Dan Deeny

Dan Deeny, 73, of Kirksville, Missouri, passed away Friday (October 15, 2021) at the Boone Medical Center in Columbia, Missouri.

Dan was born to Cornell and Laura (Brenner) Deeny on August 7, 1948 in Storm Lake, Iowa. On August 16, 1991 Dan was united in marriage to Sahay (Tsehaye) Tesfaye at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Spalding, Nebraska.

Dan is survived by his daughter, Beza Daniel, of Nome, Alaska as well as his brother, Brian (Chizuko), of Fort Collins, Colorado and sister, Sharon, of Cork, Ireland, and many other relatives.

He grew up in Eagle Grove, Iowa and attended St. John’s Preparatory School in Collegeville, Minnesota where he played football and golf, graduating in 1966. In 1970 he earned a BA in history and German with a minor in English from Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During a number of Summer breaks he worked at breweries in Austria. After graduating he joined the Peace Corps, serving as a teacher in Ethiopia for several years. He taught German, French, Spanish and English and coached football and soccer teams in public and Catholic schools in Nebraska and Missouri for about 20 years.

Dan supplemented his German, French and Spanish language skills with study at the University de Bourgogne, Dijon, France, Middlebury College in Vermont, the University of Iowa, and the Universite Laval in Quebec and improved his Amharic at Northwestern University in Illinois. He received his MA in Education from the University of Nebraska in 1998.

Dan followed social and political issues and loved reading history, biography and theology and watching films in the languages he had studied. He was a loyal attendee of the Truman State University soccer matches. With coaching from his daughter, he experimented with Ethiopian recipes downloaded from the internet. In his later years he had returned to golfing. He was actively involved in the Kirksville Mary Immaculate Church community and the Camboni Missionaries school in Awassa, Ethiopia. He loved his wife and daughter very much and was both a good son and model older brother. He will be sorely missed.