Marine, medieval weapons seller tracked escaped prisoners
Richard Lucas came of age on a prison farm, the son of the warden. He went on to study education, receive 19 medals and ribbons for his service in the U.S. Marine Corps and, later in life, find a niche in medieval weapons sales.
He was 4 years old when his father took the job at the Mississippi County Penal Farm, the temporary home to about 100 men for their convictions on misdemeanor offenses.
“There weren’t any really serious armed-robber-type criminals out there,” says Lucas, explaining that they served sentences ranging from 30 days to a year.
His parents weren’t concerned about a criminal influence.
“In some cases, they were almost playmates,” he says. “I was raised with the worst part, so I knew I didn’t want to be in that place.”
Luxora, the town nearest the prison, was the location of a German prisoner of war camp, Lucas says.
“As a reward to the German prisoners, they would bring them out and let them work on the farm,” he says. “When I was about 6 years old I would go out where the German prisoners were and visit them them and they loved it, I guess because they missed their children at home.”
Lucas got a job as a guard at the 640-acre penal farm when he was 17.
“My daddy and I would ride horses while the prisoners were chopping the
corn, chopping the cotton, he and I would ride back and forth behind them, keeping an eye on them and counting,” he says.
He had to chase a couple of prisoners who escaped and hid along the Mississippi River levee.
“We had the only bloodhounds in Arkansas but in July it’s hot and dry and bad and it’s so dusty the dogs trying to breathe and track things, they get stopped up and they can’t do it,” says Lucas, who tracked those prisoners without canine assistance.
Another time, a prisoner ran during a bathroom break and Lucas followed his trail, discovering he had stolen some clothes off a woman’s clothesline to replace his prison stripes and then hidden underneath an abandoned house.
“I took a pistol and I crawled under the house and found where he had hollowed out a spot below the ground where you couldn’t see him, and we pulled him out of there,” Lucas says.
Lucas went to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville on a football scholarship.
“I was an All-State football player, played in the very first Arkansas All Star football game in 1956,” he says.
He transferred to Memphis State University and graduated with a degree in education. He later completed a master’s degree at the University of Arkansas.
“I had dreams of being a coach someday, and I had teaching certificates in general science and biology,” he says. “The day I graduated in January 1962, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.”
Lucas and his wife, Christine, married in February 1962 and then left for Quantico, Va., where he went through officer’s training. He spent a year in Okinawa, Japan, as an artillery officer, and was sent after that to Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C.
“I ended up being a football coach at Camp Lejeune,” he says.
Lucas calls himself “real lucky” to have only received shrapnel wounds when a mortar round landed 15 feet from him while he was serving in Vietnam. Following his tour, he was assigned to recruiting duty in San Francisco.
He was put in charge of the Marine Corps Convention in Las Vegas.
“I was a major by then, and one morning one of the sergeants hollered at me and said, ‘There’s a senator on the phone and he wants to talk to Chuck Robb,’” Lucas says. “It was [Sen.] Mike Mansfield and he had released information that Chuck Robb had been charged with atrocities in Vietnam.”
Robb, a Marine Corps veteran and son-in-law of President Lyndon B. Johnson, had served as a battalion commander in Vietnam and went on to became governor of Virginia and then U.S. senator.
A news conference was scheduled once Robb was located.
“The general called me over to the table and he handed me this little switch, and he says, ‘You sit right here at this end of the table out of the cameras and if Chuck Robb says something wrong, you press this button and it’ll kill his microphone,” Lucas says. “Fortunately, I didn’t have to use the kill switch.”
Lucas moved back to Arkansas in 1973. He retired from the Arkansas Highway Department in 1995 and started a business, selling medieval weapons, like Scottish skindos, knives that are tucked into socks in traditional Scottish dress for protection and hunting as well as for cutting fruits, bread and cheese.
“I’ve been to Scotland 12 times to buy products that I sold. I traveled around the country to Scottish festivals and Celtic and renaissance things selling medieval weapons,” Lucas says.
It was a niche he realized from going to the Scottish festival at Lyon College for most of the last 40 years.
“Would you believe I’ve been to all but three of them?” he says.