Richard Landy

Richard Landy, born in Boston on December 7, 1936 and a resident of Miami, Florida, died peacefully on Friday July 12, 2024 on Cape Cod, where he had spent summers for more than the last half century. 

He graduated from Newton High School, and from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston College Law School, and also attended the London School of Economics. After beginning his work career at the Department of Labor in Washington DC, Richard spent his entire career as an entrepreneur in the communications field, starting and running businesses in the cable tv, radio and cellular telephone fields. Among his many achievements were the building of some of the first cable tv systems in the United States and being an early investor in the first wave of cellular communications spectrums. 

Richard was well known for his avid and eccentric interests. He enjoyed a life-long love of tennis, skiing and sailing, and took up golf later in life. When he did something, he was driven to do it as well as he could. He could often be found sailing around Stage Harbor in his Marshall 14’ catboat, and skied for decades in Connecticut, Vermont and Snowbird, Utah.

Richard loved to learn about and collect things of interest. He was interested in the contemporary art scene, and with his wife Lynn he began a side business as an art dealer, selling works from their apartment in New York and eventually a gallery in Brewster, Mass. They also built a collection by American and English artists. Richard had a specific interest in works on paper by minimalist artists from the 1960s and 1970s, and populated their various homes with a focused collection that admirers called the “Minimalist Palace.”

Richard had an eclectic appetite to collect items that caught his eye. He populated his “Cookie Jar Condo” in Chatham, Massachusetts with a collection of real “McCoy” cookie jars after attending an auction of the estate of Andy Warhol and seeing Warhol’s collection. It became a habit for visitors to add to the collection. Sadly, the rumor that one cookie jar contained cookies for the lucky person who guessed correctly was untrue. He also collected snow globes, super-hero and tv lunch boxes, antique decoys, wooden tools and fish lures, and various bakelite radios from the 1940s and 1950s in his Miami, Florida apartment. 

With Lynn, Richard engaged in many travel adventures, including trekking up to 19,000’ on Mount Everest in the late 1970s, and were early visitors to China in the mid-1980s, and he the Soviet Union in the late 1980s where he traced his family roots. They later visited polar bears at the North Pole and penguins at the South Pole, safaried through Kenya and Tanzania, and went to see the clay figures in Xian the year they were found.  

Richard Landy is survived by Lynn, his wife of 62 years, his sons Douglas and John, and his granddaughters Lauren Cranberry and Eleanor Jane (EJ).