David “Doc” Hooper is proud of what’s on the walls of his local Hooter’s restaurant.
Flags from each branch of the U.S. military drape one end of the wood paneled back room of the place, which sits just off Interstate 215 on Riverside’s eastern border. Carved wooden emblems from each branch are clustered in an arrangement on one wall. And several collections of photographs showing young men in combat gear, many smiling for the camera and backed by tropical jungle, decorate the walls.
There are even some black-and-white images from World War II of the last mounted cavalry unit from Fort Riley, Kansas. The man on the horse is Hooper’s father.
“We started with that small wall,” said Hooper, 73, of San Bernardino, pointing to one of the shorter end walls. “And we said, can we bring in more pictures?”
Restaurant officials gave their approval and the Veterans and Military Hall at the Moreno Valley Hooters was established.
Local Hooters officials say this is the only restaurant they know of with an area designated to pay homage to veterans. Although, manager Camile Camacho said there’s no reason others couldn’t follow suit.
“They’re never going to say no to the military,” Camacho said of the Hooters corporation. Company leaders have visited the store in the three years since the veterans “took over” the room. “All of corporate loved it,” she said.
At least once a month – usually for lunch on the first Monday -- the Old Farts Club meets here, a group of Vietnam veterans who have found more success in the support they enjoy with one another than in any program they’ve been part of. And the restaurant, they say, provides a less structured setting than most veteran organizations.
None of the men served together in Vietnam in more than a glancing way. But they have known each other for more than three decades and it shows in the familiar needling they give one another. Laughter erupts regularly from their table.
“We all kind of met each other through the vets center back in ’81-’82,” said Zack Earp, reaching for an onion ring from the top of a stack. “We’ve been friends ever since.”
Earp, 67, of Riverside, is a retired teacher and middle school principle who served on the Alvord School Board. He served in the Marines from 1967 to 1969 and spent nearly a year in Vietnam before stepping on a land mine and suffering multiple shrapnel wounds.
He said the group is tight knit and there for each other whenever there’s a problem. Alex Candeleria says their reliance on one another stems from the way they were treated as outcasts by many long after the Vietnam War had ended.
“Nobody wanted us when we got back except for each other,” said Candeleria, 68, of Riverside, who served as an Army specialist in Vietnam from 1967-1968 as part of a three-year stint in the service.
Another Army veteran, Pat Kelly, 68, of Perris, said the rejection he and his fellow Vietnam vets felt was potent. On the way home from the airport after being discharged in 1971, he asked his cab driver to take a detour.
“I said, ‘Take me to the city dump,’” he recalls. “I kicked the whole duffle bag with my stuff in it out of the cab. It’s buried out there.”
Earp said he and the rest of the group credit a VA counselor, Frank Irlanda – whom they refer to as Saint Frank – for “putting us all back together” in the mid-1980s. But without their continued friendship, Earp said, the progress they made might not have held.
“We’d have the group,” Candeleria said, “but we’d be in San Quentin.”