Remembering Dan Milton

Two weeks ago Sunday, May 26, was a sad day for the Scrabble world, as we lost a beloved member of our community. Dan Milton, a fixture on the tournament circuit for over two decades, died at his home in Virginia at the age of 89.

Dan played hundreds and hundreds of tournaments, not just here in North America but all over the world. He loved traveling, and he took his passion for competitive Scrabble to Australia, England, Germany, India, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. He was a wonderful ambassador for the game everywhere he went.

Dan's loss is a particularly painful one for the CoCo player community, as he's the first tournament player we've ever had who's passed away. He played one event with us, in Silver Spring, MD, back in April 2023; that was sadly his final tournament.

We wanted to take this occasion to give some other members of our player community a chance to share their memories of Dan. He touched a lot of lives in Scrabble, especially among those players local to Virginia and D.C., and quite a few of them wrote in this past week to offer their thoughts.

I'll start with my own. I first met Dan in 2008; the Boston Area Tournament that spring was the first big multi-day event of my playing career. I didn't know a lot of people going to the tournament, and I didn't even know how to get to the event hotel. Being a broke college student at the time, I didn't have a car or a way to get to the venue. But the director was nice enough to set me up with a kind older gentleman who offered to show me the ropes - he picked me up from the nearest train station, drove me to the tournament, even offered to room with me throughout the weekend. That gentleman was Dan.

He couldn't have been nicer or more welcoming. I had a great weekend getting to know Dan - and apparently, we were each other's good luck charms, because we both cashed in the tournament! He finished third in Division 3 and I took sixth. But more importantly, I learned a valuable lesson that would stick with me forever - that the Scrabble community is full of kind-hearted people who are more than willing to accept you as one of their own. Dan was one of the best of those.

That's all from me. Let's move on to a few submissions from other players...

Here's Mary Goulet with some fond memories of her Scrabble travels with Dan:

Dan lived one town from me, so we sometimes drove together to Scrabble tournaments. That was a few years ago, but here are some fond memories of travel with Dan.

In the car, Dan would use his tablet to read the newspaper and play online Scrabble. Sometimes Dan had us unscramble letters into words. I liked listening to Dan talk about rock, a town nearby, or what sunset was. Dan was interesting and full of knowledge. I liked seeing how people wanted Dan on their trivia team, and seeing him do the trivia team contest.

Dan had his favorite routes, great memory, paper maps, and disdain for GPS. If Dan took a nap, I'd sneak the GPS on. When Dan awoke, he'd give the GPS a look and I'd turn it off.

One time, a trio of us traveled together and were back on the road after a rest break. After a while, suddenly Dan announced that we had to go back to retrieve our friend whom Dan believed had been left at the plaza. Dan was not readily convinced that our friend was asleep across the back seat.

Dan had a favorite side road in New York where a car parts place was located, and an off-highway route around the Delaware toll plaza.

We did take some toll routes, and Dan was keen about international coins that got rejected at the toll basket. A late night-time return trip after a faraway tournament meant that the rejected foreign coins could be collected. Once a stockpile of rejects was there to be collected, and with the stoppage time, Dan was concerned that I'd get a mailed traffic cam fine. He was adamant that, if so, I tell him.

Here's Josh Castellano with his favorite memory of playing Dan:

I was down about 80 points against Dan in a tournament game after making some unremarkable fish. Dan shuffles with his tiles for a few moments before saying, "Can't go wrong with a mineral!", after which he puts down OLIVINE for 82 points. I managed to keep the game within reach for the next few turns, but Dan later locked up the win with the great find of SONGFEST. When the word OLIVINE appears in my studies or over the board, I often think of this game and that I can never go wrong with a mineral.

Here's Matthew O'Connor with a little snippet about Dan:

He loved to travel and put himself out there, even in advanced age. He was still packing himself into a suitcase and flying to Côte d'Ivoire in his late 80s, and he was preparing for his next tournament from his deathbed.

Also: A rich Nigerian man once gave Dan $10,000 as a "thank you for coming and sorry you got last place" prize at a tournament in Nigeria. He donated it to Doctors Without Borders before leaving the country.

Here's Sam Rosin with another:

I didn't know Dan well, but he was one of my most frequent tournament opponents, according to cross-tables.com. Dan was always a kind and courteous opponent. I will miss his presence at D.C.-area events.

Here's Jennifer Clinchy with a fond Dan memory:

When I was in Kenya for the 2017 WESPAC, Dan spearheaded a group outing to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. The outdoor setting was cool, and the food was great, featuring several animals I'd never tasted before. I recall the place being a bit out of the way and not easy to reach. I was impressed by Dan's spirit of adventure and his eagerness to try something new.

Many people settle into routine and stick within their comfort zone as they age. Instead, Dan continued to travel the world and explore well into his older years, and it was inspiring to see. I'm glad I crossed paths with him many times when I lived in the D.C. area. I will miss the mischievous grin and the twinkle in his eyes that he'd get when he put down a game-winning bingo.

And finally, here's Chris Lipe with a heartfelt Dan eulogy:

Dan Milton may have been the coolest person to play competitive Scrabble.

We all knew Dan as a friendly, unfailingly polite old man, a competent Scrabble player over the board. Dan was a steadfast proponent of Scrabble played with the Collins dictionary in the U.S. during the early years when it was common to have tournaments of four or six of us, all who dreamed of global travel and becoming part of the Scrabble community stretching from England to Australia and everywhere in between. Dan grabbed that opportunity in his retirement to see those places, meet those people, and help put together a community here in the U.S. and Canada to join this great, global sport we all enjoy together.

That is cool, and we loved Dan for being steadfast with us in that journey, but that wasn't what makes him the coolest.

Dan was a retired government employee. He was a career geologist in the civil service. We knew these things about his life, but it wasn't until you sit down and talked to him that you realized. You see, Dan's specialty was astrogeology. He was part of the team that created the first geological maps of the moon's surface, taking data from those early space probes launched in the 1950s and 1960s, in the middle of the space race, and turning it into maps. Maps that could be used to, say, find landing sites for the Apollo missions. Dan was also on the team for the Viking missions to Mars, our first forays to the Red Planet. Every rover and helicopter we send to Mars owes a debt to Dan Milton, one of the trailblazers as we were first learning what these places were like. Dan was friends and colleagues with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, who discovered an incredible number of asteroids and comets in our solar system, including the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet which collided spectacularly with Jupiter in 1992, the first time we were able to watch such a collision in real time. Such was the Shoemaker's respect for Dan that they named one of those objects after him - the asteroid 4332 Milton.

My favorite memory of Dan was one year, we were both attending the Malta International Scrabble Open, and both looking for dinner. We found a place on the main strip in Il-Mellieha which advertised a good rabbit stew, and I got to hear Dan tell some of the old stories from his career in science. Growing up, like a lot of geeky kids, I had many books on outer space, a lot of which were hand-me-downs from my mom's childhood. (I had a complete set of World Book encyclopedias that my mom received in high school in about 1972. I read them for fun all the time, which was great, although admittedly I was in my late teens before I learned how the Vietnam War ended.) These books on outer space talked breathlessly about the Apollo project; learning about craters on the moon and Mars, speculating if life could be surviving under the mysterious and opaque cloud of Venus. (Even by the time I got to this book I understood the answer was a resounding "no.") The amazing thing about this dinner was, I realized, here I was talking with someone who had been in the middle of the actual science these books were all talking about. Why does the Man in the Moon have those dark and light areas? Here's the guy who made the detailed map that can explain it! What is the tallest mountain on Mars? Here's a guy who was on the team, flying the probes that explored these things. What had happened when meteors fell to Earth in the past? Dan was telling me about his times in the Australian outback, looking at meteorite impact craters, and all the mundane things - making camp, procuring supplies, working with local guides - that make all those discoveries happen. Twelve-year-old me was in awe.

Dan's passing was a big loss - to Scrabble, and to humanity in general. We need more Dans - people who will look at the sky and think, what is that all about? and then go about finding out, for all of us to live with a bit more wonder and awe.

Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in to share their memories of Dan Milton - a truly special, one-of-a-kind member of our community. He's been lost, but among his nearest and dearest Scrabble friends, he will not be forgotten.

To learn more about Dan's life, I'd encourage you all to read his obituary, which ran in last Sunday's Washington Post.