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Richard B. Yuille
Born: 4/3/1947
Died: 7/28/2026
Age: 79
Community: Flint, MI
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YUILLE, Richard B. – Of Flint, age 79, passed away peacefully Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at Springvale Assisted Living and Memory Care. Cremation has taken place, and family and friends will officiate the memorial service on Friday, August 7, 2026 at 2 p.m. at Swartz Funeral Home, 1225 West Hill Road, Flint, with visitation Thursday from 11am to 3pm and 5pm to 8pm at the funeral home.
Rick was born in Flint on April 3, 1947, the third of the late Gordon and Ruth (Bryan) Yuille’s four children. Growing up in Flint through the Fifties and early Sixties, with summer weekends at his parents’ swampside Tawas cottage, Rick developed into an intelligent rascal with a strong sense of fairness and a strong sense of humor. He went to Southwestern High School, where he played basketball, making the All Saginaw Valley second team and averaging over 14 points a game his senior year. In 1965, the year they graduated, he and Patty Magee made the move from being high school steadies to being married. They then made the move to being college students and then parents, with two sons born while they were at Michigan State University (Ricky) and while Rick was at the University of Michigan Law School (Bryan). The son of an autoworker, Rick graduated with honors from both institutions. In 1972, back in Flint, Rick and his older brothers Bob and Jim were all admitted to the bar on the same day (called “Yuilletide” in a newspaper caption). Rick worked as a trial lawyer for 23 years with his father-in-law, David Magee, and his law partner, Herb Milliken, eventually becoming a partner in their firm. He served as president of the Genesee County Bar Association from 1986 to 1987. In 1996, he was elected as a circuit court judge for Genesee County, and he served in that position, including as chief judge of the circuit, until his retirement at the end of 2019. In that position, he particularly valued his work in drug treatment court, where he felt he could most directly make a positive impact on people’s lives.
Rick was a gifted storyteller with a quick wit who had a social ease that put others at ease in his company. He had a spark of trickery and mischief. In his work, he turned every page and read every word. He enjoyed playing (and watching) sports and games throughout his life: poker, gin rummy, and euchre; foosball, pool, and darts; and whiffleball, horseshoes, and Jarts. A sportsman by nature (and perhaps also as an example to his kids), he would never gloat and never sulk but always took delight in the game and its players (which is not to say he didn’t like winning). He had an unerring sense of the flywheels of fairness and would accordingly tweak the family rules of board and card games, changing the value or meaning of certain cards or the guidelines for who wears the diaper on their head (and why). While serving as judge, Rick had a backboard and basket set up in a storage area of the courthouse attic so he could shoot hoops to unwind during long days, much as he had gotten through law school by playing endless pinball in the quad. He and Pat played countertop bar games (cards and trivia) so often in their travels that they eventually bought machines to also have at home. Rick played city league softball and basketball, ran several marathons around the country, and loved golfing and fishing. He was an excellent cook of lake perch. He made a feast of the year’s catch every Super Bowl Sunday, an event that eventually included the Winter Yuille-lympics, a randomly shifting roster of table games and stunts to determine the reigning family champion. The more prestigious and crowd-pleasing Summer Yuille-lympics were held each year in Tawas, where the closing ceremony involved sitting around the firepit chewing the fat late into the night while listening to Willie Nelson’s Stardust. Rick’s passion for music was another constant in his life. He and his brother Bob spent many a firepit night challenging one another, not to name who sang such-and-such a song, but to correctly identify the B-side and the color of the label on the 45. (Beer may have been involved.) Rick’s musical tastes were broad, encompassing Sinatra, Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Robert Cray, Van Morrison, (late) Beatles, and Alabama. The sounds of Motown and the R&B songs of the late Fifties and early Sixties were probably closest to his heart, but music for him was never a wallow in nostalgia, and his ears were always open to new sounds to bring into his life. He was a master of the mix tape (#53 Steely Dan, #27 CSNY, #38 miscellaneous), several of which ended up in rotation behind the bar of the Torch for some years (have we mentioned the Torch?), and when technology moved on from cassettes to iTunes he spent many meticulous months digitizing his enormous collection. These tapes and playlists provided a continuous soundtrack to the road trips he and Pat loved to take. They went everywhere in Michigan and many places beyond, with a particular fondness for Saugatuck; Nashville; New Smyrna Beach, Florida; Playa del Carmen, Mexico; and Provincetown, where they had honeymooned (and acquired a discerning clam chowder palate) back in 1965. As that list might suggest, beaches and coastal communities were their particular jam. Rick especially loved to fish and bodysurf in the rolling waves (not at once). Other things Rick loved, in no special order: Necco wafers, fudgesicles, Abbott and Costello, his family and friends, freshly roasted peanuts, Up North bars, Up North bartenders, A Christmas Story, being able to officiate his sons’ weddings, popcorn (no one knows how many times his favorite pan caught fire and had to be raced out of the house), photography (for a time, he had a basement darkroom and enlarger), casinos, the Saint Bernard he named Miranda after both a Supreme Court decision and a Shakespeare character, walking to the foghorn on Tawas Point, his four-fingered baseball glove, Perry Mason, fish and chips from the old Ambassador Coney Island, Chinese takeout from Cantonese Gourmet (South), pizza from Luigi’s (as a side note, for various reasons he never ordered takeout under his real name), the (first two) Godfather movies, lighthouses, splitting logs and chopping firewood, crossword puzzles, Anatomy of a Murder, playing devil’s advocate, and teasing your assumptions. His later life was lit by his love for his grandson, Hudson, whom he always looked forward to spending time with and whose pictures quickly supplanted the Far Side and New Yorker cartoons that had previously been Rick’s main contributions to the family fridge.
In addition to Pat (Magee), his wife and partner in adventure for over 61 years, he is survived by son Rick and husband Tim Retzloff; son Bryan and wife Tara Yuille; grandson Hudson; and sister Karolyn and husband Jeff Willoughby. He was preceded in death by his brothers, Bob and Jim.
Rick’s family would like to express their profound gratitude to the caring and dedicated staff of the memory care unit at Springvale Assisted Living and of CorsoCare Hospice. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Make a Wish Foundation, an organization whose mission moved Rick deeply.
Your condolences may be shared with the family at swartzfuneralhomeinc.com
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| Visitation |
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8/6/2026 |
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11:00 AM |
Thursday from 11am to 3pm and 5pm to 8pm at the funeral home.
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| Funeral Service |
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8/7/2026 |
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2:00 PM |
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Swartz Funeral Home & Cremation Center
1225 West Hill Road
Flint, MI 48507Get a Map to this location...
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