Dana Lynn (Steele) MacCrimmon (45), daughter of retired coach Bob Steele, passed away on August 11^th from an aneurysm following a minor fire call she made as a member of the Carbondale Fire Department.  Dana was a great “giver” to many causes that helped people improve themselves or their lives.  She grew-up with swimming; being held by Bob’s teammates as an infant, babysat by high school swimmers in elementary school, serving as a runner at “AAU” meets, cheering SIU swimmers as a teenager, partying with them as an SIU student, and finally attending Cal State University celebrations in her adult years.   Dana was a “swimming groupie”, although she was a gymnast for eight years and had degrees in Anthropology, Archeology, and was completing a Masters in Speech Therapy she loved being a firefighter.  She leaves three children; Justin an SIU graduate, Cody, and Mallory both college students. 

Dana’s legacy is teaching “Fire Safety” to over 1300 Carbondale 5^th graders and serving as the coordinator/director of the Southern Illinois Children’s Burn Camp for youngsters that had been hospitalized for burn treatment.  She was a beautiful, giving, counselor to disfigured young people with emotionally upsetting lives.  Dana’s mission was to build self-esteem.  She helped raise $15,000 annually to fund the burn camp held at SIU Touch of Nature Camps at Little Grassy Lake which included, if necessary, sending transportation to get the campers. 

Coach Steele has taken maintaining Dana’s legacy as a personal mission and requests teams or individuals to make a donation to the Southern Illinois Children’s Burn Camp and footnote checks “Dana’s Campers”.  Send contributions to the Southern Illinois Camp for Burned Children, Box 2851, Carbondale, IL, 62902.  If a lot of people send a little ($5) it’ll help a lot.

An alternative would be to support your local Fire Department’s Burn Camp by tagging your team fundraiser, like Swim-A-Thon, as many teams do.  Every state conducts camps and all raise funds and use volunteer help and counselors.  Please support these great camps for kids in need so they experience; swimming, boating, fishing, hiking, and more.

What I Learned from Dana

by Mike Ruhland*

Play hard but play safe.
It’s better to think first and talk later.
Life has some serious questions: how I treat you is one of them.
Life has some serious questions: what I’m wearing is not one of them.
Have some extra batteries.

Sometimes listening is all it takes.
How important are you? The one who can answer that best is right beside you.
God isn’t “up there”… she’s right here.
Everybody wins or nobody wins.
Bring extra bulbs, too.

Reading to children is more important than going to the moon.
The kindness you think is small is the one a child will remember most.
A kid will remember how shoes got wet but not tell you.
Wet shoes take a long time to dry.
A hot dryer makes wet shoes curl up.

Life is not a contest.
We’ve already won, we just haven’t received notification from Ed McMahon.
Please” is the second best word.
Thanks” is the best.
Waterproof flashlight – thank you, God.

*Mike was one of Dana’s Burn Camp volunteer board member/counselors/friends