Landon Brazier

The world lost a good man on October 31, 2016, and our family lost a great husband, brother, father, uncle and grandfather far sooner than any of us were ready.

The oldest of two boys, Landon Jay Brazier was born on October 1, 1941, to Ula and Jay Brazier, in America’s heartland - Illinois - and grew up in a family that believed in family always coming first, followed by hard work and service to your community.

He graduated valedictorian of his high school class and was the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago with a degree in accounting, and soon after, received his CPA certification. During the Vietnam war, he was drafted and served two years in the army, stationed at Fort Carson, where through family friends, he met the love of his life, Marjorie, at Thanksgiving. Months later they were engaged and less than a year later they were married. In late September, they celebrated their 51st anniversary.

Landon worked for Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co (later KPMG) in Illinois for 12 years before working for a small firm in Madison, Wisconsin for two years. In 1979, he joined the Tacoma firm of Knight, Vale & Gregory (later McGladrey), becoming a partner in the firm and building a department focused on community banking. In retirement, he served as a board member and board chairman of Viking Bank. He enjoyed working with his colleagues and clients for more than 40 years.

Many people he met through work became friends and in the past 12 years of retirement he kept in touch with more people that his family ever realized, overwhelming them (in a good way) with visits and messages of care, concern and love over the past several months. It appears that that he was nearly as well-loved as a colleague, boss and mentor, as he was at home.

Landon believed in serving the community and was on the board of the Tacoma and Bremerton Symphonies, and Planned Parenthood. After retiring, his first volunteer gig was to rock babies at the NICU at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. In recent years, the volunteer activity he loved most was tutoring students at Sunnyslope Elementary School in reading and math twice a week.

He loved meeting up with his golf buddies once a week, and he and Marji enjoyed traveling domestically and abroad, having visited every US state and all the countries in which his kids lived as exchange students, as well as the countries represented by the many exchange students he and Marji hosted over the years.

The pastime he enjoyed the longest was running. He was a late bloomer, having run his first marathon at age 40, but completed many more in the years that followed, as well as half-marathons and shorter races. This past June, he was running the Sound to Narrows when he collapsed and fell on the pavement hitting his head hard enough to cause a serious traumatic brain injury. He fought like hell this past 4 1/2 months to come back to his family and friends, but in the end it didn’t work out like everyone hoped and prayed it would.

He will forever be deeply missed by the family members he always put ahead of everything else: wife Marjorie, children Anne (Jim) Gillingham, Amy Brazier (Anton Daughters), Jay Brazier (Suzanne Bigelow), and grandchildren Katy, Jack, Marco, Lucas, Eloise and Julianne as well as his brother Jon (Barbara) and their sons’ (David and Steven) families, his brother-in-law Pete Greer, as well as several cousins and their families in the Midwest.

The family would like to thank the kind medical teams at Tacoma General, Regional Hospital in Burien and MultiCare Hospice for their compassionate, quality care and suggests remembrances be directed to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, Treehouse (Multicare’s respite housing for patient families) or to the charity of your choice.

Landon’s family plans to host a celebration of his life in the spring of 2017 and will get the word out to friends and family when a date is chosen. We will remember and honor him by trying to do some good in the world.