Sgt.Santa: It’s A Wonderful Life

by Charles G. McGuigan 12.2005

I don’t know why it is, but certain members of our human race seem intent on destroying faith in virtually all that is good. Not long ago, it came to my attention that a grown man decided it was his mission in life to dispel belief in Santa Claus for a nine-year-old girl. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that Santa Claus prepares us for deeper faith. The great writer Saint Theresa d’Avilla penned the following almost four centuries ago: “Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready and move it to tenderness.” That’s exactly what Santa Claus does, he moves us all to tenderness, makes us willing vessels of faith. The man I had mentioned suffers, I suspect, from either a vacuous intellect or a total absence of metaphoric thinking. He’s not a bad man, just rigid and arrogant, adolescent in his thinking. When he witnesses something he can’t understand, something larger than himself, he seeks to destroy it. But you cannot destroy Saint Nicholas or the faith he embodies. Empires and men like Cromwell have tried to do just that through the ages and all have failed. And he does exist, and he exists in the flesh. I’ve met him and his name is Ricky Duling, a.k.a. Sgt. Santa—or simply, Santa Claus.

The Metamorphosis Of Ricky Duling

Metamorphosis is a slow process. Cell by cell an organism replaces itself with the cells of a higher form. It’s a giving over, slowly but surely, like the love between two people. It’s mystical, miraculous, uncanny, one of those marvelous moments in Nature when God reveals himself as the Supreme Architect. 

In late September, my daughter, Catherine Rose, and I watched as a striped caterpillar hung itself from the underside of one of the steps on our front porch. For days it hung from a thread, and then it began weaving a web, its own temporal coffin, silken threads that eventually engulfed it, entombing its transitioning body. The chrysalis was the color of burnished silver and it swayed in the sunlight for weeks on end. Each day we would check on its progress, but we could see no change. What was happening to it was occurring in its own secret night, was occurring from within. Then one morning, a week before Thanksgiving, Catherine noticed that a fissure had split the chrysalis almost in half. Through the tiny slit in the silver pouch we could see streaks of orange and black. On Thanksgiving morning the silver chrysalis was nothing more than a husk. The butterfly or moth had left earlier in the morning or sometime the previous night, had tasted flight for the first time, christened its new wings with air. Catherine worked the spent chrysalis away from the step; it had all the substance of a milkweed seed. It was light as air, but exceedingly beautiful, and a slight breeze carried it off her outstretched palm and it was lost in the tallish grass of the front yard. But we both knew there was a moth or a butterfly now in the world, a thing that had not been there before the metamorphosis.

I believe a kind of metamorphosis began controlling the destiny of Ricky Duling more than half a century ago when he was still patrolling the crime-beleaguered streets of some of Richmond’s tougher neighborhoods. 

A Single Mom

I’m seated at a long table cluttered with boxes of bulk candy canes that are being packaged in small sacks by some 30 elves, all working methodically while singing Christmas carols. The head elf, Ruby Clanton, answers the phone, which rings about every other minute. And next to me in a folding chair is the man himself—Sgt. Santa, dressed down in khakis, a blue work shirt, red suspenders and a teal nylon bomber jacket. His complexion is ruddy as a red delicious apple, his eyes blue as ice, and beard and hair like raw cotton. A pair of wire rimmed-glasses perch on his nose and he is talking, telling me about his own transformation.

He came into the world almost 80 years ago, the son of Frank and Margaret Sarah Duling, and was named Dalton Rotruck Duling, though everyone called him Ricky. He was born in the back bedroom of the family home in the 3100 block of Grayland Avenue. A little over a year later, his father, Frank, a Richmond police officer, was killed in an automobile accident, leaving his wife to tend to the two children—Dalton, and his older brother, Frank. Shortly after the patriarch’s death, the Great Depression hit with a vengeance.

Ricky’s mom was intent on keeping her small family together. She baked pies and cakes, selling them in the community. She took in laundry, made dresses, stretched curtains, did just about anything she could to make ends meet. She even took in borders—two dollars a week got you a place to sleep along with breakfast and a bag lunch every weekday. “She did everything she could do to keep us together because back in those days you went to an orphanage,” Sgt. Santa remembers.

Miracle Of The Nails

Like a lot of boys in those days, Ricky liked to build things. He’d scavenge boards and pieces of plywood and old nails from the alley, take them back to his house and with a hammer and hand saw begin building a clubhouse, a boat, an airplane. One day, he scoured the alley for nails, but seek as he would he couldn’t find even one bent up, rusted nail. After about an hour, discouraged, he went into the dining room, where his mother was busy stretching curtains.

He slid into a chair and when his mother looked over at him, he asked a simple question, “Do you think if I prayed to God for some nails, he’d send me some nails?”

“Why don’t you try?” Margaret told her son.

Ricky went out to the back porch and knelt on a step facing the house. He folded his hands and intoned a very short prayer. “God,” he said in his five-year-old voice. “Please, send me some nails. Amen.”

When he rose from the porch steps he could see a man from across the alley. He’d opened the double doors of the garage and was waving Ricky over. “Come on over and help me clean out my garage,” the man said, and Ricky went. One of the first things he handed Ricky was a Prince Albert tobacco tin. Ricky shook the can, heard a metallic clinking and when he opened it up found hundreds of brand new nails, silvery, without a trace of rust. 

“See,” says Sgt. Santa. “I was shooting for old rusty nails and I got the best. So, anyway, that’s how I learned God answers little boys’ prayers, and he answers them fast.”

A Family Of Police

At 16, Ricky Duling entered the work force as a photo lab technician. He later went to work for Richmond Steel in Shockoe Bottom, but the risks there seemed too great. “There were too many people that were getting killed,” he tells me. “They were dropping steel on them. I thought this is not a good place to be. So, I went to work at DuPont in the cellophane plant.”

After a brief stint at DuPont, Ricky considered his options. His father had been a police officer. His brother Frank was a Richmond cop who would one day be Chief of Police. And there were his two uncles—Tom and Dan—both on the force. Dan Duling was a legend in Richmond, particularly among bootleggers and those hiding then-illegal alcoholic beverages. “They used to have songs they used to sing about him,” Sgt. Santa says. “’Who’s that digging in my backyard, that’s Dan Duling of the Purity Squad.’ The Purity Squad cleaned up liquor during Prohibition.”

With his pedigree, it seemed only natural that Ricky Duling would join the Richmond Police. “So I said, ‘Well, I think I’ll take a shot at that,” he remembers. “I went on the force in 1953, and I remained on the force thirty-five and a half years.”

He worked patrol and traffic and vice in uniform, and in plain clothes as detective. He riffles through a mound of photographs and produces one featuring a not-too-pretty woman. The shot was taken in 1955 or thereabouts and is of Rick Duling dressed as a woman, posing as a sex worker. 

The Art Of Listening

He remembers the Civil Rights era in Richmond, when Klansmen and Black Panthers would stage demonstrations. “We had a pretty good working relationship with them,” he says. “They would tell us we’re going to demonstrate. One group wanted to try to win you over to their side and then the other group would try to win you over to their side and we used to tell them, ‘Look as long as we’re out here we will be playing right straight down through the middle. If you jump somebody else, we’re going to take care of that; if they jump on you, we’re going to take care of that. We’re playing that straight and narrow, right down the middle.’ And they appreciated the fact that you were being honest with them.”

 In more than three decades as a police officer, Ricky Duling never shot a man, and he clung to a philosophy his Uncle Dan lived by. “My Uncle Dan told me, ‘You can’t always excuse a person for what they’ve done, but at least you can take time to set down and let them talk it out. There’s probably nothing you can do to help them, but the fact that they get a chance to get it off their chest, that means the world to people out here.’ And I always tried to stick to that.” 

In at least three cases during his career, listening to a suspect before making an arrest cleared the suspect of any wrong-doing. “I was able to get to the truth because nobody else had taken the time to let them talk the thing out,” says Sgt. Santa. “I took the time and listened at them.”

The Bubble Gum Ploy

It was on the job, that Ricky Duling slowly began to slip into the persona of Santa Claus. And it wasn’t something he had planned; it just began to happen to him like a metamorphosis. As a patrolman, one of Ricky’s beats was the residential area that was razed to make way for the Richmond Coliseum. It was a tightly knit community with a grocery store on every corner, and the kids who lived there were absolutely petrified of the police. “So many people used to use the policemen to discipline children,” Sgt. Santa says. “In other words, ‘If you don’t do this, the policeman’s going to get you.’ And consequently that made the kids scared to death.”

As he patrolled those streets in Car Number 3, he watched as the kids scattered when they saw the police car approach. “So I’m thinking to myself,” he says. “Now this is not right because if the child got lost the person they should be going to is the last person they want to see because they’re scared to death of him.”

Ricky Duling had an idea. Every other week when he received his paycheck of $50, he would go to the Bauer Company on Broad Street and lay eighty cents on the counter for a box of bubble gum, which contained one hundred and twenty pieces. He would drive through the neighborhood where the kids roamed and as soon as they saw the squad car, they’d scatter. But then Ricky did something he’d never done before. He reached over to the box of bubble gum beside him, grabbed a handful and threw it out the window, then slowly pulled away, stopping at the next intersection and looking in the rearview mirror. “Well gradually they would filter out,” he says. “One at a time to pick up the bubble gum. So the next evening I’d go through and do the same thing again. You drive up and they still run, but they don’t go quite as far as they did yesterday. Finally, it got to the point where they would come to the car and take it out of my hand.”

Santa Claus Undercover

That was in 1950’s, and then in the mid-1960’s, Ricky Duling was working undercover. He shows me a photograph of an imposing man, soot-tarnished with hair that would make Einstein’s look tame—and also this: a full beard. Undercover officers made certain they looked the part. They would raise the hood on the squad car wipe the valve covers of grease, mix in a little gasoline, and then rub the filth over every exposed area of their body—down to the heel of a foot clad in a heel-less sock. This petroleum mixture was rough on the skin. “But then they came up with the Xerox machine,” Sgt. Santa recalls. The toner was an ideal makeup substitute for the grease and gas combination. 

One day, clean now and in street clothes, but still sporting a beard, Ricky stood in line to cash a check.

“I’ve been looking all over town for you,” said the man standing behind him.

Ricky looked the man in the eyes. “You’ve been looking for me?” he said.

“Yeah,” said the man. “I’ve got plans for you.”

Ricky eyed the man curiously. “How can you have plans for me when I don’t even know what I’m going to do myself?” he said.

“I want you to be Santa Claus.”

“I don’t want to be Santa Claus.”

But the man persisted. He handed Ricky a script for a television commercial for Disco Sports. This man worked for a local ad agency. “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks,” the man told him. “And I’m not taking no for an answer.”

The First Gifts Of Christmas

Ricky told him, no, repeatedly, but the man kept calling. Now during the summers in those years, Ricky and other Richmond police officers would take 65 kids from some of Richmond’s poorer neighborhoods to a camp up in Caroline County. For some of the children it was the only time they experienced the outdoors.

The next time the man from the ad agency called about the television commercial, Ricky offered a proposition. He’d dress up as Santa even though it was in the blazing dog days of July and do the commercial. But instead of getting paid, he wanted the agency’s client to donate sports equipment to the summer camp program. 

“I don’t know,” the man said over the phone. 

“You talk to your client,” said Ricky. “If they don’t agree to it don’t call me anymore about it.” They both hung up.

Twenty minutes later, Ricky’s phone rang. The client had agreed.

“You know,” says Sgt. Santa. “That was in 1972 and they were going to pay me fifty dollars for the commercial and we got over five hundred dollars in sporting equipment for the kids.” There is a noticeable twinkle in his eye.

The Closet Santa Emerges

The following November as Ricky ate dinner with a couple at Billy’s Restaurant, which was located on Government Road in the East End, the wife asked Ricky if he’d consider playing Santa Claus at her company’s family night in early December. She’d seen the commercial for Disco Sports and thought he’d make a perfect Santa. 

Ricky shook his head, laughing, slipped his arm around the woman’s shoulder. “Honey, I sure would like to do it for you, but I don’t have a suit,” he said. 

The woman smiled. “We’ve got a Santa outfit at the store,” she said.

Ricky was cornered, so he ended up appearing at the family night and as he was preparing to leave, the owner of the store handed him a large box.

“What’s this?” asked Ricky.

 “It’s the Santa suit,” said the man. “You may want to be Santa for somebody else.”

“As far as I’m concerned this is the end of Santa right here and now,” Ricky said. But the man kept insisting and in the end Ricky put the box in the trunk of his police car and drove off into the crisp December night. 

The Growing Red Light

Two weeks later, while Ricky waited at an interminable traffic light, something odd happened. “It was one of those intersections where you could just lay back and spend two or three weeks waiting for it to change,” he remembers. His neck was pressed into the headrest and his eyes were trained on the red light. The light began to grow, and it didn’t change to green. It was the size of the sun and blindingly red. He had no idea what was happening. He blinked his eyes, shut them tight, but when he opened them, the red light was still there, bright as ever, and growing. It was then that he thought of the red Santa suit in the trunk, which he had put out of mind. As soon as he made the association, the red light shrunk to its normal size and then changed to green. He drove off.

It was a moment of revelation, a road to Damascus sort of thing. He approached the city fathers with a plan. They offered him the use of a patrol car, but declined to chip in money for candy. Ricky approached a couple of lawyers, friends of his, and among them they came up with enough money to purchase candy to fill three hundred small boxes. With the patrol car laden with candy, Ricky Duling drove out of the police precinct parking lot. He was dressed in the Santa Claus outfit and it was Christmas Eve.

The Birth Of Sgt. Santa

He drove to a neighborhood where a number of the kids who attended the summer camp lived. “When I pulled up on the corner that very first night in 1972,” says Sgt. Santa. “The kids were so dumfounded when they saw Santa in the patrol car that they all just jumped back.” A number of the kids recognized him as Sgt. Duling from the summer camp. But one little boy crept up to the patrol car and said: “You’re Sgt. Santa, now.” 

That first year was so successful that the following year Ricky Duling was able to collect enough candy, cookies, comic books, coloring books and crayons to fill five hundred boxes. He’d travel all over the city from Gilpin Court to Oregon Hill, dispensing the Christmas presents.

A few years later, the Female Insurance Adjusters of Richmond gave Sgt. Santa a cash donation of about $500. “That year, I think it was 1975, we jumped from fifteen hundred to five thousand bags of candy,” says Sgt. Santa. 

The Rudolph Effect

The next year, Sgt. Santa delivered seventy-five hundred bags, the following year ten thousand, and the numbers kept leaping. In time they started adding toys to the bags. And every year it was the same thing, Sgt. Santa would leave the precinct at eight in the morning and travel through the neighborhoods. He’d cut on the flashing lights and the sirens, and the children would come forth and he’d hand out the bags. After he finished with one load he’d return to the precinct and climb into the seat of another car that was already packed and ready to go. “Sometimes it took me eighteen hours to do it all,” he says. “I didn’t stop to eat.” When it got late, he would only use the flashing lights and the kids would see the swirling red through their curtains and rush out to the street to greet Sgt. Santa. They called it the Rudolph Effect.

Reflecting on his years of service, Sgt. Santa says, “The good Lord has given me a gift; I don’t get tired, I just don’t get tired. I work around the clock.”

One particularly bitter cold Christmas Eve Sgt. Santa checked the temperature, which hovered at three degrees, with the wind chill factor at twenty degrees below zero. He drove over to Church Hill and a small boy came running down the street from a half block away. The boy was barefooted and wearing only jockey shorts. He grabbed his presents and ran home. Later, when Sgt. Santa related the story to his colleagues one of them asked if the boy had given him a hug. “No,” said Sgt. Santa. “The boy couldn’t stand still with the cold.” The colleague suggested the child was anxious to return to the warmth of his home. “If the truth was known,” Sgt. Santa tells me. “The house that little boy lived in was colder than it was outside. He’d been trying to stay warm under a pile of blankets. And he just ran out into the streets when he heard me coming.”

The Gift Of Seven Cents

There’s a steady stream of tears in his eyes as he relates this story, and there are many others just like it, and Sgt. Santa understands firsthand what it’s like to grow up in poverty. “As I told you my father got killed when I was fourteen months old and we didn’t have anything so I know what it’s like,” he says. “I knew my mom was working her fingers to the bone doing all this stuff just trying to keep us together.”

On another occasion, Sgt. Santa was stricken by the compassion of a small girl who had absolutely nothing. It was out on Government Road in front of an apartment complex. A very little girl came running up to him, received a Christmas bag and then waited patiently, while the other kids came to claim theirs. She stood behind the red-suited man and when he had handed out the last bag and turned to leave she tugged at his sleeve. She wore a dingy yellow jacket and thrust her small hand into her pocket searching for something. When she withdrew her hand she held two pennies and a nickel that she carefully placed in the large black-gloved hand of Sgt. Santa. “Take this and help the really poor children,” she told him.

Letter From A Nine-Year-Old

Over the years, Sgt. Santa’s operation has expanded exponentially. These days he has a workshop in Scott’s Addition and a large warehouse on West Laburnum. And literally thousands of volunteers help him each year, sorting presents, delivering them,and filling special requests that come over the phone or in letters.

He shows me a mammoth pile of letters. “They come in every day,” he says. He pulls one from the stack and reads it:

“I hope you can help my momma. I am nine years old and I have a little brother and he is eight years old, and my momma is always in pain and stays sick a lot. We try our best to help her, but we never have the money to pay our bills to get the things we need. I am asking for you to help us to please just get one Christmas tree so my momma can smile again and my little brother will have a tree.” The letter’s signed, Harvell Brown. 

“You see that,” says Santa. “He’s not asking a thing for himself. He’s asking for others.”

Unsolicited Funding Through Faith

Throughout the decades that Sgt. Santa has been bringing Christmas to many, he never once solicited money, but it poured in just the same. And here, I’m reminded of Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her ministries worldwide. Like Sgt. Santa she never solicited, yet the money to fund her many great works always arrived.

When Sgt. Santa, Inc., a not for profit company, purchased the building we’re now sitting in, the organization didn’t have the money to pay for it. But a roasting at the Saints and Sinners raised $18,000 and the three owners of the building chipped in another $5,000 a piece toward the purchase of the building they were selling. “So we had the down payment,” says Sgt. Santa, “And we had faith that we’d be able to take care of the rest. We had faith and we paid it off in thirty-eight months.”

The Gift Of Life

On December 14, 1993, a man made a request of Sgt. Santa that seemed impossible to fill. Sgt. Santa was at the annual tree lighting at McGuire Hospital. After the ceremony, he made the rounds, visiting the sick. He draped his arm around one man who looked absolutely defeated by disease. A photographer captured the moment with a Polaroid. As Sgt. Santa handed the snapshot to the patient, he said this: “What would you like to have for Christmas?”

“I want a heart,” the man said in a voice like gravel. “I need a heart transplant. Can you give me a heart?”

Sgt. Santa struck a thoughtful pose with his index finger at the corner of his mouth. “Let me see what I can do.”

Just after New Year’s Day, Sgt. Santa received a letter from the man in the hospital bed at McGuire. In part, it read like this: “You came over for the tree lighting ceremony, and as I posed with you, you asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I said I wanted a heart, I need a heart transplant. Your reply was, ‘Let me see what can I do.’ Well I just wanted to let you know that in the early morning hours of Tuesday, December the 21st an extended gift of life was granted. I received a strong healthy heart. I’m in rehab doing great. It just sort of renews your faith in Santa. Again, and for whatever part you played, I thank you.” The man, incidentally is still living, and visits Sgt. Santa at least once a year.

There are so many stories he tells that border on the miraculous that you sometimes wonder if there isn’t more than a little spark of immortality in this man. But Santa waves it off. “I have just been blessed,” he says. “I give the good Lord the credit for it. I always say it’s His program, I just manage it for Him. He makes it work. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

And, to all of Richmond.