There were hundreds of people at St Paul's Church in Moss Vale paying their final respects to the Wallis family patriarch. The pews were filled with a sea of grey balding heads – many unmistakably farmers, all tan below the hat rim and pale above. Well known families who have farmed in the Southern Highlands for generations: Whatmans, Schofields, Hindmarshs, Walkers, Donovans, Quiggs, Clearys and Kangaroo Valley dairy families like the Chitticks, Sharmans, Cochranes and more.

"We thank the Lord for the gift of horses," said young Samuel Connors in the first of the prayers offered at the Requiem Mass. Keith's grandson went on to say, "Horses brought so much joy and comfort to Pa throughout his lifetime." Later Keith was described as a "master horseman who was meticulous in their presentation."

His good friend and fellow harness racing colleague David Baxter said that Keith was training horses in Moss Vale long before the Lackey Park track was constructed in 1965. Keith was a foundation member of the Moss Vale District Harness Racing Association from its inception until it closed in 2015, and for 50 years a tireless worker for the club. 

"Keith and his dad, the late Francis Arthur Robert Wallis, were both champion trainers and drivers of harness racing horses," said David.

But Keith didn't have a good start in the equine world, getting tossed off his pony when he was six, then spending a year in Camperdown Children's Hospital, his legs in calipers until he was 15. With so much time in hospital he didn't pick up much formal education, but had a swift and precise mind for weights and figures, turning cattle selling into an art form. The priest delivering the homily even reckoned Keith could probably tell you in a flash what the three and a half percent agents commission of the Biblical shekel would be.

He might not have had a good start with horses, but his business future was assured from an early age. When Keith was four he went to the Moss Vale cattle sale with his father and bought a poddy calf for a shilling. When they got to Kangaroo Valley his father stopped the cattle truck at Mrs Cullen's house and they sold it to her for three bob. Keith's cattle trading business had begun. 

Apart from being a great judge of horseflesh and cattle, Keith always had a twinkle in his eye when talking with a pretty young lady and would doff his hat in the good old-fashioned gentlemanly way when he met a female acquaintance in the street.

Not so long ago, while convalescing in a nursing home, Keith's daughter Kathryn asked him to write down his story. He made a start and even gave his memoir a title – For What it's Worth – most fitting for a former cattle trader, who was still attending the Moss Vale saleyards until five weeks ago.  

He wrote three pages, said Kathryn, but unfortunately, "didn't get over the bridge and out of Kangaroo Valley," where his dad had the butcher shop during his childhood years.  

Pity really, because the Keith Robert Wallis story would be a cracking yarn – a tale that began on April 10, 1928 as the ninth child in the Wallis family at the Garryowen Hospital in Moss Vale, his marriage to Mary Williams in 1951, the birth of his children Peter and Kathryn – tough times, good times and a lifetime of stories to tell.

The funeral procession was memorable. A horse-drawn hearse left the church and headed out to the trotting track at Lackey Park where Damian Baxter gave Keith's racing colours a last look at his beloved track with a few fast laps. Then they popped him in a more conventional hearse for the journey past the saleyards and his old farm, before delivering 'Red Ned' to his burial spot among the chortling magpies in St Patrick's Catholic Church cemetery at Sutton Forest – a fitting end to a life so very well lived.