¡Colores!; 1504; Tony Hillerman’s New Mexico; Hillerman KNME Tape 1

Okay, so I think we should just start this story from the beginning, like all of those stories start from the beginning. Oh, not necessarily. Well, I think that's true. Actually, with the way I want to do the show is I want to start the show. Yeah, I got you out. Tell me about your childhood, tell me about going up in Sacred Heart. What memories do you have of that? Well, imagine if you can, a town community which had a population. I always claimed 50 people, but my older sister says, no, I always exaggerate. It was only 38 people, and she named them for me, imagine. Anyway, you knew everybody, and everybody knew you, and you knew their dogs, and then knew your dog. And you knew which one could whip you, and which one couldn't. And there weren't no pavements, all dirt roads. And so you enjoyed yourself hunting

rabbits, and you had to be 11 years old for you. You could have a real rifle, then you could have a 22. So you grew up hunting and playing cowboy in the Indian, and since about half the population was part of me, or Cree, or second fox, we always, you know, us guys would be that. Cowboys and those guys would be Indians. And then one day some of them went to, in the kind of one, saw a movie, and they found out that cowboys win in the Indian flu. So then we had to change off. We had to be Indians half the time, and they were cowboys half the time. Tell me about the fact that you used the stone in the case today that your parents found out. What did you, what stories come to mind when you think about your mother growing up, and the things that, what influences?

Well, my dad, I thought, when I think about my dad, I think about a guy, it all worked seven day a week. He was always working. It was a dust bowl depression. Making eleven was very, very tough going. And my dad had a peculiar way of enforcing discipline. He never, ever touched one of us kids in hostility. And he never spoke harshly to us. His worst penalty was to call us in and tell us that he was disappointed. And that was a devastating blow to disappoint Papa. My mother did this work this well. If we got that too far in the line, she'd say, boys, I'm going to have to tell your Papa about this when he comes

home from work. And she'd tell us in the morning, and we would dread it all day long. And he would say, the worst I remember was one day I had, we lived next door to a cotton yard. And we weren't supposed to play in a cotton yard because it's full of cotton bales. And, you know, boys love to play on cotton bales, and the guys at home, the cotton bales don't like it. So we were out there playing anyway. And he got caught at it again. And so he comes home. He has me sit down. And he says, now here's what your mother's told me about what you did today. And he recites it to me. And then he says, is that correct? And I said, that's what happened yesterday. And he said, well, you've been warned about that before, haven't you? And I said, yes, sir. And he said, I think I better have you go out in the backyard and get me a little switch off the peach tree. So I go out and I find a very small

little limb and bring it into him. And he looks at it and says, well, what do you think? Should I switch it? Or are you going to be able to remember not to do this anymore? And I said, I can remember. See, it works. It always worked for me and my brother and my sister. Oh, I don't think you ever had to punish my sister, even like that. It was quite a happy childhood, frankly. Tell me about going to school, going to Catholic, the Catholic Union School. And you're, tell me about that. Okay, we were, it was that the school had been built as a boarding school for Potawatomi Indian girls, or Indian girls in general. But a bunch of us farm boys lived around there and farm girls. And so we could go to school there too. The alternative was a

two -room school house, which had one teacher, and who was my daddy considered, my daddy was a very liberal fellow, politically liberal. And he considered the young fellow that taught that school to be a sort of a neo -Nazi. See, a racist and all those things, and he didn't want us exposed to him. Anyway, we went to that boarding school for girls. We weren't allowed to play in the girls' playground, of course. But we had a pig pen where we could play baseball, us in the pigs. And we liked it. It was a good school. And boy, you came out of there knowing how to read and write and do your math and spell and all that good stuff. Fantastic. I think one of the things I'm going to stop pick is what have you

brought with you? What do people see? What is still a part of you? Where is Sacred Heart in all these novels and all these adventures and story stories that you tell? Well, I think relative to what I've written, what I guess I learned there that was most obviously important, was growing up knowing that Indians are just like everybody else. You grew up without us and them attitude about other races. We were all members of the same species. And our mom and dad both wouldn't tolerate people being judged on anything with my dad. Does he keep his word if he, you know, that sort of stuff? And so that was a huge step forward. Some people never learn that. You know, but if you're born with it, it's easy to learn when you're a child. And I never got over that.

We had an us and them, of course. But the us was a pot of water means and the seminoles and the other farm kids. The us and them was the town boys. See, town boys had more low -clutch shoes. They had money. They, we considered them more sophisticated than us. We thought we could whip them in a fight. And us, we wore bib overalls and we wore our work shoes. We rode to school bus. We took our lunch in a sack and they bought their lunch seat. So there was a class relation between us and them, right? Which I've lived with all my life, still have it. It's the reason the villains in my books tend to be graduates of Harvard and Dartmouth and Bennington and, you know, the people who grew up with the golden

glitter of greed all around them, right? If you pardon me, waxing one of my old prejudices till you start, you lose it when you start knowing a lot of Ivy Legers. You find out they're just like the pot of water means. But anyway, that's one of the things that's probably I've taken along with me. Good, fantastic. Now, that's pretty exactly what I was talking about. I think that I'd like to talk to you a little bit about World War II and moving that next step in your life. If you're comfortable with your childhood, is there anything else you'd like to talk about? That's fine. Whatever. Well, you know certainly best. Well, going back to Second Heart, my mother, who has been a nurse in World War I. When she was a teenager, this is still hard for me to believe. When she was a teenager, she and her teenage

brother lived in Oklahoma. Then it wasn't a pre -statehood, the Oklahoma Territory. They borrowed a team and a wagon and they went from central Oklahoma all the way to the Oklahoma Panhandle. And homesteaded, each one of them, said 160 acres, they built themselves sotties, sod houses on their 160 acres. And he lived out, if you're not familiar with it, Oklahoma Panhandle folks, imagine a treeless plane. And that's it. And they went down to the Zareiro Grand, 15 or 16 miles through there. They'd go down there and order supplies and bring them back in their wagon. And obviously nobody lived out there hardly. They didn't have any neighbors. And they stayed there long enough to, what they call, prove the land and own it. And I wonder how hard you'd have to look now to find

two teenage kids who would do that. Or their parents who would let them, my mother had died in childbirth. But even so, she was afraid of nothing. My mother was. And she taught us kids. Two things inevitable, she teaches. You're born, that's one. You're going to die, that's two. What matters is what's between. Nothing to be afraid of. We had a lot of snakes around where we lived, including rattlesnakes. Don't be afraid of a rattlesnakes, you'd say. Think about it. Could a rattlesnake eat you? You could eat a rattlesnake. Just use your common sense. Be sensible. If you seem to be challenging your rattlesnake, you put your hand under the rock where he's hiding. He's going to defend himself. But don't be afraid of things like snakes or spiders either. Or anything like that. In fact, what do you got to be afraid of?

You know, you're going to die. Just be ready for it. Well, that gets ingrained early and you don't lose it. Well, one thing you also don't lose, it agonizes me to see people these days bringing up their children to be afraid of everything. I can't imagine what they're thinking of. It agonizes me to see the United States government trying to terrify us all the time, as tax paying citizens. What do we got to be afraid of? Except maybe poor government. Let's sort of move on the World War II. Okay. You're okay? A moment. It's just a little crazy stuff over here.

If I were you, I would insist. You don't have a union, do you? You have a union that have a cushion on that chair. And another one on this one. Okay. Back to World War II, though. Back to World War II. And I think what I thought was interesting. Just one of the things, it was all fascinating and it was pretty horrifying, too. But the fact that you had a different take on it and you bought it here, you didn't have to go. And I think that's just the whole thing. Well, it sounds heroic at first glance. But see, do you have to put it in a context? I was draft exam because my dad had died when I was 15. And we were at a farm. And my brother was already in the army. And that left me the guy to run the farm.

And running the farm, I'd spent enough time. Remember, I grew up in a 1930s on, which was a dust bowl period. And my one goal in life was to get off the farm. And I was also a war lover. I read everything I could find about World War II. I could tell you the tonnage of the Italian Navy and the armament of a spitfire. I read all that stuff. I was very, very much in a war. So it was a little bit uneasy about my mother not being willing to sign the paper since she was seen as a result of World War I. But as I said, she was willing to sign it. She knew I was dying to go. And I was. And so she signed a paper. And

they got off. Made me open for the draft. And I promptly got drafted. And there I was in a private in the army. Happy as a large, I thought. I was. I enjoyed it. I liked the army. Good. You know, I think that some of the adventures that you saw, you described, you described combat. You write about it in a way that is. You know, some of it was pretty terrifying. I mean, I really got a sense of sort of the chaos. Well, I said, I say, I like the army. The army in World War II, when the war started, there were about 200 and something thousand men with all their war in the army. They were ill -equipped. They were ill -trained.

The officer corps was bred dead from the neck up. And all of a sudden, we were in a war. There wasn't any public sentiment for this. My patrioticism rising, I doubt that. Let's take that from the beginning. Okay. Well, I got to put the audience, I guess, in a setting, huh? The company I was in at my seat company, with our battalion had just captured a French town called Saundier, pretty good size town. And it had been a very unpleasant day. Several days of getting there. So now we're there, and we're all worn out and hungry, and the food that never catches up with you. And we get, we roll out our sleeping bags and we're in an old warehouse, I'm sorry. Trying to

get dry, trying to get warm. And here comes somebody and said, all right, fall in, we gotta go again, out we go. And that's when I was wet, I was cold, I was tired, I was disgusted, hungry, and we're going down a steep slope to get to a road we're gonna walk down, right? And when I was a kid, in my fiercest war -loving days, I was showing to my high school kids, or grade school kids, how paratroopers jumped. See, so I climbed up in our barn loft, I was jumping out of the barn loft, and I tore up my ankle, and it's never been the same. Anyways, I'm going on that slope, and I'm thinking, all I've gotta do to get out of this, and get warm, and get dry, and have some food, is all I gotta do is just jump down on a proper ankle down this slope, and it's, you know, and I'll be out of it. Still remember, just thinking, pro and con. Anyway, I decided not to break my ankle. And

here I am, I'd got broken later, but not when I couldn't blame myself for it. I think what was, what particularly got me was your description of why you did very simple, said something in the fact that you didn't ever, we didn't want to look back on yourself as missing the big adventure. Really? Well, I grew up, you know, farm boys, big deal was, once on weekends, they bring a movie into Connoir, we had one movie a week, and I'd seen one movie up the time I got in the Army. So, you know, yeah, the world was an exciting place out there, and I didn't want to miss a rest of this. Good. That had something to do with it. Let's talk about, if possible, tell me,

looking at the war, and your experiences then, what did you learn? When do you come with you now? Well, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn what kind of manual are, and that's what's wrong with most kids are getting in trouble these days. I think they're trying to figure out who they are, you know, how good they are, or how bad they are depending on the weather. Turn goes, and I didn't know who I was yet, and here gives me a chance to find out. And I was blessed with a friend who had the same problem I did. Got him from Bob Huckins with his name, from Sasakiwa, Oklahoma. He was kind of, you'd never believe it, but we were both skinny in those days, and we were good friends, and he was

the company commander's, I don't know what you'd call him, scout, gofer. If we were short of something, Huckins would have to go out and steal it, and he would come and get me and not help him. But he was also the guy that frequently got involved in patrols. So, you think, well, do I want to go in that patrol? It sounds kind of scary, but you go because, you know, you want to find out who you are, and he was the same way. I don't know that's not, don't give you much in detail, but... Later on when you're a writer, things like that, and in this particular, this patrol that he dragged me along on was a typical in several ways, one ineptitude of the West Pointers, who thought this town we were going

to make a patrol in was, they were almost sure it was evacuated. See, they knew it was. Company commander had been around West Pointers long ago, no, not to trust them. So, he sent, he wanted, he sent a little patrol into this town to make sure it was un -evacuated. And Bob and I go, and it wasn't un -evacuated, broad daylight, the town was itterswilder. Anyway, what happened there gave me a chance to sell an article to a wine magazine, because that's the first time I ever got offered a drink of really high -quality wine. Anyway, we got out of it alive, we killed one German and captured two, and the Germans who were in the mood to evacuate anyway, were just pulling out, so we managed to survive it. But

while I keep saying, I did love the army, I love my company, and I love the guys in it. But we had some really, really inept, incompetent. People up the ladder, but this is not going to be a, intend to be a catalog of the sins and failures of the general class. But isn't that always the case though? I mean, don't you find general class exists in other parts of society, of course? I mean, for instance, and there is a difference in dealing with police officers, and you deal with the FBI, and the general class, versus, you know, the res cost. But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Yeah, we are. Let's talk about the end of the war. And I'd like to know, the end of the war, if you basically

is, is when you were seriously injured, right? And so even you spend a month plus in a hospital, and then you come to stateside, to tell me about it, yeah, tell me what happened. Well, I got there and onto one of these patrols. They planned it, let's say, on Tuesday. It was in the town we were based in. The patrols were generally made by the reserve units, you know. The ones that aren't right up on the line. And so they planned it on the Tuesday, I guess. We'll call it. And everybody in the town, we were in, spoke German. It was a French town, but it was near the Rhine. They were all German. We were going to make a patrol in the town across the river, where they were all German, too. So, after everybody in our little town knew about it, of course, then they'd postpone it 24 hours, which gives the Germans 24 hours to get their minds laid and their machine guns in position.

And then we go in, we're supposed to capture two prisoners and come back with them. And I got the job of, always used to claim I went in with it, Thompson, some machine gun, but my friend said, no, Hillary, you were carrying a stretcher. So, I changed from a war he wrote to a nurse, so to speak. Anyway, I was carrying a stretcher. I believe they remembered it correctly. We get across the river, and the Germans took advantage of the fact that they didn't want to give up two prisoners. And we lost out, I think, 20 men went, and I think we got 11 back. And I got back on the stretcher that I was carrying in, the carry of German prisoner back on, see which kind of ironic you like irony. But anyway, I'd been blown up, and my left leg was pretty well mangled,

and my right leg, and he was just located, and I had burns. Well, my both eyes were burned, and so here I am, finally, back in the third general hospital, with, I was totally blind, and I was in a body cast, and they tell me they think I'll get my vision back or something of that. I did. But I was there from February to July, I guess it was, a long time. And I remember, when I could finally see setting out in a wheelchair, and setting their thinking. Now, I knew I wasn't going back to the farm, because I had a really bum leg, because I didn't want to go back to the farm,

and I thought I got to be able to see well enough to read, and the first thing I read was a big headline in the stars and stripes, the Army newspaper, and I thought, oh boy, I'm going to make it. So I did. I knew I'd make that all right. I knew I'd go back to college. If I knew the GI Bill, thank God for the GI Bill. Anyway, they had me on a list for a hospital ship, and some idiot at the typewriter upstairs skipped my name and put somebody else in there instead, and the hospital ship sales away without me. And me and one other poor soul had the whole ward of this hospital all to ourselves for about a month, while until another hospital ship showed up. It gave me a lot of time to think.

And the concept of writing these stories down, the savings that you had seen, had you already started cataloging these things? No. I wrote letters home to my mother, a lot of them. But I knew she'd probably be worried about me. I made her sound like it was a... I didn't. I did give her any of this bad full stuff. I was just how much fun it was. But anyway, when I finally got back, I got a convalescent furlough. When we got in, they said, all right, they sent us... Here's the army. We're in a hospital nine long island, and they pick out men who are from Texas and Oklahoma, the two states. And they put

all the okis on one hospital car and the Texans and the other hospital car. And we knew there was an army hospital in their Chickasha, Oklahoma. It was close to where I live. And we didn't care what the one in Texas was. We hadn't been in the army knowing early and long enough to understand what would really happen to you. So, way we go. And they get to a sighting. They take the Texas car off, send the Texans to Chickasha, Oklahoma. We sail on down to the William Beaumont General Hospital at El Paso. Does anybody want very surprised, frankly? Things can go wrong. But anyway, they said we get a 30 -day furlough. I decided to learn how to type. And I had one lesson, but I knew a little bit about it. And I got my furlough and it said 30 days,

see? So, you don't argue with about things like this. You know what I mean? I went upstairs to where the young lady was who ran the desk. And I said, I asked her for her anchor racer. She loaned it to me, and I erased a 30 -year -old. Bards her type, or type in 60. I said, what can the army do to me? I was a private first class. You can't bust me mud down much. You already busted down once. And got back up, got it back again. So I sail off on my 60 -day furlough. And there I discovered the Navajoles. And there also I was, my mother told me, my mother lived in Oklahoma, she was working in the hospital laundry there. And I lived in a rooming house. And the lady in the way you ran the room, that's let me sleep on the sofa and living room. Or the parlor, what

do you call it? Anyway, my mother had, I'd gotten this, I'd been decorated, gotten this silver star. And the army had sent a big piece on it to the daily Oklahoma in Oklahoma to say newspaper. And the woman who wrote it told me, I asked to read my letters to my mother, and she gave them to her. She told my mother she'd like to talk to me and I got home, so my mother told me about that. And I went down the seer, and she told me I should be a writer. And I thought, well, I never had seen a writer and own a writer or understood how they made a living. But it sounded like better than farming. So when I got out of the army, I enrolled in a journalism school at the University of Oklahoma. That's what got me to be a writer. I always read all the time when I was a little boy, I read endlessly. I think that's got more to do with anything else. I just

think it's interesting that you're never as much age as a tapes. Okay. I'm sorry, we got to change tapes real quick. Thank you. You You