Life Story for David C. Heckert
David Clinton Heckert 12/31/1939-4/30/2022
If you ever wondered how chemists snuck calcium into your orange juice, you should have asked Dave Heckert, although if you had just met him casually it might be years before you heard him mention his role in the process. Indeed, most family friends knew him as a quiet man, although a few were close enough to know that he could say almost anything he wanted in a perfect imitation of Donald Duck’s voice.
David Clinton Heckert’s story began on the last day of 1939, when he was delivered at home in the Tygart Valley Homesteads of Dailey, West Virginia to Clinton and Ruth (Bittinger) Heckert. The “Homesteads” were part of FDR’s “New Deal” and something of a pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had actually visited the Heckert home (and kissed older sister Jean!) the previous year.
The Heckert family would move to Elgin, Illinois, in 1944, where he began a lifelong pattern of working hard, excelling in school, and learning about sciences of all kinds. Going to high school in the 1950s, Dave, like most of his generation, walked uphill to school both ways, if only because you had to cross the Fox River valley to get there. While his family had escaped the poverty of West Virginia, he knew then that the only way he was going to college was on his own, so he started saving money from first his paper route and, later, from Gromer’s Supermarket and other odd jobs.
His introduction to chemistry came from a quest to build fireworks and rockets during his teenage years—the resulting homemade pyrotechnics were almost universally (literally) bombs. Once, when neighbors called the police about the numerous backyard explosions, he told the responding officer it was just a chemistry experiment gone wrong. When they asked him if he could perhaps move his “experiments” to the basement, he replied that he was afraid that he might blow out the windows.
Elgin High School was therefore probably happy to graduate him in 1957 and send him on to the Church of the Brethren’s Manchester College in Indiana, where he sweet-talked himself into a tuition reduction because his father worked for the church’s general offices back in Elgin. He graduated in 1961 as a math and chemistry double major, with a minor in physics and a burgeoning rock and mineral collection. As much as he liked geology, his PhD at The Ohio State University, funded by the National Science Foundation, would be in organic chemistry. In Columbus he met Rebecca Jean Farringer, and he and Becky would marry in December, 1964. After a postdoctoral year at Iowa State University, he accepted a position as a research chemist at Procter and Gamble, and in 1966 he and Becky moved to Oxford, Ohio, where they would live until last year.
Their family grew in the 1970s with the addition of sons Andrew and Benjamin, and they also housed niece Sandra (Heckert) Pupa while she finished a degree at Miami University. They were faithful members of the community, especially of the congregation of the Oxford United Methodist Church, where he served on (and sometimes chaired) the Board of Trustees. There his calm demeanor and chemistry experience were instrumental in the restoration of the (leaded) stained-glass window and may have saved the church millions of dollars when asbestos was discovered, and quickly mitigated, during a renovation project.
While he could hyper-focus at work and on service, he also believed in leisure time, and the family vacationed yearly at Fort Myers Beach in Florida and drove across the country almost every summer to visit family and various national parks and other natural wonders. Dave could compartmentalize his life exceptionally well, rising early to be a chemist by weekday, and playing kick ball, whiffle ball, kick the ball over the wire, and wrestling and swimming with his sons on evenings and weekends. He strove to instill his work ethic in others, extolling the virtues of “do it yourself,” especially yardwork, long before it became a fashionable acronym. He was generous to others, especially with family members whose lives were not working out as well. Like many chemists, he certainly had a strong sense that there was one proper way to do things, and those who he helped might well know what he thought of the error of their ways, but he was also forgiving.
At some point he switched from fireworks to gardening as a hobby, using ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer, not an explosive. Southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana is something of a paleontologist’s paradise, and he happily collected trilobites and other invertebrate fossils from streams and roadcuts. When possible, this was combined with family picnics and the quintessential Heckert pastime: throwing rocks in the creek. Although his family had lacked the time and money for organized sports during his childhood, he was quite strong and athletic. Those at the Oxford pool knew him as the guy that swam entire laps underwater, and even late in life he would startle Miami’s lifeguards by retrieving lost items from the bottom of the 18’ diving well with ease.
He retired from Procter and Gamble in 1997, traveling with Becky to Africa, Europe, Alaska, and Hawaii, volunteering for the church, keeping up with the yardwork and playing with his granddaughters until he scarcely knew how he had ever had time to work in the first place. He had few, if any, vices, and his strongest expletive was probably “Shostakovich,” (yes, the Russian composer), sometimes muttered under his breath in duck talk.
So…the orange juice. He would never brag about them, but he held dozens of patents as a result of his 31 years at Procter and Gamble, at least one of which involves putting calcium in orange juice in a form that the body can absorb but does not alter the taste. He would be the first to tell you it was just his job, and that he was part of a team for each accomplishment. And, while we are proud of those patents, too, we are more proud of everything else we document here. Sadly, over the past two decades, dementia steadily robbed all of us of the scientist, man, father, and husband that described here.
Dave was preceded in death by his parents, Ruth and Clinton Heckert, a step-mother Mildred (Etter) Heckert, and his brother James (JB) Heckert. He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Becky Heckert, sons Andrew (Kristan Cockerill) Heckert of Boone, NC and Benjamin (Kara) Heckert, granddaughters Kailin, Tessa (& fiance Nick Lowery), Delaney, and Breena, his sister Jean Mionske of Island Lake, Illinois, nieces Sandra (Larry) Pupa and Su (Mike) Tyrell; his niece Amy (Heckert) Hudson and husband Heath and nephew Aaron Heckert with wife Michelle and their boys Zach and Jake.
We ask, because, in his prime and faced with granddaughter Delaney’s diagnosis, Grandpa Heckert (Dave) would have split his time between reading every technical article he could to understand the science behind her cancer and tirelessly helping care for her during the exhausting operations and treatments. And talking “duck talk” just to make her smile.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in his memory and granddaughter Delaney’s honor to the DragonFly Foundation of Cincinnati, 506 Oak Street, Cincinnati, OH 45219 or on the web: www.dragonfly.org – To maximize the local impact you can click “How To Give” then “Donate Now”. When filling out this info, use “Greater Cincinnati/Dayton” as the region (drop down list) and be sure to click the box for “Make this donation in someone’s honor or memory,” when the field opens up, please put “In honor of Delaney Heckert, in Memory of David Heckert.”
A celebration of life will be held later this summer near Oxford, Ohio, and will include opportunities to skip stones.
If you ever wondered how chemists snuck calcium into your orange juice, you should have asked Dave Heckert, although if you had just met him casually it might be years before you heard him mention his role in the process. Indeed, most family friends knew him as a quiet man, although a few were close enough to know that he could say almost anything he wanted in a perfect imitation of Donald Duck’s voice.
David Clinton Heckert’s story began on the last day of 1939, when he was delivered at home in the Tygart Valley Homesteads of Dailey, West Virginia to Clinton and Ruth (Bittinger) Heckert. The “Homesteads” were part of FDR’s “New Deal” and something of a pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had actually visited the Heckert home (and kissed older sister Jean!) the previous year.
The Heckert family would move to Elgin, Illinois, in 1944, where he began a lifelong pattern of working hard, excelling in school, and learning about sciences of all kinds. Going to high school in the 1950s, Dave, like most of his generation, walked uphill to school both ways, if only because you had to cross the Fox River valley to get there. While his family had escaped the poverty of West Virginia, he knew then that the only way he was going to college was on his own, so he started saving money from first his paper route and, later, from Gromer’s Supermarket and other odd jobs.
His introduction to chemistry came from a quest to build fireworks and rockets during his teenage years—the resulting homemade pyrotechnics were almost universally (literally) bombs. Once, when neighbors called the police about the numerous backyard explosions, he told the responding officer it was just a chemistry experiment gone wrong. When they asked him if he could perhaps move his “experiments” to the basement, he replied that he was afraid that he might blow out the windows.
Elgin High School was therefore probably happy to graduate him in 1957 and send him on to the Church of the Brethren’s Manchester College in Indiana, where he sweet-talked himself into a tuition reduction because his father worked for the church’s general offices back in Elgin. He graduated in 1961 as a math and chemistry double major, with a minor in physics and a burgeoning rock and mineral collection. As much as he liked geology, his PhD at The Ohio State University, funded by the National Science Foundation, would be in organic chemistry. In Columbus he met Rebecca Jean Farringer, and he and Becky would marry in December, 1964. After a postdoctoral year at Iowa State University, he accepted a position as a research chemist at Procter and Gamble, and in 1966 he and Becky moved to Oxford, Ohio, where they would live until last year.
Their family grew in the 1970s with the addition of sons Andrew and Benjamin, and they also housed niece Sandra (Heckert) Pupa while she finished a degree at Miami University. They were faithful members of the community, especially of the congregation of the Oxford United Methodist Church, where he served on (and sometimes chaired) the Board of Trustees. There his calm demeanor and chemistry experience were instrumental in the restoration of the (leaded) stained-glass window and may have saved the church millions of dollars when asbestos was discovered, and quickly mitigated, during a renovation project.
While he could hyper-focus at work and on service, he also believed in leisure time, and the family vacationed yearly at Fort Myers Beach in Florida and drove across the country almost every summer to visit family and various national parks and other natural wonders. Dave could compartmentalize his life exceptionally well, rising early to be a chemist by weekday, and playing kick ball, whiffle ball, kick the ball over the wire, and wrestling and swimming with his sons on evenings and weekends. He strove to instill his work ethic in others, extolling the virtues of “do it yourself,” especially yardwork, long before it became a fashionable acronym. He was generous to others, especially with family members whose lives were not working out as well. Like many chemists, he certainly had a strong sense that there was one proper way to do things, and those who he helped might well know what he thought of the error of their ways, but he was also forgiving.
At some point he switched from fireworks to gardening as a hobby, using ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer, not an explosive. Southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana is something of a paleontologist’s paradise, and he happily collected trilobites and other invertebrate fossils from streams and roadcuts. When possible, this was combined with family picnics and the quintessential Heckert pastime: throwing rocks in the creek. Although his family had lacked the time and money for organized sports during his childhood, he was quite strong and athletic. Those at the Oxford pool knew him as the guy that swam entire laps underwater, and even late in life he would startle Miami’s lifeguards by retrieving lost items from the bottom of the 18’ diving well with ease.
He retired from Procter and Gamble in 1997, traveling with Becky to Africa, Europe, Alaska, and Hawaii, volunteering for the church, keeping up with the yardwork and playing with his granddaughters until he scarcely knew how he had ever had time to work in the first place. He had few, if any, vices, and his strongest expletive was probably “Shostakovich,” (yes, the Russian composer), sometimes muttered under his breath in duck talk.
So…the orange juice. He would never brag about them, but he held dozens of patents as a result of his 31 years at Procter and Gamble, at least one of which involves putting calcium in orange juice in a form that the body can absorb but does not alter the taste. He would be the first to tell you it was just his job, and that he was part of a team for each accomplishment. And, while we are proud of those patents, too, we are more proud of everything else we document here. Sadly, over the past two decades, dementia steadily robbed all of us of the scientist, man, father, and husband that described here.
Dave was preceded in death by his parents, Ruth and Clinton Heckert, a step-mother Mildred (Etter) Heckert, and his brother James (JB) Heckert. He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Becky Heckert, sons Andrew (Kristan Cockerill) Heckert of Boone, NC and Benjamin (Kara) Heckert, granddaughters Kailin, Tessa (& fiance Nick Lowery), Delaney, and Breena, his sister Jean Mionske of Island Lake, Illinois, nieces Sandra (Larry) Pupa and Su (Mike) Tyrell; his niece Amy (Heckert) Hudson and husband Heath and nephew Aaron Heckert with wife Michelle and their boys Zach and Jake.
We ask, because, in his prime and faced with granddaughter Delaney’s diagnosis, Grandpa Heckert (Dave) would have split his time between reading every technical article he could to understand the science behind her cancer and tirelessly helping care for her during the exhausting operations and treatments. And talking “duck talk” just to make her smile.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in his memory and granddaughter Delaney’s honor to the DragonFly Foundation of Cincinnati, 506 Oak Street, Cincinnati, OH 45219 or on the web: www.dragonfly.org – To maximize the local impact you can click “How To Give” then “Donate Now”. When filling out this info, use “Greater Cincinnati/Dayton” as the region (drop down list) and be sure to click the box for “Make this donation in someone’s honor or memory,” when the field opens up, please put “In honor of Delaney Heckert, in Memory of David Heckert.”
A celebration of life will be held later this summer near Oxford, Ohio, and will include opportunities to skip stones.