JEH: Good morning, Dan.
DAN: Good morning, Jim.
JEH: Thank you for coming here and giving us your story.
DAN: Thank you for having me.
JEH: All right, can I have your full name?
DAN: Daniel Francis Herard, but it started out as Daniel Chandler.
JEH: We’ll get to that.
DAN: Okay.
JEH: How old are you?
DAN: 68; I’m going to be 69 August the 8th.
JEH: How many siblings do you have?
DAN: I got one here; I got four brothers and three sisters that I just found out that I have; I haven’t met them yet, they’re in Cranston somewhere.
JEH: How many siblings did you have when you were growing up?
DAN: One, just my sister.
JEH: Okay. Tell me about your mom and dad, did you have both of them when you were growing up?
DAN: Well, my parents died when I was really young, I never met them.
JEH: So, how old about?
DAN: I was probably two, maybe three. And then I went into a foster home and then I went into an orphanage, and then I got adopted out of the orphanage to Donald and Clara Herard. That was in 1960, 1960 I got adopted.
JEH: How long were you in an orphanage and a foster home?
DAN: Four years.
JEH: Did they have any children when they adopted you?
DAN: No, they couldn’t have kids, so they adopted us, me and my sister.
JEH: Now, where was that out of, what state?
DAN: Right here in Woonsocket. I was born in Providence, but I was in the orphanage over here, off Cass Avenue, off Mendon Road.
JEH: So, how was your life growing up with your foster parents?
DAN: Very shaky, by the time I got there, I already was a bitter kid, you know. I was only like 4, but I didn’t want that, I figured because it’s a foster home, an orphanage, nobody’s going to love me anyway. And that’s the attitude that I had at that age, you know. My father and mother, they bought a supermarket up in Pascoag and named it after me and my sister, that’s how much love they had for me, you know what I mean. And they tried everything to love me, and I just, I had a lot of problems back then, I had to go through counselling and stuff like that.
And then at 7 years old I was beat up and almost killed from three bikers that came into the ball field while I was playing out there, and I got raped from three guys and tied to a tree to die. I spent a week out there almost before they found me. So, that was another blow.
So, after that, you know, back then your parents didn’t believe about sexual molestation and anything like that, it was a hard thing to — so that caused a lot of animosity. But they did put me into Butler Hospital, and I got straightened out a little bit there.
JEH: At 7?
DAN: At 7, I was in counselling from 7 to almost 14, something like that. And then I was high school, I went to high school, and I met this girl there and she was the love of my life. And she had cystic fibrosis; I spent ten years with her, and she passed away, and I can still feel her today. And then I went into the Army shortly after that, about 1977 I think it was. I became a telecommunications teacher. Because of my girl passing away, she was sick at the time, they let me out of the Army early, and I got home, and she passed away two or three weeks after that. I wanted to go back in the Army, they wouldn’t let me, they said, “You need time to grieve,” so, that ended that career.
So, shortly after that I met another girl, I met Linda and I married her and she loved everybody but me over the years, but we had two kids together, and I’m still having problems with that mess. I stayed with her for almost twenty years, twenty/twenty-five years, but I was with her actual three years, we were separated all this time. I stayed married to her hoping that things can turn around eventually, but it didn’t.
So, I ended up getting in some trouble and I went to prison for two years, while I was in prison I divorced her. And then when I got out, I met somebody else eventually. She passed away of an overdose about two to three months into my relationship with her. And I had five relationships, and they all died, they all died. Right now I’m single, and I’m not getting married anymore, I give up. Yeah, I married the church, that’s what I believe. The homeless, they’re my family now.
And how I got there, is that I ended up homeless myself, and it was when the railroad bridge was down at Kennedy Plaza in Providence, remember the big railroad bridge?
JEH: Yes.
DAN: I lived under there for three years, that’s where I learned compassion, people took care of me, and I took care of them, it taught me a lot about things.
JEH: So, now you’re in your forties?
DAN: Right around forty, yep. I made it through there, I had money I just didn’t, I just, I was homeless, I just didn’t, I gave up on people, but I learned a lot of things down there, about Jesus and about compassion. And something in me just stuck; I needed to help people. So, I got back here; I got to the point, after losing all my people, that I wanted to commit suicide, and I took a suicide attempt on Tower Hill in Narragansett.
I was on the tower with a gun to my head. I’m cursing God, and I shot the gun, and it went right over me, and I fell back like somebody just knocked me onto the top floor. I was out, it was in the middle of the winter, and I was out cold on the top of this thing; I had a leather jacket and a muscle shirt. But when I woke up it was like somebody had a heating blanket around me. And I walked from there, I was in a daze kind of, and I walked from Tower Hill down to the soup kitchen on Blackstone Street in Woonsocket.
JEH: That is a long way, my friend.
DAN: Exactly, I don’t know how I did it, you know, I just kept walking, and I this is where I ended up. And at that time I met Pat Dempster, and two nuns, and they came over to my table, and they said, “Excuse me, sir, we’d like to pray for you.” So, they went to lay hands on me, and they backed up really quick, and they said, “Jesus has a special plan for you.” And I’m thinking, yeah, right, I have nothing, I’ve got no car, I have nothing. But they prayed for me, and I started a ministry then, didn’t know what it was going to be, but I got into clothes and then I got into furniture shortly after. The church helped me.
JEH: What church?
DAN: At that time it was Blackstone Holy Baptist Church, it was the soup kitchen actually that helped me get started.
JEH: Let me ask you, you said you have two children?
DAN: Yes.
JEH: Boys or girls?
DAN: A boy and a girl, I haven’t seen my daughter since she was fourteen, she’s forty-four.
JEH: Where were they when you were homeless?
DAN: They weren’t there yet.
JEH: Oh, they weren’t born yet.
DAN: They were there yet, they were born, but they weren’t with me yet.
JEH: Okay, so you had no communications with your kids at that point?
DAN: No. Now, I live with my son, but that’s not working out very well either. We don’t really pay attention to each other too much. He’s got a girlfriend that’s unbelievable, it causes a lot of problems between me and him, but we won’t go there.
JEH: And you haven’t seen your daughter since she was fourteen?
DAN: Yeah, when me and my wife separated, she went that way, I went this way, and she hated me all my life, you know, for no particular reason, you know. I’ve tried many times, right now she’s a lesbian, she’s in her second, she was married to a lesbian and now she’s separated with her and living with another one. So, we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. I pray that someday we can work things out. She’s got two kids, they’re my grandkids, I saw my grandson the day he was born and that was the last time I seen him, he’s eighteen now.
But anyway, I dedicated myself to the homeless. I started the ministry, and I furnished hundreds of houses for free in three states.
JEH: How did you do that; how did you get the furniture initially?
DAN: It was all donated, and I didn’t ask for anything, that’s the thing, this is all Jesus. When I started the ministry, I had nothing, I had no car, no way to deliver furniture so I was doing clothing out of the church, and if somebody comes by and they need clothes, that’s how it built up, and then it just started growing. Over the first two years I furnished over a hundred houses; I got clothes for like twenty-five hundred people, toys at Christmas for thousands, things like that, it just started growing. You know, people donate, they want to give, as long as you want to take, that’s the easy part.
JEH: At this point, are you saved yet?
DAN: Well, I was, and I wasn’t, I back-slid so many times. I mean, I was saved, and I was baptized from the First Baptist Church, but I back-slid, I became a drug addict and all that kind of stuff. He took that ministry away from me for a little while, that’s kind of a story in itself.
JEH: Before you continue, I would like to re-visit what you mentioned earlier. You said your mom died when you were two?
DAN: Yeah.
JEH: But where was your father in this?
DAN: He died shortly, right around the same time. As far as I know, I don’t know too much about that part of my life. I just found out recently that I have siblings down in Cranston.
JEH: So, while you were doing this ministry, you started getting into drugs?
DAN: Before, and then I took that suicide attempt I told you about, and then I ended up going to Edgehill, Newport, rehab. My roommate over there was Gilligan, you know, Gilligan’s Island, Gilligan, he was my roommate for two months.
JEH: The guy that played Gilligan?
DAN: Yeah, Bob Denver, he was my roommate for two months, and next door to me was Dick Van Dyke, and we played bocce ball every day together, all of us together. It was quite the time; I would have stayed there. I met quite a few celebs during my years; I met Nancy Sinatra. Janis Joplin, me and Jeanie, my girl that died of cystic fibrosis, we had dinner with Janis Joplin down at The Cave in Boston, and she drove us around in a limo and took us back to the parking garage after to get my car. She dies about three weeks after my girl died. But it was a time that she’ll never, Jeanie, she wanted to meet Janis for all her life.
JEH: How did you make that happen?
DAN: I just went to the concert, and Jeanie needed something to drink, so I went to get something to drink, and I started talking to this guy, and he turned out to be a roadie for Janis. I told her the story of what’s going on, I said I need to get back. And he comes down while we’re watching the concert, and she says, “Janis wants to meet you backstage after, are you interested.” I said, are we interested? So, we had to go down this corridor type deal, and she was sitting at her limo, and we started talking and everything, and they invited us out for supper over at The Cave, an underground restaurant. It was really nice, it was unbelievable.
JEH: How long were you on drugs?
DAN: On heavy drugs, I don’t even know, probably fifteen years, on and off.
JEH: What was your drug of choice?
DAN: Cocaine and Cuminol, those were the biggest things. I got addicted to Cuminol, because I was working doubles, double shifts all the time. My boss, “Here, you want to try this?” He lays out a line in front of me, and that’s what got me going.
JEH: So, what kind of work did you do?
DAN: I was working at Miller Electric making cable, making extension cords, I was a large extruder operator. I’ve worked Tech Industries, American Power Conversion, American Tourister, Toray Plastics America, all these jobs, I just kept jumping from job to job. I had like sixty jobs in my career.
JEH: What was a turning point of getting off of drugs?
DAN: Mostly my kids, I think. I wanted to straighten out and get something going. I haven’t been back that way in a long time.
JEH: Thank God.
DAN: Yeah, thank God. Now, I spend most of my life trying to get other people off it and put them in rehab, that’s what my ministry’s about.
JEH: How was your life before you got off drugs?
DAN: It was up and down that’s for sure; I wasn’t the same person I am now, I was a lot meaner, troublemaker. I couldn’t get it together, I couldn’t, I went through so many jobs just because I got bored. And I had really good jobs, some of them were really good jobs, it was mostly because of the drugs. If I get bored, I walk off a job just like that.
But once I got out of Edgehill, it was right around the time I started the ministry for the second time. I started like right after my suicide attempt, I started the ministry through the church, but like I said, I back-slid, I got back into drugs and I needed help, I really needed help, so that’s when I went to Edgehill. And once I got in there I started to focus, I met some beautiful Christian people there, and they started talking to me about Jesus. I said, this sounds great to me.
JEH: How long were you at Edgehill?
DAN: Fifty something days, twenty-eight-day programs, but I was in there twice, back-to-back, because that’s how bad I was at the time. They had me up on lithium and all kinds of stuff over there. I wanted to stay there; it was so great. You could eat all the food you wanted all day long, underground dairy farm you walk through.
JEH: The problem is, it’s not real.
DAN: No, it isn’t.
JEH: It’s not life.
DAN: No.
JEH: Now, when you got out of Edgehill the second time, and you started your ministry again, where were you living, were you living on the street?
DAN: I was living at First Baptist Church for a little while, because the church was abandoned, but they let me use it for the Agape room, I also had my office there, I lived right there, and I ate at the soup kitchen. She gave me the keys to the soup kitchen, she said, eat anytime I want, so I stayed there. And then I had a box truck, but I didn’t have an apartment.
JEH: So, how long did that go one for?
DAN: Almost a year, and then I got an apartment over on Cato Street, but the ministry went on forever, it kept growing. I furnished so many houses and did all kinds of different programs. My heart right now is into resources, so I’m trying to find resources for people, like rehab, walk them through it, not just finding it. I met one of the guys at the park this morning that I helped years ago, and he was a heroin addict ready to die, and skinny as a rail. Now he’s all buffed out, and he’s got a wife and two kids, he’s doing great, he’s one of my success stories, but I have many of them.
All the time I walk around the city and people come up to me and says, “I remember you; you remember me?” Not really. “You furnished my house back thirty years ago.” I don’t remember, when I furnish a house, I introduce myself as Dan and I say, this is from Jesus, this isn’t from me. And we’ll sit there, and we’ll pray together, and my crew is furnishing their house, and once they’re done, they come over and we all gather together and pray, and that’s the way I did things.
Some people look at me like I walk on water, but I don’t, it’s all Him. But I can tell you stories about what He did for me, it’s unbelievable. First off, he helped me with this ministry, he saved my life more than once. I had seven heart attacks, two strokes, I’ve got an artificial leg, I had a tumor in my neck that they took out of my neck. I had cancer, they took out sixty percent of my stomach, my gall bladder, my appendix, and about four feet of my intestines. And I’m still here, sixty-nine years old, so that’s a big thing that he did for me.
So, nothing worries me anymore about my health, He’s going to take care of that. I had a $4,000 dollar bill, electric bill that my kids just slapped with me while I was in the hospital. And I started stressing out and then I started praying about it and I found a way just like that to take care of it, if I can afford it, they can afford it, and they’re going to take care of it now.
JEH: How’s your relationship with your sister?
DAN: Great, we’ve been close all our lives, anything I ever needed she was right there to help me out, and the same thing, both ways. She lives in Alabama now, but we talk every day. I almost broke her heart when I told her I got cancer, and she was down there, she couldn’t come up here and be with me while I was in the hospital.
God has always helped me as far as getting into places or things that I needed to do in life, decision making, things like that. I feel that I’m a lot wiser today than I used to be, and I think that’s all Him, He’s filling me with his wisdom through His word.
JEH: Do you feel you’re being led by the Holy Spirit?
DAN: I think so, I really do, because I couldn’t have done half of these things that I’ve done in my life by myself, especially the ministry and all. I pray on it first and then He leads me to what he wants. And if I mess up, he does that too. Like I said, he took right away from one time. There was a time, I was over on Mendon Road at a friend’s house and I’m in the back door of his house, there’s a little like a dirt patch, and I’m out there and I’m praying and I’m crying my eyes out, and I said, Lord, you know, everything went bad, everything went south, I was about ready to lose my warehouse, my box trucks, I had two box trucks and six vans, my warehouse, and these are all expensive stuff, and I was about ready to lose it, donations stopped.
I was so, I know I messed up, and I’m praying to Him to forgive me, give me a second chance. And all of a sudden, that little patch of dirt started circling around. This is a calm day, it’s like in here, that little patch of dirt started circling around like that, I said, Lord, give me a sign if this is what you want me to keep doing. A page from a TV Guide came up and slapped me in the chest, on a calm day, and it was just a piece of paper. I picked it up and it was Jesus with his arms spread like that. I still have it, I still have it, this is from years and years.
That was the sign, to me it was, and things started turning better. And then it got so strong, my ministry got so strong, I was getting two-hundred-bedroom sets at a whack. People from Brown University and the Crown Royal Hotel, they’d give me six hundred blankets, pillows, and sheets all in one whack, once a month. I had Brown University, two-hundred-bedroom sets, they had the wardrobe cabinets and the bureaus and the desk. And they took it right up to my warehouse, set it up in my warehouse. I had the whole top floor of a mill for $400 dollars a month, that’s another blessing, all I had to do was carry a clipboard. I furnished almost seven thousand houses.
JEH: How did you get to Harvest Community?
DAN: I went there eighteen years ago with my box truck full, and I was looking to see if they would be interested in anything that I had as far as the clothes and things like that. And they let me store some of my clothes there, and I ended up joining that church. I wasn’t really into religion as much, I serve God, but I didn’t believe in the churches. I’ve been to so many; they keep changing their thoughts about things, and it was very confusing for me, I believe in the word of God. And then I found out at Harvest, that’s what he teaches is the word of God.
JEH: Yes.
DAN: I worked the last six years in the shelter.
JEH: Tell me about that.
DAN: Well, I worked the last six years in the shelter, there it is.
JEH: Our readers aren’t going to know exactly what that means. How did that effect your life by working the shelter?
DAN: Well, it fit right into my life, because that’s what I wanted to do. I’d been there on the streets, and my heart is with the homeless; I got a heart of compassion that’s for the homeless, and their pain, I can feel it sometimes. I sat in my office many nights counselling people overnight, and it just came so easy to me. So, then I took a couple of courses in counselling to just better myself at it, but most of what I’ve taught is through the bible, the word of God. And my life experiences, I’ve had a few, so I can use that as educational to somebody else.
I met Patrick Kennedy for Christmas one year, he invited me to his house for Christmas, he gave me a $50,000 dollar donation. Senator Bob Wiggins, $30,000 dollar donation. I was getting donations all over the place, people started hearing about bringing God’s children home, the money started rolling in. As long as I was doing things right, things were getting paid. So, Patrick Kennedy, I had a fund raiser over at First Baptist Church, and he came. Bob Wiggins, I used to go out with his sister and that’s how I met him.
JEH: Now, when we started talking, you said you had two names, could we explore that a little?
DAN: Well, when I was born Daniel Chandler, I don’t know what the middle name was, but Daniel Chandler was the name I was born with, and now it’s Daniel Francis Herard.
JEH: Okay.
DAN: My future goal is to eventually open up a center for resources, that’s what we’re working on. Now, clothes and food is important stuff, but resources that they won’t have to do that anymore, send them to rehab, help them get an apartment, a job, that’s more what I’m interested in. So, in order to do that I’ve got a lot of homework to do myself.
JEH: Well, Dan, this has been great, thank you for sharing your story with me.
DAN: Thank you, I appreciate you.
JEH: God bless you.
DAN: God bless you too.