The eleventh generation

Every chapter of this history ends at the same place. This one starts there. It gathers what the public record says about Daniel John Perin, born in 1934, the son of Arthur Perin and Esther Minerva Marsh, the eleventh generation of the family in America, counting John Perrin of Rehoboth as the first. It is not the whole of his life. It is only what strangers wrote down, and he knows the rest.

A boy who came back to visit

The earliest mention of Grandpa in print is a small one. The Beaverton Enterprise for 3 January 1947 carried a column of “Barnes School Notes,” and among them is Daniel Perin, a former Barnes pupil who had moved and was now at Ockley Green School in Portland, back at Barnes for an all-day visit on a Monday. He was about twelve. Seen in records

It is the kind of line a school sent to the local paper every week, and it says something all the same: a boy who had moved schools went back to spend a whole day at the old one. The notice does not say when the family moved, or how long he had been at either school.

The photograph of him at four, from his own blog, is in the chapter on his parents.

Unity

It was his mother who brought him to it. Esther had long been a Unity student, and he grew up with Wee Wisdom, Unity’s magazine for children. When she found a Unity church in Portland she began going, and she encouraged him to come along one Palm Sunday, the day the church dedicated its children’s building. In his own words, Moments

It was his mother, too, who first said the word. In January 1955 he was twenty, a grocery clerk passed over for promotion and wondering what else he might do. Driving with her one day, he writes, she told him:

“I know you can do whatever you put your mind to. I would never try to tell you what you should do, but if I had to suggest one thing . . .” I interrupted her by saying, “It’s the ministry, isn’t it?”

Daniel J. Perin, Moments

Aubrey remembers Grandpa saying he became a minister, at least in part, to make her proud. Family account, as Aubrey remembers it

Unity began in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1889, with Charles and Myrtle Fillmore. It grew out of New Thought, the movement concerned with how thought, prayer and spiritual life shape everyday experience, and it kept a Christian footing while reading widely in other traditions. Its work was always more than churches: a prayer ministry, Silent Unity, named in 1891, which took its first telephone calls in 1907; the devotional Daily Word, since 1924; and its own school for training ministers. That breadth is the shape of Grandpa’s working life too.

That spring he interviewed for the ministerial programme at Unity School, and by June he was working in Silent Unity, the ministry that prays with anyone who writes or calls. In his own words, Moments

By Christmas 1955 Grandpa was a ministerial student. The Unity Ministerial Students Association sat for a photograph that Christmas, and the caption names him in the seated row: “H. Evans Walker, George Pfeifer, Daniel Perin, Edward Rabel, Curtis Wilson, Robert Kohoe.” He was about twenty-one. Seen in records

This photograph is kept by TruthUnity and could not be shown just now. See the 1955 photographs and their captions.

That photograph is of students, not of an ordination; the same archive has a separate picture of the ministers ordained in 1955, and Grandpa is not among them. His own account says he has been a Unity minister since 1960, and Moments names the place: his first congregation was in Bellevue, Washington, a church built from the ground up, which he served from 1960 to the middle of 1964. Unity’s roster of the ministers ordained in 1961 names “Daniel J. Perin,” and the Association of Unity Churches’ 1989 yearbook prints his portrait with the line “Ordained: 1961.” Seen in records

Edward Rabel, the student seated beside him in 1955, was ordained in 1958 and became a teacher of the Bible in Unity whose lectures are still kept and read. He turns up again below.

Spokane

The first congregation the record names is in Spokane, Washington. The Weekly Unity of 7 February 1965 lists Daniel J. Perin as minister of Unity Church of Truth, West 1124 Sixth Avenue, and the Unity Ministers Association’s 1966 yearbook lists him there again, with services on Sundays at 9:30 and 11 in the morning. Beneath his entry the yearbook lists two study classes across the state line in Idaho, at Coeur d’Alene and at Moscow. Whether he led them himself the listing does not say. Seen in records

The same yearbook shows him working for the movement as a whole. Its list of committees for 1965 to 1968 names “Daniel J. Perin, Chairman” of the YOU Research Committee, YOU being Youth of Unity, and puts him on the Expansion Program Committee as well. Seen in records

He came to Spokane from Bellevue in 1964, he writes, and stayed about two and a half years, until the Association’s call in January 1967. In his own words, Moments

Young people, and the people who teach them, 1967–1972

In his own words, Grandpa “served as Director of Youth Education for the Association of Unity Churches and as a faculty member of the Unity School for Ministerial and Religious Studies.” The Association’s own newsletter, Contact, lets us follow him through those years almost month by month. Seen in records

The Association’s history, published in 2006, dates his appointment as director to January 1967. It credits his years with more teenagers taking part, contemporary music at a youth conference, training manuals for teachers, an experiential curriculum running from kindergarten to twelfth grade, programmes for young adults, work with the Character Research Project at Union College, and an invitation in 1970 to a White House conference in Washington, which he reported on afterwards in Weekly Unity. That was most likely the children’s half of that decade’s White House Conference on Children and Youth, which met in Washington while the youth half met in Colorado. The history says Grandpa helped write this part of it, so it is not wholly independent of his own account, and nothing found so far says he went to the White House itself or met the President. Published genealogy

On the road

In November 1969 Contact reported that “Dan Perin has conducted 30 seminars in 27 cities” during September and October, and that “attendance has been over 700”: “mostly teachers, superintendents and ministers; however, more and more parents are attending.” Seen in records That is a seminar every two days for two months.

In the last two weeks of May 1971 he “conducted a Youth Education workshop in Barbados, West Indies,” hosted by Diane Seaman and her co-workers, and “made trips to Trinidad and several of the other islands.” And in May 1972 the newsletter said that “for several years, Dan Perin has worked with the INTA in their youth efforts at Congress,” the International New Thought Alliance, which reaches well beyond Unity. Seen in records

In the classroom

The timetables of the Unity School for Ministerial and Religious Studies, printed in Contact, show what he taught the ministers in training: Seen in records

A timetable shows what was planned, not what happened, but the July 1971 issue also reports what did: at the conference that summer, “Dan Perin presented a Teaching Methods Intensive on the Thursday.”

In the office

By February 1972 his work had grown past youth education. The Executive Office was rearranged so that Dan Perin could have offices “adjacent to those of Bob Sikking,” the Executive Director, because he had taken on more of the office’s “office management and production” as “an assistant to the Executive Director.” In March he was named to the Association’s Service Attitude Study Research Committee, and with Gary McCarty, the Coordinator of Youth Activities, he introduced a new YOU Guidebook at the youth education seminar. Seen in records

Someone remembered the youth work years later, too. A 1989 article in Contact by Renee Ruth, “Freeman Writing Scholarships,” recalls an earlier Youth of Unity writing contest: the poet James Dillet Freeman was one of its judges, and Dan Perin was International Coordinator. One of the young contestants grew up to hold that same post himself. Seen in records

Moving on, in 1972

In the autumn of 1972, after nearly six years in the Association’s office, Grandpa stepped down. The December 1972 Contact announced changes in the youth education department, noting that “Dan Perin will be taking a less active part in this area of leadership training.” The research behind this chapter read the full notice from the scanned page, where the printed text is too damaged to search: he had resigned as Director of Youth Education, effective 31 October 1972, to return to ministry in the field, working with adults as well as young people. The Association thanked him for his curriculum, his leadership training, his work with Youth of Unity and his office procedures, and named three things in him by name: his loyalty, his integrity, and his commitment. Seen in records

An office does not write those words about a job description. It writes them about a person.

Beginning again, in Denver

Within weeks he had started over in a new city. The next issue of Contact, for January and February 1973, carried “News from Daniel Perin in Denver.” He had gone to “work with Dr. Irwin Gregg and the Divine Science organization in Denver, Colorado,” and was “taking classes,” “assisting on the platform,” and “giving talks on an alternating basis.” Divine Science is a sister movement of Unity within New Thought, and Denver was its home. Seen in records

He had come, he writes, as a student in training who might one day succeed Dr. Gregg, the church’s long-time minister, when he retired. In his own words, Moments The man who had spent six years training the teachers of a whole movement went back to taking classes himself, and took his turn on the platform with everyone else.

Whole Life Learning Center

And within the year he had built something of his own. In 1973, Grandpa writes, he “incorporated Whole Life Learning Center in Denver, Colorado as a wholistic education and counseling center with a staff of up to 15 professionals.” He taught meditation, psychic development and dream study there, and what he calls Past Life Exploration. Seen in records

It became part of the city’s life. A May 1977 neighbourhood study of North Capitol Hill, prepared by planning students at the University of Colorado at Denver, lists Whole Life Learning Center among the area’s places of education. The study does not name Grandpa, so the match rests on the name, the city and the years, but it is the first record from outside the family to show the center at work. Seen in records

In Moments he fills in the rest. He founded the center with two colleagues and incorporated it in June 1973. It grew from rented houses to a Victorian building of its own, with as many as fifteen people teaching classes and workshops there. He served on the board of the Denver Free University, first as treasurer and then as president, and the center lent it classrooms. A symposium at Loretto Heights College, organised by a student who had asked him to advise his degree project, drew thirty presenters and more than five hundred people, and ran every year for seven years. He edited the Colorado Holistic Health Network’s newsletter. And he married people: hundreds of couples, by his count, many of them in the mountains, one of them at sunrise on Flagstaff Mountain. The center closed in 1982. In his own words, Moments

Its own papers have not been found yet: the incorporation filing, its brochures and course calendars. Other organisations have since used the same name, in other cities, and are not his.

A hospital in Denver

The most personal glimpse of Grandpa in the record comes from Ed Rabel, his classmate in the 1955 photograph. On 19 January 1976 Rabel was lecturing on the Gospels, on the calling of the disciples, and to make a point about understanding he told a story from his trip to Denver “two weeks ago.” Seen in records

The father-in-law of a fellow minister had just had his second leg amputated. “Dan Perin and I went to the hospital,” Rabel said, and Dan went in to see him. When Dan came out, Rabel asked how the man was doing. Dan told him that, “considering the terrible shock to his soul and to his body,” he was “doing beautifully”: that he was making every effort to reconcile himself to what had happened, and that he believed “some good is going to come out of this.”

Rabel told it to make a point: when Unity’s teaching places understanding in the feet, it is speaking in symbols, not anatomy, because a man who had lost both legs could still show understanding in full. The story survives because of the lesson. For this history it matters for a different reason: it shows Grandpa doing the plain work of a minister, sitting with someone on one of the worst days of his life, and coming out to report the good in it. Years later he would put the same conviction into a single sentence of his own.

The years between

After Denver his life took the shape most lives take, and he kept serving through all of it. He moved to the Oregon coast and taught there. He filled in for six months as minister in Salem while its own minister was on sabbatical. He took temporary work, then went back to Denver to run an evening ticket programme for the Denver Symphony, still counseling and still marrying couples on the side. In his own words, Moments

In 1987 he went back to Bellevue, the congregation where he had begun, this time as its church administrator, and for a while he held it together while it looked for a new minister. He left in 1991. In January 1992 he took a temporary accounting job at Safeco Life and Investments, in its retirement services department. It became permanent, and he stayed until he retired at the end of March 2003. In his own words, Moments

The writer

Grandpa has written at least two books. The first, as he describes it, is on “meditation and its practical value in every day living”: LifeCentering: A Transformational Meditation Book. The second, Moments, which he calls in full Moments In the Journey Through Life, was published on 20 December 2009, a paperback of 244 pages. Seen in records

The cover is kept by the publisher and could not be shown just now. See Moments at its publisher.

He describes Moments as self-help “interspersed with personal biographical information,” and the sentence at its centre could stand for the rest of this chapter:

I believe that no challenge comes our way without also an equivalent source of strength and understanding to meet it.

Daniel J. Perin, Moments

Moments tells his own story, and this chapter has drawn on it throughout. LifeCentering came first, in November 2005, and has not yet been read for this history.

Faith, and family

His legacy is in two places: faith, which the records above can show, and family, which records rarely do. As the years went on he turned more and more toward the second.

When his mother reached her late nineties, he moved her in with him, and when she needed more care than he could give during his working hours he found it for her. At the end she was in hospice. He came in one morning and found her asleep.

I kissed her on the forehead and said, “I’m here, Mom.” Then I sat in the chair by her bed.

Daniel J. Perin, Moments

Within minutes she was gone, peacefully, in November 2002, a month short of her hundredth birthday. The woman who brought him to Unity was cared for at the end by the son she had brought. In his own words, Moments

His father’s tools came to him, and he set up a woodworking shop with them, making plant stands and shelves and giving them to friends. Arthur had made things too: a chess set turned on a lathe, with knights carved by hand, and violins. In 2025 Grandpa arranged to give four of the family’s violins to The Last Repair Shop, which mends instruments for children in the Los Angeles public schools, so that children without one could play them. In his own words, on his blog Of the six violins on his blog, he says, three are his father’s work and one his stepfather’s. Ezra made violins in Indiana, the family says; his grandson Arthur made more; Grandpa’s stepfather took up the same craft; and Arthur’s son gave them away so that they would be played. Grandpa’s own account, October 2026

And he has never stopped writing. LifeCentering in 2005, Moments in 2009, a blog of the same name from 2007 into this year, and now, describing himself as “Retired, 91 years young,” a newsletter, LifeCentering With Dan Perin. Seen in records

I appreciate in a deeper way my family, both those near and far. I also realize my “family” is more extended than I once thought. Some who have been friends are really my family in the truest sense of the word.

Daniel J. Perin, Moments

What the record adds up to

Put the pieces side by side and a pattern shows. Wherever Grandpa went, he went toward other people. A boy who spent a whole day back at the school he had left. A student who became a minister. A minister who spent his thirties teaching the people who teach children, in twenty-seven cities in two months and on islands across the Caribbean. A man who, when the work changed, began again in a new city and built a place where fifteen people helped others. A pastor at a hospital bedside. A minister who, when he needed steady work, kept other people’s retirements in order for more than ten years. A son at his mother’s side at the end. A man who gave his father’s violins to children who needed them. A writer who believes that every challenge arrives with the strength to meet it.

And all the while he kept the family’s memory: the blog, the letters, Stanley’s narrative, the family tree on WikiTree, and, by his own count, more than 8,500 people in his database. Grandpa’s own account Every chapter of this history was built on a trail he had already marked.

Grandpa, what is missing?

The record is thin where a life is thickest. These are the questions this chapter could not answer, and only you can:

• The beginning. What brought you to Unity, and to the ministry? Who else is in that 1955 photograph?
• Your mother. What did she say when you were ordained?
• The churches. What do you remember of Bellevue, the first time and the second? Did you lead the Idaho study classes from Spokane?
• The young people. When were you International Coordinator, and when Director of Youth Education? Were they the same job? Do you remember the writing contest James Dillet Freeman judged?
• Washington, 1970. Do you still have the invitation, a badge, or the report you wrote afterwards?
• The manuals. Which of the teacher’s manuals and lessons your department made would you most want the family to keep?
• The teaching. Counseling, Teaching Methods, Contemporary Ministry to Youth: which did you love teaching, and what else did you teach?
• The islands. What do you remember of Barbados and Trinidad in May 1971, and which other islands did you visit?
• Divine Science. What was it like working with Irwin Gregg in Denver?
• Denver. What led you to start Whole Life Learning Center, where was it, who worked there with you, and how long did it run? Are there brochures, course calendars or photographs?
• The people you taught. Who learned something from you that they still carry? A name and a memory would let them tell it in their own words.
• The Denver Free University. Is there a catalogue or a photograph from your years on its board? A programme from the Loretto Heights symposia?
• The violins. Is there a photograph of the violins you gave, or a note from the repair shop? What was your stepfather’s name, and how did he come to make a violin? And are any of the six on your blog Ezra’s?
• Ed Rabel. Do you remember the visit to the hospital that he told his students about?
• The books. Is there a copy of LifeCentering? Were there earlier editions, talks or recordings?
• Everything else. What parts of your life does none of this show?

Whatever you tell us goes here, marked as yours.