Gary Lee Cox, died 2025: Green Beret, Instructor, Sandwich Shop Owner
More than ten years in the Green Berets, a martial arts school his family says he ran for over fifty years, and an Irish sandwich shop called Magilacutty’s. Not every life on this page comes with a documented record, and we would rather say so than smooth it over.
- Died
- 25 March 2025, Salt Lake City area, Utah, “peacefully in his sleep”
- Service
- U.S. Army Special Forces, 10+ years
- Also
- Owner, Magilacutty’s
- Services
- 1 April 2025, Larkin Sunset Gardens, Sandy, Utah
Gary Lee Cox served more than a decade in the Green Berets before a long civilian life in Utah that included martial arts instruction and, at one point, an Irish sandwich shop. According to his obituary, he operated his own martial arts studio for over fifty years and was inducted into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame, receiving its Most Distinguished Grand Master recognition.
What a school owner should take from Gary Lee Cox
An uncomfortable one, and it is about the record rather than the man.
Fifty years of teaching left almost no documentary trace. No school website archived, no hall-of-fame listing we could locate, no local news coverage, no student roster. What survives is a funeral-home obituary written by his family.
That is the default outcome for a career in this industry, and it is avoidable. A school that has been running for decades should have a written history somewhere a stranger can find — a page on its own site, an entry in an association record, a local newspaper feature. Not for vanity. Because when someone eventually writes about you, that is all they will have to work with.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- The fifty-year studio claim and the Hall of Fame recognition appear only in the family-written obituary. We searched for an independent hall-of-fame listing, news coverage or school record and found none. Neither claim is contradicted; both are self-reported, and we have attributed rather than asserted them.
- His age is not stated in the funeral home obituary. A community aggregator gives 83; another syndicated copy lists a birth date of 23 October 1901, which is a transparent data-entry error, almost certainly for 1941. We have printed no age.
- Cause of death was not reported beyond “peacefully in his sleep.”
- Principal source: the Larkin Mortuary obituary, Salt Lake City.
If you trained with him, or hold records from his school, we would like to hear from you — this entry deserves to be longer than it is.