by Kitty Felde

I’ve done a lot of different kinds of writing in my life. Playwriting, of course. Fan fiction back when I was in 8th grade, a stab at a romance novel in high school, essays, letters to the editor, grant writing, a historical romance, a middle grade mystery series, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol short stories, blogs, newsletters, and thirty years of journalism.

This month, I was asked to write an obituary for my father.

My father was a quiet man, sanguine, supportive of my theatre career even if he was the audience member snoring through the second act when I was onstage. He ditched my mother in the middle of his mid-life crisis, but I get along with his second wife. He could fix anything.

But how to sum all of that up in an obituary that would offend no one?

There were so many holes to fill. Did I have to write about him starting out his career selling insurance for ships? Did I have to mention that he flunked statistics in college? Were any of his contemporaries still alive to enjoy tales from his younger days?

I started to compile family stories from my six younger siblings. It turned into a therapeutic group text, with old pictures and hilarious stories I’d never heard. Could I include them all?

I didn’t want it to be dry and formulaic. I’d read some really wonderfully funny obituaries of late, but outright belly laughs was not what I had in mind. Yet I couldn’t help the humor that kept popping up on my computer screen.

I realize now that this is the reason we write plays: to tell our family stories in a form that won’t bore the audience. We suss out the drama in our personal history, with complete permission to rewrite it the way we want it.

Perhaps someday, my father will show up in one of my plays or books. For now, he’s memorialized in the form he requested: a simple obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

(If you’d like to read the obit, see below.)

Tom Felde
1929-2024

Tom Felde was born third in a family of seven children – six boys and a girl. His parents drove from Chicago to California on their honeymoon in a Model T Ford. (A journey his daughter and niece are recreating in a 2025 podcast.)

Tom was a gifted athlete – a gift none of his children inherited – and attended Loyola University on an athletic scholarship, playing football and baseball. College was interrupted by two years in the Army, where he was posted in Cold War Germany, writing letters home requesting extra funds and more Sees candy.

He married a girl from Immaculate Heart College named Patricia Jaeger in 1952 and they started their own family of seven, again 6 boys and 1 girl, with a little help from the LA County adoption services.

Tom was active in his church, singing in the choir while clipping his kids’ fingernails, cooking spagetti for the 50/50 raffle nights. He and Pat were social activists and refused to follow the white flight out of Compton.

He could fix anything. Especially bicycles. Not one of his seven children ever had a store bought bike. Instead, they rode refurbished models, fashioned from the bits and pieces from old cycles. He was forever remodeling the house. A table saw sat in the middle of the family room for thirteen years.

He acquired the nickname “Pops” along the way, named after the patriarch in the Speed Racer cartoon series. Pops was notoriously frugal. He refused to hand out quarters for hot showers at the Grand Canyon. When the family VW bus broke down on the way to an annual camping trip, instead of hiring a tow truck, he used coat hanger wire to attach the bumper to the back of a VW bug and towed it down the hill himself, the entire seatbelt-less family riding in the van behind him.

There’s a Billy Joel song that has the lyric: “Tom was a real estate novelist.” Except instead of fiction, Tom wrote the text book which for decades most Californians used to pass the state’s real estate exam. He was a self published author long before it was popular and continued to ship books from his garage until he was well into his 90’s.

After a divorce, Tom lived on a boat for a time, and in 1992, married Manhattan Beach native Cindy Hill. Despite public protestations that he didn’t like cats, they acquired a series of felines. Tom even named one after himself. They remained a happy couple the rest of his life.

Eventually, Tom ran out of gas and at age 95, two days before Election Day, he died. But not before casting his vote by mail.

He is survived by his wife Cindy, brothers John and Peter, children Kitty, Mitch, Matt, Danny, Jerry, Alex, and Dominic, grandchildren Lynnette, Shane, Trevor, Logun, Hunter, Drake, and Rena, and great-grandchildren Olivia, Noah, Amelia, and Lauren. A funeral mass will be held at St. Martha Catholic Church in Murrietta on December 3rd.