Daniel Lanzdorf, 78, passed away on Friday, September 18, 2026, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was in a room with a clear view of Brewers stadium, a detail he greatly appreciated. "There are no coincidences in life," he always said.
He grew up in Cleveland, where he idolized Rocky Colavito and attended Valley Forge High School. He enlisted in the Army Reserve and did basic training at Fort Lee, Virginia. Then went home, started a family, and finished his degree in mechanical engineering at Ohio State University in 1973.
He went to work for the Eaton Corporation, bought an orange Volkswagen bus, and had three small sons: Matthew, Charles, and Michael.
The family moved to Pickett, Wisconsin, first renting and then owning a house with one small bathroom, several neighboring dairy farms, and a backyard exactly the right size for a two-on-two baseball or football game. Down the road, the quarry was full of fish that would nibble at your toes if you sat still long enough. Dan rarely did.
Over the next 30 years, he rose through the ranks at Oshkosh Truck Corporation, where he helped lead the design of the "Dragon Wagon," earned several patents, served as Executive Vice President, and eventually became President of McNeilus, an Oshkosh subsidiary. He also taught Sunday school classes while using “Karate Kid” references, coached 4-H basketball, never once drove past a roadside vegetable stand empty-handed, and made a habit of greeting the migrating geese overhead, and occasionally, an experimental aircraft headed to EAA. Dan did not know how to ski or play tennis. But he taught himself, so that he could teach his sons, and they could fiercely (and often hilariously) enjoy these activities together. “He flew like an eagle, but fell like a rock.”
Upon retirement, Dan moved to Mequon and became, with little warning to anyone, a juggernaut of the local writing community. He studied creative writing for the last twenty years of his life, focusing on poetry and essays that wove nature into all of life's experiences. He met Lisa Bruce at the WAC, and they married. Their life together took them to France, Morocco, Iceland, England, and back to Cleveland, where Lisa’s extended family welcomed Dan as one of their own. The path eventually led to the pickleball community, where Dan became a vibrant member of North Shore Pickleball and embraced all the new friendships that came from the sport. He and Lisa became such fixtures that they put in their own court at home, in place of the old basketball hoop and tetherball pole. As accurate a summary of how Dan handled getting older as anything else in this obituary. Together they settled at what they called Rivendell Farm, just outside Cedarburg, Wisconsin. “A slice of paradise,” in his own words, “open to all fairies and folk of good will.”
Dan served as Board President of The Bread of Healing Health Clinic, founded the Milwaukee Backpack Brigade for inner city schoolchildren, and was a teacher of adult literacy and GED training. He was also on the board of Muttland Meadows Dog Park in Grafton. He believed in “putting good out into the world.” Well done, Dan.
His favorite book was Independent People by Halldór Laxness, and it was not an idle preference. In one of his own essays, of mowing the back field on his old Grasshopper mower during a cold spring rain, Dan described himself as "the half crazed Bjartur, Icelandic hero, grasping the antlers atop his bull reindeer, racing across the rugged landscape." Anyone who knew him will recognize the comparison as entirely fair.
He was a world class griller of ribs, an elegant boiler of fish, and the one person the neighborhood dairy cows could be reliably summoned by, just by whistling a song. He captained sailboats, coached from the sidelines, kept a garden, observed “turtles as big as VW bugs,” cleaned a swimming pool without complaint, and never let anyone win at ping pong on purpose.
Dan is survived by his wife, Lisa; by Lorraine, the mother of his three sons; and by those sons and their families: Matthew and Dung, and their daughter, Kate; Charles and Jamie, and their children, Harlow, Macie, and Ellis; and Michael and Maggie, and their sons, Jack and Paul. Some of them know Dan as "Bumpa," but they all will remember him as their loudest cheerleader. He is also survived by Lisa's sons, Teddy and Keenan, who forged many of their own adventures with Dan. Not the least of which was nursing a squirrel back to life with the help of their dog, Shaboo.
Dan wrote often about his own grandfather, who carved a dairy farm out of glacial rock in northern Wisconsin. One afternoon a storm rolled in while they gathered hay. Instead of mourning for the ruined crop, his grandfather began laughing in the field, and grabbing both his hands to dance in the pouring rain. Decades later, mowing his own field in a cold May rain, Dan wrote that apple blossoms began falling around him like snow, and that he felt his grandfather's arm around his shoulder again. "We grasp each other's hands," he wrote, "and dance across the mown grass together." The family likes to think that is where he is now, hand in hand with the people who taught him how to notice the world.
Special thanks to the staff at Froedtert Center for Advanced Care for the warmth they shared with Dan in his final days. The orange popsicles, in particular.
Visitation is on Friday, October 2, 2026, at the Schmidt & Bartelt Funeral Home, 10280 N. Port Washington Road, Mequon from 5 PM until the time of Celebration of Life at 7 PM.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial donations be made to the Bread of Healing Clinic, an organization Dan poured his soul into, the same way he poured himself into everything else.