To write an homage worthy of Daniel Clay Turner is a formidable task. A highly regarded wordsmith, his powerful and poignant voice graced the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times for more than a decade.
Turner, '85, died March 30 in Los Angeles after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 49.
A Santa Rosa, Calif., native, Turner studied English at Stanford and became something of an Anglophile. The history of the royal navy and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien were among his most passionate interests, and he was a frequent traveler to the British Isles.
During the spring of his sophomore year, he participated in a FloMo Hall production of the musical Hair and became smitten with Jocelyn Medawar, '85. They married 12 years later. "Those days just glowed," Medawar says. "Stanford set the stage for the rest of our lives."
Turner's journalism career began in the Bay Area. He held reporting positions at Palo Alto's Peninsula Times Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. From there, he migrated south, working for the Los Angeles Business Journal before eventually taking a copy editing position at the LA Times in 2000.
Among the topics he covered over the last decade were climate change, gun control, the state prison system, Cameroonian elephants and Lance Armstrong's legacy. Of Armstrong Turner wrote: "That kind of me-first attitude can help make people champions. It can also make them cheaters."
An obituary published in the Times quoted a staff-wide email from editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg in which he said of Turner, "No matter what the subject—and no matter how nerdy—he approached it with the same extraordinary voice and sense of humor."
Turner was predeceased by his mother, Mary (Robertson), '52. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his father, Ransom, '49, MD '53; his stepmother, Marilyn; and his sisters Beth Proudfoot, '79, Carol Courville, '81, and Jan Turner.
Ryan Eshoff, MA '13, is an intern at the Los Angeles Times.
