Darrel Fisk Inman was born Feb. 10, 1945, to Anna Mae Fisk and Keller Inman. He grew up on a beautiful, forested ranch property in Noti, Ore., that was homesteaded by his grandparents. He was the youngest of three children and had a mostly idyllic childhood, hunting and building things. As a teenager, he made money driving a tractor around, plowing fields and harvesting hay. He once plugged the hole in a hornet's nest and little Darrel was stung more than 100 times.
Darrel graduated from Elmira High School in 1963, one in a class of 76. After high school, he attended Oregon State University and started in forestry, but hated botany class so he changed his major to mechanical engineering. He paid his way through college by working in the sawmills every summer. His favorite class at Oregon State involved blowing up stumps.
In college, he saw his future wife, Sally, across the cafeteria, and broke up with his high school girlfriend to ask her out. Sally and Darrel were married in 1967 and later moved to Connecticut, where Darrel worked for Remington. Pregnant with their first child in 1970, and homesick for the West after watching the movie "Paint Your Wagon," they moved to Lewiston, where he accepted his dream job as a design engineer for CCI, an ammunitions company.
Darrel had several titles in his 30 years at CCI: director of engineering, general manager of sporting equipment division and president of the sporting equipment division of Blount. He developed a patent, made a lot of lifelong friends and loved his career. In 2001, he retired at age 56, basically to concentrate on his many hobbies.
He was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis in 1993, but medications and treatments kept him feeling good until his disease developed into liver cancer in 2017. He passed away at home on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2017, in Lewiston.
Darrel and Sally were married for 50 years and had two amazing children - Stephanie Inman-Tsourmas (John Tsourmas) of Boise, and Todd Inman (Laura Inman) of Beaverton, Ore. They have four grandchildren: Kate Tsourmas, Amy Tsourmas, Luke Inman and Paige Inman.
Darrel was also an avid hunter, shooter, mechanic and craftsman. He was a state skeet and trapshooting champion in Connecticut and Idaho. He was an active board member of the Jack O'Connor Hunting Heritage Education Center. If you needed something, anything done or fixed, you'd call Darrel. He built everything - cannons, gas engines, airplanes, his own shop, wood stoves, several guns, powder horns, remote control boats, muzzleloaders. He loved a challenge. In 2001, he decided to see if he could make a tool in the United States of exceptional quality and at a reasonable price. The Hoedag garden tool was born. Sally and Darrel ran around and sold these tools at garden shows, and Hoedag garnered a cult-like following. By 2017, Darrel had made more than 22,000 Hoedags, all by hand.
Darrel was kind, honest, hardworking and brilliant. He loved dogs and cats and treated them like family. He loved going out to breakfast. He loved huckleberry picking and eating half a watermelon at one time. He had his pilot's license and restored an Aeronca, built a Baby Ace single-seat airplane from scratch, and loved his Cessna 182.
He seldom raised his voice and once broke off his tooth by gritting so hard when his young kids were fighting (his in-laws were in town and he really didn't want to yell and seem like a bad parent). He was a person who treated everyone the same, no matter their position in life.
He was a wonderful husband and an excellent father whose children love and respect him. He made their lives so full and so good. He was fun to play Balderdash with because he would laugh so hard he couldn't breathe. He was stubborn. He used to bake chocolate chip cookies and make pancakes and Genesee sausage. He loved playing Texas Hold 'em, going backpacking, hunting, collecting guns, restoring airplanes and gas engines, going on safari in Africa, making furniture for his daughter, woodcutting and eating Sally's homemade bread. He did not like sitting still. A favorite Darrel-ism was: "The difficult can be done immediately, but the impossible takes a little longer."
Darrel was an inventor, an outdoorsman, a man who could make or fix anything and a friend to many. His life is the epitome of one well lived, doing what he loved and helping people his entire life. We miss him terribly.
There will be a celebration of Darrel's life at 10 a.m. Saturday at Quality Inn in Clarkston.
No flowers please. If you'd like to make a donation in Darrel's name, we suggest the Lewiston Humane Society, Helping Hands of Lewiston, or the Jack O'Connor Hunting Heritage Education Center.
