Anthony John Wyman

Anthony John Wyman passed away unexpectedly in Vienna, Austria, in 2026, while traveling through Europe with his wife and family. He was 70 years old. It is nearly impossible to fit Anthony's life into an obituary. He had a personality bigger than the world and enough interests, accomplishments, stories, adventures, opinions, and experiences to fill a book. More than anything, Anthony was intensely interested in life.

His family had a simpler way of putting it: Anthony was just intent on living his life, his way. Whatever it was, he was all the way in. It could be business, baseball, airplanes, fishing, history, Lionel trains, a Porsche, a boat, a trip across the world, or finding the tastiest pear or honeydew he could possibly get his hands on. Once something caught Anthony's interest, casual involvement wasn't really an option. He wanted to understand it, know who did it best, and figure out why one version was better than another. He asked questions, read, researched, tinkered, compared, practiced, and learned. If there was a best version somewhere, Anthony wanted to find it. That intensity defined the way he lived his entire life.

Anthony was born July 20, 1956, in San Jose, California, and grew up in Simi Valley. He was a gifted athlete and fierce competitor from an early age, playing both baseball and football. He was the starting catcher and quarterback throughout high school before going on to play at the college level. But the most important thing that happened during Anthony's high school years had nothing to do with sports. In 1972, he met Linda.

They were high school sweethearts, and what began between two teenagers became the defining partnership of Anthony's life, his rock. They married, settled in Ventura County, California, and raised three sons, Spencer, Tyler, and Garrett. Anthony and Linda remained completely devoted to one another through the ups and downs life brings for more than five decades. They raised a family, built a life, traveled the world, experienced countless adventures together, and eventually became grandparents to seven grandchildren.

Anthony's professional life began in a law office and then on construction sites in the homebuilding industry. Through hard work, determination, intelligence, and an extraordinary ability to solve problems, he steadily worked his way through the business, ultimately becoming a division president for the largest homebuilder in the nation. Over the course of his career, Anthony helped build homes and communities from coast to coast and became a trusted expert in his field.

He had an unusual ability to walk into a complicated situation and make sense of it. Operational problems, difficult projects, political challenges, troubled divisions; Anthony was at his best when the problem was the one nobody else wanted. In fact, those were the problems he preferred. Give him the ugly one, the hairy deal, or the situation everyone else had already decided couldn't be fixed, and Anthony wanted the ball. People from across the country sought his advice because they knew he would dig into a problem until he understood it, and once he understood it, he was going to find a way through it.

He brought that same competitive intensity to one of the other great passions of his life: coaching. Anthony loved baseball, competition, and developing young men. In Ojai, California, he coached the first team in the community's history to advance to regional playoffs. Many of the players Anthony coached went on to play college and professional baseball, including two of his own sons. Winning mattered to Anthony. He was a competitor to his core, but coaching was about much more than winning. It was another way he taught the things he believed mattered: preparation, toughness, accountability, confidence, loyalty, hard work, and refusing to quit when something became difficult.

Those lessons were especially evident in the way Anthony raised his own sons. He was an unbelievable father. He was tough and fair, and he expected a lot because he believed his sons were capable of a lot. He raised men. But he was also the father his sons could talk to about anything. No idea was too big, no problem too complicated, and no endeavor too ambitious or ridiculous for Anthony to take seriously. If one of his sons was doing something, he didn't stand on the sidelines and offer encouragement; he jumped in. He listened, asked questions, challenged assumptions, made phone calls, worked through problems, found the right person, or simply showed up. He was their father, but he was also their friend, coach, adviser, sounding board, and one of their greatest supporters.

Then came the grandchildren, and Anthony absolutely adored all seven of them. Nearly every phone call with his sons began the same way: “What are my grandkids doing?” It was never a canned grandfather question. He genuinely wanted to know. How was school? How did the game go? What position were they playing? What were they interested in? What happened at the performance? One answer generally resulted in five more questions. He sent them pictures, FaceTimed them, followed what they were doing, and remembered the details.

More importantly, Anthony and Linda showed up. From their home in Nashville, they traveled across the country for games, first days of school, plays, performances, birthdays, and milestones. If something was happening in the lives of their children or grandchildren, they didn't want to hear about it afterward. They wanted to be in the thick of it, and man, were they.

Anthony also loved hunting and fishing, and naturally, he didn't do that halfway either. His fishing adventures took him from Mexico to Alaska. Then there were airplanes. Anthony loved airplanes. Flying wasn't simply a hobby; becoming a pilot was one of the great accomplishments and sources of pride in his life. He became an instrument-rated pilot and had the extraordinary opportunity to learn to fly under legendary test pilot Robert J. Gilliland, the Lockheed Skunk Works test pilot who made the first flight of the SR-71 Blackbird. For a man fascinated by machinery, skill, preparation, precision, and mastering difficult things, aviation suited Anthony perfectly. He loved airplanes, loved flying them, loved talking about them, and remained an unbelievably dedicated aviator throughout his life. Anthony was also a car guy. Earlier in life he owned a Porsche 914-6, and later he had a beloved Corvette. He loved race cars, performance, engineering, and speed. One car remained particularly high on his list: the Porsche 911 Turbo.

Anthony appreciated the finer things in life. He liked good things, good food, good cars, and great experiences. His philosophy was simple: “It costs just a little more to go first class.” But Anthony's desire for the best was never simply about spending money. He was willing to do the work to find the best. That might mean understanding an airplane, researching a car, planning a trip, finding the right fishing spot, picking the best cigar, the most complex wines & bourbons or determining where to find an absolutely perfect piece of fruit. If Anthony decided there had to be a better pear somewhere, there was a decent chance everyone around him was about to learn far more about pears than they had ever intended.

He was also exceptionally well read and spent countless hours studying history, politics, America, and the wider world. He was curious about how things worked, why events happened, and how the past shaped the present. He read because he genuinely wanted to understand. Then there were the Lionel trains. Anthony spent thousands of hours of his life building, adjusting, fixing, improving, changing something, and then probably changing it again. They were perhaps the perfect hobby for him: mechanical, intricate, nostalgic, endlessly adjustable, and never completely finished.

Anthony was hilarious. His humor was intelligent, dry, layered, and frequently delivered with such a straight face that people who didn't know him well sometimes had absolutely no idea whether he was serious. Those who did know him learned to wait, because there was usually something coming. Sometimes the funniest part wasn't the joke at all, but watching Anthony maintain a perfectly serious expression while someone else slowly tried to determine whether he actually meant what he had just said.

He had a big personality, strong opinions, and an enormous appetite for life. He loved to laugh, learn, compete, travel, and experience things, especially when Linda was beside him. Together, Anthony and Linda traveled extensively throughout America, Europe, Asia, and beyond. The two teenagers who met in the Simi Valley in 1972 spent more than half a century building a family and then exploring the world together.

His final trip was another of those adventures. Anthony was traveling through Europe with Linda, his son, and daughter-in-law when he unexpectedly passed away in Vienna. He had another adventure already waiting: just one week later, Anthony was supposed to get behind the wheel of one of his dream cars, a Porsche 911 Turbo, and drive it on Germany's Autobahn. He never got that final drive, but there is something unmistakably Anthony about the fact that his final days were not spent sitting still. He was in Europe, traveling with the girl he had fallen in love with as a teenager, surrounded by family, experiencing the world, and already looking forward to what was next.

There was a toughness about Anthony that is difficult to describe unless you knew him. To his sons, he was something like John Wayne in real life; not because he was trying to play a part, but because that was simply who he was. He believed you kept your word, took care of your family, worked hard, and did things correctly. Problems were meant to be solved rather than complained about, and when things became difficult, you stepped forward instead of backward.

For all the things Anthony accomplished, however, his greatest legacy isn't a job title, a house he built, a baseball game he won, an airplane he flew, a fish he caught, a country he visited, or anything he owned. It's Linda, the high school sweetheart who became his wife and partner in a lifetime of adventures. It's Spencer, Tyler, and Garrett, the three boys he raised into men who went on to find their special “Linda”. It's his seven grandchildren, whose lives he refused to observe from a distance. It's the players he coached, the people he mentored, the colleagues who called when they had an impossible problem, and the friends who knew that life became considerably more interesting when Anthony was involved.

Anthony didn't dabble in life. He participated. He built homes across America, built teams that won, raised three sons, coached generations of young men, flew airplanes, raced across the water with his boys, fished from Mexico to Alaska, and traveled the world with the girl he fell in love with as a teenager. He studied history, drove fast cars, tinkered endlessly with Lionel trains, told jokes some people didn't realize were jokes, searched for the perfect piece of fruit, spoiled his grandchildren, and appreciated the hell out of the good things life had to offer.

Whatever Anthony loved, he went all the way- his wife, his work, his interests, his adventures, his friends, and above everything else, his family. He wasn't a spectator in his own life. He was life personified.

And man, did he live. His way.