Peter John Malecki

Peter John Malecki was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1953 to Elizabeth & Walter Malecki. He got his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Conestoga College in 1980, parlaying his degree and his knack for making stuff into a career as a building supervisor. Later, he left Canada for Florida, where he supervised the construction & management of commercial buildings & luxury hotels. Tiring of the vagabond lifestyle of a high-end construction engineer, he earned his Juris Doctorate from Nova Southeastern in 1996. Armed with a degree in law and a taste for the verbal skirmish, Peter went to work as an attorney at C. Brooks Ricca Jr & Associates until he retired in 2018 to spend more time paying compliments to his cats.

Peter was a no-nonsense yet affable guy. Sometimes irritable and irascible, nevertheless Peter had an undeniable charm and joie de vivre. He could fix just about anything and never lost his fascination for new, cool gadgets and old-school audio equipment. He loved listening to his library of vinyl and repairing his collection of astonishingly high-end turntables. He was a loyal and trustworthy friend, a failed heavy metal guitarist, and was hopelessly addicted to mimosas, action movies and coffee. He stockpiled staples like gum, sport drink powder, and non-dairy creamer in vast, apocalypse-prep amounts. He was an avid angler and enjoyed boating. He always wore Crocs with socks.

From go, Peter lived for two-wheeled mayhem. He raced motocross as a kid, vying for multiple national motorcycle-racing titles in Canada while breaking most of the bones in his body at various times. After one last try at a “major injury while motorcycling” 15 years ago, Peter abandoned the throttle to focus on his lifelong mountain biking obsession. He rode trails in Colorado & Florida, and all the way up the east coast of the USA. When he and his wife Linda bought a mountain home in North Carolina, he immediately took advantage of the legendary single tracks nearby. He spent hours watching mountain bike videos and poking through message boards looking for bike parts. In the late ‘90s, he and his friend John envisioned, planned, and built the Dyer Hill Park Bike Trails on the slopes and edges of a newly-opened sports park on a converted West Palm landfill. They rode, maintained, and expanded its network of tracks throughout the remainder of his life, always aided by a community of like-minded local mountain bikers. He rode brutally technical & steep NC mountain trails up until only a month before his untimely journey to a higher plane.

Like an unexpected sharp rock on a hairpin turn, Peter left a lasting mark. He is survived by his wife, Linda Cheramie; sister, Danuta Skowronski; his stepdaughter from childhood, Heather Girardi; stepchildren, Ashley, Cheslie, Stephen Leacock and Cheslie’s husband Fred Shernoff and step-grandchildren, Sophie, Maya, and Lyla. He is also survived by his adoring feline pride, Eddie, No. 9, Tommy, and George, as well as the steadfast, Gloria.