The newspaper that roams
All Aboard : The Story of Joshua Lionel Cowen & His Lionel Train Company
|
Cadillac Jack and the trolley he loves
The only love of Jack Richer's life is a retired trolley car he transported from Los Angeles to the Southern California desert. By Chuck Woodbury From Out West #30 Cadillac Jack fell in love in 1963, and it changed his life. Jack Richer, his real name, took his love to the desert, where he built a home and was as happy as a guy and his streetcar could be. Yes, his love was (and is) a streetcar — a 1930s-era trolley car from the Los Angeles Railway. In 1963, with the arrival of freeways, trolley number 3072 and the rest of its proud fleet were put out to pasture. Richer bought it for $1,550 at an auction. It would be the defining moment of his life. It wasn’t (and isn’t) easy owning a streetcar. For example, where do a guy and his streetcar live? Richer and his streetcar ended up on five lonely acres in Pearsonville, Calif., in the Mojave Desert north of Ridgecrest. His property is a Godforsaken plot of baked earth with no water, no power, no neighbors, no paved access — nothing but sagebrush and rats, and sunlight so brutal it about kills you. “We had 100 days over 100 degrees last year,” said Richer, a private, soft-spoken man of 64. The first thing he did when he moved to Pearsonville was build a 192-square-foot, one room wooden cabin, his home ever since. Then he started building the home for his trolley, a barn of 65 feet. It took him seven years. “Every payday I got another board,” he said. From the day he moved in there was trouble — vandals shooting up everything he owned — his cars, house, the barn, guests’ cars, the piles of junk all around. “They’re not after me personally,” said Jack. “They just come out here to target practice, and there’s nothing around except what’s on my property.” Jack Richer is a retired electrical engineer from the Naval Weapons Center in nearby China Lake.
He once had the company of coyotes. But some local ranchers complained they were killing their cattle, so they poisoned them. With no coyotes, the rats came. Jack’s trapped ‘em, poisoned ‘em, shot ‘em, but they’ve been relentless. He brought in cats, but they died or disappeared. The rats eat everything — junk, electrical wires, curtains, rugs, whatever’ll fit into their filthy little mouths. Nowadays, they’re working on eating the trolly. Yet, incredibly, Jack Richer has stayed in what some folks might argue is a Hell on Earth. Why? Simple, of course: To be with his trolley. He insists he has only one regret in life — that he didn’t buy a Quonset hut instead of constructing his trolley barn of wood. “It would have kept the rats and wind out,” he explained. He says that his trolley represents the best years in electrical engineering. “It’s a complete textbook in electrical engineering of the ’30s,” he said. “That’s when it reached its peak. In one body, the trolley represents the best of power engineering.” It still runs. Jack has put down 180 feet of track, and with power from a generator, he’s driven the trolley from one end to the other. The Bureau of Land Management once told him he could lay track clear to the base of a nearby mountain. Then they said he couldn’t. So it sits, very still and very silent, gathering dust in the dark, rat-infested barn, half of its seats missing. Its destination plaque reads “Pico and Georgia,” as if it were about to embark on a proud electronic stroll along the rails of a bygone Los Angeles. “If the trolley could talk it would have a million stories,” Jack said. I boarded her, then sat down and pretended it was 1947 in Los Angeles, the year and area of my birth. It wasn’t, of course, and I felt sad, mostly because this beautiful piece of history was locked up in a barn in the middle of nowhere, a solitary prisoner of time and space and one man’s love. “Why am I here? Take me away,” it whispered to me, but only in my imagination. Jack Richer has considered donating the trolley to a museum, but he says he would have to move, too, to be near it. “As long as I’m alive I don’t ever want to lose that car,” he said. The name stuck. The car is as unique as its owner. It’s propane powered with more than 300,000 miles. The totally altered instrument panel looks like something out of a Buck Rogers movie. It’s the product of a never-married electrical engineer who lived alone in the desert with a trolley car, who had a lot of spare time. ©2003 by Out West Newspaper
Out West, 9792 Edmonds Way, #265-A, Edmonds, WA 98020. |
