In Richard Pryor\u2019s comedy routines, his father Buck is known for two things: his powerful fists and his ice-cold honesty. He’s an imposing figure who offers little support and sympathy, cutting Richard down as equally with a brutal remark as with a blow to the chest.<\/p>\n
In more straightahead interviews, Pryor recalled him in much the same terms. \u201cYou could be in an orphanage,\u201d Pryor remembered him threatening. \u201cI chose you, so be cool.\u201d Yet Pryor also drew comic inspiration from his father, whom he credited with an honesty so harsh that it was bracing \u2014 unforgettably real.<\/p>\n
Born June 7, 1915 in Decatur, Illinois, LeRoy \u201cBuck\u201d Pryor was the\u00a0first child of Richard\u2019s beloved grandmother Marie Pryor. At age eighteen, he won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Chicago,\u00a0and never forgot how to score a knockout. After his mother opened a brothel\u00a0in Peoria in the mid-1930s, Buck played the role of the muscle in the\u00a0family business.<\/p>\n
There he came to know a young Gertrude Thomas, a working girl in Marie’s brothel on North Washington Street. Gertrude gave birth to Richard in December 1940, and after Buck was drafted by the Army in late-1943, the two married<\/a>. \u00a0Their marriage was tempestuous and, like the relationship of Buck\u2019s parents, physically violent.\u00a0On New Year\u2019s Eve, 1946, Gertrude took a five-year-old Richard and fled to her family\u2019s home in Springfield, filing\u00a0divorce papers<\/a> in which she reported that Buck had acted with “extreme and repeated cruelty.” But despite Gertrude’s pleas for custody, the court sided with Buck in the ensuing divorce trial, and Richard was returned to the custody of his father.<\/p>\n Buck Pryor\u2019s first run-in with the law was an arrest for disorderly conduct<\/a> at age fifteen, and he continued to run afoul of the law throughout his life. He had inherited from his own parents a skeptical attitude towards the law and a willingness to back up his own authority with physical force \u2014 without, it appears, his mother Marie\u2019s larger sense of justice for all.\u00a0Only seven months after joining the Army, Buck was sent home with a\u00a0Section 8 discharge<\/a>. Less than a year later, he was indicted for assaulting a black sergeant<\/a> on North Washington Street and robbing him of $106 in cash and assorted personal effects.<\/p>\n He steered clear of legal trouble through the 1950s, during which time he married Richard\u2019s stepmother Ann<\/a> (with whom he had a longer-lasting relationship) and ran a family trucking business. But in the 1960s, he returned to running brothels and came back into police crosshairs. Tellingly, when police raided his Aiken Avenue brothel in 1965, the fifty-year-old Buck took off and ran<\/a> \u2014 and not only eluded the police for several hours but also managed to escape with the relatively small penalty of $20. (Two women captured in the raid paid $200 each.)<\/p>\n