Harold Caywood Feeback 1925 - 2011

This is my mom and dad--when they were just dating, way back in college. Dad died last Sunday. He was 86.

Harold Caywood Feeback was born in Kentucky in Horse Country. For vacations we used to go back there and visit. I remember going to the Man O' War monument. If you don't know who Man O' War was--well look it up--the greatest horse that ever lived. Dad's kin were old time folks. Go-down-to-the-river Methodists. He called his granny Granny. Dad used to laugh and say he never knew that a Depression was going on because everyone he knew was poor anyway.

Before his senior year in high school his dad got a job with Coca-Cola bottlers in Cincinnati. Harold graduated from Withrow High School in 1943 and immediately joined the Navy and served on the USS Porter. He did his training at Great Lakes Naval Base just north of Chicago.

Harold attended Ohio State University on the GI Bill getting a degree in Business with a specialization in International Finance. He was big on education and made sure all four of us kids went to college.I love the picture above because it shows him at a desk writing.

In college Mom and Dad did the typical student thing. Note: the bottles, Also note: Mom's great legs.

this isn't Mom, but whoever it is Dad sure is swinging her

My dad was quite the dancer. He and Mom married September 17, 1949.

After he graduated from college Dad was called up again to serve during the Korean War. In a box of old maps I found a log book he kept. Mostly it was a few one liners such as shoved off from this port or under way on this sea--and tucked in there was an entry from April, 1951--son born. He would get a 2-week leave to come home and see his son, before rejoining the war and being gone for a year. 

Dad and Mom move to Dayton in 1953 where Dad first worked for NCR (National Cash Register) and then Monarch Marking Systems where Dad was on the development team for a product that would revolutionalize the supermarket industry.

Have you seen one of these? Before the label price gun there was the ink stamp, which didn't quite work on frozen foods (the ink smeared). With the price gun a stockperson could cut open a box and zip zip zip price a case of canned peas. Of course soon after the invention of the price gun came bar coding.

Here's Dad at the zenith of his powers.

It's hard to think of him gone. It was a slow transition. After retiring in 1987 he and Mom built a house in Fairfield Glade a sort of Stepford golfing community. All the houses were too big and too nice--but again it fit their lifestyle. Everything was going great.

Until Dad suffered a stroke about 6 years into retirement. It seemed an awful irony--finally the time and opportunity to play golf and he's paralyzed. He would remain debilitated by the stroke for 16 more years. So it wasn't the stroke that took him, but his heart. Slowly he was wearing out.

Harold (because we all called you that, even the grandkids) you lived a long and good life. Those who knew you will remember you as the guy in these pictures: dancing, golfing, enjoying life. You leave us--your wife Ann and the four kids--to mourn and miss you.