Katrina's Lives Lost:	Hingle, Gary 1954 - 2005
Submitted By: 		N.O.V.A March 2006
Source:			Times Picayune 

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For 15 years, Gary Hingle worked on his house in Slidell. He always had a
project going. He laid carpeting, he hung wallpaper, he rewired the fuse
box, he installed a Jacuzzi. He loved figuring things out and working them
through.

"He never met a challenge he didn't want to beat," says his fiancée, Ana
Fradera.

He used some of the same talents — patience, persistence, inquisitiveness —
in his business, the DG Body Shop, which he opened in 1980 with his partner
and best friend, David Forsyth.

"We were like brothers," says Forsyth. "We told each other all our secrets.
We talked about problems. We got into arguments. We settled them. It was
like a marriage, to tell you the truth."

Born and bred in Gentilly, Hingle graduated from Holy Cross High School in
1972 and went to work at his uncle’s body shop in eastern New Orleans,
where he and Forsyth met and hatched their plans. Hingle had always loved
cars. As a young man, he had a race car named Mighty Mouse, a Camaro with
blue metal-flake paint. Later, he drove a 1999 Corvette. And recently, he
began restoring an antique Studebaker.

Hingle had a jeans-and-polo-shirt kind of style with dark curly hair and a
trim physique. He liked soft rock music, action movies and do-it-yourself
books. He liked red beans on Mondays and he liked to watch drag-races.

Married and divorced and engaged to be married again, he was close to his
two children and a pushover for his two grandchildren. Peepaw, they called
him, and he didn’t mind a bit when they climbed all over him or cuddled in
his lap.

Hingle was a man of habits and traditions. Every morning, he had breakfast
with Forsyth at Betsy’s Pancake House on Canal Street: eggs and grits and
orange juice. Every Saturday night, he took his extended family out for
dinner: Semolina's or the Macaroni Grill or the Southside Café. And every
Carnival, he took three days off for the Endymion parade.

He had been in Endymion almost from the beginning and had been a lieutenant
for 20 years. He was aversive to crowds and spent Mardi Gras in his living
room, but he loved Endymion. His daughter, Lisa, was a maid one year and he
had her costume on display at home in his game room.

Last May, Hingle and his son, Eric, finally finished working on the sunroom
of the Slidell house. It had started out a patio, but they had closed it
in, tiled the floors, put on a roof, hung the Sheetrock, applied some
molding and put in a fancy chair rail all the way around.

The tree that killed Hingle finished off the sunroom too.

"It's gone," says Eric. "Tree fell smack on top of it. It's amazing how
long it takes you to do stuff and how fast it can be destroyed."

Gary Hingle's funeral was held at the Schoen Funeral Home in Covington on
Sept. 30.