Raymond Odrey

Ray Odrey was born in San Bernardino, CA in 1955, and raised by his mother and step-father, Renee and Arthur Hanley, respectively. He studied at Crescenta Valley Senior High, before attending Moorpark, Pierce, and Glendale Community in his college years. Outdoorsy, adventurous, and largely self-taught, Ray went on to garner interest in the fields of science and engineering, landing his first engineering job as a tooling project engineer in 1991.
Ray moved to Simi Valley with his first wife in 1978, viewing the location as an affordable place to live, with a short drive from the city where he worked. At the time, there was no freeway; the only route between Los Angeles and Simi being the pass through the Santa Susana mountains adjacent to the railroad.
Ray met his second wife, Joan (nee, Winters), at a baseball game in Balboa Park in the valley in the summer of 1984, arranged by a group of mutual friends. He has laughingly joked that her “Daisy Duke” style denim shorts are what drew him to her.
In their adolescence and as they dated, Ray and Joan were members of the Modified Motorcycle Association of America, where they were on several occasions placed as security for events, organized rides for charities and canned food drives, and would often do a Sunday ride with friends to the Rock Store along Mulholland Highway.
Ray and Joan married in September of 1986, and had their first child, Victoria, in 1989; followed by a son, Michael, in 1991. In the following years, Ray would attend school events, take the kids fishing, develop an interest in boxing with his son, and build animatronics for Halloween shows, all while running his own engineering business. He took a job as a tow-truck driver in the late 2000s, later stating that it was some of the best fun on a job that he’d had (as an engineer, Ray had always enjoyed imagining how to re-purpose the engines and chassis of out-of-use cycles and automobiles). He would go on to work as a machine design engineer for Moldex, one of his final projects to design and maintain machinery to manufacture N95 masks in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Ray spent his last years building model cars, many of whose parts were custom 3D-modeled on his in-home 3D printer. He developed a fondness for raising and keeping monarch butterflies, releasing at least a hundred individual specimens back into the wild from his backyard garden.
Ray passed peacefully in his home in the summer of 2021, and is survived by his wife Joan, son and daughter, and granddaughter.