Richard Craig Vallery

1Beginnings1956

Richard was born in Torrance on April 10, 1956, the middle of Julius Chapman Vallery and Ellen Margarett Vallery's five children. He wore braces on his legs as a small boy, which is a fitting way for the story to open, because he spent the next seventy years refusing to be stopped by much of anything.

He grew up in a house where you had to be fast. He loved telling the story of racing his older brother Bobby to the refrigerator and losing, because Bobby had already cleared out anything worth eating. He told it laughing, every time. He also watched Bobby take things apart and put them back together, or use the parts to build something else entirely, and somewhere in there Richard picked up the habit that would define him. There may have been a lawn mower powered bike involved.

He was a good ballplayer, with an accurate throw and real speed, and he told it that way for fifty years. A league write up from 1970, the summer before he started high school, has him on the senior team and lists him among the top ten batters in the league. He was not exaggerating. He played in high school until his coach told him to cut his hair. He trimmed it. The coach said it was still too long. That was the end of Richard's baseball career, at least the official version. He played adult league softball into his late thirties, so the swing never left him at all. Fifty years later he still finished his golf swing one handed, like a man who had just turned on a fastball.

2Kim1972

South High in Torrance gave him something better than a baseball season. It gave him Kim, a year younger, whom he was courting right around the time he started buying and selling. Motorcycles first, then cars: somewhere near a hundred of them, by his own rough count, between the ages of sixteen and twenty one. He graduated in 1974, worked the snack shack at the Palos Verdes Golf Club, kept flipping cars, and bounced through a few colleges before finishing at Cal State Dominguez Hills with a double major in business and philosophy.

They met through friends, the way it worked then: her girlfriend was going with one of his. What Kim remembers first is the motorcycle, and Richard doing wheelies up the street, and her mother at the window not liking any of it. She remembers her own father's Mustang, and the standing order not to touch it while her parents were away. They took it out anyway, all the way up into Los Angeles and Pasadena, and blew the engine. And she remembers sewing him a suit for a dance.

Her parents spent their summers at the river, at Parker, Arizona, which is how Parker came to belong to this family at all. Richard had an Impala, and Kim's mother did not want her riding out there in it with him and a carful of his friends. They were sixteen. So the boys camped and Kim stayed at her parents' place, and that might have been the end of it, except one of the boys cut his foot badly enough to come down to the house to be patched up. After that they kept coming around. They never really stopped.

3The Work

The real estate career started with a paint brush. He painted houses through college, for owners getting a place ready to re-rent or sell, and it was only ever meant to be extra money. Then he bought a house of his own, did most of the renovation himself, and sold it for what the work was worth. That was the beginning. He worked at Fred Fredericks Realty, opened his own real estate brokerage office, and later went over to Moore and Associates, though anyone who knew him would tell you he was always really working for himself.

Then came development, including a stretch of work that tells you everything about him: he moved buildings. Whole structures, lifted off one property and set down on another, which meant pulling the permits, closing the streets, and talking a city into letting him do it. He built apartments from the ground up as well. Later in his working life he moved into tax resolution, at Valor Tax and a couple of other firms, where he was regularly the top producer in his office.

He had always talked about doing voice over work. Character voices, the whole thing. In those last years he actually got to. He recorded spots for Valor and for a few other companies, and he lent his voice to whatever side project Brett had going, for the fun of it.

4Home on the Hill1981

On September 19, 1981 he married Kimberley Ann Lenton at St. Peter's by the Sea in Palos Verdes, a few miles up the same coast where we will gather for him. They were married forty four years. They lost their daughter Margarett when she was only days old. They raised Katie and Brett, and they lived to see three granddaughters: Olivia, Abbey and Emma.

They started married life in Torrance, moved to Long Beach for a few years, where Katie was born, and then, while she was still small and before Brett arrived, moved up to Island View, a new development on the top of the hill in Rancho Palos Verdes. He was proud of where he raised them. Katie and Brett went to school on the hill, preschool through high school, every year of it in Palos Verdes and Rancho Palos Verdes. Good public schools, a safe place, good people around them, and a view in every direction. He thought that was worth working for and he said so. And he taught the rest of it himself: aim high, dream big, enjoy what you earn, and know that none of it shows up without sacrifice and work and getting back up.

5The Water and the Mountain

He found the two loves of his life early and kept them: the water and the mountain. Water skiing at Lake Arrowhead, snow skiing at Mammoth, and out of those, decades of family trips back to Parker, where Kim's family had been going all along, and up to Mammoth. Kim gets the credit for the boating.

Mammoth ran the length of his life. He first went up as a teenager with the Cummings family, who had a house there, and he never really came back down. He bought a condo of his own shortly before Katie was born, and years later, when Dr. Cummings let the house go, Richard bought it, and brought his brother Ron and a friend or two in on it with him. It is still in the family, which means they are still going up to the same mountain and staying in the same rooms.

He had owned Schiadas before, but not the big one. In 1989 his sister Julie's husband, Steve, called to say there was a twenty four footer sitting on the showroom floor, a cancelled order, and Richard did not think about it for long. By every account he was stoked. That boat is in everything: there are photographs of Brett as a baby in it, and photographs of his granddaughter Emma as a baby in it, thirty years apart, the same boat.

6The Garage

He was Mr. Fix It. If something broke, he was going to try. If a car came home scratched, he was the first one to speak up.

And most of the time, he could. There was always something underway in the garage: a ski trainer so the kids could learn, a quarter pipe so his son and his friends had somewhere to skate. He was never afraid to tear into a project, which is rarer than it sounds. His son will tell you the best part was being handed the flashlight.

He handed down more than that. Brett scrolls the classifieds most days now, looking for the next one, the way his father worked the Auto Trader. The whole collection in his garage came out of that habit.

Around 2003 a 1966 Porsche 912 came into the family, and it came the way things tended to come to him. He found it in the Auto Trader and called the number. An older woman answered and said the listing was her son's, and that he would sell the Porsche, but what he really wanted was somebody to fix his Studebaker. So Richard and Brett hooked up the trailer, drove to Hollywood, and brought the Studebaker home. They rebuilt the transmission, got it running right, and took it back. The man was happy. They left with the Porsche. Father and son restored it together, and then Richard gave it to Kim for their twentieth anniversary, with a custom plate that read HPY20.

Katie's first car got the same treatment. A 1988 GMC Jimmy, door handles already shaved and Cadillac tail lights on it, went into that garage and came back out with new carpet, zebra seat covers, lights inside, zebra tinted windows and more besides. It was the early two thousands and it was magnificent, and nobody at her school was going to mistake it for anyone else's.

There was also a 1955 Dodge pickup he pulled out of a barn on a property he was helping someone sell. For years it was the Christmas truck, out for the tree and out again to drive Candy Cane Lane in Torrance.

7Showing Up

He coached whatever his kids were playing. Tee ball, then AYSO soccer, and for a few years he was the AYSO commissioner. He coached Katie's softball team and Brett's. He did Indian Guides with Brett and Indian Princesses with Katie, pinewood derbies and all. He built skateboard ramps and longboards and a go kart, and produced a Go-Ped. He taught Brett to ski and to ride a bike without training wheels before he was three, with a leash on the skis for safety's sake.

The year Brett played Pop Warner football, Richard signed up to announce the season. A game in, Brett broke his foot at the river, and that was the end of that. His parents made him come to the games anyway, to support the team and carry the water, and Richard went right on announcing. He had the whole crowd laughing, week after week, calling plays for other people's kids on a team his own son was not playing on.

None of it was as easy as he made it look. A car accident wrecked his neck, badly enough that surgeons took bone out of his hip to build him new discs. The hip did not heal right, and years later he broke it at the river. That meant a replacement, and then more surgery when the replacement brought complications, and more hip replacements after that, and a torn knee somewhere along the way. He lived with pain and discomfort for the rest of his life. His son is certain it hurt more than he ever let on.

He kept showing up anyway. He coached through it, and there are team photographs of him standing with the kids in a neck brace. He went back to skiing. At seventy he could still put a golf ball two hundred yards down a fairway and do it again the next hole. It was the leg braces all over again: he simply declined to be stopped, because he was always moving, always helping somebody, usually Brett, and always looking for the next good thing to do. It probably also explains why he loved a nap as much as he did.

8Sugar, and Late Nights

He had a serious sweet tooth and he shared it around. He taught his niece Christie to freeze Snickers bars, which is still the correct way to eat one in summer. He stocked his kids with their favorite candy for their first flight alone. He drove the family to the chocolate factory in Mammoth for caramel apples and molasses chips. He would eat a Sugar Daddy and then warn you it could pull your teeth out. Lately what he had been looking forward to most was giving his baby granddaughters ice cream.

He pulled faces. At his kids, at his grandchildren, and in most photographs anyone ever tried to take of him. And there were kid shoes: you stood on his feet and wrapped yourself around his legs and he walked you around the house, and then he would turn into crazy driver, wobbling the wheel and letting on that the whole thing was getting away from him.

He was a night owl, and he made night owls of his children. Movies started at midnight, after a run that got them through the door at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video just before it locked. Projects in the garage ran late enough that Kim would come out and tell them to put the power tools down. There were late nights at PV Bowl, rock and bowl, which is gone now. And there were nights he put the kids in the car and drove them out to toilet paper their friends' houses, which is not a thing most fathers will do for you.

9People

He had the gift of gab, and no stranger stayed one for long. He gave people rides. He turned up with flowers, or with some surprise he had decided you needed. He wanted every coworker to have something at the holidays. He believed the best of people, sometimes past the point the evidence supported, and he would have told you he would rather be wrong that way.

He threw a party like he meant it. There was a big one at the seawater lagoon in Redondo, Halloween parties for years running, and a fortieth birthday for Kim that people still bring up.

He also believed in pushing his kids out the door. The summer Brett finished high school, Richard sent him to Europe for five weeks with his friends, and a few months after that he sent him to business school in Boulder. Two planes in one year, and no sign of nerves about either. He moved Katie around the west side of Los Angeles more times than either of them counted, sometimes on a few hours' notice, and he never once told her to be more realistic. He told her to be a dreamer.

10Golf

Golf was the long thread. He was a naturally athletic man and a consistent player, with a knack for putting and a good short game, and he had one hole in one. When Brett was in middle school he decided Ridgecrest needed a golf club and went and built one, with Los Verdes and the pro there, Mike, so that a dozen kids got rounds and range time and real coaching. And for the last few years of his life he and Brett played nearly every week. Mostly the courses in Long Beach, and Los Verdes when they could snag a tee time. Marshall Canyon for a while, for the deer, which were all over the course and which he was forever stopping to photograph or pose beside. This past April, for his seventieth birthday, they played Sandpiper for the first time, and he loved it enough that they meant to go back.

They had a standing Saturday tee time and rain gear to protect it. He did not care for wet or cold and he went out in both anyway, more than once in conditions that would have sent most people home. Twice the driver got away from him. Once it went up into a tree and stuck there, and Brett knocked it down with a branch off the ground before his father could get a photograph of it. Once, in Monterey, in fog thick enough to lose a ball in the air, it left his hands altogether and flew at the cart Brett's cousins Chad and Craig were sitting in. Craig may or may not have been hit. The accounts vary.

Any time the two of them were paired with strangers and Brett hit a good one, Richard would turn to their playing partners and say, "I taught him how to do that." Every time. Ask Brett about those years and he will tell you he was lucky, and he will be right.

11The Last Part2026

Then he mentioned he wasn't feeling right, that he was getting light headed easily. He went in for tests. A week or two later, on July 16, he was gone, at seventy, far too soon.

He is survived by his wife, Kim; his children, Katie and her husband Ryan, and Brett; his granddaughters, Olivia, Abbey and Emma; his sister, Julie; and his brothers, Ron and Paul. He was preceded in death by his parents, Julius and Ellen Vallery; his brother, Bobby; and his daughter, Margarett.

He loved a sunset. The family house looked out over the water and none of them could tell you how many they watched from it. For a few summers he talked Brett into driving down to Rat Beach at the end of the day, just to be in the water while the sun went down. That is why his family will be standing on a bluff at golden hour on the thirtieth of October, and not anywhere else.

The boat is still in the family, and a couple of summers ago they ran it out to Parker, the way they always used to. The Porsche is in the garage, apart. Brett is going to finish it, so his mother can drive it again. Richard pushed Kim to plan a trip for the two of them to Portugal, Spain and Italy this coming March. With a slightly modified itinerary, that trip is happening in 2027, and more of them are coming than he planned for.