Edward Drumheller Obituary

Edward O. Drumheller passed away on the morning of July 3rd, 2025 at home in his bed at the age of 82 years, 6 months, and 26 days after declining health over the past eight months. Nobody, most of all himself, ever expected Ed to reach old age. We usually summarized his life story as, "going through multiple sets of nine lives." However, Ed liked to tell people that he was, "going to live to 120 and get shot by a twenty year old's jealous husband."
Eddie, as he was known his entire life by anyone that knew him before he was an adult, was born to Dale and Nina Drumheller on December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in a house in Oceana, WV. Eddie ended up growing up in Ansted, WV from age five to fourteen and he always considered it his hometown. This is also where he started smoking at age seven. Ansted was an interesting place to grow up as a child in the fifties since OSHA did not exist yet and mischievous rascals could get their hands on items such as dynamite and gunpowder that was just laying around thanks to the local coal mining industry. He also enjoyed building catapults and cannons as a kid and into his adult life, including one cannon that he had to bail out of jail in Arizona in the 70's.
Eddie moved to Beckley, WV at fourteen and attended Woodrow Wilson High School until he left West Virginia in 1959 at age seventeen after his father lied to the Navy and said that Eddie was eighteen. He always said at that time in West Virginia you only had two choices, the military or the coal mines. Ed spent twenty years in the U.S. Navy and retired as an E-6 in 1980 as an experienced machinist. While in service to his country, Ed survived three tours in Vietnam, getting blown out of a boat on the Mekong Delta and only losing his wallet, having a rocket explode in the sand outside of his hut on Red Beach in Danang during the Tet Offensive in 1968 while he was a Seabee in MCB-58 during his first two tours, significant amounts of Vietnamese beer with formaldehyde in it, a spinal fracture after the war back in the States, and the first of his two triple spinal fusion surgeries. He also quit drinking in 1974 and became an on base AA counselor and was still not a pleasure for a dumb teenager to deal with on the subject in the early 2000s.
Ed quit smoking cold turkey in 1984 while his second wife was pregnant with the author of this obituary. He considered quitting alcohol and cigarettes one of his greatest achievements and could often tell you on the spot how many years it had been since he last had each one. Ed's second spinal fusion surgery was at VA Durham in 1986 where they almost killed him with a post-op infection. He still let them take another crack at him about twenty years later when they removed roughly half of his right lung that had become scar tissue from asbestos exposure, but that recovery went much better. Ed held several machinist jobs over the years, but was with Becton Dickinson in Durham the longest and medically retired from there in 1998.
Ed always said he was going to make the VA spend every last dollar on him that he possibly could and he meant it by spending 27 years in retirement. He put his foot in a grave and then pulled it back out so many times over the last fifteen years that we just gave up on trying to predict his mortality. The emphysema finally slowed him down a little bit, but not by a lot for the past three years. Ed was of course stubborn to the very end.
Ed was preceded in death by his brother Fred in 1973, his father Dale in 1991, his mother Nina in 1996, and by his second and last wife Patricia in 2019. He is survived by his daughter Cindy (Glenn) Hayse and son Mark Drumheller, both of whom are located in Greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He is also survived by his youngest son and "surprise second generation" David Drumheller, along with daughter in law Ginny and step-granddaughter Kaylyn all of the home in Mebane. Ed also has two biological grandsons, Keith and Stephen Hechinger who are also in Australia that he never managed to meet.
No memorial services are planned per se, but we will scatter his ashes into the New River Gorge in West Virginia from Hawks Nest State Park in Ansted at a to be determined future date. Special thanks to the staff of Waffle House Mebane who basically adopted Ed as the restaurant's dirty grandpa and fed him hundreds of times over the past five plus years. Also thank you to Jessica Clay CNA who spent the last eight months from 9-5 Monday through Friday trying her very best to talk Ed out of getting himself in trouble and he listened to her better than he ever listened to us and we could have never made it to the end as smoothly as we did without her.
In lieu of any flowers, please donate to the Navy Seabee Foundation at P.O. Box 657 Gulfport, MS 39502. To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Edward, please visit our floral store.To make a memorial donation, please visit the donations section of this obituary.