Edward Neurohr was born to German immigrants in Flint, Michigan, on August 8th, 1930; he was the youngest of nine. He grew up in a black neighborhood. It was the only part of town his family could afford to live in, and his mother didn't want to live in the German neighborhood, as "they were Americans now."

He married his high school sweetheart, in secret, while she was still in high school. When her mother found out, she said “He’s German. He’s going to get drunk and beat you,” neither of which ever happened.

College didn't work out. He always told me that it was because he always stayed up late watching movies in the student union, but he later confided that it was because he had a tendency to "read words backwards," but nobody knew what that was back then.

When he went to get a job in the GM factory, he was destined for the assembly line, mostly on account of his socioeconomic status. A letter from his local priest got him an apprenticeship in “Jig and Fixture” at Fisher Body. The four year program consisted of several thousand hours of trigonometry, general physics, body work, and fabrication skills.

When working in the "shop" he always had coffee and a doughnut nearby. When asked "if his wife didn't make any breakfast for him" he replied "It's none of your fucking business what my wife does." That comment probably cost him any shot of getting ahead at General Motors.

He moved to Georgia, to work at Lockheed. His job was to get 50 farmboys to assemble airplanes. He was shocked to discover that not only could they not read blueprints, many of them couldn't read at all. He taught them the principles of assembly by teaching them how to draw blueprints of milk bottles. Turns out they are more or less the same shape as airplanes. Despite his skills at managing the shop floor, he couldn't get ahead at Lockheed because he didn't have an engineering degree, so he took a second job making pizzas.

He discovered there was a lot more money in pizzas than in airplanes, so he opened Bella Pizza.

He made pizzas damn near every day for 24 years. He felt like the place went to hell if he wasn't there himself. When he caught me making sloppy pizzas one rush hour, he told me "just try to make it perfect every time." The pizza empire was pretty much built on that principle.

He used to drink about ten cups of coffee a day when working in the kitchen. It wasn’t always pleasant, but it got the job done. It can’t go without mention: he had a fierce temper, though most people outside of the family never saw it. It generally subsided when he retired.

I heard that he occasionally kicked out unruly drunken customers by storming into the dining room brandishing a pizza cutter.

In a time when Atlanta didn't have a lot of bona-fide sports heroes, "Pistol" Pete Maravich came into the restaurant and walked up to the counter and asked for a pizza. My dad told him he had to stand in line. Pete asked "Do you know who I am?" and my dad replied, "I don't care who you are, you have to stand in line." No wonder we never had signed photos of celebrities on the wall.

When I was 10 (?) years old, I spotted a tiny burn hole on his shirt. He could have easily told me it was from the pizza kitchen, but he told me the truth: He was hanging out after the restaurant closed one night, and he went out for a late dinner and a drink with some of the restaurant staff. (The Lark and the Dove, maybe some other 70s hangout?) At some point, they were passing a joint, and they convinced him to try it. Having never smoked in his life, he coughed so hard that he dropped it on his shirt and burned a tiny hole in it. That was the beginning and end of his experimentation.

He was only drunk twice in his life. His nickname at Bella was "half a beer Ed."

He retired in 1985, and spent the next 24 years driving around the country with my mom, usually in a motorhome. It was bigger than a Manhattan apartment, with a satellite dish, so they could watch Michael Jordan. My mom called it "Jewish Camping."

He built my mother her dream house, on Beaver Island in Michigan. After getting ripped off by a contractor who was both incompetent and a thief, he came to job site and told him "You're not getting another fucking penny from me." When asked, "What about my crew? We just worked 12 hours a day for over a week on your house." his reply was "Fuck them too." There are few things I love reading more than the "threatening” letter from the contractor detailing this conversation. The contractor didn't get another penny, he was fired, as was the next incompetent guy, and my dad finished the job himself, at the age of 72.

If a homeless person asked him for fifty cents, he would give them $5. He occasionally gave away cars, if someone really needed one.

My parents once spotted a woman and a ten-year-old boy on the side of the road, with car trouble. He picked them up, got their car to a service station, and drove them home. In this case, "home" was about 200 miles away, on the south side of Chicago.

My father, like many who grew up in the depression, could get extremely anxious about money. He pulled all of his money out of the stock market 20 years ago, and wouldn't let my mother use a credit card on the Internet.

Despite this, he once loaned a massive chunk of his life savings to a friend who was starting a business. When he was paid back, less than a year later, he would only take the same amount of interest he would have received if the money had been sitting in his savings account.

He became a skilled silversmith in his 60s. It seemed incongruous at the time, but given his shop training, it makes perfect sense.

He couldn't go a day without going to "the club" - any coffeeshop with decent coffee, a comfy chair, and a newspaper.

His German tendencies manifested in strange ways. Once we came for a visit and he went out and detailed Tresa's car. He'd stop by and fix or clean something that caught his eye, though recently he had a habit of "fixing" things in his own quirky way.

Despite being "just a pizzamaker," he put three kids through college, two through graduate school, and he made a hell of a start on the grandkids too.

He didn’t know how to mess with the TV remote, so he left it on the “cowboy movie” channel for the last three years.

He really, really loved to drive. He and my mother once drove a thousand miles to see Michael Jordan play in person. He would spend $25 in gas for a $10 lunch. He would drive five hours to see his brother, have a cup of coffee, and head back home. He and my mother once drove nearly 300 miles from Door County to Chicago because they wanted a decent hot dog (ok, they visited me too, but the hot dog prompted the trip). He never had a car accident.

At the age of 78, he had two gay roommates move in. One was a friend and former neighbor; he and his partner had a car accident, and as a result, they'd lost a car, half a paycheck, and one of their jobs. He gave them the master bedroom. When I hear myself telling this, I think it sounds like the premise for a bad sitcom.

I can be pretty lazy, but once I get going, I work and work and work until there is no more work to be done. The first time I did this, I thought, "I got this from my dad."

He once told me that "everything he ever got in life was a result of taking a risk." And that they were usually my mother's ideas, and always the result of her convincing.

Eddie passed away on January 21st, 2009.