Rudolph "Rudy" Fink III

Rudolph “Rudy” Fink, III, age 87 of Ocean Springs (“O.S”), Mississippi, left to happily be with the Lord on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. He passed, quickly, with family in Gulfport, following a second significant stroke. Rudy, for years, told everyone, “I know where I’m going and I’m ready.” So, instead of sorrow, picture him in heaven, talking to all and singing bass harmony.

Rudy genuinely cared about people and, to his core, believed in their goodness, humanity, and that no one was beyond help. He often spoke honestly and intensely, catching people off guard, and wanted to understand each person as who they truly were. He always said “everyone has a piece of the truth, talk to them and you can find out what it is.” He was a life-long lover of coffee, conversation, and ice cream. He was a serial forgetter of his phone or wallet and had a generous soul. His passing is a loss, but it came at the end of a full life.

Rudy was born on Sept. 18, 1938, in Dayton, Ohio, to Col. Rudolph Fink and Mrs. Martha Hickam Fink, the oldest of two siblings (his brother Albert sadly passed in 2022). Rudy inherited confidence, a belief in virtue, propriety, and that anything could be accomplished. His father—who retired to O.S. as a realtor in his red railroad caboose—was an Air Force commander and a prolific inventor, from unmanned aircraft to oxygen systems, which led to the aqualung. His great grandfather, Albert Fink, was a noted attorney who helped develop the Iditarod dog-sled race and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. His maternal grandfather, Horace Hickam, was an Army Air Corps commander who later gave his name to the Army airfield at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Over his life, Rudy attended many schools: Marion Military Institute; UMS-Wright Preparatory School; William and Mary; Perkinson Junior College, and technical-training schools. But he was always happier outside the classroom, especially working and sharing what others knew or he had learned. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together, including, famously as a child, his father’s new sports car, only to have pieces left over.

Rudy worked, hands on, for 65 years, from his youth through his early 80’s, enjoying learning, solving problems, and, of course, meeting people, in a variety of jobs that shaped his life:

In the 1950s, he worked on a large chicken-egg farm in Mobile, with smells he did not love. In the late 1950s, in hot summers between school, he surveyed the route for I-10, clearing his path with a machete.

In the 1960s, he served in the Navy’s North Atlantic Fleet, retrieving astronauts, seeing the major cities of Europe, visiting the Berlin Wall, and serving on a destroyer in the Cuban Missile Blockade. He remembered falling overboard, in the bone-chilling water and waiting alone for the ship to retrieve him, after a crewmate let go of a rope. After his service, he went to Flint, Michigan, and worked different jobs for a few years: for General Motors, for political campaigns, and as the community-relations director of Goodwill Industries, working to provide community services.

After training as a pilot, loving flying low over fields, he flew auto parts in a DC-3 in the Midwest with his friend Bill Signs. But, after a harrowing delivery into Detroit in a storm so bad he saw power transformers explode below him as much as he saw lighting in the sky, he stopped commercial flights. He would fly privately for 30 more years.

Throughout the 1970s, he worked in his cabinet shop—TreeHouse Cabinets—in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a cabinet maker with his future wife. They had the joy of creating everything from the first Border’s bookstore, to working Bristol biplanes for a movie, to custom furniture. And the cabinet shop was located behind a famous blues bar—The Blind Pig—so they hosted after parties with musicians, such as B.B. King.

From the 1980s through 2010s, Rudy worked in Mississippi. At first, he worked different jobs, including making picnic tables for parks across the coast, being a landman in Louisiana, and opening stores for Domino’s Pizza, including the store in O.S. Then, he started his business in contract work, primarily for Keesler A.F.B., teaching himself the details of different businesses, including managing the photography and art generation for the base’s classes and systems for hospital paging; sound; security; pneumatic tubes; nurse call; televisions; and radios.

Rudy always liked to see and experience new things. And he was gifted with a lifelong ability to talk his way into anything, from riding in the cabin of the Goodyear blimp to talking with the CEO of General Mills over an issue with his Cheerios.

Rudy was also a believer in giving and donation. For a year, following Katrina, he worked full time to coordinate teams of volunteers through St. Paul to clean and repair the homes of those affected by the storm. As other examples, he volunteered for civic and sports organizations; donating time to setup the O.S. Elementary school for sound; designing and building a “singing” Christmas tree for O.S.; and organizing and playing in chess tournaments for years, occasionally even winning a game against a grandmaster.

Though something of a skeptic in the first half of his life, Rudy grew into a strong Christian, which gave him immense happiness. A member of St. Paul United Methodist Church for more than 35 years, he also attended Grace Baptist Church and joined Bethel Baptist Church in 2022.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Susan—he always said he “married up”—and son Rudolph, IV.

Rudy would have wanted to thank all of those with whom he shared his life and all of those who helped him, including those who helped him in his last days. To those reading this whom he had not met, he would have wished he had met you.

His memorial service will be held at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 2, 2025, at Grace Baptist Church, 3707 Bienville Blvd., Ocean Springs, MS. Friends may visit one hour prior. The service will be followed by a potluck, so please feel welcome. In lieu of flowers, the family prefers donations to mission programs at Bethel Baptist (https://bethelbaptistgautier.com/), Grace Baptist (https://www.graceos.org/), or the American Red Cross (https://www.redcross.org/).

Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Homes is honored to serve the family of Rudolph Fink III.