My City Different. Betty E. Bauer
inlaid in turquoise on the lid.
McKinney asked George a question and, while George was answering, he casually opened the box which had a hinged lid. George thought he was going to have a cigarette, but instead he looked inside the box for a moment, then closed the lid.
Every time he asked George a question, he went through the same routine. Opened the box, looked inside, then closed the box.
The telephone rang in another room and McKinney’s man came and called him away. George couldn’t stand it—he had to know what was inside that box. He raced to the coffee table and, breathless, he opened the box. There was nothing inside, but the interior of the lid contained a mirror.
One Saturday I was having lunch at the Pink Adobe which was now housed in an old adobe on College Street (which was later changed to the Old Santa Fe Trail) across from what was then St. Michaels High School. It was summer, and I was sitting outside on the patio. At a nearby table sat an older woman with a young girl. They were chatting away, and I was happily eavesdropping. The woman fascinated me. She had an angular face with a straight acqualine nose and she wore a flat-crowned, wide-brimmed hat sort of gaucho style; dark trousers, jacket and a cream-colored blouse completed the ensemble. In a cultured, whiskey-baritone, she was asking the young woman something about her school when another woman walked up to the table and interrupted. The lady in the hat said, “Oh, Susan, I want you to meet my niece from Las Cruces.”
With that tidbit of information, I marched into the office of the Society Editor, Ann Clark on Monday to find out who the woman was. I described the woman to Ann and said she had a young woman with her who was her niece from Las Cruces. “Oh,” Ann said, “of course, that was Eleanor Bedell. She’s one of our better local lessies.”
I was stunned. I was pretty sure I had interpreted her meaning correctly, but I had never heard that term tossed out so casually. I did not know then that Santa Fe was a refuge for homosexuals and all others whose proclivities labeled them a little the other side of center.
Peach Mayer (Katherine), Mrs. Walter, was a very energetic Santa Fean. She devoted much of her life and her able executive abilities to doing good works. She was involved with the Maternal and Child Health Center, New Mexico Heart Association, and the Santa Fe Boys Club. She was forever a regent, was twice the President of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, and served at least seven terms as President of the Santa Fe Opera Foundation. She was a very active staunch Republican. Peach was not loved by all and had made a few powerful enemies.
While I was still at the New Mexican, Peach Mayer’s husband, Walter, shot a man back east in Iowa. It came in on the wire late at night and Dick Everet, the Managing Editor, had left for the day. The paper had been put to bed and the presses were running. Art Morgan was the only one in the news room, and he didn’t have the authority to stop the presses. Dick was nowhere to be found, so the paper didn’t carry the story in the Sunday edition which was the next day after the shooting. McKinney blew his top. I think he was not fond of Peach and printing that story would have given him great satisfaction. As it was, he had to be content with firing poor Dick Everet, which he did on the spot.
3
Some friends of mine, Bill and Josie, and I decided we’d do a little spying on the I AMs, a mysterious religious cult which had been kicked out of California to resettle in Santa Fe. It was known that their big meeting day was Wednesday and their temple was, we thought, easily accessible, lying as it was just off the road at the foot of the old Taos Highway. There were many stories about Mrs. Ballard, the head hancho, and her cult. They worshipped St. Germaine and were very sensitive to colors—purple was the best, but all pastels were in—red and black were the devil’s colors and to be avoided at all costs. They were vegetarians—absolutely no meat, and spirits were verboten. It was rumored that they could only mate during the month of April but, if some woman was just beside herself during some other month, she could go to the big mucky-muck, Mrs. Ballard’s right hand man, and be serviced. What men with a like problem did is anybody’s guess.
We parked the car up the hill away from the temple and crept down the side of the road, keeping close to the ditch. When we arrived at a good vantage point where we thought we’d be able to see the goings-on through the windows, we lay in the ditch, concealed by some tumbleweeds. Music started and we eagerly awaited action to begin. Just as there was movement inside, there was movement just inches from our hiding place. Oh, my God—it was a uniformed guard patrolling the grounds carrying a very menacing-looking shotgun. “Yipes, let me outta here,” I thought, but didn’t dare say a word. Shortly after, he moved off toward the other end of the grounds and you never saw three people skedaddle any faster than we did—up the hill, in the car and away.
I never had any further interest in the I AMers except one evening to note Mrs. Ballard’s son in La Fonda enjoying a big steak and a bottle of wine.
Another time, Bill and Josie and I went to Taos. One of the famous early Taos painters, Bert Phillips, was Bill’s great uncle, and I was to meet him. Taos was settled at the foot of the mountains which rose straight up perpendicular to the land. I found them harsh and unrelenting, not at all like Santa Fe’s Sangre de Cristos which were comforting and embracing. Some thought the people of Taos felt threatened by those mountains, and that was why they were such a cliquish, churlish bunch. Whatever its cause, it seemed to me there was an undercurrent—an ill wind that permeated the town. It was really not a town at all, more a village—at that time, mid-fifties, there were probably no more than 2500 people who lived there.
Bert Phillips was an elderly gentleman, very gracious with courtly, old-fashioned manners. He was still a fine painter and I was honored to meet him. While there, I also met Lady Dorothy Brett, a titled English woman who was a part of the D. H. Lawrence saga. She was amusing, with light blue twinkling eyes and unruly white hair that was forever escaping its bondage. She, too, was a painter of some renown. I saw her many times thereafter lunching in Santa Fe at La Fonda, regaling her companions with tales of Taos goings-on.
We visited Taos Pueblo which was a sophisticatedly-constructed tri-level apartment complex built by the Indians centuries before. The Taos Indians are a handsome breed, more closely related, it is believed, to the Plains Indians, than to those of New Mexico’s other Pueblos. It was there I met Jerry Mirabel. He was a canny, engaging middle-aged Indian who gave me a hard-luck story which I thought was worth the dollar he wheedled out of me. It intrigued me to have a real Indian acquaintance—that is, until about his third visit to the New Mexican to hit me up each time for another dollar.
4
The first house I owned in Santa Fe was a small studio house with a large walled garden and patio. It was down a little lane off Cerro Gordo Road. There was an adobe house with a pitched roof on Cerro Gordo at the corner where my lane turned off. It was owned and had been built by a nice youngish man who I knew only as Pedro. He lived there with his wife and several small children. A large wooden plaque had been placed above the door lintel just under where the roof peaked. In bright red large letters crudely painted, it read “LIVE AND LET LIVE.”
There was a profusion of outhouses among the hills off the north side of the road. On my side, the south side, the land was flatter and sloped down toward the Santa Fe Canyon and river far below. Either there were no outhouses on my side of the road or they had been artfully concealed.
It was 1956 and Santa Fe still had a bus—as far as I know, it was the only bus route left. It was the Canyon Road, Cerro Gordo route so, coming from town, it followed Palace Avenue to Canyon Road, east on Canyon Road to just before it reached the Randall Davey property where the road made a wide curve to the north, then to the west where it became Cerro Gordo. A Mr. Gustafsson lived just beyond the junction on the south side of the road. He was Greta Garbo’s brother, and she was a frequent, rarely seen visitor. The road wound around the hills and eventually went past my lane and ended back on Palace Avenue and thus into town. One day a friend of mine was driving on Palace and had just approached its intersection with Cerro Gordo when she spotted a woman trudging toward town. It was a