David Crandall

David Peter Crandall was born on May 28th, 1960 in La Cañada Flintridge, California to Bill and Edith Crandall. As the middle of three boys, he spent much of his childhood enjoying many exploits with his brothers and getting up to as much mischief as was possible without his mother finding out. As he grew up, David was an avid tennis player and Boy Scout. He loved snorkeling on Catalina island and embarked on a lifelong goal of taking every new opportunity or experience that came his way. Of the many cities and countries he was lucky enough to visit throughout his life, La Cañada was still the only place that truly felt like home to him and he always made it a point visit several times a year. He loved to revisit all of his favorite haunts growing up: Descanso Gardens, Cherry Canyon, Foster's for a doughnut, and the Gamble House in Pasadena.
David served an LDS mission in Germany and attended Brigham Young University for his undergraduate degree, where he met his beloved wife, Michelle. They sat by each other in an English class and it took him the entire semester to work up the nerve to ask her out, but he didn't waste any time after she agreed. On their first date, he made Michelle homemade cinnamon rolls and asked her to marry him. After two years of an often long distance engagement as they both returned home to work in California between college semesters, they were married for time and all eternity in the Los Angeles LDS temple on June 12th, 1986. They spent the first year of their marriage living in a beautiful cottage nestled in the forest hills of Portland, Oregon. While Michelle worked a fancy job at a bank, David delivered bread and sent in graduate school applications. He was accepted to Oxford University in England and they left Portland to embark on the adventure of living abroad and welcoming their two daughters in England and Namibia, respectively.
David obtained a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Keble College at Oxford. Although they had to have their families ship peanut butter to them since it wasn't available in England at the time, David and Michelle loved their lives in Oxford and made many wonderful friends who remain close to this day. David has always credited the Southwest Indian Museum in California with sparking his interest in other cultures as a young boy, and decided to focus his anthropological research on the Himba in Namibia after seeing a picture of a Himba woman in a book at the famous bookstore, Blackwell's, in Oxford. It took a lot of research and logistics to move his young family to a newly established country (Namibia gained independence from South Africa after apartheid ended), but David was a meticulous planner and great at making connections with people. He reached out to the local LDS branch in Windhoek, Namibia and was put in contact with a dentist who did volunteer dentistry for indigenous people and he took David up to Kaokoland in northern Namibia to introduce him to the Himba. The Himba lived very remotely and were shocked and amused that anyone would be interested in learning about them and their way of living, but David's genuine and unaffected curiosity caused trust to build that deepened into lifelong friendships as the Himba confided in him their views of the world and life stories.
In 1993, David accepted a job offer to become a professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. As quickly as he could, he set up a study abroad program to take students on a two month study abroad to Namibia. Students spent the first month camping in the bush, living among the Himba, and the second month traveling around the country. Organizing and leading the study abroads was a huge undertaking, but became a very important part of David's life as they allowed him to continue his own research. He is considered the world's foremost expert on the Himba and has written many articles about them. His life's work was his book The Place of Stunted Ironwood Trees, published in the year 2000. He wrote of his experiences while living with the Himba as well as sharing many of their stories.
After 30 years of teaching, and riding his bike to work for almost every single day of those 30 years, David retired in 2020. He greatly enjoyed working with his colleagues and having the opportunity to share his work and ideas with the many students he taught. In 2021, David and his wife and their children and families were all able to travel to Namibia together for 6 weeks. The Himba called David Odavido and it meant the world to him to be able to visit them and say goodbye, knowing that his health might prevent him from making future trips. Many of his Himba friends and informants had passed away over the years, but he was able to have one last exchange with a dear friend named Katwerwa who told David that he'd had a dream that David had come to visit him one last time before both of them passed on.
David was an extremely loving husband and father and took his wife and four children on all of his many travels whenever possible and was the fearless leader of endless family adventures (and countless misadventures too!). He never even entertained failure as an option in one of his many plans or schemes because he could jerry-rig just about anything and sweet talk basically anyone into assisting him (let's just say he got a giant piece of elephant dung through airport security one time). David was always quick with a joke and had a nickname for almost everyone he knew, was an accomplished chef who never met a dessert that was too big or too rich, worked harder and longer than anyone, always had a dream or project he was excited about, played the piano beautifully, and owned more books than a library. He thought and felt deeply and always gave heartfelt advice. Despite doing a lot of it in Africa, David loathed camping and was often known to say that his idea of camping was a hotel without room service. He believed that duct tape and twine could fix anything, that hot fudge should be eaten by the spoonful, and that talking to himself in the shower or while vacuuming would sort out all of his problems. He didn't believe in sunscreen, desserts that weren't made from scratch, or that there was any souvenir too big or impossible to fit in a suitcase. David was a one of a kind person and it is impossible to sum him up in just a few paragraphs, but the number of people whose lives he touched is immeasurable. For someone who was incredibly private and never liked to speak of himself, his loss is felt by many around the world.
David passed away on December 11th, 2024 after a lengthy battle with early onset Alzheimer's disease and is survived by his wife, Michelle, and their four children: Ellie (Andrew) Madsen, Margot Crandall, Nicholas (Melanie) Crandall, Drew (Lincoln) Crandall; his two grandchildren, Art and Flora Madsen; and his two brothers, Steven (Tami) Crandall and Bruce (Caren) Crandall. He is preceded in death by his parents, Bill and Edith Crandall.
In lieu of flowers, please eat a delicious dessert in his honor.