LEIGHTY, Herman Daniel "Ike" c1916-2015

LEIGHTY

Posted By: K. L. Kittleson
Date: 9/4/2015 at 18:02:38

Biography--

Herman Daniel “Ike” Leighty, a salesman, was promoted to a “Larger Territory” on August 20, 2015.

He would have been one hundred years old on November 11.

Ike was born in a farmhouse near Macomb, in western Illinois, the youngest of five siblings. His father was a sharecropper farmer. The family moved to a small, rented house in Macomb in 1918, where Ike’s mother died of TB in the 1921 flu epidemic.

Ike’s sales career began at age 11, on the town square in Macomb: Baby Ruth candy bars for 5 cents, to raise money for Sunday School. He discovered he enjoyed talking to people, offering them a benefit, persuading them. “Selling doesn’t begin until the customer says ‘No’,” Ike liked to say.

Ike moved to Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1932, age 16, just before his father died. He was adopted by the Arthur L. and Anna Mae Fergason family, his oldest brother Wayne’s in-laws. In 1931, Arthur had bought the 22-room Litchfield Mansion in Cedar Heights, later known as Mandalay Apartments, for $15,000 in unpaid taxes, and needed Ike’s help to open it as a supper club and bed-and-breakfast. Ike said, “It was quite a move for me, from two rented rooms over a grocery in Macomb, to a 22-room stone mansion, in the middle of the depression.”

Ike was raised in the Methodist Church in Macomb. The Fergasons attended First Congregational Church in Waterloo, IA, which became his church home for the next eighty-three years. Ike graduated from Cedar Falls High School in 1934, a year older than his classmates, because he had flunked fourth grade in Macomb. Jobs were hard to find.

Ike attended Iowa State Teachers College (ISTC, now University of Northern Iowa) for a year 1934-35, where he met Marjorie Jane Gibson at a fraternity dance. Ike dropped out of college, after a year, to work for Burgess Battery Company, as a traveling salesman covering Northeast Iowa, delivering “dry” batteries to hardware and drug stores.

Ike resumed his education at the University of Iowa in 1938, graduating in Business in 1941. Ike and Marjorie Gibson married June 15, 1941, in LaSalle, IL, with Ike’s oldest brother Wayne, a Methodist minister, presiding, and departed to honeymoon in California.

En route, Ike received a telegram offering him a job as a contracting agent with the War Department, based at the John Deere Waterloo Works, which had suspended tractor manufacture to build transmissions for Army tanks. Ike and Marge cut the trip West short, returning to the Cedar Valley to begin Ike’s long career here.

In 1942, the War Department transferred Ike to Racine, Wisconsin, to the Massey-Ferguson tractor plant, dedicated to Army tank assembly. Their son, Bill, was born in Racine, June 18, 1943.

Ike joined the Navy as a Supply Corps officer in October, 1943, assigned to four months’ training in Boston, where the young family lived in a basement apartment on Copley Square. Ensign H.D. Leighty was assigned to brief aviation supply training at Banana River Naval Air Station, Florida, and ordered to report to the Commander of Pacific Forces in Honolulu, and shipped out from California on June 6, 1944. Marge and Bill went to her parents’ farm near Danville, Illinois, to await Ike’s return.

Ike was based in the Southwest Pacific, in New Guinea, Australia, and the Admiralty and Philippine islands until the War ended. He returned from the War as a Lt. JG in November, 1946, to the Gibson farm to pick up Marge and Bill, age 3.

The family returned to Cedar Falls, where Ike happened to spot a “blind” employment ad in the Courier for a Sales Associate. He called the Courier, which revealed it was from the Hinson Manufacturing Company, founded in Waterloo in 1923 by Clyde Hinson, to make canvas side curtains for Model T Fords. Clyde had diversified, brought sons Jim and Bill into the business, and had made a variety of sewn canvas items for the War Department. Ike and Bill Hinson had been fraternity brothers at ISTC in 1933. Ike was hired by the Hinsons in November, 1946, as Salesman, soon promoted to Sales Administrator, in charge of finding new markets, developing new products, and managing a sales force. “They treated me like a third brother, bringing me into the Sunnyside Country Club and the Rotary Club,” Ike said. Daughter, Jane, was born in May, 1948.

The Fifties were good. Ike and Marge moved into their new house at 1066 Prospect Blvd. in 1952. They had many friends and were very engaged in the community. Ike earned his pilot’s license in 1958, logging 2,500 business travel hours in the Hinson company planes, as the company diversified and prospered. He flew well into his eighties, a member of UFO – United Flying Octogenarians.

The Hinson family sold the company to a California conglomerate, Royal Industries, in 1967. Ike’s wife, Marge, died December 1, 1970. In a downsizing, Ike lost his job in 1973, at age 58, freeing his entrepreneurial spirit to “capitalize on a negative,” to begin his new career as a solo sales and marketing consultant. He was soon introduced, by a mutual friend, to Joe Nelson, who had invented the Filter Minder gauge for preventing over-servicing air cleaner elements, but hadn’t found a market for it. Ike and Joe and Fran Nelson founded Engineered Products Company (EPC) in Waterloo, in 1977. Ike’s decades of sales experience won orders for Filter Minders from the major truck fleets, for retrofits, and then from the major truck, construction, and ag equipment manufacturers, where it became standard equipment. Joe led new product design until he died in 1984. Ike bought Fran’s share of the company, grew EPC for the next fifteen years, and sold it to the employees in 1989; the EPC team had become “family.” EPC developed many new products, and has grown to employ fifty people in Waterloo.

In 1985, EPC’s CPA, Tom Siders, suggested that Ike start a charitable family foundation, and invite Bill and Jane and their spouses to join him on the board, which now also includes four from the third generation. The Leighty Foundation has become an ideal way for the family to help Ike with “the stewardship of God’s great bounty which has been entrusted to me.”

Ike was board chair of The Leighty Foundation until he died; he saw its thirtieth anniversary. Please visit: www.leightyfoundation.org

Ike also established a donor-advised fund at the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa, and funded several scholarships at UNI, University of Iowa, and Hawkeye Community College. But he was most proud of the “Mother Moon Service Scholarships,” awarded annually to high school students in Black Hawk County and in McDonough County, IL, where Ike grew up. Sadie “Mother” Moon was a neighbor with ten children, who welcomed the five Leighty kids to join hers at the table, in play, and in her Sunday School class. Ike personally contributed to many local and worldwide charitable and non-profit organizations. “We can never repay all that has been given to us by those who love us. We can only pass it on,” Ike often said.

Ike and Myrtle Telleen Collins were introduced in 1990 by Don Baldwin, the same ISTC classmate who had introduced Ike and Marge in 1935. Ike and Myrtle became great friends, maintained their separate homes, and enjoyed world travel together. Myrtle died in 2002.

Ike and Emile Stingley married in 2004, and also greatly enjoyed traveling the world and visiting family. They were so different, yet so alike and so supporting of each other.

Ike was a member of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, Waterloo Rotary and Elks clubs, Quiet Birdmen, Plungers Unlimited, Sunnyside Country Club, and the Defense Orientation Conference Association (DOCA) – with whom he traveled the world. He was a founder and Post Commander of the Guy F. Iversen AMVETS Post # 49 in Cedar Falls, and served on the Grout Museum District and Community National Bank boards for many years.

Ike’s last public appearance was July 21, 2015, at a Cedar Valley Chamber Alliance lunch, followed by an interview conversation with retired Waterloo banker, Joe Vich. The video is at: https://vimeo.com/136725450

Ike leaves these family members on the “Old Territory,” to continue the family’s legacy of stewardship:

Wife Emile Stingley Leighty;

Son Bill (Nancy Waterman) Leighty, grandchildren: Will (Tiffany) Leighty, Wayne (Heidi Reifenstein) Leighty, and great-grandchildren: Owen, Greyson, Elliot, Felix, and Ilyana Leighty;

Daughter Jane (Bob) Leighty Justis, grandchildren: Lisa (Hillary Lipton) Justis and Ryan Justis, and great-grandchildren: Addison, Tate, Trent, and Jackson Justis.

Ike outlived his siblings Wayne, Veda, Marvin, and Freida, and his first wife, Marjorie Jane Gibson Leighty.

Donations in Ike’s memory may be made to the First Congregational United Church of Christ, Grout Museum District, the Guy F. Iversen AMVETS Post #49, or to a charity of your choice where you participate and find meaning.

Services:
10:30 a.m. Friday, August 28, 2015 at First Congregational United Church of Christ, 608 West Fourth Street, Waterloo

Cemetery:
service preceded by interment at Waterloo Memorial Park Cemetery with military rites by Cedar Falls Amvet Post # 49 and U.S. Navy Honor Guard

· The Leighty Foundation: www.leightyfoundation.org

· Video of July 21 interview: https://vimeo.com/136725450

Source: Locke Funeral Home website
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NOTES:

According to www.people-finders.ws , Herman was 99 years old, so he was born about 1916.

Black Hawk Obituaries maintained by Karen De Groote.
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