Extracted from The Dallas Morning News (Dallas, TX)
Tuesday, August 7, 2001

Harold Francis Gaar, Sr.

A memorial Mass for Harold Francis Gaar Sr., a longtime Dallas-area electrical contractor, will be at 11 a.m. Friday at St. Rita Catholic Church, 12521 Inwood Road in Dallas.

Mr. Gaar, 80, died Thursday of natural causes at his Highland Park home. He had heart disease for 20 years, his family said.

``He was a guy of few words and a lot of hard work,'' said his son, Harold F. Gaar Jr., director of sales and marketing for Texas Cable News.

Mr. Gaar was born in Dodson, La., but moved with his family to Tyler, where he grew up and graduated from Tyler High School. He attended Tyler Junior College. On Dec. 31, 1941, Mr. Gaar married Cam Carter of Bunkie, La. He served in the Army for three years during World War II.

After he was honorably discharged in 1945, Mr. Gaar worked in the oil fields of Louisiana for almost 20 years. In 1963, he and his family moved to Highland Park, where Mr. Gaar earned his masters electrician's license and founded a small electrical contracting company, Yale Electric.

``He moved to Dallas to learn the electrical trade and get out of the oil business,'' his son said. ``It was dangerous to some extent because he worked out in the oil fields.'' Mr. Gaar primarily did residential electrical work in the Park Cities and near North Dallas.

``He made a lot of friends and met a lot of people,'' his son said. ``He never had more than two or three people working for him. It was a very small business, yet he touched a lot of people's lives.''

Although Mr. Gaar began slowing down when he was in his 60s, he continued to do electrical work for longtime customers and friends until about six weeks ago, his son said.

``If it was something he could do without crawling in attics, he'd go help people and take care of the little electrical problems they had,'' his son said. ``It was important to him.''

Mr. Gaar loved fishing and the outdoors. He usually found a way to combine fishing with his favorite people and almost all of them have a special memory from sharing that experience with him, his son said.

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Gaar is survived by a daughter, Linda Magnuson of Grapevine; his sister, Margie Lowry of Tyler, and three grandchildren.