EASTHAMPTON — On a typical day, around 4 p.m., Richard Lavalle could be found at the Brass Cat sitting at a table next to a window looking down Cottage Street with his favorite beer in hand, a Budweiser.

He would either be playing cribbage with a friend, talking to the regulars at the bar he co-founded or recounting stories from his days as an Easthampton detective.

On Friday, that table was full of flowers and a sign that read: “Reserved for Richard Lavalle.” On April 18, Lavalle, 86, died at his Easthampton residence surrounded by his family.

Family and friends gathered at the bar to celebrate Lavalle’s life and share stories of the man —better known as Dick — whom several people described as “always fair.” He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War during the 1950s before joining the Easthampton Police Department, where he worked for 34 years, first as a patrolman and later as a detective. In 1994, he founded the bar at 65 Cottage Street with Glenn Humphriss and Toni Tygard.

“He was beyond optimistic all the time,” Michael Lavalle, who now owns the bar, said about his father. “Whatever trying times he faced — whether small or a catastrophe — he would say, ‘This too shall pass.’”

Of the nearly 80 people at the Brass Cat by 2 p.m. on Friday, many were drinking Budweiser as a tribute to Lavalle. His sons — Ted, Peter and Michael — wore plaid jackets like the one Lavalle would wear as a detective in the ’70s and ’80s.

Ted Lavalle, of Wesley Chapel, Florida, recounted once meeting a man his father had arrested while he was visiting Easthampton a few years after the Brass Cat had opened.

“He looks at me and says, ‘You’re not from around here,’” Ted Lavalle recalled the man saying. “I told him I grew up around here, and my father is the owner of the Brass Cat. He says, ‘Oh, your father is Richard. He arrested me, but I like your dad. He was always fair.’”

As a patrol officer, Lavalle covered the Cottage Street beat and then became a detective working on various cases, robbery investigations, harassment incidents, elder abuse, child abuse, credit-card fraud and house break-ins, while also breaking up a bar fight here and there. 

Lavalle spent a year investigating a 1977 triple homicide in Easthampton, one of the county’s most notorious cases. Herman Harris fatally shot and killed his mother, his sister and a boarder living with them on East Street. Lavalle was part of the detective unit that successfully solved the case and put Harris behind bars for life.

Raymond Sliz, 74, served in the police department at the same time as Lavalle, and Sliz remembered his colleague as having a personality that could gain the trust of not only his fellow officers, but also suspects he would interview.

“Dick was a confident professional,” Sliz, a former city police chief, said. “Once he got on a case, it was definitively going to get solved. With his personality, he could make you feel comfortable, even though he was investigating a crime in which you were a suspect in.”

When Lavalle retired from the police department in 1994, then-police chief Robert G. Redfern praised Lavalle’s commitment to the department.

“He’s not only the finest police officer, but the finest investigator I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with or knowing,” Redfern told the Gazette in 1994.

Former Easthampton Mayor Michael Tautznik said, “I was always impressed with the way he treated people.” Tautznik met Lavalle before Easthampton was a city; Tautznik served on the Select Board and Lavalle was a police officer.

In the years that followed, Tautznik said they became friends and they would go on camping trips with other friends to Cape Cod every summer. Tautznik credited Lavalle for starting the Brass Cat before Cottage Street became a cultural district and for helping to “improve the atmosphere of the street.”

“He will be missed,” Tautznik said. “He was the kind of person you take stock in.”

Many friends and relatives of Lavalle said he was one to give advice, whether solicited or unsolicited. For first-term Mayor Nicole LaChapelle, his words of encouragement came at an important time.

“During the election, he told me, ‘Kid, don’t let them get you down,’” LaChapelle recounted on Friday. “‘Fight the good fight and soldier on — keep going.’”

Throughout Friday afternoon at the Brass Cat, regulars would stop by to pay their respects to Lavalle, and occasionally a family member or friend would hop behind the bar and tell an amusing anecdote or share a fond memory about Lavalle.

Michael Lavalle said his father taught him “patience, a certain grace in the face of adversity, and to never forget to have fun.”

He added, “Today is a celebration of him — he wouldn’t like a whole lot of mourning.”

Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com

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