Fred Rickabaugh Sr. liked to cook, ride around in cars, plan family parties, visit cemeteries, dote on his grandson, play the patriarch.
For someone who made a living as a doorman for an after-hours club, his inclinations were relentlessly domestic.
Family was "number one on his priority list," his only son, Fred Jr., said at a gathering of relatives to discuss his dad. "That's where he got his joy."
Rickabaugh was killed five years ago this weekend in a triple homicide at an after-hours club - the UVA - by illegal immigrant Miguel Padilla, who's on death row waiting for a state Supreme Court ruling on his appeal.
Rickabaugh was the middle child among seven - all but the oldest were sons - and after the death of his parents, he took over the family, his brother John said.
"Everything we did," John said, "he started it."
That included cookouts and the annual Christmas Eve party. He'd call "board meetings" to plan such events and dinners on holidays. The "board" consisted of Fred and his wife, Janet, and John and his wife, Mary Jane. They lived across the alley from one another on the 500 block of Sixth and Seventh avenues.
Everyone would go to a restaurant - they'd try to hit all the new ones - then ride around in John's Lincoln for hours, talking about what needed to be done.
When it came time to prepare the dinners, Fred would help Mary Jane bake. She'd been "handed down" all the Italian cookie recipes and made as many as a hundred dozen at a time.
Fred would mix the dough. For Mary Jane's orange cookies, he'd separate the eggs, fold in the whites and eat the scraps - "the edges" - that she'd cut off from the rolled-out dough.
John would join him in that.
When John and Mary Jane's son got married, they had board meetings weekly for two months. Fred and Mary Jane collaborated on a menu for 200 guests, and he cooked meatballs, sausage, chicken, ham and pasta, filling three tables at the Cesare Battiste, if you count the cookies and fudge.
At the same time, he plotted with their son to plan John and Mary Jane's 25th anniversary party, and he helped with their daughter's wedding.
Every Saturday, Fred and John would ride and listen to the police scanner and oldies on WALY, stopping for a milkshake and arguing over who would pay, with Fred usually prevailing.
Sunday afternoons, the couples went to dinner, sometimes writing preferences on paper slips and drawing a winner - whether Hoss's or Ryan's in Johnstown or a restaurant in Belleville.
They'd sometimes ride as far as West Virginia and Maryland to sightsee. Once they went to St. Francis University and walked around, looking at the flowers, never having realized before how beautiful it was, Mary Jane said.
They'd take the "Yesteryear" picture in Sunday's Mirror and try to locate the building pictured, never failing except once with a house on Fourth Street they figured had been demolished.
And they'd visit cemeteries, Janet said. "Let's go to the garden of stone and see what we can see," Fred would say.
They'd go to the old one at 17th Street and the boulevards, near Luciano's Auto Body, Grandview and Rose Hill, where they found gravestones for a Florence Rickabaugh, her son John and his wife, Mary Jane, all of whom they hadn't known existed, all of whose names matching perfectly with their family, like a shadow.
They'd take apples for the deer when they went to Calvary Cemetery. Fred is buried there now.
Since his death, it's not the same. They don't do much riding anymore.
"The joy went out of it," John said. "All those little things, you can't get them back."
Giving
Fred had a generous streak.
When there were leftovers from family gatherings, he'd invite neighbors to partake, Fred Jr. said. When the Sno-Cone man would come around and some kids didn't have the money to buy, he'd buy for all, he said.
One Thanksgiving night, they found a homeless man sitting on a sidewalk grate near Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. Fred put together a meal from what was left of their holiday dinner and left it near the man's blanket.
The generosity went back to their childhoods.
"He'd baby all of us," John said.
In any picture that included both of them, Fred would have his arm around him, John said.
Matt
He was proud of his grandson, Fred Jr.'s son, Matt, whose birth turned the older man's life around.
"He felt like he had something to do [then]," Fred Jr. said. "I didn't get into sports like my dad [had] hoped. My son turned out to be the the son he wanted."
He built Matt up, gave him confidence. Matt played football for Altoona Area High School, earning a spot in the East-West all-star game as a senior.
Fred was buried two days before Matt's first game that season.
He didn't play in college, using his grandfather's death "as an excuse," Fred Jr. said. He'd have played if Fred had lived, because "Matt did what his Pop said," according to John.
Members of all three victims' families attended all three funerals. "That was a rough week," Fred Jr. said. "A whole week of mourning."
It ended with the death of Fred's sister, Regina. She'd been sick, and they never told her about Fred.
Aftermath
The family is bitter about what happened. Fred Jr., however, has accepted it.
"You can't deny it," he said.
"[But] it's not fair," Theresa, Fred Sr.'s daughter, said.
As for forgiveness - the perpetrator would need to admit culpability before he'd consider that, Fred Jr. said.
Theresa has written numerous letters, but shredded all of them. In them, she asks Padilla to think what it would have been like
if someone had murdered his mother.
John and Fred think that if the situation had been different that night - if Fred and Padilla had been alone - Fred could have talked him down, and nothing would have happened.
Fred had a way of defusing situations, relaxing tensions, giving people who had their backs up a way to back out "gracefully," John said.
Fred always liked trivia, old things and local history. He followed the replacement of the old Seventh Street Bridge obsessively, and would visit the project daily.
He died Aug. 28, 2005. The new bridge, a couple blocks from his house, opened a month later.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.
