Harold R. "Casey" Hoehn

Harold R. "Casey" Hoehn, 93, passed away on the evening of October 8, 2026. Whether you knew him as Harold or Casey, you knew he was a wonderful man.

Do you know how he got the nickname Casey? When Harold's dad, Rudolph, was a young man, a friend compared his work ethic to the legendary American folk hero Casey Jones, and the name stuck. Harold was the firstborn son, and he followed his dad everywhere. Before long, he had a nickname of his own: "Little Casey." That one stuck too, and for the rest of his life, most people knew Harold simply as Casey.

Casey was born in the winter of 1933 in Belgique, Missouri. His parents, Rudolph and Bertha Hoehn, were sharecroppers who farmed another man's land. The house had no electricity and no running water, and supper was often milk soup or cornbread crumbled into a glass of milk. Casey always said they had what they needed.

In the one-room schoolhouse, he found out he had a gift for numbers in the Friday cipher matches. By the time he was nine, he could drive a team of horses. That wasn't for fun. The farm needed him.

That skill was tested in the spring of 1943. With the river rising, the family got out two days before the levee broke, and nine-year-old Casey helped drive the horses twenty miles through the night to his grandfather's house.

In March 1948, his parents bought a forty-acre farm near Longtown, outside Perryville. Fourteen-year-old Casey helped move the family there by wagon. At a narrow one-lane bridge, he pulled the ten-foot hay rake across by hand while his dad drove the horses over. The new house had electricity, a first for the family. It also had plenty of work.

After eighth grade, Casey worked the farm full-time for two years. Then the high school agriculture teacher drove out to recruit him for Future Farmers of America. And at sixteen, he enrolled as a High School freshman. He went out for football, though he had never thrown a football, and earned a spot at right end. He played basketball, too, and made his mark tipping in rebounds. In 1951 he became the first in his family to finish high school, graduating, as he liked to joke, "dead last in the top third."

He spent the next summer at the Perryville ice plant, cutting 300-pound blocks for seventy-five cents an hour, nine hours a day, seven days a week. He was drafted into the Army, where he drove supply trucks, worked as a clerk, and saw Germany. Back home, he took a clerk's job with the Frisco Railroad in St. Louis. When a promotion went to a seventeen-year-old with three more weeks of seniority, Casey decided that relying on his own aptitude would get him farther than staying in a hierarchical work environment. The next day he enrolled in college.

With the help of the GI Bill, he earned his degree in business and accounting from Southeast Missouri State College in December 1959. He drove home to Perryville that Christmas with an almost empty gas tank and twenty-five cents in his pocket, hoping his dad still had some tractor fuel to put in the car. That night, he promised himself he would never be that poor again. He kept that promise through a long career in accounting at Missouri Research, Standard Automotive, and Nestle. The same work ethic that earned him the nickname “Casey” carried with him throughout his career: show up, do the work, and finish what you start.

Casey had an incredibly close family. And his circle of close friends was equally incredible. Lifelong friends from Perryville, friends of Rosalyn's who instantly became his, too, and seven couples who became so much more than neighbors. Casey would travel the world with his friends, golf and play poker with them, and of course, there were the parties and the happy hours. One of Casey's most recent favorite moments with a friend was taking the Honor Flight with a friend who served in Vietnam. Casey loved his friends deeply, and more importantly, he was grateful to have them in his life.

One of Casey's greatest joys was football. He was in a fantasy football league for the past 20 years, and finally won the trophy last year. It was one of Casey's proudest moments. Casey's fantasy football team was called "WWDD" (What Would Ditka Do). He wore a custom-made sweatshirt with the letters WWDD, and he loved it when people asked what WWDD stood for. One of the best parts of his day would be talking about football with strangers. The night that Casey passed away, Mike Ditka also passed. For Casey, that may be the greatest pass completion of all time.

Casey is survived by his wife, Rosalyn; his son, Craig Hoehn; his daughters, Renee Moore, Leslie Hayes and Alison Hoehn; his grandchildren, Jordan and Keaton Moore and Nathan and Emma Bauman; and his brother, Ronnie Hoehn. He was preceded in death by his parents, Rudolph and Bertha Hoehn; his sisters, Arlene, Betty, Margie and Carol; and his brother, Larry. He now joins his son Paul Hoehn in heaven. Casey's immediate family will hold a private funeral service.

As a service of the SCHRADER Funeral Home and Crematory, friends may sign the family's on-line guestbook at Schrader.com.