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Leighton Dorey Obituary
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Memories and Condolences
for Leighton Dorey
JH
May 30, 2025
Rest in peace my friend, lest we forget.
June 9, 2019
We havent forgotten your smile, wisdom and friendship. You are remembered with fondness and love. Sending love to Kim and Alyrene on this sad anniversary.
B Craul
James Robertson
July 8, 2017
Oh, Leighton. How sorry I was to have to hear about your sudden death. We have known each other for more than sixty years. We shared some good times when we were kids. We both had similiar stories about our first marriages which we shared a few years ago. When we last talked a few years ago you were surviving cancer and were in love and getting ready to retire. Oh, how horrible way to die. Friend I mourn your loss but I will cherish my memories of better times with you.
Stephen and Beverly Volk
July 8, 2017
We knew Leighton from the years our sons were in gymnastics together. We knew he was a successful businessman, and that he was proud of his children, but we didn't know that he'd once been a gymnast himself, or that he loved literature, or that he was a horticulturalist and naturalist, among his many other talents.
We are saddened to learn of his passing, and wish his family comfort and peace, and the richness of good memories.
June 26, 2017
My thoughts and prayers go with Kimberly and her family and Leighton's daughter Alyrene.
The word tragic seems inadequate when describing Leightons passing. How like a Greek tragedy that after striving for and finding peace and happiness he should meet this end.
Rest In Peace. You will be remembered in our hearts always.
B Craul, Hellertown, Pa
Patti Sakdiponephong
June 21, 2017
There are no words to descibe the utter sadness in the loss of Leighton Dorey. Please accept our deepest sympathies to His wife & family from Patti,Toy ,Cathi & everyone at The Cafe in Bethlehem.
LouAnn
June 20, 2017
I am shocked and saddened deeply of your horrible loss. I remember sharing with Leighton at a Landmark seminar many years ago in Doylestown, PA. He was authentic and open and honest as I expected.
The realty business in Springtown was one that was highly respected and admired because of his standards.
May you find peace in the future years. I could not let the day pass without acknowledging his life and the difference he made in his community.
Whitmore family
June 20, 2017
My condolences to the Dorey family. May God provide his care and comfort you each day. - Ps 145:18,19
June 20, 2017
I am so very sorry for your tragic loss. The pain of loosing someone so dear can be so deep only God can help ease it with His comforting words. Please take solace in them in Isaiah 57:15; Psalms 29:11
June 20, 2017
But God resurrected him by releasing him from the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held fast by it. Act 2:24 shares the promise of a Resurrection for all of us. My condolences to the Dorey family and his loved ones.
- Jerry
Connie
June 19, 2017
May the God of comfort be with you at this time
Leighton at Moffat Tunnel, Winter Park CO, an allusion to the tunnel disaster in Atlas Shrugged.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton showing one of his many fine citrus trees.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton reading, of course.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Walking the cliffs at Torrey Pines State Park.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Walking the beach at Torrey Pines State Park.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
At the top of Loveland Pass, Colorado.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton and friend John at the top of Loveland Pass, Colorado.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton and friend John at Red Rocks Amphitheater, Denver.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton was an outdoorsman, a reader, a thinker, a doer.
John Holmes
June 18, 2017
Leighton and I went to military high school together, roommates part of the time. I visited him on Dale Rd in Abington P.A., and somewhere in the early college years we drifted out of contact. To fulfill looming military demands of the time and avoid danger in Vietnam he went into the Coast Guard, I pursued ROTC in college.
During those years apart I pursued introspective inquiries such as Werner Erhard's erhard seminars training' and The Forum, My psychic brother Leighton and his families did The Forum and more.
After Al Gore invented the internet I found Leighton 35+ years later doing real estate in Rancho Santa Fe. When we got together it was like nothing had changed. How have you been.' Good, you?' Fine.' Back in touch.
Leighton was a reader. He showed me an essay by John Ruskin which in part is still one of my most favorites:
you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllablenay, letter by letter.
the study of books is called literature, and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books
you might read all the books in the British Museum, and remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,-- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
Leighton was a man of letters.
He pointed me toward Ralph Waldo Emerson and On Self Reliance:
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Leighton loved the outdoors, perhaps as Mark Twain describes in his Autobiography:
I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep
woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wildflowers,
the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling
clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees,
I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the
oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the
maples and the sumacs luminous with crimson
fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen
leaves as we plowed through them.
For a well-read and well-educated person Leighton never stopped inquiring. He shared with me:
Eric Hoffer, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Sowell, Henry Hazlitt, NYRB, The Harvard Business Review, Lapham's Quarterly - my favorite, TED talks, and Hans Rosling, to name but a very few.
We traded many many emails with articles, essays, and opinions we knew would interest us. So many of his emails ended with What do YOU think?
Always thinking, always inquiring. I saw a noteworthy quote a couple of days ago:
Proverbs 27:17
Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.
King James Version (KJV)
Leighton sharpened all of us.
Perhaps one of his favorite authors, or at least most-read, was Ayn Rand:
This is Leighton Dorey speaking
I swearby my life and my love of itthat I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
It is actually This is John Galt speaking, of course, from Atlas Shrugged.
Farewell my friend. We can't converse anymore, but I will still ask when reading and inquiring, what would Leighton think'?
David Rowe
June 17, 2017
Leighton was my former patient in Springtown
Pennsylvania, may he rest in peace
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