Mike Triebsch

 The first time that I met Mike Triebsch was at “The Bristol” restaurant in Louisville.   Ann Feldkamp, Tracey’s friend since their Centre College days, had told my wife that she was “in like” with Mike and wanted us to meet him.  Shortly thereafter, Mike decided to propose to Ann but he wanted to make the moment special by combining it with another one of his passions, which was sailing.  The idea was to take Ann out on the water and raise the sail.  He had written on the sail, “will you marry me?”  But it was a windy day and he couldn’t get the sail up.  Not to be deterred,  Mike proposed to Ann on the dock.  We were at their wedding and it is gratifying to know that the two had just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary.  We have known each other for so long that Ann was Tracey’s maid of honor and they were both the godparents to our youngest daughter.  I always thought of Mike as being the big brother that I never had.

In retirement, Mike became a part time handyman.  He believed that you could do anything that you wanted if you had a lot of self confidence and a little common sense.  For example, Mike removed that load bearing walls from his basement on Cowling Avenue and installed new support beams that he had bought from the hardware store.  The idea was to dig up the old floor, cart out the dirt through the back door, and make more head room in the basement.  Mike said that he spent a sleepless night listening to every creak and groan that the house made, half expecting it to collapse of itself.  It didn’t.  The support beams held and Mike earned a lot of respect for completing this demanding project.  He was always doing things like building a picnic table for use in his back yard, or a ramp for his son, or a play set or my children when they were young.  Mike dove right in on these projects with gusto.

The last time that I saw Mike was at Adam’s graduation party.  He had surgery for a blood clot that morning and he couldn’t get up from his chair.  He had such a big personality that he wouldn’t let his health stand in on a good time.   He smiled through the pain and just seemed glad to be there.

The tragedy of Mike’s early death is that he was finally able to retire after a long and distinguished career.  He had worked at the Louisville Zoo, Louisville Public Media, Olmsted Parks Conservancy, and, for 23 years, he worked in Internal Communications for Toyota.  When his job moved to Dallas, Mike had to move with it and his last years at Toyota meant commuting from Louisville.  Further, Mike had earned his Masters from Bellarmine University, saw his son get his Masters from the University of Louisville, and saw his daughter become a sophomore at Centre College.  It is patently unfair that, just when it was his time to relax and enjoy an easeful retirement, Mike was plagued with the health problems that ultimately took his life.

Mike was proud of the fact that he was a native born Pennsylvanian.  In a casual conversation he would bring up Frank Lloyd Wriight’s “Falling Waters” or talk about how General Braddock was defeated at the Battle of the Monongahela in French and Indian war.  We went skiing together at Seven Springs, Pennsylvania because that is where he went when he was a teenager.  He wasn’t a very good skier when he was young but preferred to sneak in some whiskey and drink on the slopes.  More than anything, however, Mike loved his Pittsburgh Steelers.  I had never been to an NFL game and I decided that I wanted to share the experience with Mike so, two years ago, we drove to Cincinnati to see the Bengals play the Steelers.  In fact, in my last text to Mike, I had written “Go Steelers, Beat the Browns!”  He gave me a “thumbs up” emoji on that one.  

His other interests included hunting, fishing, skiing, and Rock and Roll music.  He was so passionate about hunting that he travelled for over twenty hours to get to Nova Scotia to fulfill his life long dream in of shooting a moose.  It was such a long and desperate trip that David Feldkamp, his brother in law, exclaimed, “You must have hated that moose!”  Mike took me fishing in the back woods of Kentucky one weekend, but we were skunked in that we didn’t catch a single fish.  He said that it was alright because he had been fishing a couple of months before.  He shared a makeshift cabin with a friend.  Arriving late in the evening, he saw that his cabin mate had broken into his foot locker and stolen his bottle of whiskey.  The guy was sitting on the floor, drunk as a monkey, when Mike walked in on him.  Rather than get angry at the theft, like most people would have done, Mike sat down and shared whatever was left in the bottle.  The lesson is that he refused to let a little thing like stolen whiskey get in the way of a good time.  

In conclusion, the image that I like to have of Mike in retirement was of him and his dog, Washburn, driving around the neighborhood to go to the hardware store.  One time, when he saw me sitting in front of my condo building, he stopped to say hello.  Both man and dog looked so happy just to be out and about.  That is the kind of guy that Mike was; full of personality and the kind of guy with whom you would like to share a beer with.  And, almost as if it were scripted, the Steelers defeated their hated rivals, the Raiders, the Sunday following his death.