Twelve Days of Christmas 2021 finale: The ongoing search for James Danny Hollingshead

*Dad with my younger brother, who is named after the old man’s best friend.*

If you read this blog, you’ve probably read about Danny, my father’s best friend from his days in prison and in the years after both left the joint. My dad respected him so much that he named my younger brother after him.

Somewhere along the way, however, Dad and Danny had a falling out. This happened not long before the old man went to prison for the final time after pulling a series of burglaries in the San Diego area. My father didn’t pass on many details about that, but he still honored his friend a few years later by naming my brother Daniel. Off and on during the final 40 years of his life, Dad tried to find him.

I helped here and there, beginning with a search in the early days of the Internet. The web wasn’t endless back in those days, so that investigation didn’t get too far. Through the years, Googling, using various background search sites and making dozens of phone calls did not produce much beyond a random newspaper clipping from the late 1950s (Danny was arrested and jailed for stealing as a teen in Hutchinson).

Dad thought he had the right James Danny Hollingshead at one point, sending a letter to an address we found in South Lake Tahoe. The old man also called the phone number associated with that address several times. If it was Danny, he didn’t want to be found.

As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones looking for Danny. Several months after I wrote about him for last year’s Twelve Days of Christmas series, I received an email from a man in Texas. He explained that his aunt on his mother’s side had two sons, one of whom was named James Danny Hollingshead.

This man would have been a cousin to the Hollingshead brothers, the younger who lives in Florida today after residing in Dodge City for many years. That made sense because a man Danny was arrested with in the late 1950s, Charles Patten, lived in the same city for many years before he passed away.

To make a long story short, the younger brother has been looking for Danny for a long time now. The cousin, whose career entailed tracking down missing mineral owners, has been trying to find him for decades, too.

This gentleman also connected me with a daughter of Danny’s brother, and we exchanged a couple of messages in June. She shared that her father said that he and his brother had rough childhoods, and her dad was in foster care after his mother went to jail. That also made sense because I’d found an article from 60 years ago about Danny’s mom being arrested.

To add to the mystery, Danny’s niece said she was contacted by a woman whose DNA was similar to her DNA and they were likely related. It’s possible that the woman is Danny’s daughter.

I also exchanged Facebook messages with a woman in California whose husband is named James Danny Hollingshead Jr. She did not know much about James Sr. and spoke for her husband, who is deaf. She did say that her husband and Danny were not close and that the latter died in 2016. So, though we’ve made some progress, we continue to search for the man whom my brother is named after.

If you knew or know James Danny Hollingshead, who would be 79 years old now and likely living on the West Coast, please email me at erniewebbiii@hotmail.com.