers and goes to class or the library. He writes his papers in Catholic-school longhand and hands off to his daughters to type them.
On game days, he is back at 4:30, and rarely leaves before midnight.
In the last decade, he has studied Russian history and the American West, anthropology and even Swahili, though he dropped that. To fulfill the language requirement, he studied sign language - useful for a man who is deaf in one ear.
Some of his favorite courses have been with anthropology professor Melvyn Hammarberg, who inspired him to major in American Civilization. Harrell thrives in the classroom, Hammarberg said, and brings his life experience with him.
For a class on the American Indian, he wrote a paper on the Lenapi’s version of football. For a class on modern American cultural values, he observed the dynamics of the Penn women’s volleyball team. For another, he studied how West Philadelphia real estate agents adapted to a changing population.
“One of the things I got from going to Penn,” Harrell said, “was a better understanding of what happened to my own city. It was white flight based on fear and ignorance. Nobody really knew each other. ”
This semester, he is doing an independent-study project - on boxball. Of all the street games he played growing up, boxball was his passion. His project, he said, will celebrate the freedom children once had to create their own games and rules.
Since 1961, he has tried to preserve that culture, and his neighborhood, by coaching football at parish schools.
Two weeks ago, he became the first inductee to a new hall of fame established by graduates of St. Barnabas School, his alma mater.
He wore a blue suit and tie. His wife, who works at a shoe store, bought him Italian loafers - his first shoes without laces.
The same night, Penn was playing Yale at the Palestra. Before the induction, he dropped in to check the floor. In suit, tie and fancy loafers, he bent and scraped some gum.
“If you are a good person, you’re in with Dan,” said Julie Soriero, the former Penn women’s coach. “If you are a little shady, you’re out. He likes to be around good people. And in return, he’s a good person to all those he cares about. ”
Matt Langel, a senior guard, found the proof of that in his locker that Tuesday afternoon.
When he walked out on the floor for a warm-up, the first thing he did was thank Dan for the shamrock and the note and hug him.
Next in line was senior forward Frank Brown. “Dan is such an example of perseverance,” Brown said. “He’s like another coach to us. ”
At 5:30, the women’s game began. Harrell was too busy working to catch much of it. Yet at the end, he was posted by the locker room, slapping five to the women as they ran in.
Soon the Palestra was mobbed for the men’s game.
In the front row was Karim Sadak, a senior who took Group Dynamics 240 at Wharton with Harrell.
“You walking with me at graduation, right? ” Harrell yelled.
“Absolutely,” Sadak replied.
With Harrell out of earshot, he confided: “I learned as much from him as I did from the professor in that class. He showed me how to interact with people, to treat people with respect. . . . He made the classroom a nicer place. ”
With a minute left, and Penn ahead by 70-48, Harrell worked his way up to the Penn bench, where Michael Koller was getting ready to go in.
Koller, a senior, had played on the junior varsity this season. Because this was the last game, Dunphy let him dress with the varsity and, with Penn so far ahead, let him play the last minute.
With 34 seconds left, Koller drove to the basket and was fouled. He went to the free-throw line with a chance to score his first-ever varsity points.
The crowd roared for him.
He missed the first foul shot.
He hit the second.
Harrell stabbed the air with such glee that his feet left the ground.
When a time-out was called, Koller came to the bench. Harrell kissed him on the cheek.
“Hold on,” Koller screamed. “This is what did it! ”
Koller rolled down the waistband of his shorts.
Pinned to the inside was a shamrock from Dan Harrell.