Larry Victor was born on June 16, 1933, in Worcester, Massachusetts to immigrant parents, Boris and Sonia Victor, who separated when he was four years old. Raised in Brooklyn, NY by his mother and grown sister, Cecile, Larry was an enterprising youth who worked hard to help support his legally blind mom.
When high school no longer interested him, he quit without graduating to join the Navy. He first had to travel to Massachusetts to get his dad’s signature because he was underage at seventeen. Larry was proud of his military service and would remark to his family that, “The Navy straightened my a** out…without them I might have wound up behind bars!”
Larry Victor was honorably discharged from the Navy at twenty-one years old. He met Lynn Knaster who was eighteen years old and a year out of high school. Larry has been quoted, “I saw a good thing when I met her and quickly took her out of circulation.”
Larry and Lynn married in 1954. Their first son, Richard, was born a year later. Richard said he still has a photo of his dad with a big cigar in his mouth pushing the baby carriage. A dad at age twenty- two!
When his second son, David, was born two years later, Larry told Lynn that he didn’t want his little boys embarrassed by their daddy’s lack of a high school diploma. So, he worked as a common laborer while he went to night school to get his high school equivalency. Larry Victor attended nights at City College of New York and proudly graduated in 1961 with Lynn and their two little boys in attendance.
Larry worked towards a master’s degree in business but stopped. Richard remembers his dad’s sarcastic wit when he said, “I knew more about business than my professors, for chrissakes!”
In 1963, their only daughter, Liz, was born. By that time, Larry Victor was learning about the stock market and investment banking. He became a millionaire and moved the family to a posh suburb of Long Island. He and Lynn regularly toured Europe. Just as quickly, the fortune disappeared because of some failed business ventures.
In 1976, Larry and Lynn Victor with their three kids, piled into an old car with a U-Haul trailer in tow containing all their worldly possessions and drove to Houston, Texas, where Larry started a business. Within a few years he was successful as a broker, selling wholesale steel to industries around the world.
After being in Houston for twenty-five years, Larry and Lynn Victor permanently retired to their new home in Rancho Viejo in 2001. They became members of Temple Beth-El and supported all the functions of the Temple. Lynn was a member of the Temple Ladies Reading Club.
Their son, Richard, remembered when he played Little League baseball in New York. He said that his dad was not content to merely watch the baseball game, he had to be the coach. Larry also became the cubmaster for the entire cub scout pack. On Sundays, Larry would drive Richard and six or
seven friends to grass fields to play baseball and often join in. Richard said that his dad was very sensitive to any of his friends growing up without a dad in the home. He would take them along to museums, parks and on cub scout trips, never forgetting what life was like growing up without his dad at home.
When times were good, Larry took his two sons to the 1969 World Series to see the Mets play and got season tickets for the 1970 season. Even when things were not good, Larry made sure that his daughter spent summers at an expensive sleep-away camp that she loved so much.
Larry saw to it that his two sons could attend Vanderbilt University. Richard remembers that his dad told him about standing beside his car parked near the runway so he could wave to Richard on the departing airplane when he first sent him to college. Richard didn’t see him, but now understands the feeling when he left his daughter, Gabi, at the University of Delaware as a freshman in 2015.
Larry was fiercely protective of all three children, often confronting bullies, teachers, principals, professors and even employers who tried to make life difficult for them. He would say strongly, “nobody
messes with my kids”. Of course, his language would be more colorful.
Richard remembers his dad’s bad habit of impatience while driving. He said that he learned every curse word in English and Yiddish while driving with his dad. His mom banned him from
repeating them, though.
Larry Victor was particularly proud that he was mentioned in the autobiography of billionaire financier Kenneth Langone, Sr., cofounder of Home Depot. Mr. Langone mentioned that he was greatly influenced by a young financial analyst who assisted him over fifty years ago on his road to fame and fortune. The young man he wrote about was a then 32-year-old Larry Victor.
Larry Victor loved life and loved his kids, his music, his travels, and his wine. Most of all he loved his wife, Lynn.
They had been married for sixty-five years when Lynn Victor passed away on May 6, 2019, at eighty-three years old. Three months later, on August 14, 2019, Larry Victor died at eighty-six years old.
