Don Lee Van Winkle 1948–2024

9 min readMar 10, 2024

Keep Winkle in Your Heart: Eulogy by Stephen Fried

For a full Winkle obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer, click here

It was one of the great honors of my life to be asked to give the eulogy for our friend Don van Winkle to two overflow crowds of the people who loved him, at his 3/9/24 memorial service and again on 6/16/24 (Father’s Day) at the amazing Winkle Tribute Concert at Bridgeport Bar. Here’s what I said:

I’m honored and a little embarrassed that anybody would suggest I should say anything today because of all of you, I knew Winkle the least. But he ended up having a profound impact on Diane and I, as he did on all of us.

We met him almost 38 years ago — which I know, for Philadelphians is nothing: what you only knew him 38 years?

We met, like we met all of you, through a magazine story I was writing. And he was, honestly, the most laid-back, unassuming, strong-silent member of this large group of raucously loud and musical, loving and lovable, and unbelievably intertwined Philly friends, band-mates, lovers, and exes — with such complicated backstories with coincidental crossovers that you needed a computer (and those were still pretty new back then) to keep all the music, sports, love, drug and other connections straight.

The first time we ever saw Winkle call attention to himself — and be the Winkle that we later got to know — was not in a musical setting at all. It was at a bowling alley. I started having a bowling party for my birthday, and Winkle would come and quietly, methodically kick our asses. But when Diane pulled out some of the old pictures from the parties in the late 80s, we noticed how impishly he posed: in one group shot everyone else was standing up and winkle laid across the ground in front of us — like a centerfold — with this big grin that made his eyes, already hidden behind thick glasses, almost disappear.

So what I knew about Winkle was that he was a hard-working guitar player with a gloried past, I knew he loved Kathy McDonnell, and I knew he could bowl.

I got to know him better as he got to know himself, later in life through a series of events that he talked about more and more as they piled up. Kathy got pregnant when she was in her 40s — and she and Winkle finally got married and had a son, Major, in 1994. Winkle always said that having a surprise kid at 46 changed his whole life — both in terms of what he got to experience watching Major grow up and sharing that life, but also getting more in touch with himself. He talked more about how Kathy, who he had known since she was 13 and he was 16, had saved his life when they got together in 1980, helped him rescue himself from drugs which had taken too many others. He also reconnected with a daughter, Lynda, who he and a girlfriend had allowed to be adopted.

And as he had these experiences, he became more open about himself — although he shared what he was experiencing the way musicians often do, as I know from years of interviewing them. They never just share their feeings; they put them into songs, and then only let themselves actually talk about them to explain the songs.

The emotion and joy that emanated from Winkle, Kathy and Major during those years was amazing, contagious. It wasn’t always easy for them, and there were quietly lurking health challenges. But Kathy made important policy changes in her work with the DAs office and was a great sister to Reenie and Millie, Winkle made great music and was such a great molder of young athletes that he became a baseball coach, and together they raised this astonishing kid, who then turned out to be the frontman in the family.

And after 2010, when David Uosikkinen started the “In the Pocket” shows, you also got to see Winkle as one of the elder statesmen of an all-star Philly band in which Major would come on and do a rock/rap cameo. At those shows when they were on stage together, every performance was Father’s Day.

In early 2017, Richie Ingui died, and I remember the memorial concert for him in June felt like such a rite of passage in so many ways. Winkle and Major did their own set together, and it was the first time I heard Winkle cover Warren Zevon’s aching farewell tune “Keep Me In Your Heart for a While.” None of us could have had any idea how often he would need to play it in the coming years.

Less than six months later, Kathy died at the age of 66. And Winkle and Major started a different kind of life together, with all their powerful emotions being channeled into powerful music. I mean, you just never see two men who are so emotionally open about love and loss, but it was never maudlin, it was always loving and appreciative and rocking. It was like a father-son buddy movie musical.

I think of the times Diane and I got to see them perform together — thank god for youtube we can still see some of them — and the memory just makes me want to laugh and cry but also to dance, because the music was always great.

In an interview Winkle did last year with an old friend of his, Susan Schaeffer — which she shared with me — he said that after Kathy died, he and Major and Reenie and the others closest to them were “holding each other up like pillars” which I thought was a great image. He said “You have good days, you have bad days. And there’s nothing you can do when the grief hits except to let it pass through and let it do its thing.”

The day we lost Major in 2020 — hard to believe it’s been well over three years — changed so many things. The day after Major took his own life, I called Winkle because he wanted some help with Major’s obituary. And we had the longest conversation I ever had with him — and, honestly, one of the most profound and moving conversations I ever had in my life. He told me everything that had happened, we talked about whether he wanted to be open about major’s struggle with mental illness and how he had taken his own life, and he didn’t even pause for a second. He said if it would help anybody else, he would be completely open about Major.

I interview people with mental illness and about mental illness for a living — and also, too often, I interview their loved ones after people take their lives. It is very, very rare for someone to decide to be as open as Winkle was, especially that soon after. It was inspirational, and because he did it and encouraged it, others who loved Major and tried to help him save himself were honest as well.

I am so glad all that honesty got captured in the wonderful film This Is Major, which we will now, I suspect, all watch a little differently. I watched it again last night. While it was made to capture the life of an amazing young man lost too early at 26, it is now also very much a film about his amazing father, who we lost too early at 75 — but, before he left, he taught us so much about how to miss those we loved and lost, and talk about what they meant to us, but in a positive, affirming way — which few people really know how to do. Lessons we will now use with his memory.

I’m going to stop talking soon, I promise. But I wanted to end with one more thing. When I heard that Winkle was gone, I started listening to a bunch of interviews he did just over the past few years. He told wonderful stories about the old days: I especially loved the one about how The American Dream were hired to come on AFTER the Doors, in case Jim Morrison exposed himself again and the crowd needed to be calmed. I also loved the story of the night that young Elton John opened for his band, The American Dream, at the Electric Factory. After the show, Winkle reported, Kathy told him Elton was pretty good but “he won’t endure.” I can hear her saying that.

But the story I loved best was him talking about the first song he learned and got to play in front of people, back when he was mostly a drummer. And that was “Who Do You Love?” He talked about playing it when he was 16 and the 13-year-old Kathy was in the audience. But it made me think.

You know, “Who Do You Love” is one of the greatest rock posturing songs of all time, classic Bo Diddley beat, and lines that sound cool but are wonderfully ridiculous, like “just 22 and I don’t mind dyin’” I don’t know what’s more ridiculous, actually, the idea that Bo Diddley wrote this line when he was 28, or the image of 16-year-old Winkle playing and singing it. And, actually, given Winkle’s later activism, he might have said anybody who truly believed they didn’t mind dying should be talking to a mental health professional or calling the 988 hotline.

But the thing about Winkle was, especially as he aged, he found more powerful and mature messages in the music of our youth. He’s the only person I ever heard sing “What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace Love and Understanding” without an iota of sneer or snark.

And what four words better describe Don Van Winkle than “who do you love?”

There are lots of ways to value a life — your accomplishments, your earnings, your stuff. But Winkle knew that what really mattered was “who do you love” and how do you love them.

And those of us who loved him will always keep him in our hearts.