David Kaplan died at his home in Santa Barbara, California, on February 24, 2022, surrounded by his loving family. He will be remembered as a husband, father, “baba,” friend, professor and athlete with a zest for life that could only come from pairing hardship with resilience.
David was born on July 11, 1930, in Los Angeles, California.
His mother, Dora Persily, was born in 1900 in Oryol, Russia. As a young girl, she fled the anti-Jewish pogroms and resulting genocide in Imperial Russia. She made her way with her sister to America where she went on to establish one of the largest and most successful fruit and produce businesses in post-war Los Angeles.
David’s father, Itzhak Herschel Kaplan, was born in Palestine in 1882 and immigrated to America via Ellis Island in June 1905.
As a teenager, David experienced severe back pain and was eventually diagnosed with vertebral osteomyelitis. The day after he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1948, he and Dora flew to Rochester, Minnesota, where he was treated at the Mayo Clinic. Doctors saved his life with a new antibiotic called penicillin.
Upon concluding his treatment, he was told he’d never walk again and was placed in a full-body cast for six months. When the cast came off, he stubbornly found his way to Will Rogers State Beach where he discovered his love for beach volleyball.
David become one of the most prolific doubles beach volleyball players in the world and is heralded as one of the top defensive players of all time. His nickname at “the grains” was “The Crab” due to his speed and ability to dig with either hand.
From La Jolla to Santa Barbara, David won tournaments up and down the Southern California coast throughout the summers of the 1950s and early ’60s.
He found a way to maintain his chiseled volleyball physique throughout his life through healthy eating, tennis, running and walking. At 91, his last workouts were grittily completed with a walker and oxygen tank in tow.
Always an intellect, David attended UCLA, where he ran track and fell in love with and eventually obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in Economics. He went on to teach Economics at Santa Monica College, where he inspired and challenged students for 42 years.
David also had a deep love for English and Russian literature and took classes at UCLA on the subjects in his middle age.
Miles Corwin, a literary journalism professor at UC Irvine, took an economics class from David at SMC and wrote a 2014 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times headlined “How an Economics Professor Taught Me a Life-Changing Lesson — in Literature.” He fondly recalls professor Kaplan: “Economic theory is important … but reading authors such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dickens, Shakespeare and Wordsworth has a different and equally important kind of worth, shaping students’ values and deepening their understanding of life. The writing, critical thinking skills and appreciation for creativity that students learn as liberal arts majors … will enrich their lives and also serve them well in a variety of careers, including business.”
David’s love for writing manifested itself in the economics textbooks he co-authored and in his monthly economics column in the Tideland News in Swansboro, North Carolina, that he wrote for more than 40 years.
Separate from his athletic and academic pursuits, David was a devout husband and father.
He parented two children, James and Jean, with his first wife, Shelby Williams in Pacific Palisades, California, along with three grandchildren, Cameron, Erika and Charlotte. As an older man, David raised another son, Danny, with his wife, Louise LaMothe, in Santa Barbara.
He will be remembered by his family as a tender and loving man without ego. Always emotionally available for others, he was a fantastic listener, intently focused on the lives and well being of those around him, and poured his energy into the relationships he forged with family and friends. He was a profoundly loyal friend.
As he did with osteomyelitis as a young man, David beat battles with skin cancer, lung cancer, sepsis and COVID-19 as an older man. He was strong, resolute and possessed a lovingly inexorable will to live. The only thing he liked more than words was laughter.
He cherished his family, friends, champagne, vodka tonics, two-minute showers as a cure-all, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw LPs, unique one-liners, and daily sunsets. He will be missed and celebrated for years to come.