Dana Abbott:  

It was the "do your own thing" era...and I did. You won't find my Senior class picture in the 74 yearbook since I graduated early but you will find me on page 181 doing stained glass in Mrs. Younts' class in the 1973 yearbook. I kept mostly to myself but you could find me running laps with Coach Keller...on my butt. I enjoyed all my courses and teachers. Especially designing stained glass and crafts in Mrs. Yount's class, listening to Mr. Ransom's unbiased opinion in Economics, or Mr. Solem's rants on saving the desert and especially Mr. Al Norman always talking about the "Green Latrine"...his beat up Green Ford Maverick. Upon graduating from Saguaro, I immediately gained employment at the First National Bank of Arizona while attending ASU. In 1978 with a degree in Geography I decided to use my newly found education as the best way to turn academia into life experiences...as seen in MASuccess magazine below... Dana Abbott's story could be the plot of a martial arts action movie: a young man from Arizona dreams of learning swordsmanship, sets off for Japan to follow the same path as the samurai warriors from centuries past, and studies under one of the world’s premier masters to emerge decades later as a master in his own right. Although it would make a cool movie…this story isn’t from a film and it isn’t even fiction. Shihan Dana Abbott, seventh-degree black, recently recounted the story of how he came to join the ranks of top-echelon martial artist sword fighters for MASuccess magazine. “Swordsmanship was always something that was a mystery, and held a great deal of intrigue for me,” Shihan Abbott said. “I became interested in it when I was a student at Arizona State University, and I searched, to no avail, to find a qualified instructor that I could relate to and learn from.” Shihan Abbott graduated from ASU in 1978 with a degree in geography, and decided to put it to use in the best way possible. He sold everything he owned that didn’t fit into a single box and ventured out onto the road. “I started off traveling the United States, Canada, and then south to Mexico,” he said. “The next two decades were spent exploring, while living abroad in Europe, Africa and Asia while encountering many wild and crazy adventures during my treks.” Several adventures that took place before Shihan Abbott even held a katana could warrant feature stories in their own right. He was in China during the student protests and had a bird’s-eye view of the now-infamous Tiananmen Square. Later that year he was in Berlin at the time the wall fell. He hiked mountain trails on Everest and explored jungles in the Congo, navigated the Silk Road, and crossed deserts on camelback. From skydiving, to scuba diving, sledding in the Arctic Circle, fishing the fjords of Scandinavia and running with the bulls in Spain, Shihan Abbott did everything an adventurous spirit could hope to do – almost. There was still swordsmanship. Shihan Abbott has always been a person who turns thoughts into actions, so what happened next shouldn’t come as a surprise. Just as Shihan Abbott had taken his love of geography from academia to real-world experience, he decided to turn his fascination with Japanese swordsmanship into more than a mere interest. In 1985 Abbott’s travels brought him to Japan. He enrolled in Nihon Taiiku Daigaku, J...Expand for more