Birth date: Nov 27, 1943 Death date: May 11, 2025
Daniel L. “Danny” Phillips November 27, 1943 – May 11, 2025 Danny Phillips, age 81, of Gainesville, Florida, passed peacefully into our Lord’s arms on May 11, 2025, of natural causes. He was born on November 27, 1943, in Miami, F Read Obituary
I too loved my brother. I live in California and seldom saw him but I know a lot of good things about him; he is extremely talented and could always do anything he set his mind to do, which included but not limited to building his house, built airboats; which was his passion. When he left us i prayed and asked God to take him to his heavenly home where we will all be reunited. It will be a grand homecoming.
I loved my brother Danny, who was a rare combination of talent in all the mechanical and artistic ways that I am not!. At any time that you might meet him, he was down to earth, and he listened carefully to everything you might say. In early life, he was surprising in his instinctive gifts...like the time years ago in a shop class at Gainesville High School when he forged a beautiful silver cross and decided to give it to me. Only Heaven knows why he would give it to me, but it found its place on a silver chain around my neck for all the decades since! Soon the cross will be gifted to Danny's wife, Dianne, who has said "It will mean the world to me." And of course there is much more about my brother's courage in the face of life-threatening health problems. At Shands Hospital at UF, he became one ot the oldest recipients of a lung transplant when his own lungs failed, and he lived to demonstrate you can start again....at life with your friends and family. His wife and children know you could never underestimate the stamina and will-to-live that enabled him to triumph over difficulty as big as this one. In fulfillment of a goal he expressed to his Mom while still a little boy, Danny acquired the knowledge and skills to build airboats, including the engine, and to design the hulls that became known as the Phillips Hulls. There is history, known best to his boating friends, of the airboat races that he won handily. My brother was special, and I loved him! ......Arline Phillips-Han
Mr Danny was a great friend . We have all lost an incredible person.
My condolences to the entire Phillips family and Danny's many close friends. Blessed to had met and spoke to him twice at Burnt Island he def had my respect for his wealth of airboating knowledge. I took a Phillips hull from a cow pasture out here last year that I was very proud of-that will live on for a few more decades to come!
You will be missed Danny….sending prayers to your family…..
“Daddy” as I affectionately called him was the sweetest man I have ever met! He was one of kind. He will be missed!!
Ol' Danny Phillips was one of the Journeyman I was fortunate to work with/under, and learn from while working for WWGAY Mechanical. We worked together from 2002 building the Bull-Gator and all the glass skyboxes at the Swamp (UF Gators football stadium) until it's completion... one thing I loved (Danny and I were both early risers, and generally the first two on the job...) nearly every morning we'd hike up the stairs to the tip-top of the stadium, and so up there sipping our coffee, ☕☕ and him having a smoke 🚬 watching the sunrise 🌅 come up over Payne's Prairie... 😅 and nearly every day, he'd make a comment about wanting to get out there in his airboat "just once!" And take them Frogs 🐸 up haha.... we worked together untill he retired in 2004, While we were building the first Shands/UF Cancer & Genetics research facility, behind Lake Alice, near what used to be the pony field. He taught me how to do more with an oxy/ accetlyn torque, and most folks could do with and arc or mig... He was one of the good ones, right up to the end 🖤🤠☕
Sorry for your loss, Tommy & Mary Nettles, Tommy went to school with his sister. We have wonderful memories of all the good times we had with Danny over the years, we will miss him.
