Dan Nastali left us to join the great majority on March 4, 2024. He was born in Chicago on June 6, 1941, to Edward J. and Mary A. Nastali and named for his grandfathers Dan Yurkovich and Paul Nastali. The family moved to Kansas City in 1946 and to Shawnee, Kansas, in 1952. He spent his childhood summers on his grandparents’ farm in northern Wisconsin in an extended Croatian family. He looked back on his early years as a happy time.
Dan attended Creighton University in Omaha where he met Susie Kuchel, a nurse, whom he married in 1964. Three years later, they moved back to Kansas City, buying a home in the Brookside/UMKC area where they raised their daughters Laura and Katy. They found in that part of the city a comfortable social and political culture, a beautiful neighborhood, and lifelong friends.
His formal education centered on English literature with a special interest in how literary traditions develop. He was a constant reader who would happily lose track of time in bookstores and libraries, and he collected books, building an excellent family library as well as two specialized collections: books and periodicals related to the history of comic art—a love since childhood—and one of the most extensive private collections in the world of material on the Arthurian legend: over 15,000 books and other works.
In the 1980s, as a contributing editor of a magazine devoted to Arthurian studies, he developed contacts in the scholarly community and began in earnest his own research on a project which previously had been only an occasional hobby: documenting the history of the Arthurian legend from the Middle Ages to the present. The result was a series of articles in books and journals and his major contribution to scholarship, The Arthurian Annals, the definitive reference work on the development of the Arthurian tradition in the literary, performance and popular arts from 1250 to 2000, which was co-authored with Phillip Boardman, a scholar with similar interests at the University of Nevada.
Dan's Arthurian activities were subsidized by a thirty-one year career in the federal government where, in various administrative positions in the Social Security Administration, he would say he experienced professionalism equal to any he encountered in the private sector. He had the good fortune to work with a number of talented people, fun-loving people, and sometimes both.
Dan and Susie began taking camping trips with his sisters and their families in the western states in the 1970s, finding a spot in Montana which they returned to almost every year, joined over time by any number of friends and relatives. Trips to other parts of the country and Europe were more frequent in the years after their daughters were grown, and Dan especially enjoyed exploring the cities of northern Europe. Presentations at international literary conferences were typically followed by vacations in the regions visited.
Dan loved dogs, and several were part of the family, including the Springer Spaniels—Jennie, Annie and Meg—who were his constant companions. When someone once charged that he liked dogs more than people, he replied that he just liked most dogs more than he liked some people. He enjoyed movies and plays, and music as well, favoring blues, rock, R&B, and folk-influenced music. He and Susie were charter members of the Kansas City Blues Society and spent many nights at concerts and in clubs. Their home held a large selection of recordings and was the site of many live music parties over the years. He followed the local sports teams, though his enthusiasm waxed and waned with their fortunes.
Politically, Dan was an "old socialist" who voted as a Democrat, and he believed deeply in personal liberty, despising censorship by any special interest. He opposed those who start and perpetuate wars and who justify misbehavior on any scale on the basis of religious beliefs. Although he had a lifelong interest in mythology and the history of religions, he came to have no use for religion in his own life. He believed, with favorite poets Matthew Arnold and A. E. Housman, that the difficulties of life should be faced stoically.
Dan was preceded in death by his infant daughter, Jill Marie, his parents and sons-in-law Daniel Samenus and Royce Wood. He is survived by the best partner life could have given him, his wife Susie, by his daughters Laura Samenus and her son Charlie, and Katy Wood and her daughters Anika and Grace. Other survivors are his sisters Mary Ellen Alea and Pat Alea, her husband Bruce Collick, and four nieces.
Dan believed that his generation was the most fortunate in history, surpassing previous and subsequent generations in general prosperity, education, health care, social enlightenment, personal freedom, and endless amusements. His family wishes to add that he was our North Star and we loved him well.
A memorial for Dan will follow in early June.

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Daniel Nastali Obituary | Cremation Center of Kansas City