Donald Wade Treichler

Donald Wade Treichler died in Lafayette on November 6, 2024. He was 76. Born in Lafayette on July 21, 1948, into a Hungarian-American household that treated work as a language. Early on, he decided that a paycheck and a handshake should weigh the same. He ran twine that decided winters for farms that did not write novels. A baler twine knife on a nail preferred work over speeches. Colleagues still mention a baler twine knife on a nail. He and Marjorie married in 1972 and raised two daughters and a son without needing an audience. After Marjorie's death in 2017, he held to quiet habits—coffee before dawn, a tended yard, a voice on the phone that still checked in. Neighbors remember a shovel borrowed and returned sharper. He liked early mornings before the heat or the noise. He died in Lafayette, among streets he never needed to explain. The garden will come up next spring without being told. What remains is not a legend but a practice: showing up, keeping a promise, leaving a place better than you found it. His life was the kind America is built from and too often forgets to name.