by John Hockaday

I left a lot out. I don't think I knew I had a cousin Richard until I was 5 or 6 years old. I was riding my tricycle in front of Grandma and Grandpa's house, west Grand was still a dirt road in those days, out of no where this kid showed up, jumps me, and starts punching me with his fists. I didn't know what it was all about and I got the hell out of there.

I don't think I knew he was my cousin until later. I guess this was just his way of saying hi. Later in life I thought he learned to fight watching all those cowboy movies. But after remembering this story, I think he was just born that way. It caused him a lot of trouble all his life.

Most of the time he thought himself right. It cost him a lot of friends and a lot of jobs. The only time he really had a place of his own was when he lived in his car or his truck parked in somebody's backyard.

He got his mail at my mom's ‏[Eva Hockaday]‏ on Buena Vista. For years he lived in the wash house behind grandma and grandpa's, until the place sold. That is where he lived for a good part of his life. He probably stayed there longer than any other place.

He had a girlfriend. I don't know what happened, but I think she dumped him. He didn't ever get over it. He never bothered her, I don't think she knew, but he kept track of her for years. Knew where she lived and how she was doing. Maybe he thought they might get back together, I don't know. Just seemed kinda strange.

He'd go into the Marines right after that.

That's when I bought his 33' Chevy. Before that he had a 29' Ford Sedan. This story is too good to leave out: I had a Model A, 2 door, with two bucket seats that weren't bolted to the floor. If you didn't hang on to the dash when you took off, you'd go over backwards. For a joke, I took the nut off the steering wheel and if my passenger didn't like the way I was driving, then I would just hand them the steering wheel. I drove the car like that so long, that I got used to grabbing the dash, keep me and the steering wheel from going over into the back seat.

Back then, the old oxidized paint wouldn't shine unless you scrubbed it with kerosene and that only lasted until you took a dirt road. There was a hill climb place over in San Dimas near my cousin Jim's place. It wasn't real steep but you had to hit it just right to go up it. My cousin Richard showed up with his kerosene shine on his black 29 Chevy. He wanted to climb the hill but didn't want to get his car dirty and he asked if he could use my car. I'm thinking about the steering wheel and the seat thing and I said "yeah". You don't have to guess what happened. He got part way up the hill, my car made a U-turn, almost turned over, and came back down the hill with Richard bouncing around inside. When he got excited he would start stuttering. It was a long stuttering that he said, "You should of told me about the seat and everything". He was ready to fight. I stayed way back. I told him I was used to driving it like that and forgot all about it. It didn't mean to cause him any trouble and it seemed to settle him down a little bit.

Last thing I remember about his old Chevy was it had a broken axle. He had another car by then. We wired the throttle open and hid behind Grandpa's garage until the old Chevy blew up in a cloud of smoke.

When he was in the Marines, or right after that, he bought Uncle Vercill's 1940 Ford. He bought another car and sold me the 40 Ford. I nearly drove the wheels off of that car. Then I bought a new 55' Ford pickup and got married. He bought Vercill's car back from me and rebuilt the engine and other stuff. He worked at several jobs: Ace Pipeline, and others, got his chauffeurs license. Vercill got him a Safeway job driving an egg truck. But he couldn't handle having a boss - he knew more than they did. He didn't like the way he was being treated and he usually quit. I don't think he ever got fired. He just quit. While he was working he'd save his money and buy a lot of guns. He would live off of his unemployment when he was out of work. He collected coins for a while too. I remember one time he was living in the wash house behind Grandma's and Grandpa's place, he slept on an old army cot. He could cover his cot from head to toe with his gun collection. When his unemployment ran out, he would hock one of his guns, then he'd get a job and start all over.

His specialties were guns, airplanes, and movie stars. He knew a lot about all of them. One of his favorites was John Wayne. He thought he was John Wayne for a while. He bought himself a John Wayne hat. He could walk and talk just like him.

I almost forgot about this: He bought a 55' Ford pickup like mine. We took a sight seeing hunting trip to the High Sierras and went clear up to Crescent City to see my sister Margie and her family.

Richard lived in North Pomona for a while, just across from Uncle Lloyd. The guy that owned the place just wanted enough money to pay his ‏[property]‏ taxes, so Richard got the place real cheap. Just $20 a month. Lloyd helped him put the deal together. Richard lived there quite awhile.

The reason he knew so much about airplanes was he built most of the models of them. He knew the test pilot names, the date they were built, how high and how fast they flew. One time when I was visiting him, he had all his models spread out all over the living room floor - almost took up the whole living room. One time when he got broke, he sold his model collection to the Chino Air Museum.

He couldn't pay his gas bill. They turned it off. But he turned it back on. The next time they took the meter. He didn't like taking a bath with cold water so got a whole bunch of that cheap plastic hose and spread it all out over the backyard. On a sunny day he could get enough water to take a warm bath. When they turned off the electricity, he moved into the garage where he had a wood stove and a kerosene lamp for light. But he eventually got into it with the owner and lost the place. That's when he started living in his Mercury station wagon.

He spent more time at my Mom's house on Buena Vista in Pomona. After several other episodes, he ended up in a cold storage place in Claremont. The place had a sloping roof that went from one storage to storage. The owner had an old Stearman biplane on display, up on the roof of that place. The owner let Richard stay there to keep an eye on things at night. I guess he was sort of a security guard. He lived in the back of an old 60 Ford pickup for a lot of years. He bought another truck just like it but he never got enough money to fix it up. He stored it at my place for several years.

Then he found he could collect cardboard and sell it. He soon found some of the dumpsters behind supermarkets and donut shops threw away stuff that was still good to eat. When the price of cardboard was up, he could buy a couple of burritos each day and keep a little gas in his truck.

There were a lot of other people collecting cardboard to make a little money. There was an person, who's straight name was "Mad Dog", he stole the cardboard when they were in the dumpster and Richard found out about it and set the guy up and got into a fight. The guy had Richard's thumb in his mouth and almost bit it off. He wouldn't let go, until Richard hit him with a short piece of pipe. Richard got arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. The Raghead took him to court and had half his family there for witness. Richard said there wasn't any.

His thumb got infected and nearly lost it. He spent 2 weeks at the County hospital. He said there were no witnesses, but he lost and had to do 6 months in the County jail. It took a lot out of him. He didn't seem quite the same after that. He started carrying a gun.

He eventually got gut cancer and was going down fast. I finally talked him into going to the Veteran's hospital in Riverside. I told his brother Ray about it and he showed up to take him to the hospital. When I got there, he had just woke up. He was so weak that I had to help him get dressed couldn't hardly stand. He lived there a long time and everybody there knew him and were all lined up on the loading dock watching what was going on. When Richard seen all those people watching, as weak as he was, he put on his best John Wayne walk and walked all the way from Ray's station wagon.

I went to see him at the hospital several times. All the nurses liked him, said he had a good attitude. Last time I went to see him he was real talkative. Told me he had some money hidden in his truck and said I could have it, Ray didn't need it. He gave me his 2 trucks but I had to promise that I would get the blue one running. When I got home, the hospital called and told me he had died.

Richard was more like my brother than any of my other cousins. I went through the stuff in the back of his truck. I found books about movie stars, ... , military phone, airplanes and a bible. Way too many flashlights, 5 or 6 of them, but none of them worked. When I opened one of them to check the batteries, a bunch of Susan B. Anthony dollars fell out. All of those flashlights were full of these coins, close to a hundred of them.

Here are a couple of stories I left out.
Richard, Ray, and my Aunt Blanche moved around a lot, several different places. When they lived on West 3rd Street, Richard started 7th grade. He couldn't get his mom to quit walking him to and from school, so he just quit going to school.

It was about the same time, Richard kicked the ass of the meanest kid in junior high, name of Raymond Leara. When in the Marines, Richard got upset at a Drill Sargent abusing a fellow recruit and he stepped in and kicked his drill sergeant's ass. He was almost court martialed. He had a temper, especially when he thought he was being taken advantage of or if he saw some else being taken advantage of.

That influence of his John Wayne spirit. It was that spirit that he demonstrated at the hospital and why the nurses said he had a good attitude.