DALE SCHNELL

Dale Schnell Dale Schnell was born in Milwaukee, in 1926, and died on November 13th, 2010 in Marin. Dale grew up in Northern California during the Great Depression, first in Palo Alto and then in San Francisco. After working at Mare Island Navy shipyards while in high school, he joined the Navy and served on the USS Enterprise during WWII. When the war ended, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied under Park, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Still, Spohn, among others and received the IM Walter Sculpture Award. While at SFAI, Dale met Margit Matrai, a fellow student, and they began a marriage that lasted 61 years. Dale became an architect and worked in an architectural firm in San Francisco and then opened his own practice. He designed his beautiful home built in Marin in 1969. Although his profession was architecture, his real passion was writing and drawing cartoons. His stories, mostly autobiographical, tell of the adventures during his youth: games of dare in the rail tunnels, playing in the sand dunes that stretched from Sunset Blvd to the ocean. He was a creative, sincere, kind, loyal man with a brilliant, unique sense of humor. His wife, Margit Schnell, and his two daughters, Katherine Ware and Lesa Martin and her husband, Paul Martin, and grand-daughter, Sasha Martin, will all miss Dale very much.