A presence is missing at Haden Hardware that can never be replaced.

Eddie Haden, who grew up and worked in the store family-owned hardware store that has been a fixture in Vicksburg since 1958, died Monday at the age of 59, leaving his family and friends with memories of a man who always kept a positive attitude, made friends easily, had a generous nature and a personality “that could light up a room.”

“The best way to describe my dad is he was full of life,” his daughter Kelly Meeks said. “Everyone loved being around him. My dad never had a worry in the world. He was real calm mannered and real laid back. He was kind of the glue that held us together.

“He was always calm-mannered. He always had a joke. He could turn any situation into something positive.”

“Our mother called him ‘the playboy,’” brother Kenny Wayne Haden said. “It didn’t matter if the sun didn’t shine tomorrow, he didn’t worry about it, because if he couldn’t do anything about it, why worry about it? That was his spirit. If he couldn’t change it, why worry. He a positive attitude and he didn’t get upset with people.”

“He was very dedicated to family,” daughter Heidi Pickett said, recalling the time she was living in Austin, Texas, and her father “drove nine hours straight through” to check in her because she was upset.

“He was very hands-on with everything we did growing up. He never missed our sports. In school he was involved in everything.”

She said he was also very involved with her son, Aideyn, adding, “He taught him baseball and football.”

“We grew up at the lake house at Lake Bruin (La.). He taught us how to ski, bought us jet skis. We spent all our weekends there, and pretty much during the summer when we were kids.”

Their father, the women said, worked six days a week, got off about 1 p.m. on Saturdays, gathered the family and headed for the lake, a hour’s drive from Vicksburg.

“We’d get there and he’d spend the first two hours cutting grass,” Heidi said. “He always said it was just for us. He didn’t have a lot of down time to enjoy on the water. He always made it clear everything he did at the lake and provided us with, it was for us. For us and our mom to enjoy.

“He adored our mother. Their 35th wedding anniversary would have been this December, but they had been together since they were 14. I think that’s going to be the greatest transition for all of us. Anytime people talked about either one of them, they always said Ann and Eddie. They talked about them like they were a team. It’s going to be strange not saying that.”

After Heidi’s other son died in 2015, Kelly said, their father went to the cemetery every Sunday to visit his grandson and his father.

“Every Sunday he would go get his coffee and go the cemetery,” Heidi said.

“The Sunday before he passed, he and our mother had been to a wedding in Hattiesburg and got back after lunch. As soon as they got back, they went to the cemetery. Every Sunday that was his thing,” Kelly said.

“He was a man of routine,” Heidi said. “The hardware store was all he knew and he loved it. His morning routine would be he would go to the Fastlane, a gas station off Indiana Avenue, get coffee, and hugged all the women there. When I would come in, or my sister, they would ask, ‘How’s your crazy daddy?’ Everybody remembers him and knows him. Anywhere he went people would remember him, for good things, just the funny things he said.”

“He was my best friend,” Kenny said. “We worked together all our life. He loved to hunt. He loved to hunt and fish, and he took his girls hunting and fishing, and we hunted and fished together. Dad bought us up to do mostly fishing, and we got into hunting when we were young.

“He loved people just like our dad did. He could always joke. He loved his family; he loved his customers; everybody who came in, he always treated everybody equal; no one was better than the other, that was the way we were raised.”

Kenny recalled a conversation Eddie had one day with a customer who asked him how long he had been in hardware.

“He answered, ‘Well, right after the doctor spanked me on the butt, I went to work.’”

“People would come in here, and if they couldn’t pay for it, he’d most of the time give it to them,” he said. “It didn’t matter, he just wanted to help people. He took care of our fencing company for many years. He’d do anything in the world for you.”

Kelly said the family learned Tuesday morning their father paid for a man to have his teeth redone. She said the man planned to do yard work for her father to show his gratitude.

“There was a homeless man, and my dad when to three or four stores in town looking for diapers for this guy, and he showed up with them and the guy was gone. He was so upset,” she said.

“He did things like that. He was so humble; he didn’t want anybody to know about it, but he had a huge, huge heart and he did things for people. He told us to be humble and be kind.”

“He had a lot of friends, and he loved to help people,” Kenny Haden said. “He would talk to anybody. I’ve had people come in (the store) today and they just heard about it. It’s hard to believe; he was so young.

“I know he’s in here (at the store) looking at us and he always will be. I wish he were here.”