In Loving Memory of
Wayne Alan “Chip” Sturdevant, Jr.
of Leander, Texas
05/20/1977 – 04/19/2026
Wayne “Chip” Alan Sturdevant Jr., known to nearly everyone as Chip, passed away on April 19, 2026, just one month before his 49th birthday. He was born on May 20, 1977, at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California, to Wayne Alan Sturdevant Sr. and Helen Sturdevant.
He was named after his father, a man he admired deeply — and from whom he inherited his infectious smile, his red hair, and no small part of his sense of humor. Along the way, Wayne Jr. became “Chip.” The family story holds that as a baby he stuffed his cheeks so full of food they puffed out like a chipmunk’s. Chip himself offered other explanations depending on his mood: sometimes he was “a chip off the old block,” and sometimes, with a grin, “like cow chip or potato chip” — just to make sure no one got too serious for too long.
Chip grew up in a home rooted in faith, and that foundation stayed with him throughout his life. He earned his Eagle Scout before the age of 14, studied Russian throughout high school, and eventually studied abroad in Russia — driven by a genuine curiosity about the world and the people in it.
He worked hard his entire life. Chip began his career at Albertsons and moved through video rental and into computers, building on skills his father had taught him. Over the years he held roles in IT and operations at Dell, GM, BMC, Fred Meyer, TCEQ, and many other organizations where people relied on him because he kept showing up and figuring things out. Even in the middle of a full technology career, Chip still picked up part-time work at a grocery store — because that was who he was. He did what needed to be done.
Chip had a remarkable ability to hold something meaningful in one hand and humor in the other. He loved words — not just using them, but playing with them, twisting them, reinventing them. He collected phrases and reshaped them into something uniquely his own. He called these little inventions his “neologisms.” Ask him how he was doing, and the answer was almost always: “Splendorfatastic.” Not just fantastic. Splendorfatastic.
Chip loved Kurt Vonnegut, and he lived by a Vonnegut principle: noticing the nice moments. Not in a naïve way — quite the opposite. He had walked through genuinely dark places, and those places left real marks on him. But what made him extraordinary was that he never hid those marks. Instead, he used them to help other people survive their own.
Chip’s empathy shaped everything. In AA, he showed up not just for himself, but for others. He listened without judgment, shared openly, made people laugh when they thought they’d forgotten how, and helped people believe they could find their way back toward light. He understood that the hardest parts of his own story could become the very thing that helped someone else heal.
People were drawn to him. Chip collected friends, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers who somehow stopped being strangers after one conversation. They told him things. They leaned on him. They loved him fiercely because he loved fiercely first. Underneath all of it — the humor, the storytelling, the wordplay, the tenderness — there was kindness. Of all the things he could have been praised for, kindness was the one that mattered most to him. When his middle child Nash once told him, “Dad, you are kind,” it stayed with him.
More than anything, Chip loved his children. Natasha, Nash, and Niki were the center of his heart. He spoke of them with pride, protectiveness, tenderness, and humor. He wanted to be better for them every single day.
He believed in noticing the small things — quiet evenings, shared jokes, putting your bare feet in the grass and looking up at the stars. He gave full-body hugs, the kind that made the world feel quieter and safer. And in those ordinary moments, he would often say the Vonnegut line he loved most: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Chip was messy, funny, complicated, deeply human, endlessly loving, and always reaching for connection. He was someone who carried his scars openly enough that other people stopped being ashamed of theirs. He kept trying. He helped people feel less alone.
Survivors
Chip is survived by his mother, Helen Sturdevant; his brothers Brian (Dorothy), Daniel (Shelly), Stephen (Jenn), and John; his former wife Desiree and their three children Natasha, Nadia, and Nikita; and his partner, Lara Hall. He was preceded in death by his father, Wayne Alan Sturdevant Sr.
“If this isn’t nice — loving people deeply, being loved deeply in return, finding laughter in ordinary moments, holding each other close through all the messiness of being human — I don’t know what is.”
