Report from Santa Fe; Ernie Mills - In Memoriam: Frank Waters - In Memoriam

Ladies and gentlemen, Ernie Meals always like to do programs he called Golden Treasures. Interviews with those he referred to as Golden Oldies. Today's report from Santa Fe was originally broadcast in June of 1995. It is an interview with author Frank Waters, who died on June 2, 1995, shortly after this program was videotaped. Ernie Meals died on February 26, 2003. This was one of Ernie's favorite shows. Another now is Ernie Meals paying tribute to author Frank Waters. No single work of New Mexico author Frank Waters can describe the achievements of this accomplished

gentleman. His legacy is a lifetime of good works and contributions that have made our world a much better place to live. Report from Santa Fe interviewed Frank Waters not too long ago, and we hope that show conveys the depth, kindness, gentleness, and humor of one of New Mexico's Golden Treasures. Frank Waters died Saturday June 2 at the age of 92. I'm Ernie Meals, and this is report from Santa Fe. Today for the first time in ages, I'm loaded down. I have books, the man who killed the deer. I have brave or my people. I have a proclamation from the governor's office, loaded down for one reason. Our guest today is one of the most familiar figures in New Mexico, but one of the most revered author Frank Waters. Frank, thanks so much for being with us today.

It's so nice to be down here, thank you for inviting me here. You made a comment to a reporter and they said, are you going to do a biography? I think you said that is the last thing that I'm going to do as a biography. You also gave some good advice to writers, and you said, I don't talk about books that I'm working on because you talk them out. I think that's the wisest thing a young writer can hear. What I wanted to ask you today, I have a 10-year-old daughter. She's going to say to me, what kind of a man is Frank Waters? Well, he's just as common as an old shoe. In your writings, I spent the little time when I came to New Mexico in 1957 in Gallup. And at that time, the problems of the Native Americans were not, they weren't political. They weren't considered political.

In this time span, they'd become very political, haven't they? In your writings, what do you feel you have taught the Indians, and on the flip side, what have you taught the non-Indian? I think I've helped a little to raise the consciousness of the general public angloses to Indians and Indian culture. On the other side, I haven't taught the Indians anything except I've helped them to realize more that they are a part of the general commonwealth. They're not an outmoded minority. How were they relating now?

There was a period where it was very difficult for the Native American to come off the reservation. It was very hard for them to do that. I think the general public, like the idea of pinning the Indians up on reservations, they were an outmoded zoo for people to look at on their vacation. But they never regarded Indians as part of the general commonwealth. And I think now that the people are amalgamating with the general commonwealth. Frank, you triggered something in my memory that I hadn't thought of before this moment. Frank, when I came in from the east, that was back in 1957, I had really had to do some study. I guess they called it the collier theory at that time where they literally looked upon the Indians on the reservations as something was a museum theory, wasn't it?

But it was purposeful. That's right. This was John Collier, I guess, was the head of the Indian Affairs Commission at that time. John Collier was an old friend of mine. But this was his idea, and it was generally adhered to keep the Indians on the reservations and people could go there and look at them and talk things over with them. They weren't out and mixed with the general public. We didn't want to change it. There was no malice to it, though. Oh, no malice at all. There was just an outmoded minority to be taken care of, and that's all. We had the, I remember during that period, we had the bird watches in Santa Fe, and it

was interesting because also at that time it was not considered politic to discuss the Native Americans, but there was one other thing I found interesting. The environment itself in those days was not considered a political issue. Today it is. What do you think has brought that change about? Well, the general general destructiveness of the land. We are destroying the land. Our developers are moving in on all unoccupied land, and land is now precious commodity. If you were starting your writing all over again, would you have changed anything? No, I don't think so.

Change comes slowly, and I didn't know what was going to happen, so I was just going with the flow. A little thing, a few things at a time. Tell us a little bit about your background coming out here. I know when I came out, there was no purpose in my coming specifically to New Mexico. I stopped, someone said, we had a newspaper, you were a newspaper editor for a period, and someone said, I need help for about six months, and I decided to stay for a short period of time and never left, I guess as you say, that's going with the tide. Tell us about your background, how did it start out here? Well, I was born in Colorado Springs, and I had gone to lived in New York for a short time, lived in California, Los Angeles for a short time, and several places on the Mexican border.

When I was going through the Southwest, generally, I ran into Tows in New Mexico and in Tows, and I thought, this is a great place, so I settled there. For a year and a half, I was the editor of that little Tows newspaper, it was called Atlanta Alcropus Colole, and I later became a director of the New Mexico Arts Commission when it was first established, and I lived in Santa Fe, and I got acquainted with the state in general. You worked for a while for the Los Alamos laboratory, right? Tell us about that period.

Was that during the 40s? About the time we were just finding out about the lab? No, I think this was a little later. Do you remember when I worked there? It was about the middle of 1955, I must say, that was Barbara, she's the one who prads us in Towson, but it prads our memory. I depend on my wife, Barbara, quite often, because she has a better memory than I do. She told me that your memory is selective. You remember what you want to remember, and you forget what you want to forget. That's a nice way of putting it. I had, someone said to me, we were talking about John Dendall, who was a very good friend. John said once, you can't ram economic development down the throat of people, and Los Alamos was a pretty good example of that.

No one here knew about it when it came in, and those days the excuse was, we needed it to help win a war to protect the people, but after that the whole argument for it became economic development in the sense. What was your impression of what you did up there? Well, this was the tail end of the war, I thought we'd get into another war, the Korean war was just starting. So the government boasted the budget, and the laboratory started a new program of development of A-bombs, I guess you'd call them. The phrase was a bigger bang for a buck, and they were boosting the power of a bomb all the time.

They were talking about the H-bombs. They would have a series of testing these bombs in Nevada every spring for six weeks. They'd work in the laboratory in Los Alamos, and do all of the lab work and testing. And then to test them, actual field test, the core of scientists would go to a Frenchman's flat in North of Las Vegas. When I was working there, I was, as a information consultant to Dr. Bradbury, who was the director of the laboratory, and I would work there most of the year, but in the spring for the

six weeks or two months period, they were testing these bombs. Why I would accompany the scientists to Frenchman's flat and live with the scientists north of Las Vegas. As a result, I saw about a hundred of these bombs testing, field testing. I remember one especially, a house was built, a three-room house, and it was completely furnished, and they had a family of dummies in that house. And the father and mother and the two little children playing on the floor, and the father

in his easy chair, reading the newspaper, and the wife sitting in the arm chair, doing her netting or embroidery. They had the hired girl come in, the neighbor girl, to come in to wash the dishes, and there's a nice, normal household, and suddenly, a bomb was dropped on that house, and in an instant, everything was vanished. There was hardly a, there was no debris left at all. It was just completely gone, illustrating the power of these new bombs.

Disruptive power. Very destructive, and I think this was a very drastic, realistic demonstration of what it would do. There was a newspaper reporter, a very enterprising man, and he showed up. A day later, with a dummy, and that was the older son, Hank, of this family. And he said, well, what happened to your family?

Well, he said, they, the government, they just took the family for a test for the A-bomb. Really? That's interesting. We had a lot of friends in those days that worked with the laboratory, and a lot of, you know, I say old timers, and one of the things that I had, and things I've read about you recently, we looked back to some of the great characters that we knew. I had, my little one recently went up to the Elliott Barker camp, you know, and I know you knew that you, the Barker brothers, I would speak. He was a good listener and viewer of mine, and we did a show once, and he said, you know, he said, I've, I've outlived, well, basically what he said, I'm a man without enemy, and he said, I've outlived the SOBs, and Elliott was just markable that way. Do you miss some of the characters, the old characters we knew, you know, here in Santa

Fe, the Tommy Masione, the Barry Watchers? Yes, I occasionally do, yeah. Time, time has faded up though, you know? Yes it is. And time wipes out a whole series of people that you knew, and replaces with another series, and that series is coming so fast, you can't grieve too much for, for one series of old friends. Well you don't look backward very much, do you? You look ahead. Well, yes, I do, I don't, I don't live in the past too much now. I have had people tell me when they were writing books, one of the problems they have, and I think I face that, is the fear that if you start on something that you may stop living

in a sense, and then live just in that past time frame, that's a danger that you have to guard against, isn't it? No, I never felt that. No, you live in a time, but that time has set apart for your working day, working, working writing day. For example, I always worked usually in the morning, and a lot of my books had to do with pre-Columbian America, all America, North America, Central America. So this is pre-Columbian, and there was no past to look back on then. Do you write, no matter what, a certain, Bob Benchley, not the young man, but old Benchley

himself, told me once that he would get up in the morning, he had a little guesthouse, you know, he used to go to the New Yorker every day in New York, but then he became famous and he moved away from New York. He would get up every day, put on his bowler hat and his coat, and walk across the lawn to his guesthouse and sit down and write, go home for lunch, go back to work, but he wrote eight hours, no matter what. It was that routine to get into, later polishing, but he had that kind of a format. You still work, but you had an old, was it all of Eddie, you used to work? I still have that, and all of Eddie, portable, that I bought in 1956, I still use it. You haven't switched to computer for writing?

No. Well, there's a computer expert, so I hate to admit that I haven't been sold for computers yet for myself. Our secret is out. There's still writing on the all of Eddie, that's marvelous. Yes, I am. I want to talk about your new book, because it doesn't, it represents tribal leaders, but a broad expanse of them, I believe, to come to one of them. And also, it had to be a great man, Manuelito, right? Yeah. A lot of people will write about one specific tribe, and you don't get held back by that. You spend a great broad expanse, I tried to cover the whole field. What should people look for in your new book? What do people look for? Yeah, what should they look for? What would you like them to look for in this book about, and the tribal leaders? Well, first of all, to get a picture of the caricature of each later, and their influence

on the influence they had, and conversely, the influence of our culture, our government on them, they were treated very badly, and I think we ought to get that picture. The Indian leaders and the culture they represented were treated very badly by our government, and I think we ought to get that picture. One of the things I've noticed, we did some work recently in trying to, it was on voting rights, where we did some television work in Navajo and Tewa, you know, in Karrus, and what it basically was to show the Indians how to use some of the more modern devices.

We're using the interesting thing was that very few of the non-Indians that we worked with had any understanding at all of what the Indian government is, and that's where you maintain, though, in your books where you've done more education than you have for the Indians. Good. Good, I'm glad it's helped a little. When fellas like me sit down with you, inevitably we look to get very serious, but I also realize you're, firstly, you've got to be a fun person because of Barbara, she is a marvelous personality. What are you doing now for fun? I'm just listening to Barbara's. You've always been a fun-loving person, you've loved our environment out here, you've heard?

I don't know, Barbara's a fun, she keeps me laughing and so on. Have you fallen prey yet to television, do you watch much of it? Barbara, do you answer this? It was stolen. It was stolen. We live in Tucson in the wintertime, and somebody that had rented that house while we were going in Tows, had left us a beautiful television set, and we used that and enjoyed it, but our house was broken into and they took the television sets, so right now we're without a... Now you're back to Barbara. We've been talking, I went, you had a birthday party this past week, and I don't...

I watched you sign, it had to be anywhere from 500 to 1,000 autographs, I thought your arm would fall off, then I was watching, or you were writing, signing the books, I watched the birthday cake start to melt in the Santa Fe sun, and we all joined in, singing Happy Birthday Frank. What are the proceeds on this are going to be used to establish part of the land you have up in Tows for young writers? Tell us a little about that, Frank. Well, Barbara really should talk about that because she can save the idea, and she is organizing it, and managing it, but part of that land, it turned over to the Towsland Trust, so as to preserve the middle part of our 15 acres, so developers can never move

in on it, and then Barbara is organizing the, now my memories, what do they call it? The Frank Waters Foundation. Had trouble with the name, did we? Yeah, you're marvelous, that man's pretty sharp, isn't it? Frank, I wonder, you know, I have where we're going to read, I should show the proclamation. I think what the Mayor Sam Pick had a proclamation, this was Frank Waters Day in New Mexico, in Santa Fe, Governor Bruce King, good friend of yours, loves you dearly, and he, there was

a statewide observance as well, and you brought so much to the state, I won't ask you what your projects are for the near future because you're not going to tell me anyway, you said if you did, you'd talk them out, but on behalf of our viewers and listeners, from my throughout the state, we want to say one big thank you to you. Thank you very much. And I will ask for a commitment when the 100th birthday will be coming up in nine years and we can do another show. I hope you invite me. The invitation is out. I'm Ernie Mills, I guess today is the great man, Frank Waters, one of the most revered respected writers in not just New Mexico history, but United States history. To my knowledge, I think he is probably the only writer who has 18 publications out and all of them still are in print, and that is what is known as a working writer and a great humble man.

I'm Ernie Mills, who want to thank you for being with us on report from Santa Fe. This show is dedicated to the memory of Golden Treasure, Frank Waters, and his lovely wife, Barbara, and to all who are much better human beings because of his works. Ladies and gentlemen, this report from Santa Fe was first broadcast in June of 1995. It was an interview with author Frank Waters, who died on June 2nd of 1995 shortly after this program was videotaped. Ernie Mills died on February 26th, 2003. This was one of his favorite shows. Thank you.