The life of Bob Danon, which has smartly slipped into its eighth decade, has lost none of the energy, creativity, political awareness, playfulness and ambition that have peppered its preceding decades.
“I’m getting ready to, hopefully, pitch to the Obama Foundation, with a big underlined maybe,” he was telling me Sunday afternoon as the sun splashed the street outside his latest professional home, the Danon Gallery, a charmingly cluttered space at 1808 Central St. in Evanston.
That’s one of Danon’s latest goals. He shows me, among many interesting art pieces, a compelling oil portrait of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teen from Chicago whose brutal lynching in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.
“I think this belongs in the new Obama Presidential Center,” he says. “And I own a number of very significant and historical pieces regarding Chicago and America. They belong in museums. And these works of art, in most cases, were done by different local artists.”
He has always had big ideas and interests, from the time I first met him, more than 50 years ago, when we both were hired by a new magazine named The Chicagoan. He was its circulation manager; I was a reporter.
I quickly learned that Danon was Hyde Park-born and raised, attended Ray Elementary School and Hyde Park High School, leaving in his senior year to enlist in the U.S. Navy where, among many duties, he was a swimming instructor.
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When the magazine ended publication after 18 months, he wound up managing Grandma’s Receipts, a popular turn-of-the-century themed restaurant on Clark Street at Diversey Parkway for a couple of years.He had been collecting art for some time and made a leap in 1976 by opening the Rainbow River Gallery on Armitage Avenue, across from Park West. He sold art and did framing and he loved it.
He also fell in love with a nurse, married, had a baby girl and moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where he opened a frame shop and gallery and a hot dog “restaurant” named Last of the Red Hot Lovers. But the marriage quickly fell apart, and he was back here with sole custody of daughter Kate. They lived in a Rogers Park apartment, and he began, he says, “working a lot of part-time jobs so I could be a full-time father.”
One of those jobs was writing a weekly column for the Hyde Park Herald, “One Plus,” which detailed his “adventures” as a single dad. (He would later create a politics-focused blog called BrokenNews.Press).
Then in 1993 came one of the biggest jobs he would ever have. Danon was chosen to frame and hang artwork and photos on the walls of a new high-profile venture, Michael Jordan’s Restaurant at 500 N. LaSalle St.
It was a massive undertaking, hanging 400-some pieces in 10 weeks, from sports-related photos, Sports Illustrated covers and the work of Bill Smith, the official photographer for the Bulls. Also capturing diners’ eyes was a large and vibrant portrait of Jordan by acclaimed Chicago artist Ed Paschke, a leading figure in the Chicago Imagists movement. There was also wall space charmingly dedicated to original drawings sent in by children and fans from all over the world.
In 1996, Danon opened a frame shop at 1126 Central Ave. in Wilmette, expanding into the space next door two years later and turning it into a gallery.
Business was good, but, Danon being Danon, in the summer of 2004 he transformed the gallery into Charlie’s Coffee House, named after his beloved English Springer Spaniel. It featured an array of soups, pastries and sandwiches. Within a few months, there was music when he started a weekly concert series that he called “Friday Night Live,” featuring such stars as Ed Holstein, Corky Siegel, Don Stiernberg and Megan McDonough.
He successfully fought the town for the right to serve wine and beer. He started open mic and comedy nights. Though the place had a capacity of only 25, for many of a certain age, it warmly recalled the Earl of Old Town, Quiet Knight, Orphans and the other great city clubs that helped get us through the nights.
In 2010, he moved his operation into his current space, and business boomed, though he did miss his musical events. A visit to Danon’s shop now is not only to see a vast number of artworks of various sizes and styles. It is also to meet a man who is a compelling storyteller. Among those he might tell you — showing you a map on the wall as he does — is why in 2019 he went on a kayak trip along the coast of Crete to raise money for Shriners Children’s Chicago.
This was his fourth such fundraising-rowing effort. One of the others raised money for pediatric cancer research at what was then called Children’s Memorial Hospital, in honor of a 13-year-old girl from Wilmette.
“I fell in love with kayaking back in 1995,” he says. “To use it for good became a special thing for me.”
After the trip to Crete, he had planned to close his shop and move to Lawrence, Kansas. That’s where his daughter Kate, after graduating from Kansas University, lived and worked as a nurse, married to “a really fine guy named Brian,” says Danon.
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But COVID came and plans changed and he remains in his Evanston shop and seems happy and active, in part because after 50 years in the business he has close relationships with many clients.
One of them is Donna La Pietra, who tells me, in reference to her husband and business partner, Bill Kurtis, “As a long-time pre-iPhone photographer, Bill had always created physical prints. We believed in framing those that carried special memories of a location, an event, a story covered. These were placed on the walls of the places we lived and worked. Few were as skilled as Bob Danon in that special craft of framing the photos and the memories.”
Now, Danon has a possible new client on his mind and he will tell you that he briefly met Barack Obama long ago at a Hyde Park party. “No chance he’ll remember that,” Danon says, smiling. “But you never know.”