Businessman took up sailing in retirement

5/28/2003

Howard E. Mitchell, a World War II veteran who founded a former electroplating company, died Monday in Lake Park Hospice. He was 80.

Mr. Mitchell had been ill for six years, suffering from complications of a heart attack, his wife, Lois, said. A longtime resident of West Toledo, he had been a patient at several medical facilities for about a month.

Mr. Mitchell volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and was stationed at various bases in the South. The war ended before he was sent overseas. He and his wife were married in 1946, the year he was discharged, and he went into business.

He operated a printing company on Front Street in East Toledo in the late 1940s and then became a traveling salesman for Codman Brass, a Massachusetts company that dealt in tools for industry. His territory was Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan and he stayed with the company about a decade.

Mr. Mitchell and partner Joe Robie started an electroplating venture, Mitchell-Robie Co. on Upton Avenue. When they parted ways, Mr. Mitchell renamed the business M&M Plating Racks, Inc. The letters stood for his name and his son, Gary Mitchell.

The firm coated auto parts and racks that held parts with plastic. At its height, it employed about 10 people on Troy Street in North Toledo. He retired in the late 1980s, and the business closed in the 1990s.

In retirement, Mr. Mitchell took up sailing on Lake Erie and golfed more frequently. He and his wife enjoyed big band music and ballroom dancing.

“They cut a mean jitterbug,” daughter Pamela Mitchell-Giagni said.

Mr. Mitchell, a tenor, sometimes sang at parties with his late sister, Leora Jones. Their parents had been vaudeville performers before settling in Toledo where his father, a Spanish-American war veteran, was a sales representative.

Born in East Toledo, he attended Longfellow Elementary School in West Toledo, and graduated from Devilbiss High School in 1941. He studied business at the University of Toledo before World War II broke out.

In the 1950s, he led a Boy Scout troop in Regina Coeli Parish.

Surviving are his wife, Lois; sons, Gary and David; daughters, Pamela Mitchell-Giagni and Mary Beth Streight; eight grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and 13 half brothers and sisters.

Visitation will be after 2 p.m. today at the Walker Funeral Home, where a Rosary service is set for 7 p.m. The funeral will be at 1 p.m. tomorrow in Gesu Catholic Church. The family suggests tributes to the American Heart Association.