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7/30/26

"Uncle John"

John Lockridge (1906-1983), Grandma Mindte’s brother, was one of the more interesting characters in our family. The Lockridges moved from their home in Indiana to Reno, Nevada sometime before 1920. John’s occupation was listed as “Battery Man” in the 1923 Reno telephone directory. His first marriage didn’t last, but there are a few photos of his first wife (name unknown) in the family archive. He met and married his second wife, Dorothy Madhill in Reno. By 1940 the family had moved to Santa Monica, California. I don’t believe John and Dorothy had any children.

Now for the interesting parts:

According to my father, John ended up in prison a couple of times. Once he robbed a cab driver at gunpoint and another time he was caught counterfeiting.

John was the designer of the "JL Special" tethered gasoline powered model race car, which is now an extreme collector's item. My banjo picking friend Reed Martin had a JL Special poster hanging in his house. Daddy noticed it and told Reed that John Lockridge was his uncle. Reed wanted us to take him to my great uncle Scotty’s house in California, where Daddy thought some of the JL car parts might still be stored. Daddy was considering it, but Mom put a stop to it, saying, “You’ve never visited Scotty before and now you want to go and root through his shed.” That ended that – No JL special for us.

When I was growing up, John had a laboratory in the basement of Grandma Mindte’s house on Beall Avenue in Rockville, Maryland. This was after Grandpa died, of course, for The Commander, would not have allowed him to live there and set up shop. Grandpa Mindte was known as The Commander because of his rank in the Navy, but also because of the way he ran his household. In 1964, on my seventh birthday, I got the grand tour of John’s lab. There was a printing press, perhaps for more counterfeiting but I don’t know, and all kinds of electronic equipment. It was the perfect young boy’s paradise. The press was flapping and all kinds of gadgets with vacuum tubes were lit up and humming. It was total chaos, with papers and books scattered everywhere and half-finished sandwiches and coffee cups all about. After the tour, he cautioned me not to tell my father about what I had seen there. I agreed, and kept my word until 1974, when another incident caused me to spill the beans.

In the late 1960s, John married a sweet lady named Katy. The couple moved into a house on the western outskirts of Rockville where it seemed like John was making an attempt to normalize his life. He attended some family functions and invited us to their home for meals several times.

By 1973, brilliant, misguided John, the mad scientist, was back. I don’t know what became of Katy. He had bought a hearse and with the help of Daddy’s employees, cut its roof off and extended the sides to make it into walk-in motorhome. He had his bed in there and a cook-stove, but most importantly, there was a home-built computer with a teletype machine as the input-output device. I don’t want to get too technical, but it was a Baudot teletype, which uses a 5-bit code to communicate with the computer. Most computers of the day used Ascii, which is an 8-bit code. John’s reason for using the less efficient code was that he had invented a new way to type. “You can type as fast as you can think,” he said. He had wired each of the five Baudot bits to a switch with an indentation about the size of a fingertip. The idea was to lay your hands on two sets of the switches and directly input the 5-bit Baudot code into the computer, alternating left hand, right hand, etc. So, if you learned the Baudot code for each letter, you could input the data as fast as you could press your fingers down.

He parked the converted hearse in Daddy’s shop on Stonestreet Avenue in Rockville and lived there for about a year while working on his invention. One day when I arrived at the shop after school, John told me that he had to scrap the whole idea, because it would take longer than a lifetime to train someone to use it. He didn’t say whether he had been able to train himself!

One day in the winter of 1974, John and his hearse were gone when Daddy arrived at the shop. Also missing was one of Daddy’s credit cards that he had left for the employees to use for gas. That’s when I finally spoke up about what I had seen in John’s laboratory ten years earlier. Daddy didn’t report the card missing. I suppose he figured that John wouldn’t rip him off too badly. My parents followed his route across the country by the credit card receipts, as Mom kept urging Daddy to report the card. But the only charges on the card were gasoline (cheap then) and some meals at truck stops, so Daddy had been right about his uncle’s intentions. After he reached his destination, he stopped using the card. According to the receipts, for we never actually heard from him again, John ended up in Arizona. John passed away in 1983 at the age of 76.

Tom Mindte

John Lockridge, 1960s

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