The luckiest day in my life was in the spring of 1988 when I met Sandy. I was hanging out at my favorite watering hole, shooting pool and having a couple of beers when Sandy came in with some guy I didn't know. I noticed her right away and pretty soon we were talking. I wanted to sit with her and was ready to take on the guy she came in with, when she told me that she'd already sent him home. She was so smart and pretty, and could shoot pool better than most men. I soon found out she could do almost anything. We never spent another day apart after that spring night.

We hit it right off right from the start, and shared a lot of the same interests. About 1990 we bought an old motor home that she named Clyde, left the ranch in care of her two sons, Rick and Steven, and took off on the first real vacation either of us had ever had. We visited Guthrie, Oklahoma, where I was born, and then went on to Hastings, Nebraska where she was born. We were antiquing all the way there and all the way back, looking for clowns for her collection and oil lamps for mine.

After we got home from our vacation, Sandy became interested in our genealogy and was off on another quest. While all this was going on, she still found time to tend to her flock of geese, several goats, some burros, a cage full of birds, and a pig she named Red who thought he was a dog. After doing both our genealogies and helping friends and others with theirs, she was getting burned out, and she asked me what I thought she should try next.

I had been working on a history of the Cajon Pass, and I mentioned to her that I wasn't going anywhere with it. She said, "Is that what you want me to do?" Well, when Sandy got interested in something, you'd better watch out because things were going to start happening! She was really good on the telephone and at writing letters. Before long we had Cajon history coming in from every direction.

We met a lot of interesting people, and made lots of new friends. When Sandy found out about the San Bernardino County Archives, she soon became one of their volunteers. What a history gold mine that place is. When I'd get home from work, Sandy would be hammering out Cajon history on her word processor, and with a big smile, she would say, "I've been a busy girl, just wait till you see what I found buried in the Archives today".

Sandy was a real organizer, but we were running out of a place to put all this stuff. One time I heard an old man say that you could stick a shovel just about any place in the Cajon Pass, and it would bleed history. Well, Sandy got real good with that shovel.

As I get older, I sometimes think of the changes I should have made along life's trail. I've decided that if things were any different, I might have never met Sandy. We had more fun, and accomplished more in ten short years, than most people do in a lifetime.

Written by her husband, John Hockaday