Gary Lynn Strawther
Dec. 10, 1947-Dec. 18, 2011
Redwood City, California
Gary Lynn Strawther, 64, died in Redwood City on Dec. 17, 2011. He was born Dec. 10, 1947, in San Francisco and moved with his family to Redwood City in 1952. He attended Taft Elementary, Hoover Jr. High, Menlo-Atherton High School (Class of '66), and Sonoma State College where he earned a degree in business.
He worked for Peninsula Creamery fountain in Palo Alto while in high school, in the 1960s, and after college at GMAC, and Longs Drugs Stores in Redwood City for a few years before beginning work as a carpenter and then a general contractor. He stayed in the construction field the rest of his life.
In 1971, he was drafted into the Army and served a few months before being honorably discharged after Army doctors discovered a hole in the retina of one of his eyes.
A longtime sports fan, he played for some of the early Menlo Park Little League (Lowe's Realty) and Pop Warner teams, and played basketball and ran track at M-A. To those who only know him from his later (and heavier) years it may surprise them to know Gary was an outstanding athlete in his younger days. He once scored six touchdowns in a Pop Warner football game. Along with a Taft School friend, he won the Redwood City 2-man Hunch Basketball championship in 1964. And perhaps most surprisingly to some, his squatty, bow-legged body was still fast enough to make him one of the legs on M-A?s champion 4x110 relay teams in the mid 1960s.
For years, he was a fixture at Menlo Park?s Burgess Gymnasium pick-up basketball games, as well as local rec league basketball and softball leagues. In these activities he made friendships that lasted throughout his lifetime, in good times and bad, and outlasted the many arguments he would get into. He was also an avid Stanford, 49ers, Giants and Warrior fan -- although in later years he preferred college sports to pro sports.
Unfortunately, his passion for horse racing led to many ill-advised financial investments and poor life choices over his adult years which strained relationships. But when times were good ? and they were sometimes very good -- he was generous to a fault to all around him.
As a niece said, ?It was Gary who came to all of my soccer and basketball games, who rooted for me from the front bench, who gave me the only nickname I have ever had, who took me and my brother out for breakfast nearly every Saturday, and who tried to impart to us some of the lessons he had learned in life. Maybe none of us will ever understand how or why his life took so many disturbing turns, but for my part, I will always remember Gary in the good times.?
Those of us who grew up with him will try to do so as well. From the many touch football games on Page Street, and the Friday night "Kick the Can" games (with the 14 kids on our block) til our parents called us in well after dark, big-time wrestling in the living room when our parents were away for the evening, raking the leaves every Saturday morning then heading over to Howatt?s on Middlefield, or Jiffy Burgers or Foster Freeze, riding our bikes to the 5&10 on Fifth Avenue where the fountain made suicides, or riding across town to the Redwood City Rec Center (now Red Morton Park) and crossing the pipe over the creek to peek through the fence at 49ers practices when Y.A. Tittle, Hugh McElhenny, and R.C. Owens were the team stars, the summer bargain matinees at the Fox Theater, watering down the Cassells concrete back patio so we could play ?ice hockey,? turning the Tibbals back yard into the Fenway Park of neighborhood wiffle ball stadiums, the pick-up baseball games at Taft School (Page Street vs. 15th Street, or the Garfield School boys from Fair Oaks and Sixteenth), the long Sunday car rides to visit cousins and uncles (and the not-so-subtle secret tickling wars between the brothers that drove my mom crazy), talking our parents out of making us go to Sunday morning church so we could watch the 49ers play an East Coast team on TV, the Monopoly marathons, the Ping Pong tournaments, and later the college summer road trips to Mexico, the rec league basketball games at Burgess, M-A or Sequoia and the beer and pizza afterwards at the Dutch Goose, Harry?s Hofbrau, Round Table, the Annex or Finale?s. Fortunately, the list of good memories goes on.
Gary will be laid to rest in a private ceremony next to his parents, Joe and Alma, at Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo. He is survived by two older brothers, Charles (Sonny) of Spokane, WA (and wife Donna, and children Rory and Rachelle), Bob of Grass Valley, CA (and wife Linda) and a younger brother, Larry, of Los Alamitos, CA (and wife Nancy and their children, Megan, Michael and Mallory).
