From the Palestra to this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a Southwest Philly icon walks the walk

Dan Harrell, who will be the parade's Grand Marshal, is bringing a Southwest Philly contingent to march.

Dan Harrell, who worked at the Palestra for years, is Grand Marshal of Sunday's St. Patrick's Day Parade.Read moreDAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer

Published March 11, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

When your last name is Harrell and you grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, can there be a higher honor than grand marshal of Sunday’s Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade?

Now, being grand marshal comes with responsibilities, some involving fundraising. Dan Harrell, 2023 grand marshal, has taken them all seriously. Last Saturday, he hosted an honorary fun run to raise funds.

A 5K? Actually, it was a .317K “Irish Jog,” held outside the New Deck Tavern on Sansom Street. “If 200 people were there, 199 had to be from Southwest Philly,” Harrell said this week.

If you’re a sports fan and the name Harrell rings a bell, you’ve spent time inside the Palestra. Harrell may have snuck you into the Palestra. For years, he was in charge of mopping the floor and was unofficial godfather to several generations of Quakers players, and consigliere to all sorts of coaches.

A number will be walking in Sunday’s parade in support of Harrell, alongside a contingent of ex-Penn lightweight football players, since Harrell was a Quakers volunteer assistant coach for years on what is now called the sprint football team.

“Bigger than life,” said former Penn lightweight offensive lineman Denny McGorry, class of ‘94. “He brought knowledge, he brought humor. He had the ability to kind of teach you in a way that was uplifting, teaching about being young men, and being kind.”

McGorry, now a doctor in Allentown, said he has walked in a parade with Harrell before.

“I took the kids to the Mummers Parade,” McGorry said. “We’re standing there and there’s Dan leading his brigade. He called me over and we walked a couple of blocks, much to the chagrin of my children.”

How could he refuse? With Danny Harrell, the pull always goes in both directions.

“He ended up pledging my fraternity – after initially threatening us with a lawsuit,” McGorry said of his undergraduate days.

Part of the Harrell legend: Dan, now a birthday away from 80, began taking undergraduate classes in the late ‘80s while working at the Palestra. When Harrell graduated, he walked up to get his diploma carrying a mop. While it’s important to look at what this man has done for all these Penn athletes, what did Harrell get out of working at the place?

“It brought me back to life,” Harrell said. “I was working three jobs just to keep things going. I was getting away from sports. I was turning into a major league jerk. Down in the dumps … this fell into my lap. A job with benefits, a dream job.”

His first job at Penn, Harrell added, was not a dream job. But it led to it. “The planets lined up,” he said.

He was working the night shift cleaning up at the Wharton School. He desperately needed the job, he said, but night work “wasn’t working for me, getting up at 3 in the afternoon,” Harrell said. He’d been to a few Penn lightweight games, had been head coach himself at West Catholic for a time. Cleaning up at the dining room at Wharton, Harrell would stop and chat with Steve Blazejewski, a lightweight team captain who used the area for nighttime school work.

“You ought to come up and help coach,” said Blazejewski, who followed up with his head coach, Bill Wagner, who was all for it.

Around the same time, the Palestra job opened up.

“A guy retired, I got in there,” Harrell said. “It was getting paid to go to a basketball game. I would have gone anyway.”

It was Blazejewski, Harrell said, who suggested he enroll as a student, just take a class. Good idea. Part-time, but he saw it through to the end.

He didn’t stop being himself. Somebody needed a way into a game, Dan was there to help.

“It also ticked some people off,” Harrell said. “One time I snuck a whole CYO team in. They played, had a blast.”

Health issues are causing Harrell to reserve his energy for these big events, which meant he skipped last week’s Catholic League finals at the Palestra.

“Guys were calling me from the outside – they’re all standing by the back door, looking for a trash can to carry in,” Harrell said. “I told them, I don’t work there no more and I’m crawling around on a cane.”

“Dan [was] the caretaker of one of the most important basketball facilities in the country,” said Scott Kegler, a shooting ace for early ‘90s Quakers powerhouse teams. “In my mind, although that facility is located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, it belongs to the city of Philadelphia, and it belongs to the players and coaches and fans who have shared experiences in that building. Dan totally gets that.”

Like pickup games on Saturdays. Kegler coordinated them for years, ex-Quakers players and others of their era getting in there.

“That was when there was a key to get in, and we didn’t have a key,” Kegler said. “Dan was the guy who let us in. It was his day off, but he’d show up with a coffee and a Cryptogram [in the Daily News], stay awhile. We’d just talk about life. Then he would vanish. Once things changed and we could get in the building in other ways, he still came. I think he just loved being around it.”

Back to pledging that fraternity. A bunch of these athletes were in Delta Kappa Epsilon. Hey, he was eligible.

“I got a T-shirt made up, it just said, ‘Too old for DEKE, legal action pending,’ ” Harrell said. “I wore it, it must have been the Princeton game, doing the floor at halftime … 10,000 people must have seen it. This guy comes under the stands. He could have been 50 years old. He was a DEKE guy himself. I told him the story.”

Harrell told him he was kidding.

“I’ll take care of this,” the guy said.

So, yeah, he’s a DEKE. Did he ever show up?

“Yeah, he would on occasion – not at a big party,” McGorry said.

Harrell knew how far to take a bit.

“We used to practice, the field was the farthest reach from the university, along the train track,” McGorry said. “Dan would routinely have guys shouting from the trains. ‘Yo, Dan!’ Freight trains. Probably once a practice.”

“I can tell you who it was,” Harrell said, explaining that his buddy John used to drive a freight train.

“One time, we were playing Army,” Harrell said. “I still lived in Southwest Philly so I saw these guys more often. I said, ‘Do me a favor – Friday, what time do you drive the train by?’”

It was like 4 o’clock, John told him.

“I said perfect,” Harrell said. “I gave him a ‘Beat Army’ sign. The train used to come within like 20 feet of the field. It honked. He actually stopped the train. It said ‘Beat Army’ on the side of the train.”

The beauty of a Dan Harrell tale … If there’s more to the story, it keeps getting better.

Like these former basketball players walking in Sunday’s parade. That has precedent. Maybe two decades back, the parade and especially its Southwest Philly division was dangerously low in numbers. Harrell would find some extra bodies. He was at Penn basketball practice.

“I said to the two managers, ‘You guys want to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade?’ ”

“We’re Jewish,” he remembers one saying to him.

So did they march?

“The whole freaking team marched,” Harrell said. “One kid was 7 feet tall – he was our St. Patrick. Fran Dunphy will deny it, but it’s true.”

Dunphy was Penn’s coach at the time. The wrinkle: Like this year, the St. Patrick’s Day parade was on Selection Sunday, and the Quakers had won the Ivy League and were expected to be at Selection Sunday festivities inside the athletic department building dressed and acting appropriately, alumni and media also invited.

“I was still carrying a pager then – one of the guys had a phone, said, ‘Fran Dunphy wants to talk to you,’ ” Harrell said. “You can’t print what he said to me.”

Nope, Harrell is right about that. If this year’s grand marshal has made any of it up, it does not matter. Fiction can’t keep up. The festivities will continue until Monday morning for Harrell, when he receives a hard-earned honor at the Coaches vs. Cancer breakfast at the Palestra. The Dinsmore Award is given to a cancer survivor, Harrell now a member of that club. He’s ready to speak Monday, which means everyone at the Palestra will be eager to listen.

“We are all better off because of the circumstances that led Dan to the Palestra,” said Kegler, who plans to be walking in Sunday’s parade for the first time of his life.

That other time Quakers players walked – they all apparently made it back to campus on time.

“I think some of them ran back,” Harrell said.