Richard 'Skippy' Polizzi of Bohemia dies at 55

Richard “Skippy” Polizzi worked hard but played better, eager to mediate disputes and make sure everyone around him was having a good time, family and friends said.

His smile and heart were generous, said his mother Elaine Faith Thompson, an artist. He joined his friends in shaving his head and helping with a memorial baseball game to raise money, she said, and he drove a friend to see her dying father in a Manhattan hospital.

“If somebody became a widow, he always asked me for a piece of artwork to raise money for them,” Thompson said. “When anybody ever needed anything for a fundraiser, he’d come to me [for a painting] and say ‘I’ll pay for it, Mom.’ He really went out of the way. That’s why he had so many friends.”

Polizzi died Dec. 22, two days after a coronary heart bypass for a blocked aorta, discovered during his hernia surgery in November. The Bohemia resident was 55.

He had worked immediately after high school in his stepfather’s South Bay Asphalt company, moving up and on to other companies in the industry. About a decade ago, he began installing garage doors for T.M. Kenney Door Systems. 

Last summer, Polizzi started his own company, All Rise Garage Doors.

Once in while, he was his mother’s model. His hands, in a praying pose, are the ones in her paintings of Pope Francis and George Washington. He posed for his mother’s painting of John F. Kennedy on a sailboat and appeared a few times in Suffolk County Water Authority literature his mother did artwork for, she said.

His friends called him the “mayor” of Bohemia and Oakdale because he knew so many people, due to his habit of starting brief conversations with strangers wherever he was. He also had the nickname “peacemaker” for trying to mend people’s relationships and pointing out that the other person may be going through tough times.

Polizzi always made people laugh, those who know him said. He would often speak in a Brooklyn accent or like a mob godfather. “We be hootin’ and hollerin’,” and “babies and animals love me and mothers too” were some of his favorite phrases.

“He was very approachable, always happy, always had a joke,” said friend Lee Soucek of Oakdale. "As soon as you looked at him, he would smile. He loved life.”

Polizzi even impressed himself when he connected a relative’s senior citizen friend, a recent widower, with siblings that he never knew he had, his wife Teresa Polizzi said with a chuckle. He was visiting his friend in Florida and overheard a neighbor there talking about a man they were trying to find. He immediately called his mother to help.

“The most important thing to him was everybody being OK,” Teresa Polizzi said. 

That was why Polizzi dubbed himself “director of entertainment.” He arranged bar meets, park gatherings and regular visits to Montauk and Lake George, leading a caravan of his circle of friends to the good times and annoying companions by playing his favorite 20 songs on a loop during the round trips, his friends and family recounted with laughter. 

Besides his wife and mother, Polizzi is survived by his children, Richard and Madison Polizzi of Holbrook and Ryan Sam Dessin of Sayville; sister, Dawn Mas of Sayville; brother, Howie Thompson of East Yaphank; and stepfather, Red Thompson of Bohemia.

A funeral Mass was celebrated Dec. 30 at St. John Nepomucene Roman Catholic Church in Bohemia, followed by burial at St. Lawrence Cemetery in Sayville.