Daniel Eesley, 86, died January 7, 2018 in San Francisco from Alzheimer's disease.

He was born Nov. 29, 1931, in Buffalo, New York, and grew up there and in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio.

Dan graduated from the University of Michigan in 1954, where he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity. After graduation, he served as a Lieutenant Junior Grade in the U.S. Coast Guard. This experience left him with a deep love of nautical lore, especially lighthouses. Later in life, he helped restore the Hercules, a 1907 steam tugboat preserved at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

After leaving the Coast Guard, Dan began work in the early 1960s in the then-nascent Bay Area technology industry, first as a systems engineer for IBM. He went on to work for Amdahl, Memorex, Hewlett-Packard and other leading tech companies of the time. He retired from HP in 2000.