After Gary retired from his construction company, he began to make custom wooden furniture in an onsite workshop. He has several grown children. His wife, Ali, first came to the U.S. as a live-in nanny for clients in the movie industry.
Back in 1976, Gary was looking through classified ads in the newspaper, hoping to find a “fixer-upper” house in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles. What he found instead was a listing for an 8½-acre piece of land in a remote part of the Santa Monica Mountains with a 70-foot waterfall. The seller was offering it for just $500 down, and was even willing to finance. Gary jumped at the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a “real piece of paradise.”
“It was like a gift from heaven,” he said. “There was nothing out here except for the Junior Blind Camp down the canyon (now Wayfinder Family Services).” In true pioneer spirit, he camped out on the property in primitive conditions, brought in a bulldozer to make a driveway, and then built his own home from the ground up.
Gary says that, since then, not a day has gone by that he didn’t do something on the property. He put in ponds, overnight rental accommodations, a furniture-making workshop, and a special kitchen for his wife to make her line of soaps, creams and lotions. “43 years of love went into that place,” Ali said.
Sometime after their wedding in 1997, the Richardsons began hosting an annual party for friends and relatives that got bigger and bigger every year. It began as a party for anyone with a birthday in March. In the early years, the party drew 50-75 guests, but for each of the last three years, there were over 400 guests. “It was like a mini-Renaissance Faire,” Gary said. “We dug a pit and had a whole pig roast; there were kids of all ages, piñatas, and sack races.
“Over the years, there have been a lot of wildfires, sometimes completely encircling us,” Gary said. But after 43 years, he didn’t think a fire would ever get them. On the morning of the Woolsey Fire, he told his Airbnb customers to leave because of road closures. Shortly thereafter, the sheriff’s deputies came with mandatory evacuation orders – and the power went out.
The Richardsons lived so deep in the canyon that they didn’t see much in the way of smoke and didn’t see any flames. They were busy looking for checkbooks and medications to pack when their neighbors drove by to say they were “out of here.” That’s when they looked up and saw the wall of flames heading down towards them, felt the horizontal winds, and saw huge embers and big sticks on fire blowing past.
Gary continued, “In my heart, I knew the house was gone.” Then a man and a dog walked out of the smoke. “He had been trying to save his house when his car caught fire,” Gary explained. The man had no choice but to evacuate on foot, so the Richardsons picked him up and drove him to safety. “We had real angst about driving down the canyon,” Gary said. “It was solid black smoke with a wall of flames blowing all around us.”
When they finally made it to Camarillo, the Richardsons thought they’d be gone for days. It turned out to be months. When they first found out their house was gone, “We broke into tears,” he said. “We’re still pretty raw.” They spent the next six months staying with friends all over Southern California until they were finally able to bring a trailer onto their property.
“We feel so grateful to be back home and have our own place again,” they said. They do plan to rebuild, but a lot of things they lost in the fire weren’t covered by insurance.
