Enfield
The Enfield native raised a family of five, was a self-taught software engineer and co-produced a rap album.
He also spent many a day riding off-road vehicles, perfecting his superior hacky-sack skills and cooking top-notch meals for his mother and partner, Christopher Paul Roberts.
“He had a heart of gold,” his sister Jennifer Lurvey Dole said recently. “He would give somebody the shirt off his back, that’s just how he was.”
Lurvey’s life was cut short on March 26 when he died from injuries sustained in a snowmobile crash on the Northern Rail Trail in Lebanon. He was 47.
On the day before he died, Lurvey exchanged several texts with his partner, messages that seemingly helped Roberts cope with the shock of his death.
“The trails are so nice!” Lurvey wrote. “I’m having a total blast.”
When he returned back to his mother’s Methodist Hill home that night, which is where he had recently been living, Lurvey told Roberts, “That was the best ride of the season!”
The following day, Lurvey set out for what would be his final ride.
“He died doing something he loved,” Roberts said, adding “the world had a big loss when he died.
“I think he would have created some kind of app or computer program that would have changed the world … and who knows what would have happened with the rap,” Roberts said. “He was just a really amazing person. He was so full of life.”
D-I-Y
Lurvey was born in Claremont to Ross and Sandy Lurvey and grew up in Enfield among close friends, many of whom became lifelong.
His mother, now Sandy Benjamin, recalled her son as a typical boy, racing around area trails on dirt bikes and four-wheelers and tinkering with whatever came his way.
She came home one rainy day to find that he and his friends had a dirt bike resting on a milk crate in his bedroom.
“Who is your new interior decorator? Harley Davidson?” she joked. His reply: “Well, Mom, I had to take the wheel off, and it is wet, muddy and cold.”
“When will it be in here ‘til?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I just ordered the part,” he said with a laugh.
Do-it-yourself projects were something Lurvey enjoyed taking on, whether they were as straightforward as changing a tire or complicated as computer programming.
Lurvey graduated from Mascoma Regional High School in 1987 and although he took some vocational classes in the culinary field, he went into the technical support field, first working at Hypertherm. He was hired to operate machinery, but in a short amount of time, he learned how to make the machines operate more efficiently, and soon took on a new role, Roberts said.
While there, he met Sharon Angel through mutual friends. They married in the mid-’90s and had three children, Rachel, Jonathan and Rebekah; Angel had two children from a previous relationship. His kids were his world, his family said.
In 1996, he started working as a computer support engineer at Sun Microsystems, both in Massachusetts and in Colorado, and in 2005 moved on to a senior technical support role at Massachusetts-based Veritas Corp., a software company that later merged with Symantec.
He lived in West Newton, Mass., for the 11 years he spent with the company, and he had only recently moved back to Enfield when it announced mass layoffs scheduled for fall 2016.
At Veritas, he worked alongside Michael Geiser. The two sat in nearby cubicles, both providing phone support for the company, which specializes in storage-management and backup software.
“He was a team player,” Geiser said.
In addition to his regular work, Lurvey created a software program that improved the functionality of a scheduling system at the company.
Lurvey taught himself how to write code, or programming language, and designed that program, which allows employees to log in and sign up for certain after-hours shifts instead of emailing back and forth with managers.
“That was a surprise to me,” Geiser said. “I didn’t know he wrote software.”
Lurvey learned through trial and error and by reading manuals and textbook-like materials, said Roberts, his partner. He taught himself how to use several computer operating systems, including UNIX and LINUX.
“He had a mind like a sponge,” Roberts said. “He had many interests, and if he wasn’t interested in something, you’d know it. But if he was interested, he would get obsessed.”
Unique Talents
In the late 1980s, Lurvey crossed paths with music producer, Paul Breeden, a Massachusetts native whose father was the dean at Dartmouth College at the time. Lurvey had a friend who worked with Breeden, and one day the two found themselves in the same vehicle.
Breeden said his mind was instantly blown when a jam came on.
“He was rapping a song and I was like, ‘who is this white guy from New Hampshire?’ ” said Breeden, an African-American. “He was a trip. He was really, really good at rap. It was too bad he got cut short.”
In the early ‘90s, the pair aired on a Hanover-based radio station, opened for a group at the college and performed at fraternities. They even lived together in Wilder and at one point Breeden couch surfed at the Lurveys’ Enfield home. Life eventually took them in different directions, but they reconnected in the early 2000s and co-produced the album Stolen Bootleg Tracks in 2008.
Both men wrote and rapped, Lurvey under the name MastaSwitch and Breeden as MC Holy Ghost. The lyrics centered on several themes, including politics, love, war and religion.
“We liked to hide the messages in some songs,” Breeden said, adding that although Lurvey had his “moments of despair” he was “a really upbeat guy.”
“He was the only guy I could definitely say I could rely on,” Breeden said. “I had his back and he had mine.”
Roberts said he was taken aback by Lurvey’s ability to write raps.
“I am not a rap person, but I do know English and writing and poetry,” Roberts said.
If Lurvey’s rapping ability couldn’t stand up to the best in the industry, his writing certainly could, Roberts said, adding that a lot of his lyrics were controversial.
He could write double, triple and quadruple entendres.
“You could read so much meaning in just one phrase in a song,” he said.
Lurvey had many interests in life, including break-dancing and drawing, and he “was an absolute master” at video games, said Roberts, who met Lurvey online in the mid-2000s.
Lurvey’s mother called her son “old fashioned” in the sense that he wanted to get married and have children. He came out as gay later in life, she said.
“You can’t pick who you love,” she said with a smile and shrug during an interview recently. She added that she loved him for who he was, not who he loved.
“Rich adored his mother,” Roberts said. “If you are looking for a man, find out if he loves his mother.”
Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.