Louis Fazekas (Medina, OH) attended Fenn College after graduation. He completed two years but had to quit school to work because his father was diagnosed with cancer. Louis worked at the post office in Brecksville for one year until he was drafted. Louis attended basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, advanced individual training in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then he was assigned to the 41st Infantry in Fort Hood, Texas.

While at Fort Hood, Louis joined the Drum and Bugle Corp. He played trumpet. He traveled to Texas and surrounding states. After nine months at Fort Hood, Louis was sent to Ismet, Turkey, located about 110 miles south of Istanbul. The site was storage for nuclear warheads for the obsolete Honest John and Little John truck-launched missiles.

While in Turkey, Louis traveled often to Istanbul. During R & R he visited Frankfurt, Germany and Rome, Italy. He stayed in Turkey for one year during which he made Specialist 6th Class. Louis was discharged in February of 1965.

After his discharge Louis went back to school under the GI Bill and graduated in 1967. He met his future wife, Janice Tekempel, in 1966, the year she graduated from North Royalton High School. They dated for three years before deciding to get married.

Louis and Jan started looking for a home in January of 1969. They then found an old barn on 3-3/4 acres of land in June and spent the next two years remodeling. They were married in the living room of their home in 1970 and have been there ever since.

“My wife wanted a horse to ride. She had a Pinto pony growing up and she missed riding. I didn't know much about horses. I found a 12 year old stud ‘Man’, being raised in a barn with cattle. This horse thought he was a cow. He only wanted to eat what the cows ate. We provided him with horse feed which he refused to eat. We then, through a friend, found that his teeth need to be filed or ‘floated’. We found a vet who made house calls and was also a blacksmith. After floating the teeth and clipping the hooves, Man was a totally different horse and lived up to his name. He disliked children. Jan and I had no problem handling him with just a bareback saddle.”

Man liked to play ball with their dog Oscar in the pasture. Man learned to kick a basketball, and then both he and Oscar would chase it. Sometimes he would let Oscar get the ball. Louis and Jan wish they could have used today’s cameras to record Man and Oscar playing ball. Louis and Jan kept Man for six years. Jan could not spend as much time as she used to with him and Louis was doing quite a bit of time traveling with his job. They sold him to a farm on Edgerton Rd. in North Royalton where he lived out his days.

In November of 1987, Louis opened LNF Designs Inc, his present business. Louis was working for Hall System Inc, a newspaper equipment manufacturing company in Westlake. “There I was the chief electrical engineer. My job was to keep up with technology and I designed a system which provided a means to transport newspapers by holding the nose of the paper in a gripper rather than conveying them on a belt conveyor). This system needed controls that were not commercially available. I designed and built the controls for Hall Systems, Inc. The manager of Hall's engineering department said I needed to incorporate my business otherwise Hall could not buy the controls from me. LNF Designs was then incorporated.

Louis quit Hall Systems in 1999 and decided to try his business full-time. The first couple years were rough. The company's name was not recognized in the industry. One of the first good jobs LNF Designs acquired was as contractor for a company in North Royalton. There Louis designed electrical controls for a custom machine that was to paint the insides on conduit, apply a coupling on one end of the tube and a plastic cap on the other, then strap together ten pieces to form a bundle. The machine was being built by a company in Mexico City. “I spent three months in Mexico City starting up the job and babysitting it until all the bugs were worked out. My high school Spanish was put to good use.”

After the above-mentioned job was completed, Louis found a company on the west side of Cleveland that was an OEM of special equipment and robotics and Louis has been designing PLC and PAC-based control systems for them since 1994. “Of course there are other companies I do work for, but 85% of my work comes from them.”