Max Hamby
July 5, 1937 – September 5, 2026
Max Hamby, 89, of Westmorland, California, died at home on September 5, 2026, having come home from the hospital that same day. He was born July 5, 1937, at the old Brawley hospital to F.J. and Mary Hamby, and he spent nearly all of his 89 years within a few miles of that spot, in the Imperial Valley, he farmed, built on, and never quite stopped tinkering with.
Max grew up in the family bee business his father started in the years after World War II, and honey was the first of many trades he would work with his hands. As a young man he drove a truck for Goodwill in San Diego. He married Fannie on June 15, 1959, and their first child, Mark, was born in Chula Vista in November 1961 on a night so foggy the young couple could not make it home to the Valley. Sharlet followed in 1964 and Stephen in 1966. By 1967, tired of finding hive after hive killed by the heavy cotton pesticide applications of the day, Max and his parents moved the bees to western Montana. Two dry years followed there, the season he came home, by a honey crop worth two years of work made all at once. He returned to Westmorland in 1969 and stayed.
He was a builder before he w...