The world is full of David Harmans — the late ‘Dave Dee’ (1941—2009) of the madcap 1960s band Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich was one, while those who didn’t change their names include a master blacksmith in Kent, a parish councillor in East Sussex, and others working for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in Swindon and Leadership Development Ltd (‘passionate about getting people to outperform themselves’) in south London. Not to mention the National Sales Manager of the UK edition of Machinery Movers, the specialist monthly construction and quarry equipment magazine, and another who’s the CEO of Unitpool, ‘The Pooling Company’.
On the other side of the pond you’ll find an ophthalmologist in Virginia, dentists in Georgia (David R.) and West Virginia (David E.), a headmaster in Brooklyn, New York, and — among the best known — a golf course designer in Orlando, Florida (who died at the end of 2004), and a conductor and professor of music at the University of Rochester, NY. So which of those might be me? Here’s a question posed on a web forum by one Tom Harmon: ‘I would be interested in find out more about your David Harman. Is he the same one buried at Oak Shade cemetary?’ No, siree, I sure am not… and, perhaps surprisingly, nor am I another who might have something to say about Tom’s grammar and spelling — the educationalist and author of Functional Illiteracy in the United States: Issues, Experiences, and Dilemmas and the |
blockbuster sequel Illiteracy: A National Dilemma... though he’s not the author of yet another, more recent Harmanian tome, Eulogy for a Lost Frontier: the Americanization of Alaska.
Nor am I the intelligent polymath Senior Researcher in the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute at the University of Wollongong, Australia — he’d like to be thought of as ‘a physical organic chemist who has actively explored the area of advanced mass spectrometry on the road to the promised land of materials science!’ yet also seems to find time to organise the UoW Folk Music Club. The ‘real’ David Harman must surely be… a real estate agent in Utah, USA. (Good to know that he’s genuine. Does anyone know any fake estate agents?) Which leaves the creator of this website to deal with the nitpicking (aka proofreading), faffing (aka editing) and occasional scribbling on things classical musical, as well as being an addictively frequent and regular concertgoer in and occasionally away from London, England. If that all seems duller than dentistry, more boring than blacksmithing, horribler than headmastery, even more ridiculous than real-estating, remember that many other David Harmans are available… but wait till the children have gone to bed before further investigating the one who co-starred with Arnold Schwartzenpecker and Rick O’Shea in Adventures of the DP Boys 17: South of the Border. |