Richard Craig Vallery

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 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. The swing never left him, though. Fifty years later he still finished his golf swing one handed, like a man who had just turned on a fastball.

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 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.

Then he turned toward real estate, and eventually 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.

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.

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 to Parker, Arizona and back up to Mammoth. Kim gets the credit for the boating.

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.

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 said, more or less, happy heart 20.

He coached whatever his kids were playing. Tee ball, then AYSO soccer, and for a few years he was the AYSO commissioner. 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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. Los Verdes mostly. 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.

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.

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. And the trip is still on. He was planning Portugal, Spain and Italy for himself and Kim. The family is going in 2027, and more of them are coming than he planned for.