From feral freedom to farm discipline, Joel Randall in Episode 295

This week, Big Rich sits down with Joel Randall, whose path to becoming an OG R-Gang rock crawler started far from ordinary. Pulled from school after third grade, Joel grew up on the move—living in an Airstream behind a 4x4 International Travel-All, camping in Baja and the Tonto, reloading shells by age seven, and learning survival skills during his family’s doomsday-prep phase. 

A cross-country odyssey led to communes, holistic doctors, and the Santa Fe Free School Community—an egalitarian, hands-on “free school” that doubled as a commune. Joel thrived building wind-powered go-karts, raiding government surplus auctions, and even serving as a “theatrical prop” in anti-war protests. 

The family later settled in Chimayó, NM, where Joel helped hand-build an adobe addition—hauling vigas, quarrying flagstone, and working with Santa Clara Pueblo craftsmen. After his parents’ divorce, Joel bounced between unconventional schooling and real-world hustles: statewide Roto-Rooter setup at 13, flea-market flipping, dinner-theater bartending at 15, wild street races, and an infamous teen road trip to Vegas—all before a move to Nebraska, where his rancher-grandfather became a steadying force and mentor. 

From feral freedom to farm discipline, Joel’s early life forged the grit and ingenuity he’d later bring to competitive rock crawling. 

More of Joel’s story next week – don’t skip this one; it’s wild! 

Transcript

[00:00:05.100] 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:46.460] 

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[00:01:11.860] - Big Rich Klein

My guest this week is a man that had a most unconventional, yet fascinating upbringing. Pulled out of school after the third grade, living in an Airstream trailer pulled by the family's international travel all, to growing up in a commune and learning to hustle at auctions to make money. This conservative Nebraska farmer/rancher has a story to tell on how he became one of the O. G. R-Gang rock Crawlers and competitive rock crawling. Enjoy this first episode with Joel Randall. Hello, Joel Randall. It's so good to have you on the podcast. Really looking forward to talking about the good old days and finding out more about you.

[00:01:59.480] - Joel Randall

Well, Well, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, too, actually.

[00:02:05.260] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I know that we talked a little bit, and your daughters want an unedited version, but I don't do a lot of editing, so they're going to get that anyhow.

[00:02:15.020] - Joel Randall

Well, we'll see. Like I said, as I was doing a little research for this, I started to think, I think my childhood is probably more interesting than my rock crawling career.

[00:02:29.140] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that That's good because everybody needs to know about you anyhow, besides just the rock crawling career. What got you to where you were at then and what got you to where you're at now? All right. This is your story. So let's start with the first question. You know what it is. Where were you born and raised?

[00:02:50.660] - Joel Randall

I was born in Carnegie, Nebraska, but shortly thereafter, two years after my parents moved to Scottsdale.

[00:03:00.000] - Big Rich Klein

Arizona?

[00:03:02.200] - Joel Randall

Yup.

[00:03:03.040] - Big Rich Klein

Oh.

[00:03:04.380] - Joel Randall

My dad moved there for his health, supposedly. I can't really say that I grew up in Scottsdale because we moved a lot, but I'm going to try and cover some of it if you're interested.

[00:03:15.600] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:03:17.400] - Joel Randall

Yeah, we ended up moving to Scottsdale and drove out there in an old Ford. I can't even remember what year it was, probably about a 52 or 53 Ford or something like that. Moving out there. He got a job working at Coca-Cola in the accounting office. We lived, well, between Indian School, well, on the corner of Indian School and Pima Road. I don't know if you know where that is in Scottsdale. But when we lived there, that was the edge of Scottsdale, right on the edge of town. And so I was two years old at that point when we moved. I started, I guess, the next thing we did, I started elementary school there, went to Pima Elementary, and Then in 1965, my dad got a job at the Motorola Credit Union. I don't even know for sure what he did. He was an accounting person But in that time, here I'm five, six years old, and he was an avid hunter and collected guns and did a lot of skeet shooting and stuff. At the age of five, all of us kids, there were four of us, we knew exactly how to reload shotgun shells by the time we were seven years old.

[00:04:58.980] - Joel Randall

Because he had He had all the machines lined up in our garage, and we each set a primer. We put this, we did wads, whatever. He just trained us to be his reloading team. Of course, he reloaded for just about everybody out there because he had this system set up and he did it so fast. Well, we did it so fast and so cheap. We did a lot of hunting and fishing at that point and camping back then. He had a lot of vehicles. He was pretty mechanically inclined as well and from the farm. We had a lot of vehicles. He went through so many We had trucks with big flotation tires on them. We had a 48 willies pickup with a homemade camper on it. We used to go camping down in Mexico. I tried to ask my mom, but she's not in very good shape, and my sisters and brother and stuff, but I'm pretty sure we're on the Baja. At this point, I'm only seven years old. We did a lot of camping up in the Tontos, in the Tonto National Forest. I can't tell you, like I said, we had that Willies pickup.

[00:06:30.000] - Joel Randall

We had a couple of other. I know we had a forward cab Jeep at one time. That was really cool. I can remember going on the Dune someplace in that. I was introduced to four wheel drives in pickups at a pretty young age, that's for sure. During that time, like I said, he used to do a lot of hunting and skeet shooting. I can remember I went dove hunting with a 410 shotgun when I was six years old.

[00:07:03.420] - Big Rich Klein

That's pretty cool.

[00:07:05.420] - Joel Randall

Quite a few times. And one of the stories that I think is pretty interesting from back then is our next door neighbors that we went hunting with, they had dogs, and they trained dogs for hunting ducks and hunting dove. Because dove hunting was a really big thing. I don't know if it was just big because my dad was a skeet shooter and we went hunting dove. But I can remember my dad and my neighbor and his son was about my age, we would go out at night and they would have us climb up billboards. We we'd be out. I don't know where we were. I think we were out probably where the 101 is now, somewhere in there or something. They would send me and this other... His son, his name was Rick, up the billboards to catch pigeons as they were roosting in there. We would fill gunny sacs with pigeons and then drop them down to our parents, which would be parked with a ladder and a pickup truck at the bottom of the billboards. This is one of my most vivid memories from my childhood, being a sevener. I might have been eight.

[00:08:26.050] - Joel Randall

I don't think I was eight yet, but Yeah, we would climb up there. They would just be covered in pigeon crap. We would climb up there. We were kids. We were having a blast. But if somebody did that now to their kids, well, for one thing, the cops would be there in an instant to stop you from doing it. But yeah, I can remember doing that several times. Then we'd take the pigeons out and train the dogs with them. Let them loose. We'd throw them over, and we've trained them to go in the water, so we were over the canal systems or over ponds or whatever. We would throw those pigeons. Then my dad would usually shoot them. Then Lance, my dad's best friend, he would train the dogs to go get them. That was one of my brightest memories of growing up there.

[00:09:25.140] - Big Rich Klein

You said there was four of you kids. Were you- There is, yeah. The Who is the oldest? The youngest, the oldest, the middle?

[00:09:31.340] - Joel Randall

Second oldest, my sister is older, and then I have a younger sister and a younger brother.

[00:09:38.060] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:09:39.160] - Joel Randall

Yeah, we were quite the group. All of our names back then, all of our names started with R.

[00:09:49.900] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, really?

[00:09:51.240] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Roxanne. My name was Randy. My younger sister's name was Rochelle, and then my youngest brother, his name is I got to ask, how did you go from Randy to Joel? Well, you know what my last name is, right?

[00:10:08.540] - Big Rich Klein

Randall, yeah.

[00:10:09.880] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Well, if you've ever met somebody with the name Randall, most people call them Randy.

[00:10:18.340] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:10:19.000] - Joel Randall

And so everywhere we went, whenever I'd say Randy Randall, they'd say, Well, what's your last name? I think I was probably eight or nine years old, and my parents changed my name to Joel.

[00:10:31.420] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:10:32.520] - Joel Randall

And that was my father's name, so I'm Joel Jr. But yeah, it's just... And on my birth certificate to this day, the Randy is crossed out, and then they just wrote by hand, Joel on the top of it. And somehow, I sent it in, and I've gotten passports and everything, and that birth certificate works, but that's all it is. It just Xed out. They Xed out the Randy and wrote Joel.

[00:11:03.020] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[00:11:04.280] - Joel Randall

Yeah, by hand, not typed or anything.

[00:11:07.120] - Big Rich Klein

It's a different age.

[00:11:09.880] - Joel Randall

Yeah. You don't realize how... And looking back to get ready for this interview. A lot of things have changed. Yes. I don't always think about things like that, but this is... It's been nice, Rich. I'm glad you asked me to do it.

[00:11:28.800] - Big Rich Klein

Good. I'm glad that you were able to run that timeline and do some research.

[00:11:34.600] - Joel Randall

That's cool. Yeah, it brought up a lot of memories. I definitely have talked to a lot of people that I hadn't talked to for 20 or 40 years.

[00:11:45.580] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Okay.

[00:11:46.600] - Joel Randall

Just to sharpen. And when you're thinking about stuff like that, you're like, I'll just share this with them.

[00:11:53.940] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:11:55.500] - Joel Randall

So like I was telling you, we did all those camping trips, and and had that homemade camper, which was really a pretty cool item that we had back then. And then it was on a 48 willies pickup and had high flotation ribbed farm tires on it.

[00:12:14.410] - Big Rich Klein

Nice.

[00:12:15.860] - Joel Randall

And he would take that thing and we'd air it down and we'd go across sand, we'd go across arroyas, whatever, and just really enjoyed it. And this I don't know exactly what happened at this point, but in 1968 and late '67, we started going camping and we started doing doomsday survival training.

[00:12:47.860] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Okay.

[00:12:49.440] - Joel Randall

Our family did. We would bury things. My dad had two friends, the neighbor across the street with the dogs, and another friend that also started doing this preparation, and they all had kids. I think there was seriously almost 12 or 15 of us kids between the three families, and they were doing They just trained us how to use guns, trained us how to purify water, how to gather water off of stuff, you name it. They weren't even good at it. This was before the Internet, you couldn't Google anything. We started doing this, and it led on. It seemed like it got more and more intense and more and more of an urgency for all three of these families, especially my dad. So late '68, I'm not really sure, and my dad doesn't have a good explanation for it. I haven't asked him in the last 20 years, but he quit his job and bought a 22-foot Airstream camper trailer and a 70 or a 64 international travel all. We took off in it, sold everything we had, left Phoenix, took off, drove all over Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. That that winter. Then we were mainly...

[00:14:52.840] - Joel Randall

I mean, we were driving around. He was going to doctors, he was going to holistic medicine places, he was going to different types of schools. And we drove around until... I can't remember exactly where we were, but we had this camper and we were in some mountains, and that travel all had a three-speed transmission, three on the tree. And got to a place in the mountains in low gear, and it started slipping the clutch. It would not pull that hill, so we had to back down. I think it was a few miles that we had to back down. I was eight years old and I was spotting him because my mom would not have been a good spotter. At this point, none of us really know what he's got planned. We back down, and just from what I remember, they discussed it, and we'd decided to go back to Nebraska. We took that camper and that travel home. We went back to Nebraska and we put a four-speed, and I'm almost positive that it was a T19. Like I said, I'm only nine years old, so I'm not that sure, but it was a fully-synchronized four-speed.

[00:16:27.280] - Joel Randall

I think that's what it was so that he could shift into gear with this camper. And we stayed in Nebraska that summer, and I built a go-cart. It was a cool one out of a windmill angle iron and 26-inch bicycle tires. And a one-horse Briggs & Stratt engine. I built that with my grandfather that summer while my dad was putting this transmission in and fixing the camper and stuff and doing doing different things. And then we stayed there part of that summer, and my parents went to Alaska to explore Alaska for a little while. And then they came back in the fall and got us. And we drove around a total of two years in this travel all in this trailer. And we were just And as all he was doing... Well, and I guess I should have said something, when we left Nebraska, both my parents were teachers. My mom taught elementary, and my dad taught high school in Nebraska.

[00:17:44.580] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:17:45.660] - Joel Randall

And so they always said whenever anybody asked us, they said that we were homeschooled, but all of us kids, we always said we were home slaves. That was our joke with the family. Well, just within... I mean, there's six of us in this travel all in. We're living in a 24-foot camper with the bunks in the back, four bunks in the back. My parents actually slept on the dinette that folded down to a bed for two years.

[00:18:25.360] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[00:18:26.760] - Joel Randall

A little over two years, actually, I think is how it ended up. But So we're driving around. This is the summer, fall, summer and fall of '69.

[00:18:38.400] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:18:39.660] - Joel Randall

Yeah, fall of '69. And all we're doing is exploring schools and doctors and communes and different things like that because he's just experimenting. I don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. I know my older sister and I, we were the the ones really that were ever... We would pull into a town and I would go to the school with him. Sometimes both of us would. If it was a boys' school, I would go. If it was for both boys and girls. A lot of Montessori schools were boys and girls. I would spend the day there. He would usually apply for a job or see if there were any applications. But a lot of them were boarding schools. My sister and I both thought, Well, if he finds the right school, we're getting left. We didn't know what to think. My dad really wasn't one to talk to. He was more... He would do things and then explain them later. A lot of times now, when I look back on I think it was more justified. But so anyways, we did this for all of '69, pretty much. Just went to schools and didn't really ever find a school I guess, because none of us got left.

[00:20:17.340] - Joel Randall

The longest I think I ever went to a school was maybe three days, two or three days. But they were bound and determined. By this point, he was very anti-government, very, very... Oh, no public schools. I never went to a public school on this journey anyway. And one of his favorite sayings was, none of my kids are going to be cookie cutter kids.

[00:20:50.060] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:20:51.040] - Joel Randall

So we were just... And like I said, he was going to a lot of doctors, holistic doctors, all different kinds. So by the end of this trip, Well, not the end, but by the middle of this trip, all we were eating was fish, potatoes, vegetables, and we were taking sea kelp pills and other pills. I don't know. We had a spot on the camper where he would put piles of pills, like four piles of pills, and all of us kids would just take them.

[00:21:27.600] - Big Rich Klein

So basically, supplements?

[00:21:30.000] - Joel Randall

Supplements, yeah. Kelp. I know kelp was a big one because they were huge green. They were huge green seaweed pills. We called them seaweed pills. And we'd have to take five or six of those three times a day.

[00:21:46.760] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Interesting.

[00:21:49.360] - Joel Randall

And him and my mom were also doing this, and he was just trying to feel better. Like I said, he's always said he left Nebraska for his health. But So we traveled. Like I said, we were going to all these schools, all these different theories of schools, all these different communes and different places. And this is 1969. So this is the I mean, a lot of people were doing this. Right.

[00:22:19.120] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Just near the end of the war.

[00:22:21.520] - Joel Randall

Yeah. So we ended up heading south because it was getting cold in '69, and we headed south. I don't remember a whole lot. I mean, we went through Kentucky and down, and we were zigzagging all over the place, Rich. We were just going. It was just nuts. But I remember we got in a wreck. This is one of the vivid memories of my childhood. We were in Mississippi someplace, and we were just driving, and a big Cadillac pulled right out in front of us. I can remember the tires squeling, and we hit this Cadillac, and there was probably five people in the car. It was a family, but they were black, and we were in Mississippi. I don't know, my mom immediately told all of us kids to put away our stuff and sit up straight and to be... Because who knows what we'd be doing in that car while we were traveling. We just lived in that travel all. And we were surrounded. Within five minutes, we were surrounded by families and people. They were all black, just totally surrounded by black people. And my dad, of course, he had a gun in the glove box, and I know he got it out and had it on the seat beside him because we didn't know what was going to happen.

[00:24:01.560] - Joel Randall

We had no idea. We're like, here we are in this small town in Mississippi, and we just got in a wreck, and now we're surrounded. And then just about the time, I didn't know. None of us knew what was going to happen. It was probably the tensest moment of my life to this point. The police showed up, and they were black also, but not that that really matters. But they came, and then a couple of more police came, and they were white, and they were actual troopers, and the other one was a sheriff, I think, or a local cop. We really thought, We're in big trouble here. Our whole family felt that way, and we talked about it. My dad was telling my mom what to do if they took him to incarcerate him or whatever. It came down to... Because my dad at this point had his hair really short, looked military-ish. It came down to, we found out later that the black people were afraid we were going to do something, and that they might get surrounded by, I don't know what they thought we were. Because we're driving this white international travel all with this huge sober camper on it.

[00:25:41.400] - Joel Randall

I would think we look like tourists, but that was the tensest moment. Then it just comes down to it. They were afraid that some white police were going to show up or white people were going to show up and there was going to be a controversy or something because they blatantly he just pulled right out in front of us. We smashed it, and it didn't even hardly hurt this travel all because these things were built like tanks.

[00:26:07.650] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, and they had pretty good bumpers on them. Steel. Steel. Oh, yeah. Real steel. Yeah.

[00:26:12.960] - Joel Randall

So anyways, that was probably one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life, is to see that these people were just protecting that family from us. And I never, ever... I was never in a situation like that before, so it's just a huge memory in my childhood. But we got out of there. The people were so nice. They came over and apologized and everything when all the police got there and everybody figured out who was who. It was the biggest relief of... It was just my whole family, just the biggest gasp of... Let out the biggest gasp of air. It was crazy. But that was, I don't know. For some reason, that's a huge memory of my life. I know most people probably don't care.

[00:27:04.100] - Big Rich Klein

No, I can see where that would be, that would be concerning for you, especially in that age, in that time frame.

[00:27:15.640] - Joel Randall

Yeah. And later on in life, I was spent more time in the South than I understood, because even in the '80s, there were still white counties.

[00:27:25.660] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:27:28.920] - Joel Randall

I'm I might go into that one when I get further up in this. But so, yeah, it was quite the deal. I didn't know it at the time, and I don't even know if my dad did, but we ended up, we kept going from there. And it was maybe two, three weeks later, we ended up with some friends of ours from Phoenix that had moved to Florida. And we ended up in Florida. And we pulled in. It was Clearwater, Florida, is where it was. And we pulled in there. And once again, I'm only 9, 10 years old, but I gathered from the conversation with these people that we'd ran out of money. And just hanging out. We parked in their yard and plugged into their house and stuff. Just probably learned more about everything in that backyard because they were talking to this other family that was also the survival training family in Phoenix. Talked to them about what we had done, all the schools that we'd gone to and everything. I learned at that time that my dad was thinking thinking about when he got to Florida, that he was thinking about buying a sailboat.

[00:29:05.280] - Joel Randall

I'm like, What the heck? We've been traveling for two years, and now he's thinking he's going to sail in the ocean? Our My whole family, my mom, all of us kids, we just thought that was really probably not going to end well.

[00:29:23.960] - Big Rich Klein

How old was your parents at this point?

[00:29:28.040] - Joel Randall

How old were they? Yeah. They would have been 30, 29 and 30. Wow, okay. Yeah. They actually got jobs there. My mom got a job in a lawn chair factory, and my dad got a job in a cigar factory. Country, somewhere just outside of Clearwater. I'm not for sure exactly where they were. We stayed there for probably three months. My grandparents from Nebraska came and visited us. I don't know exactly what all happened, but my grandfather did not loan him the money to buy the sailboat, thank God, because I think we'd be dead. Shortly after my grandparents left, my dad and this friend of his, somehow, I don't know where they read this because this is before the Internet.

[00:30:28.420] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:30:31.680] - Joel Randall

They had heard of a family in New York City that wanted to start a school. It was Summer Hill. I don't know if you ever heard of Summer Hill school systems or school theories. But is what they are, is they're an open, free school where the students have the same rights and voting and I mean, everything's equal. The kids are just at the same level as the teachers. So whatever the kids and the teachers vote on or decide to work on or go to school, it's an even democracy is pretty much what it is. And so I don't know how they found this out, but the people from New York were looking for like minded families to start school under this umbrella, and they were moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[00:31:38.860] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:31:39.940] - Joel Randall

My parents... Well, I shouldn't say my parents because my mom was a little skeptical, but my dad got it in his head that we were going to be one of those families. How they communicated back and forth with these people, I have no idea. I know my dad used to read these magazines, Mother Earth News, and a bunch of these different ones. If they put an ad in there or what, I really don't know. We leave Florida, and the other family that's in Florida decides not to go. They stayed in Florida. We left and we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in this camper. I can remember really vivid, we got there, and it was sometime in the spring of '70. I don't know exactly when, but we went to Santa Fe, and of course, we're camping. We've been living in a camper for two years at this point, two and a half years. We go to a park and we meet up with, I think there were eight families that met in this park in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they discussed what they were going to do. The family from New York was very, very wealthy, very wealthy.

[00:33:11.920] - Joel Randall

I don't even know to this day how wealthy they were, but they went and bought Ranchero on the west side of Santa Fe. It's a huge house that had a green house in the back and a huge huge courtyard. It was a really nice place, and I think it had 40 acres. They went and bought that. Everybody in the park, and they started this right from the beginning, everybody in the park, including the kids, got to vote on what was going on with every aspect of this school. Like the name of it, where buying that place. Everybody agreed it was a perfect place. They really liked my dad. The whole group did because he had farm background, he had mechanical background, he had the survivalist stuff. But none of these people were interested in any of that stuff. They were just educational-based, and most of them were teachers. That had just decided the public school system had failed them. We moved. They did all kinds of things at this school. We hooked up to the septic systems. We had plugins. We had There were several of us that were living in campers and several other families.

[00:34:50.050] - Joel Randall

Then some of the other families, they moved in mobile homes. A couple of the families, they were more hippie-based families families. We put up, I think, four teefees, and I think we dug at least two kivas or wigwams, more kiva style, I think, they would be considered. They started this school. We built corals, we got animals, we built forts, we I mean, I pretty much just did whatever I wanted because that's exactly what the theory of the school is. Hands-on, no classes, nothing. If you didn't want to, they had classes rooms because this huge Ranch Arrow house, one of the families opened a math room. One of them opened. You could go to a room if you wanted to at the beginning of this deal. You could go to that room and study that if you wanted to study it.

[00:36:01.580] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:36:03.360] - Joel Randall

But at this point, I had a third-grade education from Phoenix, plus whatever we did in the car, which we did do some studies in the car, but we're on an adventure the whole time that we were in the travel, all traveling. So I'm more or less building bikes, building go-karts, anything that I can do to stay out of that house. I wasn't interested in anything that was inside that house. And a lot of the people were very hippie-ish, like flower power hippie. So I built a wind-powered car, go-cart, because we had all this army surplus stuff. So I built a go-cart, and I had a parachute tied on the front of it. And whenever the wind would blow, if it was blowing in the right direction the length of this property, a bunch of us kids, the kids I hung out with at the school, we'd go out there, jump on the go-cart, and we'd throw the parachute in the air. It would catch the wind on a windy day, and it would take us clear to the other end of the property. Then we would just sit there until the wind blew from the other direction.

[00:37:30.000] - Joel Randall

Unless I could talk some of the younger kids into pushing it back for a ride, and then we would do that. Then this school was, like I said, it was on the west side of Santa Fe on Airport Road, and there was a big hill that when you dropped off of... I can't remember what street was, but anyways, you dropped off the... I think it was Airport Road. When you dropped off of Airport Road to go down to the school, it was a big hill, like a soapbox derby-style hill. So we had a ton of stuff that went along with that because I built so many go-karts there. It was crazy. Because we could go to government surplus options as a school back then that weren't open to the public. And all that was there was nonprofits and different things. And we just bought all kinds of cool stuff to make everything at the school. By this point, the school was probably up to 50, 60 people going between teachers and kids. And we'd go to this auction and we just buy the strangest things for pennies on the dollar. Just like I said, the parachutes, we had so many parachutes It was crazy.

[00:38:45.900] - Joel Randall

We had forts that had parachutes all the way around them, like 10 parachutes. And we had huge telephone poles. And it was a hoot. Not the best place to get a good education, but it was a hoot.

[00:39:05.500] - Big Rich Klein

It was basically a commune.

[00:39:08.100] - Joel Randall

It was called the Santa Fe Free School Community, is what it was called.

[00:39:15.320] - Big Rich Klein

Santa Fe Free School.

[00:39:17.520] - Joel Randall

Free School Community. It was the first three or four months we had a blast. We did all these things. I mean, we built so many things and did all these things. But it was growing. And this is almost probably 1971 by this point, because we actually lived there for a year, I think almost two years. I remember at the end, we had three mobile homes connected Wow. Because we went to those army, the government surplus auctions, and they had these mobile homes like FEMA mobile homes. But this is also 1970s, so they were old, narrow little mobile homes. I don't know what they gave for them, but I think we ended up with 10 or 15 of them on this school ground. Our family had three of them bolted together. I remember that. That's where we ended up living because he ended up selling the camper. I guess we kept the travel all for a while, but we didn't have any cool vehicles at this point, which my dad gave up on doing that stuff at this point. But anyway, so we lived there for two years. My grandparents came to visit. They were not impressed.

[00:41:03.560] - Joel Randall

It got out of control. The school got out of control. It became a flop place for people, hippies that were headed to California. I know we went on a lot of war demonstrations, and we did a lot of sit-ins at the Capitol and stuff. As the school did it, and they, whatever they thought was going wrong, they tried to fight and they were protesting things. I can remember I was a prop in at least one of the war demonstrations that we went to in Albuquerque. They carried me. I was in a casket, and I was dressed in soldiers, fatigues, covered in blood because these people, a bunch of them are theatrical people. It was just a crazy setting. They would do this chant. At the end of the chant, I can't remember exactly how it went, but it went, If you sent your son to Vietnam, he would come back in a box or something like that. It rhymed. It was way better than that. Whenever they said that, I just sat up and I was covered in blood dressed, and they were carrying me above their head in a coffin or a casket or whatever you want to call it.

[00:42:27.260] - Joel Randall

I do remember doing that. That was Of course, I was also 11 years old, so I thought it was fun. And I thought it was funny. I didn't know exactly. I knew the war because they talked about it a lot. And like I said, the school talked about things as a group just about every day.

[00:42:47.490] - Big Rich Klein

But at 11, you're not rationalizing everything.

[00:42:50.680] - Joel Randall

No, not even. And probably lucky that we weren't, because like I said, it became a flop house, and there was a lot of things going on that shouldn't have been going on. And when my grandparents came to visit, they saw that it was probably not the best place to raise kids at this point because it was seriously going way south on the hippie end of it. I was a pretty mature 11-year-old at this point, just from my upbringing so far. But I had a couple of jobs that I'd picked up. We would drill tortish shell and mother of pearl and stuff and string it on wires and grind it to make necklaces and heeshe necklaces. We'd drill a couple of the people there. We were making money doing that. Just all kinds of things, anything we could do to make money. We'd go to flea markets. We'd take some of that government surplus stuff, and we would go to flea markets and pedal it. There was a group of us, because some of the kids were a little older than me, that could drive, and we were doing all kinds of stuff. Anything to earn money and have fun and get off of the school grounds for a little bit and away from our parents.

[00:44:30.500] - Joel Randall

Which were probably who knows what they were doing at this point because, like I said, it really grew out of control.

[00:44:38.920] - Big Rich Klein

Right. You can just imagine what you mean by out of control.

[00:44:44.220] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Well, It's 1971.

[00:44:47.040] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:44:47.780] - Joel Randall

I mean, it's a crazy, crazy time.

[00:44:50.920] - Big Rich Klein

Free love, drugs, all that stuff.

[00:44:53.220] - Joel Randall

Crazy stuff. Everything. It was my life. I was used to it. It was no big deal for me to see naked people, for me to see anything. Large groups of people tripping out. Whatever. You just use your imagination and multiply it. So my grandparents came and visited, and shortly thereafter, my dad bought a small farm in northern New Mexico, in Chimay, New Mexico, right by Espanola, straight east of Los Alamos. And it was supposedly it was going to be a self-sufficient farm. It was an orchard, a little single one bedroom house. I don't know, I think all total it was 40 acres, 35, 40 acres, something like that. And so we moved off of the school, thank thankfully. But it was just a one bedroom house. And just to give you an idea, it wasn't a garage. It was just a tool shed next to the house, really close to the house. Then we had a fruit stand because it was an orchard and a farm. We had a fruit stand down by the road. It was probably it was probably 100 yards down to the fruit stand, and it was probably 20 yards over to this little tool shed.

[00:46:39.700] - Joel Randall

Well, we converted the tool shed, and that's where me and my brother lived. Then they converted the fruit stand, and that's where my sisters lived. And then the house, my parents lived in the house. It was just a four bedroom little house. We were the the only white people within 25 miles.

[00:47:06.400] - Big Rich Klein

Right. All the rest were Native Americans.

[00:47:09.540] - Joel Randall

Spanish and Indians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we moved there, and he decided that he was going to have a self-sufficient farm. And so we worked and got horses, goats. We had chickens. We had everything, all the farm things. And of course, he knew what he was getting into because he was from a farm. And we'd been at the farm in Nebraska, so I'd worked a little bit that summer that I built that go-cart in back in '68 or '69. And so we started doing this project. And He decided right away that we were going to add onto this house and make it bigger. We were all for it because neither one of us really liked living in tool sheds and- Fruit stands. Fruit stands. Yeah. It left a little to be desired. Well, I can tell you a story about the tool shed. My brother and I, we built bunk beds in there, and he was in the top Bunk because he was younger than me. And it was cold. I mean, Santa Fe and T-Mile, this is just north of Santa Fe a little bit, about 50 miles. And it gets cold at night, and he liked comic books.

[00:48:43.630] - Joel Randall

So he's up there reading a comic book at night, and he had a 100-watt light bulb without a shade or anything. I can't remember. It was supposed to be on a table, but he had it in his bed under his covers, reading comic books, and lit his bed on fire.

[00:49:00.000] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, jeez.

[00:49:01.740] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Trying to stay warm in this place. We had tons of sleeping bags from the government surplus stuff from the school. We had tons of stuff, but still, I just remember that happening one night because the smoke woke me up, luckily, and we threw all this stuff out, and it burned a hole in his mattress, actually.

[00:49:24.540] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[00:49:27.640] - Joel Randall

Then I think that's while we're trying to add onto this house. But like I said, our family saying was we weren't homeschooled, we were homeslaved. Right. Well, we He decided he's going to build it the same as the house with traditional adobe blocks. Wow. And we have a hill on the side of our property. Our property was an orchard with a little hill. It's a wash is what it is. Just for when it rains, there was a gravel wash, a dry river bed that went through it. We started digging clay out of the side of the hill and forming these adobe blocks with two by four frames.

[00:50:26.580] - Big Rich Klein

Jesus.

[00:50:27.580] - Joel Randall

And they're 16 by, I think we made them 20 inches long, maybe, or 18 inches long. And they kept falling apart. And we weren't doing it. He knew nothing about adobe, obviously. So we drive around and we end up at the Santa Clara Indian Reservation. That's north of there. And I don't know if you've ever been to Santa Fe or not, or Northern New Mexico, but have you ever seen the Black Pottery? Well, that's where this Black Pottery comes from, is that Santa Clara Indian Reservation.

[00:51:06.530] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:51:06.970] - Joel Randall

And we just drove in like we own the place because that's pretty much how my dad was. And we found a group of Santa Clara Indians that were building an adobe house. And so he went in there and friended them. Somehow, we hired a couple of younger kids to come and help us make these blocks. Blocks. So the weeks go by and we're making these blocks, and we make them. You make a bunch. One day, you pull the forms off, then you make new ones. And about four days later, you tilt the blocks up on their side and dry them. Maybe a week. I don't know. We made so many of these forms. It was crazy because the plans that he had for the house were pretty big. But in the process, he quit helping us because he got so enamored in this Indian tribe that he made these friends. And there was a couple of them that were coming and helping us on the adobe blocks, and they helped us make fence. They just worked for us. But he friended the medicine man for the Santa Fe or for the Santa Clara Indian tribe that's right there by the Black Mesa.

[00:52:29.600] - Big Rich Klein

All right.

[00:52:30.940] - Joel Randall

He friended him or became friends with him and started hanging out with him. I seriously don't remember seeing him for almost... It was just like we rarely saw him. We had all these goats to milk, and we had chickens to take care of. And he was off just about every day, just learning Indian stuff.

[00:52:55.800] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:52:57.280] - Joel Randall

Yeah. And he brought that medicine man and a couple of other people, and we started going up in the mountains. I don't know where he got it, but we had a cab over Ford. It was probably like a 50 something cab over Ford, two-ton truck. We started going up in the mountains collecting pine poles for Vegas. I don't know if you've ever seen the old adobe houses that had the pine poles. They're called vigas, is what they call them in New Mexico. So we go up and gather up a bunch of those, and we're skinning those with broad axes and draw knives, and we're making these adobes. And then he decides, well, we need something for the floor. So we started going up in the Truchis Mountains right there by Chimayal, where we lived. And we started digging into the sides of mountains and getting the flagstones. Wow. And so we did that for a couple, three months, probably between the poles and the I can't remember the Spanish name for lath, but we also had to gather a bunch of two-inch diameter pine trees for the cross for the cross pieces to go over the vigas, and then you cover that with...

[00:54:32.200] - Joel Randall

Well, we covered it with plastic, and then you make a flat dirt roof on the house was the plan, and it did. We ended up doing it. It took us about a year and a half, but we ended up doing it, mainly the slavery and the two or three or four young Indian kids that were helping us. And so we lived there. And I should have mentioned all this time, from when we were at the community school until this, my mom worked at a bank.

[00:55:12.460] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:55:13.840] - Joel Randall

And she looked like she worked at a bank. She did not look like a hippie person. And she had her own life. I mean, she'd drive away and go to the bank and come back. She'd be wearing a dress and she looked like a million dollars compared to us. But she was earning the money to fund all this stuff. My grandparents obviously loaned my dad a lot of money to buy this farm. So all this time, this is all going on. And we were getting really… During this time also, my younger sister and my younger brother were still going back to that school.

[00:56:01.520] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:56:02.640] - Joel Randall

She worked in Santa Fe. She drove a VW Bug to Santa Fe, and one of the teachers would pick up my... And I would go every once in a while just to get away from the slavery. If it rained or something, I could go to school. And that went on for, like I said, the first year of building the house. And then my mom, I don't know what happened, she started trying to pull her weight or whatever, and she enrolled me and tried to enroll me in a public school.

[00:56:37.520] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, I'm sure that went well.

[00:56:39.800] - Joel Randall

Oh, it did not go well. Right. But I told them I would try it. I was like, I'm pretty much I think I would have done anything because I was tired of working. So I went to public school to sixth grade at this point, and My sister went to seventh grade, so we went to different schools. She talked them into both of us, trying school. I think I went almost a semester, but I was the only white kid, and I was a toehead blonde, by the way. My sister was the only white girl at her school. They were all Latinos down in this valley. It was the Chimayos, Santa Cruz Valley area. We went there, and it did not go well, Rich. I thought I was smarter than the teachers, and all the kids thought I was a freak because I was two foot taller than everybody in the school. It did not go well. After about, I don't know, three or four months of this, we ended up going back to Nebraska for Christmas, just my mom and us kids. When Whenever we would go back to Nebraska, we would go. Immediately, we would go to J.

[00:58:07.210] - Joel Randall

C. Penny's, and she would buy us all clothes, and she would give us all haircuts. And do everything, just dress us up as normal kids.

[00:58:21.320] - Big Rich Klein

Because I would imagine being out there on the farm or with the school, it was pretty feral.

[00:58:34.360] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Oh, and I had hair down to my belt.

[00:58:37.520] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[00:58:38.440] - Joel Randall

At this point. And she still, I didn't let her cut it. It was still his shoulder length, at least when I went, I can remember, because we had a big argument about how much we were going to cut off. But we went back to Nebraska, and I don't think we'd been there for about two or three years, probably. And we went back Nebraska and went to Christmas, and her parents were really conservative, really conservative. My dad's parents, we went to their house, too, for another Christmas. I can remember it pretty vividly. And had a really good time. And on the car ride back, we convinced my mom that she should probably get a divorce. Because she had been living, and we use that trip as an example. You're normal every day. We only get to be normal when you let us be normal. Because we thought we were living... We knew we were living an unnormal life, but it was normal to us until we went and saw people that were living conservatively and living a normal life. We went back, and it was only a couple of months later that she filed for divorce.

[01:00:13.540] - Joel Randall

It was quite a time for us kids because it didn't go well. There was other stuff going on at this same time. It's almost too much to even take in in this article or this interview. But they got a divorce, and we were supposed to do joint custody, and They didn't work it out very well. I don't know. It was a cluster. I was really used to doing all the chores and doing everything on the farm, and I liked it. I was building stuff. You can imagine I was doing other stuff as well. And the house is about half done. We have the walls up and we have the vigas up, and we're putting the cross pieces across the vigas, and we're doing the dirt, the flat roof. And so I stay and help finish the house because I've got a lot invested in it. It was almost like my house. My dad, all this time, has really invested in Indians, and they adopted him and named him and everything. He's Gray Rabbit or something like that was his Indian name. My mom moved to Albuquerque. Well, no, she moved back to Santa Fe first.

[01:01:40.740] - Joel Randall

Then in the wintertime, that winter, I went back and stayed with her for a while and signed up for school for a little bit in Santa Fe and tried to go to a public school again. But it really wasn't... By this point, it didn't work out very well, again. Just everything went south.

[01:02:04.440] - Big Rich Klein

Because you were still pretty feral.

[01:02:07.840] - Joel Randall

Well, not just feral, but I was a hippie, more or less. Okay. I seriously, I always told it whenever I tell anybody part of... I've never really told this whole story straight out like this before, but whenever I tell people about it, it was like, I was The most mature 12-year-old you'd ever met at this point is the way I felt. When you go to the third grade in elementary, I knew arithmetic and spelling and English and all that stuff. You learn most that stuff by the time you're in the third grade, and then it's just repetitive after that. They multiply it and stuff, but it didn't work out. And because of the divorce and stuff, my dad had to get a job or figure out a way to make money because he's no longer got my mom making the money, obviously. So somehow he talks my dad, my grandfather, into loaning him the money to buy Rota Ruta franchise.

[01:03:23.400] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[01:03:24.580] - Joel Randall

For the whole state of New Mexico. Oh, wow. Yeah, except Albuquerque. It had already been purchased. And my dad, by this time, I'm 13 years old because we He changed the house. I mean, it was never that great. So my grandfather loans him the money to buy this Rota Ruter franchise, and he wants me to help him. So So at this time, we go and all we do is we buy two vans, we drive to the town. At 13, I could get a work permit in New Mexico at this time. So we go to the auction, we buy a couple of vans, we drive to the town. I'll just pick a town that everybody knows, Roswell, New Mexico. We'd pull into that town, we would train, and we'd already been doing this in Santa Fe and Espanola area for, I guess, I left part of it out. I'd been working and doing the job of Rota Ruter. Right there, we set up the Espanola one first, and then we set up the Santa Fe one. Then we started moving to these other towns. By this time, I already knew how to do the job. The much the techniques for selling it.

[01:05:01.540] - Joel Randall

But we'd buy two vans, we'd go to Roswell or whatever town, Rio Doso or Las Cruces or wherever, and we would get two vans. We'd rent a gas in a vacant gas station or a vacant office, and we'd cover the windows with stickers that said Rota Ruter, and we'd cover the vans with stickers that said Rota Ruter, and we'd start getting jobs. And we'd hire a couple of people, and we'd train them to do it. We'd set up the business for maybe two, three weeks tops. But by that time, we'd been to hotels and restaurants and stuff and explain to them, If you pay us to come in and clean these sewers every six months instead of when they plug, it's this much cheaper for you than calling us in an emergency and having us come and do it when it's plugged. So we would just do maintenance. We would come in and clean out their sewers just as regular maintenance. And so we would sell that to the people that we hired, and then they would either get a loan from the bank or my dad would finance them. And the two guys that we hired or if we could find good people, and then we would move to the next town.

[01:06:26.720] - Joel Randall

We'd go back to the auction, buy more vans, go to to the next town, do the same thing over and over again. I did that for quite a while. And then my mom decides to move to Albuquerque. I was making pretty good money doing all this, working this road route or gig, but I really didn't have any friends. I didn't have a social life or anything like that. I decided I was going to go to Albuquerque, too. I pretty much told my dad that I was going to quit and decided to move to Albuquerque. And Anne, once again, she wanted me to try school, so I tried school again. I went to the seventh grade, I think it was, for a while. Then I bought a car because I had a ton of money from the road route or stuff because he was fair in paying me. He almost had to be because of the way I was raised going to that school where all people were equal.

[01:07:43.340] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Whether he wanted to or not, he'd set a precedent.

[01:07:48.300] - Joel Randall

Exactly. Yeah. I bought a car. I know this is one of your questions, so I finally got there, Rich. I bought a 1966 Chevy Biscayne four-door. Yes. At the government auction, because we're still riding. My dad is still riding off of being the vice principal or whatever he called himself at that community school, so we could still go to this auction. So I bought this '66 Chevy Biscayne for $250. And it wasn't even that It only had 35,000 miles on it. But they had painted the doors. It was a light blue Biscayne, but they had painted the doors white where it said Air Force taxi or whatever it said on it. I can't remember. It said something about being in the Air Force, something taxi, runway car, or something like that. That was my first car, and I had a license because I had that work permit from when I was 13 working in a Rota Ruter. So I'm driving to junior high, seventh grade. And there was a little bit of an issue at the school because they don't have a student parking lot in Junior High.

[01:09:15.700] - Big Rich Klein

No.

[01:09:17.140] - Joel Randall

But I have a license. So they ended up having me park across the street in front of somebody's house that agreed that I could park there. And this is just This is just how my childhood went. I don't know. I thought I was smarter than everybody. I thought I was more mature than everybody, and I just got in trouble. I got in fights. I got in trouble. I can remember one time I went to the principal's office for being in a fight, and we got swaps back then, and we got swaps. And after we left, me and the kid that I got in a fight with, I asked him if he wanted to go back to class or we could go out back here and have a cigarette first, because I smoked at this point in my life, too. I should have told you that. So we go out in the back of the school and we're talking. He was coughing a lot because I'd already been smoking for a couple of years at this point, and I smoked back at that community school when I was 11 quite a bit. But he was trying to be tough.

[01:10:36.620] - Joel Randall

He picked a fight with me earlier that day. I can't even remember what the fight was about. But long story short, we get caught.

[01:10:46.660] - Big Rich Klein

Smoking. After getting swats for fighting.

[01:10:50.000] - Joel Randall

After getting swats. And I thought it was funny. He was scared to death. So we go back into the principal's office, and I told the principal, I'm like, seriously, I mean, after we got swats and we got in a fight and stuff, I said, I really just needed to relax for a minute. What's the big deal? I did not think it was a big deal. And he just got madder and madder. Madder and madder. So he's like, Give me your mother's phone number. And I said, Well, she's at work. And he's like, Yeah, give me her phone number at work. The principal, and he was on an old dial-up phone, this is Rotary Days, and he calls the principal, or the principal calls my mom. He says, Marlene, I have your son here in the principal's office, and we've had a bit of an issue today. He got caught fighting, and then right after that, he got caught smoking. I could hear on the phone, they better not have been Benjamin and Hedges or whatever. Yeah, Benjamin and Hedges cigarettes, were they? Because she was afraid that I might have stolen her cigarettes. And he just looks at the phone and looks at me and goes ahead and says, No, they're Marlborough's.

[01:12:15.140] - Joel Randall

And she's like, Well, they better be. So is he going to get in trouble? Is he going to get expelled? You could hear because those phones back in those days were louder than heck. Right. And so he He did not know what to do with me from that point on because he knew when I got in trouble, calling my mom was going to do no good at all.

[01:12:38.540] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:12:43.080] - Joel Randall

I might have gotten away with a lot of extra stuff from that point on, Rich. It was quite the deal. So this is 1974, I think, is when this Well, no. Yeah, '73 and then went into '74. So in '74, I decided, or my mom decided that because I'd gotten in so much trouble and stuff that I should probably go back to Nebraska and work for the summer with my uncle that had a construction company and live with my really conservative grandparents. She thought that was going to be the fix all for everything. So I rode the Greyhound bus to Nebraska and worked all summer and had a blast. I mean, it was like a vacation for me. Working construction when you're that young is fun. And you're throwing up... My uncle had a small construction business we built. We roughed in five houses over the summer. It was a blast. Got to hang around with a bunch of guys that were... Everybody on the crew was older than me.

[01:14:05.930] - Big Rich Klein

And smoking and drinking.

[01:14:07.920] - Joel Randall

Smoking, drinking, you name it. I was probably doing it and had a blast all summer. Chaste girls. I mean, I'd never been around white girls before. I'd been living in a place where- It's all Hispanic and native, yeah. I mean, They were pretty girls, but- Yeah, different. Language barrier. And this wasn't now. This was 1973, 1974. It wasn't the same. Definitely wasn't the same. And so I just had the time of my life. I loved it. But they wanted me to go back to school, my grandparents, of course. So when they found out that school was going to start back up in New Mexico from my mom, I had to go home. So I went back home and I, once again, let's see, did I go to... I might have gone to high school at this point. No, I went back to that element. I went back to eighth grade. Now I'm in eighth grade. And I have a couple of friends, and I have tons of ways, tons of ways to make money. I'm working stuff. I'm still doing flea market stuff. I'm still buying and selling things to distribute to other kids at the school.

[01:15:39.620] - Joel Randall

Because I learned a lot growing up on that hippie commune. I knew how to make 40 ounces come out of a kilo, for sure. I have a lot of ways, and I made a lot of money, and I was I was the only one that drove in this. So I was the fun kid for everybody in this school. And by this time, there's a lot more Anglo kids in this school. The first year I went there, there was maybe five or six Anglos. And then when I go back the next year, because Albuquerque is growing so fast, It's like, heck, there's like 20, 25 new kids in that eighth grade class, and they were almost all Anglos moving in, moving into Albuquerque. So I had a lot more fun, tons more fun, tons of trouble, tons of everything, and actually made it through the whole year of school, which shocked my mom. She was shocked. My dad was super shocked. And I was still going back and working for him sometimes, too, when he needed help. With the Rotary stuff. So then the next summer comes along, and I decide to... I'm going back to Nebraska for sure, because it was a blast.

[01:17:15.940] - Joel Randall

And that kid that I'd gotten in the fight with that I got the swaps?

[01:17:19.180] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:17:20.420] - Joel Randall

Well, he's my best friend from that day on.

[01:17:22.960] - Big Rich Klein

That's typically what happens.

[01:17:25.040] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Oh, yeah, especially for the new kid in school. And like I said, my hair was mid midwest when I went to this school, and that's what they were probably picking on me about. I went back, and this is 19... Yeah, so it would be 1975. I went back, took him with me. We were working construction, and my grandfather from my dad's side came over, and I'm like, What is he doing here? He lives about 50 miles away from where I was working construction, and he wants me to go help him on the farm because one of his hired men got kicked in the head by a horse. So he wants me to come and help him on the farm. He needs somebody for the summer right now. And so we go over there, and he offered me tons more money because I'm a pretty good negotiator at this point. And so I decided, well, I will. He will always seemed really standoffish when I was a kid. Even though the other ones were more conservative, he was really... And I think it's because I thought he judged us because he came and saw us in Florida and he came and saw where we were living and stuff in New Mexico.

[01:18:57.960] - Joel Randall

But I thought, yeah, I'll go work over there. Working on a farm can't be that bad. It's probably okay. And so I go over there to his farm, and I hadn't really spent a lot of time there, but he's got a pretty decent-sized farm We have four or five pickups. All of them were Jeeps. They were J10 to J20, and a couple of Wagoneers. He drove a Wagoneer, and my grandma drove a Wagoneer. And tons of welding, tons of working on tractors, and driving tractors, and tons of stuff. I learned so much I always considered him the first good male influence in my life. From a guy that I was scared to be around, because he always seemed like the really powerful guy whenever he came to visit us, and he was always very judgmental, which he had every right to be.

[01:20:12.240] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Now that you look back on it, especially.

[01:20:14.880] - Joel Randall

Oh, yeah. As an adult, sure. But we hit it off, and I started learning things. It was unbelievable. The things, he was a mechanic, he was a blacksmith, He was a mechanic. He was a blacksmith. He was a carpenter. He was a safe cracker.

[01:20:37.960] - Big Rich Klein

He was a gun collector. It's one of those guys that, when you work or live on a farm, you become very self sufficient.

[01:20:46.320] - Joel Randall

Oh, yeah. And he was a very quiet, very humble person, which is not what I'm used to being around. My dad was quite the opposite of that. And so we just had a blast. We were building gate panels, we were building all kinds of stuff, building corals, but not by hand. We had tools. And this is like, I mean, I just loved being around all of the mechanical stuff. I ended up working for him for probably, I think, two more summers because that kid that went with me, he went back in '76, too, because we I built a bunch of stuff in the shop to commemorate the bicentennial. So I can pretty much remember that. And we made really good money because I negotiated a really good deal because of the guy getting kicked in the head by the horse. So we were making good money and we had time whenever it would rain, we could go do whatever we wanted. We ran around. I don't know, I was trying to think of a story. Well, I think this was in '76 in the summer. The trains that go through Nebraska, especially right where we live in Carny, there's so many trains because all the cold trains and all the West trains come into Carny, and then they split off.

[01:22:24.260] - Joel Randall

They either go to Kansas City or they go to Omaha. And it's the largest... Like In our area, like they say, a train goes by every five minutes. And I think that's an exaggeration, but that's what people say. One night, we were out partying and running around, and this train is going so fast. It's unbelievable. It's probably going 65 miles an hour, a coal train. And so we're driving along beside it, racing it, and we're in one of these Jeep pickups. But we go and we decide, what would be cool is if we were at the exact point where two of these trains meet. And so we just haul but up the highway that runs right alongside of the the railroad tracks. We just haul but up there. I can't remember how far we went, probably 10 or 15 miles, when we found another train. And then by this time, that other train is like two miles behind us. So we'd start driving We're driving back, we drive down in the ditch, and we're driving back, and we're trying to guess where these two trains are going to meet. And the one's going really fast.

[01:23:38.860] - Joel Randall

I don't know why we thought it was going so fast, but it seemed like it was going really fast. So we got in between these two tracks run next to each other. Jesus. Just wide enough to where they don't hit each other. They're probably six feet apart. I don't know, six or eight feet apart. And so we stop, we jump out, we jump over one set of tracks, we lay down in the rocks in between the two tracks, right where the two trains meet. And that became our deal We would go, even if we picked up girls, we try and talk them into going and doing this with us because it was a rush, Rich. It was just... I mean, these two trains, they're both going 60 miles an hour, and one's going east and one's going west.

[01:24:31.060] - Big Rich Klein

And the ground's rumbling.

[01:24:33.520] - Joel Randall

Oh, is it ever? I mean, it was something. We did that four or five times during that summer. I tried to get other people to go with us. And amazingly enough, we never got in any trouble. I don't know if they didn't know. I mean, our truck was sitting right there in the ditch next to us, and this was always at night. I mean, it probably would have been fun in the daylight, too, but it was way more fun at night. We just did stuff like that. We went to concerts, fairs. Every county has a fair, so we'd drive, whatever. It was just like living the dream for me.

[01:25:19.900] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:25:21.240] - Joel Randall

Yeah. So this was '76. I end up going back because school is going to start, and I go back and sign into high at this time. I seriously got through the eighth grade. I don't even know how. It really seemed easy to me, but I really didn't think I knew that much. But I got through And so I signed up for high school and went to high school for a couple of months, started deciding I needed more money. I'm still doing the flea market stuff. I'm still doing things all the time to make more money. I used to go to auctions in Albuquerque and buy a state lots full of... At the end of the auction, they would sell pallets of stuff just to get done with the auction quick. And then me and a buddy of mine would take that stuff. And then on Saturday morning, we'd go to the Albuquerque flea market and set up a spot at the Albuquerque flea market and sell it all. And it was really random what we would get. I mean, we'd buy boxes. We didn't even know what we were getting and pallets of junk. And so me and this kid did this for quite a while, like most of the winter.

[01:26:43.120] - Joel Randall

And we made pretty good money And then his dad decided to open a dinner theater, and he hired me to build the backdrops and all the sets and stuff. Okay. And all the stage equipment. Him and his son and me. But he knew I was the one that knew how to build things because I'd helped him with some stuff at their house in their garage and stuff. And so we got started doing this, and he opened this dinner theater in Albuquerque. He was just a typical theatrics person. Really, really colorful and really I don't know, he was the director, and he made movies later on in life. I've seen a couple of movies that he's made. But so we got this job, and it was a dinner theater that was boarding house dinner theater style. So the cast would come down and feed everybody at the break. In their costumes. And it was like family style theater. So we would be there because him and I were doing most of the work, the bartending, the cooking, and all that, because at this point, I'm 15 years old. So of course, I'm primed to be a bartender at this time.

[01:28:22.540] - Joel Randall

And so we're doing this and having a blast. But the thing last till... Because we had a dinner show, and then they also had a night show, like Thursday through Saturday night. They'd have a dinner show, and then they'd have a late one. So we wouldn't get done until two or three o'clock in the morning. Well, that makes it pretty tough to go back to school on Monday morning. Because Sunday, we would be running around and partying and stuff, and we were used to being up to three o'clock in the morning. So I was missing a lot of high school at this point. And this dinner theater was doing pretty well. And the guy that... I can't remember his first name. Brett Robbins was his son. I think his name... I don't know. I think it was Steve. But anyways, it was going really well, and he was really busy. So he started having us go down to the wholesale liquor place and pick up all the booze.

[01:29:28.560] - Big Rich Klein

Really?

[01:29:30.000] - Joel Randall

High school. With a list, with a list written in pencil, Rich. A list written in pencil. And I'm 15 years old.

[01:29:43.640] - Big Rich Klein

You know, I got to interject something right here.

[01:29:47.140] - Joel Randall

Okay.

[01:29:47.960] - Big Rich Klein

I thought that you grew up just a Nebraska farm boy. I had no idea that you such a colorful past. This is awesome. Okay, you can continue.

[01:30:04.300] - Joel Randall

Okay. Well, just on that point, nobody knows that this is how I grew up.

[01:30:11.580] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[01:30:12.440] - Joel Randall

I mean, a few close friends, I knew. You sit around a campfire on trail rides and stuff later on. People would ask me, and I've told people this all my life. I learned everything. I learned everything I needed know by the third grade. And after that, I was in the school of Hard Knocks my whole life.

[01:30:34.320] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:30:35.440] - Joel Randall

And they thought I was kidding.

[01:30:37.460] - Big Rich Klein

They'll know now.

[01:30:38.430] - Joel Randall

Nobody knows. A lot of the people that we were out-crawled against, they thought the same thing you did. Actually, we'll get to that if we get to it.

[01:30:47.720] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, we will.

[01:30:48.940] - Joel Randall

Okay.

[01:30:49.430] - Big Rich Klein

Even if we have to do a section two and a section three. This is fascinating.

[01:30:57.120] - Joel Randall

Okay, well, I didn't know. I warned you, though, that when you talked. This is great. I told you, I said, If I get going, you can't stop me. That's okay. It's like an avalanche. So school is getting harder, and Actually, I'm going to back up a little bit, Rich, because I left some stuff out. I had that '66 Biscayne, right?

[01:31:23.540] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:31:25.740] - Joel Randall

But when we left New Nebraska in '76 to come back, and I told you my grandfather and the farm, we had all these Jeeps. He was a fleet owner. We would get fleet pamphlets all the time. And the guy that owned the AMC dealership in Carny, where we write, our farm was only 13 miles from there, was my grandfather's best friend. So we had tons of Jeeps. He bought two new Jeep pickups every year. We always had at least five or six Jeep vehicles on the farm, and they also had a Cadillac for trips. My grandfather was a big Cadillac fan, and not new ones. He had 10-year-old ones because, like I said, he was a mechanic. But when I left in '76, I went down to that Jeep dealership. Well, we were down there a lot because we'd have to go there for parts. Then they also did warranty work and stuff on these Jeeps because farming and ranching, we had cattle. We farmed and had 250 head of cow, cow-cath herd. And so we'd go down there all the time. Well, they had a '72. Somebody traded in a '72 Raleigh Nova. Oh.

[01:32:56.660] - Joel Randall

Yep. And I fell in love with that car from the very first day I saw it.

[01:33:02.000] - Big Rich Klein

Goodbye, Biscayne.

[01:33:04.640] - Joel Randall

Yeah, from a four-door Biscayne to a two-door Raleigh Nova. Yeah, I was moving up. And so I bought that car. That was my second car, and it was a 350 automatic. And I put headers on it, put air shocks on it, put Craegers on it, all that stuff in Nebraska before we left. And so when I went back to Albuquerque and I signed into high school, this is what I drove.

[01:33:37.920] - Big Rich Klein

And you still had long hair?

[01:33:41.700] - Joel Randall

Yep, still had long hair and had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder at this point because I got into a few tussles because of how I look still.

[01:33:56.040] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:33:57.160] - Joel Randall

And my grandparents at the farm, my grandfather, they picked on me about my hair, but they didn't care. I go back and I sign in for high school, and we're doing all this, the bartending and building the sets and doing all the heavy lifting for this dinner theater. This best friend of mine at the time and I, and making tons of money. I can't remember what break it was. I think it was spring break. We decided we're doing a road trip in this car. We told my mom, and he told his dad, even though my mom, I could have told her anything at this point because she didn't really have any reins on me at for most of the time that I lived with her. But we told them we were going on a ski trip with the school up to Northern Taos and then to Angel Fire and up in there. But we went up there and we thought it was going to be ski bunnies and all this. No, it's a bunch of old Texans. It was not any fun at all, Rich, at all. So we took We took this '72 Nova, and we just started driving.

[01:35:35.560] - Joel Randall

And we didn't know where we were going to go or anything. And we ended up in Las Vegas, Nevada.

[01:35:47.600] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, wow.

[01:35:49.120] - Joel Randall

Yeah. Two of us.

[01:35:52.130] - Big Rich Klein

A road trip to Vegas.

[01:35:54.280] - Joel Randall

Yep, two of us. And here, I've got long hair. At that point, I was wearing a flat-brimmed Stetson hat with a break in the front of it. And my friend was about the same, had long hair, and he usually wore a straw cowboy hat. We go to Vegas, 15 years old, and he's 14. I can't even remember. I think we stopped at one hotel on on the way, and they just let us get a room. I don't know if they thought I was older or what. But when we got to Vegas, we had a heck of a time. We're cruising. At this time, Fremont Street is still open.

[01:36:44.160] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:36:46.100] - Joel Randall

All we're doing is cruising Fremont Street because that's what people did in 1976. I mean, all the kids, we found a bunch of high school parties and a a bunch of stuff, but everybody was just cruising this street. We'd go up, turn around, come back, and hoot and holler back and forth to girls in other cars and stuff. Well, it came time we needed a hotel, and we could not get a hotel to give us a room at all. There was no way. We devised this plan that we were going to go into this hotel, and we'd already been to it earlier in the day, but they wouldn't give us a room. So later on, we were hanging around and walking in and out, and there's different people working at the check-in deal. And we devised this plan. I went up to a table, and I talked to a guy and was asking the dealer, and specifically talking to the guy right on the corner of the table. And the people that were at the check-in place could see that we came in because kids aren't supposed to be in the casino, even back then.

[01:38:11.100] - Joel Randall

I knew they were watching me because they watched me walk over there, and I'm walking over there, I'm talking to them, and I talk to this guy, and I put my arm on his shoulder, and I point over towards the hotel desk, and I said, So is this where you have to if you need to get a room, if you want to stay here and stuff? They're all like, Oh, yeah. The guys, they're all pointing over there, and I'm pointing over there and everything. I go over to the desk afterwards and I said, Yeah, my dad just told me we need to get a room. Because we're not leaving. He's winning, and we're not leaving, so we're supposed to get a room. I gave them. I went in my pocket, and I had tons of money at this point because we were making money hand over fist. I mean, we thought we were rich. I bet I left on that trip with probably $2,500.

[01:39:02.040] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Okay.

[01:39:03.720] - Joel Randall

And you could buy a new car for $3,500 in 1976.

[01:39:08.600] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:39:11.880] - Joel Randall

So I go up there and I just, I threw a couple of hundred bucks down and I said, Yeah, my dad said we got to get a room because he's winning and we're staying here tonight. I guess we're not going home. And they didn't go check. They didn't go take him off that table. They gave us a room. I signed my name. I shouldn't have. I wrote my name and signed my name. I did it just like I would. That was really my dad. I said, Yeah, my name's Joel Jr. I was talking to the lady and doing all the stuff. And we got a room, and we stayed there for, I don't know, four or five nights because we never had to go back.

[01:39:55.580] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Once you have it, you're done.

[01:39:58.220] - Joel Randall

Yeah. We didn't. I mean, we weren't... I always thought I was smarter than everybody else, but for my age, for my age, I knew I wasn't a genius. But we never had a party or I mean, we brought some girls back there, but we never had a party. Because we wanted to keep it. We didn't want to have to try and pull that scam again, for sure. We knew better than that.

[01:40:24.800] - Big Rich Klein

We kept it more low-key.

[01:40:26.580] - Joel Randall

Yeah. So we stayed there. We were there, like I said, four or five nights. We met up with a lot of people, made a bunch of friends, went to tons of... I think they were all on spring break, too, because we went to tons of parties during the week, and we went to parties out in the desert. We'd find out about parties, and we'd go out wherever it took us. Then, of course, we figured out we needed to go home, and we got done with this whole trip. We had a blast. A blast. And between us, like I said, I think we had pretty close to almost $4,000 between us when we left on this trip. But we were high rollers. We took girls out to Steak and Lobster, and we bought tons of booze It was just a crazy trip. But on the way home, we ran out of money, completely out of money. And in Gallup, New Mexico, I had to sell the spare tire to the gas station to get enough gas to drive home. And I guarantee you that was the best trip of my childhood. After all those road miles and how that Nova survived it, because we raced so many people.

[01:41:53.960] - Joel Randall

We street raced so many people in Albuquerque. It was crazy. And it wasn't even that built. Like I said, I put headers on it, put a four-barrel on it, put a torquer manifold on it, some traction bars, just typical hot rod. But we had a blast. So that was my... The Biscayne was my first car, and I had a lot of fun in it, too, because I was the only kid that was driving in junior high, and I had a blast in that car. But I always considered that one of my favorite first vehicles, that '72 Raleigh Nova. I thought about getting that one now, but... Should I let you ask a question or should I keep going?

[01:42:50.400] - Big Rich Klein

So did you make it all the way through high school for four years?

[01:42:55.300] - Joel Randall

No.

[01:42:56.020] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[01:42:56.760] - Joel Randall

No. It's coming to a quick, screaching haul right now. All right. Like I said, we're earning all that money. We're still doing the flea market deal, which was really lucrative. I mean, you just can't believe how much we were making doing that. I bought a pile of trunks one time at this auction, because at the end of the auction, they just sell everything. And it was completely full of cameras. All these trunks were full of cameras.

[01:43:25.940] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[01:43:26.960] - Joel Randall

But they just sold them by the lot. I mean, they were there. Nobody ever opened them. They were behind a bunch of other pallets. I bought another pallet that had saddles and reins and boots and stuff in it. And we made so much. I mean, it was good, high quality stuff. And we made so much money. And then a church, the guy that had the dinner theater, they hired us to clean out. They had a couple of apartment complexes that the church owned, and they had us clean out these garages and stuff. I didn't even know what the situation was. I was just happy to have free stuff to sell at the flea market. And they loaned us their van, and we cleaned out all these things, and it was just crazy how much stuff we got. We got furniture. We had huge. We'd go and get three lots at the flea market because we had so much stuff to spread out. Wow. We would be selling that stuff. A couple of times when we got this van, we drove down to Mexico and filled it full of Mexican pottery and Mexican flower pots and metal works, metal art, all this stuff.

[01:44:51.680] - Joel Randall

I still knew people from the community school times, and we were selling stuff that they were making, the necklaces. We had tons of stuff. If I couldn't double my money on it, I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't take it. We were still earning a ton of money, and we were still doing the dinner theater thing.

[01:45:14.780] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[01:45:16.420] - Joel Randall

And so school, I can't say in high school that I ever passed a class. I don't think I ever did. I went a couple of different semesters, probably two or three semesters total, but I don't think I ever passed a class. I don't think I ever went long enough to really pass a class. I think I was considered a freshman when I quit, but we were working this dinner theater gig, and I'd made one of those alcohol runs to the wholesale liquor store.

[01:45:52.660] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:45:53.740] - Joel Randall

And, of course, like I said, it was a list made with a pencil. So we always had to stop at my house and drop off all the extra stuff that accidentally got loaded into the car. Because I had a warehouse at my house, pretty much, of this stuff. And I can't remember exactly what the circumstances were, but after work one night, we were driving the car that they always loaned us this Rambler station wagon to go get the booze with. We were driving it, and I can't remember why we were driving it, but I ended up getting six traffic violations.

[01:46:44.820] - Big Rich Klein

Six traffic violations in a Rambler wagon. In one stop.

[01:46:48.820] - Joel Randall

In one stop.

[01:46:50.260] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[01:46:52.260] - Joel Randall

Yep. So my mom, at this point, is dating a Albuquerque police officer, luckily for me. And they negotiated with the judge that I would be moving to Nebraska and that I would serve my community service there. Because a lot of things happened. I mean, I was street racing. South Ubank in New Mexico was an awesome place to go street It was right where it drove into the Air Force base back then, and it was a closed road. I had done so many things because I'd had a few tickets before that. And so they negotiated with this because it was careless, reckless, speeding, because I took an on-ramp and tried to jump over the intersection road at the top of the on-ramp.

[01:47:57.600] - Big Rich Klein

So you were evading Oh, yeah.

[01:48:02.420] - Joel Randall

It was a list. It was a list because we took this off-ramp off of I-40, and I think it was at maybe Tramway. I don't know. Tramway was a gravel road at that time, pretty much, but it had an exit, I think. Just for a little ways, but it was a gravel road where I lived. But anyways, I took this exit and purposely was trying to jump not touch the on-ramp and not touch the road that it was an off-ramp for and land on the on-ramp to go back down on the road. Like I said, by the end of the night, they came up and it was seven different violations, I guess, total. Miner, possession, you can just name it.

[01:48:58.220] - Big Rich Klein

Because you Had you been on a alcohol run?

[01:49:03.440] - Joel Randall

Or were you- No, no. This was like three o'clock in the morning. Right.

[01:49:07.440] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[01:49:08.100] - Joel Randall

But we somehow still got that vehicle. I don't know why. I can't remember the circumstances why we had that vehicle that night. It's just a blur. A lot of my... And this is also 50, 45 years ago.

[01:49:25.420] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:49:26.520] - Joel Randall

So it's a little bit hard to remember everything. But so they made that agreement, and I ended up going and moving to Nebraska.

[01:49:40.900] - Big Rich Klein

And there's back, too, with your dad's dad? Yeah, to the farm. Okay, so not the real conservative one?

[01:49:48.940] - Joel Randall

No, no. The good influence in my life. And he knew the circumstances. My mom had talked to him about it and warned him. You know He knew I was a wild kid, but he was a wild kid. My dad was a wild kid, and when he was in high school.

[01:50:08.260] - Big Rich Klein

You ended up with a mug shot?

[01:50:11.720] - Joel Randall

No.

[01:50:12.220] - Big Rich Klein

No? Oh, you got away without a mug shot.

[01:50:15.320] - Joel Randall

Oh, no. My mom was married, or not married. She did marry him later, but she was dating a police officer on the Albuquerque Police Department.

[01:50:24.800] - Big Rich Klein

So he was able to keep it controlled? Nothing.

[01:50:28.160] - Joel Randall

I got nothing.

[01:50:32.480] - Big Rich Klein

Except that you needed to get your act straightened.

[01:50:36.820] - Joel Randall

Yeah. They promised that I was going to go there and that they would set up a type of, which they didn't, community service, something with my grandfather and the locals there, but they didn't follow through with it. I mean, my mom and this, well, he ended up being my stepdad. No, they did not follow through with it, but they got me off the ticket.

[01:51:04.440] - Big Rich Klein

Awesome.

[01:51:05.900] - Joel Randall

So I ended up moving to Nebraska, and I lived with my... I moved down there, and right away, I bought a '74 international pickup four-wheel drive because the Nova was... At this point, I was afraid If I kept driving it, I'd probably lose my license in Nebraska.

[01:51:33.380] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[01:51:35.060] - Joel Randall

So I got rid of the Nova, which I wish I still had, which everybody says that about their high school car. Oh, yes. But I started working for my grandfather, and like I said, he was a really good influence on my life, and I started to turn everything around from there and I became the person that you know.

[01:52:02.500] - Big Rich Klein

More of the... Yeah. What I thought, just a conservative upbringing Nebraska farm boy.

[01:52:13.160] - Joel Randall

Yep. Well, I became that person.

[01:52:17.840] - Big Rich Klein

And did you continue schooling or?

[01:52:21.000] - Joel Randall

No.

[01:52:21.580] - Big Rich Klein

So your third grade was pretty much it for real education. Well, I went to... I went to...

[01:52:27.940] - Joel Randall

Yep, yep. Homeslaved.

[01:52:31.300] - Big Rich Klein

Homeslaved.

[01:52:32.860] - Joel Randall

Yeah, that's where we landed.

[01:52:36.000] - Big Rich Klein

This is a perfect spot to end part one of the Joel Randall interview. Please stay tuned next week for part two. Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have, or if there's anybody that you have that you think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams and live life with all the gusto you can. Thank you.