Report from Santa Fe; Fabian Chavez

Music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education. For bachelors, masters and PhD degrees, New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for. 1-800-428-T-E-C-H. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Today, our guest is Favian Chavez Jr. Thank you for joining us. That's great to be with you again. Well, you've just pulled me away from curling up with one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's the book about you called Taking on Giants, Favian Chavez, and New Mexico Politics. Yeah, that's something isn't it? It really is something and it's a great read. And anyone who's interested in New Mexico history, because you have been really a main figure in New Mexico history since what you're first selected to the House in 51.

And elected in 50 but served in 51 yesterday. Yeah, that's a long, long time. Over half a century ago, wow. Well, talk to me a little bit about your family because the Chavez, the Chavistas, is so much. Well, I come from a large family. There's 10 kids, six boys, four girls. I'm a third youngest. And I'm going to be 84 in August, minding. There's still five of us left out of the 10. And I had quite an adventurous youth. Yes. And that's in the book. And it's very important that the family, I think, as we go through this interview, was very important to me. They were my incentive to do a lot of good things. But the most incentive I had was my beautiful wife.

Yes, Coral Jean. You won the lottery on that win. You won, boy. Anyway, I was quite involved in a lot of things because everybody asked me, what do you mean by taking on giants? That's a good question. And it comes about from the position that I took when I held public office, all public office positions that I held. But I accentuated by what I did when I was a legislator, especially when I was a state senator and a majority leader of the Senate. I took on issues that everybody seemed to run away from. And that's what they call giants. I took on strong positions, even though the higher ups and my own democratic party didn't think I was doing the right thing. I knew I was doing the right thing and I would be explaining that as this goes on. But one of the things that was an incentive for me to do that was that my bringing up by my family,

the firmness of my father, because I was quite a rascal when I was a little kid. And it's in the book. I hitchhiked all the way to Los Angeles and back. At what age? Age 12 years old. My goodness. I was gone for a whole month. And as a result of that, my dad was very upset. Of course, mother. Later on, I wondered what I had done to my darling mother. You don't think that much when you're just a kid. Not when you're a 12 year old boy. And you want to go to Los Angeles? Yes. And then when dad, I won't give the detail, but I had put a hitchhiking to Towson. They didn't hitchhike in Albuquerque. And this time I hitchhiked. And it was gone for a whole month and worried dad. Very bad. I came back. I thought I was a little hero having done that. And that promptly took me.

And put me in Boy School in Springer for a school year or nearly a school year. Because that's the one thing that really disturbed him that I missed about nearly a month of school. Anyway, I was there from a lot of parts of September to May in the back. And thank God dad did that. Yeah, yeah, certainly. So that's the kind of background. And then later on, not too many years after that, when I was 16 and a half. Together with some other buddies from high school, we became dropouts, signed each other's approvals, and volunteered to go into the service this 1941, 1941. And that was World War II, and then your service you won five Battlestars? Yes, I earned five Battlestars. I was in the service for nearly five years in the European Theatre of Operation. And when the idea of a book like this, one of pushing me the hardest was Dick Fulmire. Remember him?

Yes, I do. Great, great Deputy Director of the Lays State of Consulate Service. And I told Dick, when I did a lot of things in my youth that I don't know what I want to publish to you. And he said, you know Fabianne, that's what made you. Why you go up, your experiences, your adventures, if you want to call them that. And then you ended up as State Senator and Senator Majority Leader, and then you did all these other things. As Director of the Department of Economic Development, Tourism Director, National Tourism Director, and retired as State Insurance Superintendent. Yeah, you came home to retire and they made you, in charge of the entire Insurance Network in New Mexico. Yes, and so he convinced me that I should. And then being that I was very deeply involved in the creation of a medical school. Yes, they have an endowed chair in your name at the UNM Medical School. That's right. So thank you for doing that. Yes. So you have touched us all so deeply. I don't think that people really understand the depth of the effect that you've had on New Mexico politics and history. But let's look at a few of the giants that you did wrestle with because one of the first ones that you took on was our Judiciary System.

We had a justice of the pieces and that could have been construed as being a little corrupt perhaps. It was a rotten. Yes. Downright a rotten. It was so bad that organizations like AAA from Los Angeles and Chicago would put out bulletins, redlining New Mexico, like that meant once if at all possible, avoid driving through New Mexico because of the speed traps and JPE system that we had. And there was a lot of the other abuses by the justice of the peace system, all the main highways and byways. It was just flat rotten. And everybody's afraid to take them on because, well, quite frankly, there was over 300 of them, most of them were Democrats, and I think about half of them were precinct chairman. Well, they were the local powerhouses. Well, part of the local powerhouse, yes. And so, but as I went and made this study and discovered and documented all these bad things that were going on, there's a range between the resting officers and the justice of peace.

There would be kickbacks both ways. Yes, all that sort of stuff. It was awful. But as chairman of Judicial System Study Committee, I checked the entire court system and we were away behind in our administration of our courts and the state uniformly across. If you came from a rich county, you had a better administration in justice than you came from a poor one. I'm talking at the trial level now. So we had to do something there. We had some district judges. They were not very, very good. Then we had to find a way to remove judges and justices and magistrates from power without having to go through an impeachment process. So we created the Judicial Standards Commission. So I was taking on not only the JPs, but the entire remake of our entire Judicial System and state. We created the Court of Appeals, Central Court Financing. The Magistrate Courts. The Magistrate Courts when we abolished the JPs.

JPs are justices of the peace. So we went from the all justices of the peace to magistrates. To magistrate courts and court of appeals. Yes, and all those other things. And then of course, then came the medical school. There we had some difficulty also because there were some of the institutions higher learning. Other than the University of New Mexico that were not very strong for it because they were afraid that medical school would draw too much money. And the expense of the other schools and one of the main opponents in that was the Mexico State University. And they were opposed to UNM having a medical school because they would get more money thereby. But they thought that the medical school would attract so much more money that there'd be less left money left for the rest of the schools. That didn't work out that way. But anyway, that was a fear. But we don't want to give all the details. You have to get the book to read that. They have to get the book to read it. But as a result of your work in helping establish the medical school, you have the Fabian Chavez endowed chair. Well, much more important than that is that the school has gone way beyond even my dreams.

That is one of the top medical schools in the United States of America. Not only joined in with the hospitals, they had there already an expansion of it but in health research and working with organizations like Sandia and Los Alamos. I mean, the university medical complex now is one of the fantastic ones in the entire world that remind the United States. Very proud of that. And then taking on giants, I was in essence taking on some of my own leaders. You see, we had another battle with the so-called liquor industry. Yes, and maybe most famous for that because you took on this entrenched liquor industry. Well, yeah, I got a lot of publicity. Yes, it did. Yes, and they had the so-called Fair Trade Law, a minimum markup law. It was the official title of it.

And I had been a supporter of it when I was in the House of Representatives and early on in the Senate. Because I thought that it was meant to protect the little liquor dealer. And I found out that it did not do that. That there was an arbitrary and a capricious law that should be done away with. So that was a tough, tough battle. Well, one of the figures, and we've had him on the show, Poncho Padilla, was one of the main liquor lobbyists. And you, it's fascinating part of the book. But you talk about this fight in Lafonda where he had told these lawmakers, I own the legislature, I own you, and then what did you do? Well, I reacted to it. And actually, what I did was there was some commotion when he said that. And most of the conversations was in Spanish originally. And so he was taking away, afraid from the ballroom. But then he came back.

And when I saw him coming back and directed at me, I switched to English and told him at the time, you don't own me and you don't own anybody else in the state. And he says, I do own you, I own the legislature and the press was there just taking it all down. Unfortunately, because basically Poncho was a rather decent guy. But he'd been drinking. And that's where he did some stupid things. Well, that was one of the kind of emblematic situations of a lobbyist really, really, really getting out of line that said that in the later years, they would say, well, you may not, this legislature, you may not own it, but you could rent it. Yes, I know they may all sorts of jokes out of it. And it was bad. It was a bad reflection on the legislature as a matter of fact. In the book, I tell them of an experience that I had early on when I was a member of the house on only 26 years old in 1951. That made me extremely cautious as I went into higher position to the legislature of getting involved in any hanky-panky involving money of any type directly or indirectly.

Because it's a stigma on you as an individual and also collectively on the legislature itself. And so I established sort of a personal code wrapped around basically two words. One was civility. And the other one was respect for the rules, which is protocol. And I practiced it, and I was very, and it was very effective for me. But getting back to the book, Dick Fulmer after he convinced me that I should do it and I had to find an author. And I had several that were interested in doing it. But I knew David Royball.

I'm known for over a quarter of a century. And he has a fantastic writing style. Number one, number two, he is born and brought up in Espanola. Like I was born and brought up here in Santa Fe, north of New Mexico, boys, Hispanics, if you will. And I figured that if I was going to do a biography, not a not a biography, that it had to be by somebody that could not just write, but be able to interpret me by being brought up in the same area, in the same environment that I grew up in. And that's David Royball. So when I first talked to him about it, he had no interest, excuse me. No interest whatsoever, because he'd never done a book of any time. But I told him to think about it, and I explained to him what I had in mind, and part of my background. And he didn't treat him, and he came back. He says, well, I'll go for it. But I want you to know that it has to be a biography, words and all. And it has to be done in such a way that it will be used as a text for people

interested in studying New Mexico history. Absolutely. If we don't do that, I have absolutely no interest in doing it. So I turned him loose. The only contribution I made to besides the interviews and boy, you had to see the research he did. Yes, yes, yes. The only country we stand made was dedicating it to my darling wife, Coral Jean. Yes. Well, it is so well researched that it will be used to teach New Mexico history, because not only did it, there would be a story, say, the liquor lobby story. But then he would interview all the major characters there, and then give references where you can find out more information, and it's very well indexed. It's a very thorough piece of information. Well, you see one of the things that created friction between me and higher ups, like Senator Joe Montoya and Senator Troot and P. Anderson. And others, high up in the office, is that both the liquor dealers and the justice at peace were an intricate part of a democratic organization.

Yes. And they would come to me and say, Fabian, you're hurting our friends. I am not attacking individuals. I am attacking systems. The systems are bad. We have to do something about them. In the meantime, I was a proud, progressive liberal Democrat, as all Democrats are supposed to be. If they are like FDR Democrats, like I am, fighting for civil rights legislation, it's in the book, and very successful at it. And doing a lot of those things that you would think would make me a hero amongst my own. But they didn't, and it's in the book. Well, maybe a hero among more people than you realize, but in terms of how it, it panned out in terms of your running for higher office, you had a very close election in 1968, you ran against Dave Cargo for governor. Yes. He had tell us a little about that race. Yes, I have to mention two. I ran for United States Congress in a white-up and primary, I guess Johnny Walker, in 1964, and I only lost by 2,215 votes.

Then I ran for governor four years later and lost the governorship by 2,910. But that second one, now the first one is more significant in that there I was fighting for a position to be United States congressman within the Democratic Party. And I had only one Democratic County chairman to support me at that for that race, and that was Henry Kiker Jr., Bernalio County chairman, even my own county chairman, Santa Fe County, didn't support me. And the one for governorship, as I was running as a Democrat, I won the primary, hands down. And then when against incumbent, which was then incumbent Governor Cargo, and what happened there was that Hubert Humphrey and Nixon were running for U.S. Presidency, and Hubert Humphrey lost New Mexico by 40,000 votes. Right, and so the Democrats didn't down the ticket. That's right, so that was the defeat there. There's something else in the book, there are people saying that

I might have won if I'd had an angle, so-called angles are running made, because one of the most decent intelligence people ever known and former legislator, Mike Allorie, was my running mate. So you had to do Spanish running for governor, Newton and governor. And they said that if it would have been a balanced ticket out of one, but I don't think so, had nothing to do with that. It had to do with Hubert Humphrey being so kind. Yeah, the national movement in the other country, yes. And so that's, so I was taking on giant cent, too. I mean, I personally was interviewed by some of the top guys, telling me if I want to ease up on the JPs, ease up on the liquor ratio, ease up on this, ease up on that, and I said, I can't. It's systems I'm attacking, not individuals. One of the systems, and that's what counts. Yes, exactly. How did you end up going to Washington DC and tell us about your work there with the Commerce Department and the Tourism?

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a story out by itself. Yeah. That was more by accident design that I ended up there. So I ended up being national tourism director of assistant secretary of commerce in charge of US travel service, which is a national tourism office. Probably the only guys ever held a tourism director of the state and also director of the tourism director of the nation. But while I was there, that position was an easy one because promoting the United States of America is a destination point to the rest of the world is easy. Yeah. And we had all the work that was also to do it with. And we worked cooperatively with the private sector, the major hotels like Marriott, Milton, and others. The major airlines flying into national flights, continental, built all of them. So that was an easy job. But they used me at the state department too. And I did quite a few trips to Mexico. And one of the most interesting trips I ever made was to Havana and I got to visit with Phil Castro.

That's in the book. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I was supposed to be a 15 minute interview. I was advised by the American intersection. And the South American desk at the state department that they had received information at Phil Castro would like to probably meet with me because he was curious. My name, Fabian Chavez, you know. And so I went to this conference and sure enough, I was there to advise me that I'd be there about 15, 20 minutes at the most. And they gave me a little coaching. That's the protocol. Yeah. And they ended up over two and a half hours. Oh, wonderful. Yes, we had wonderful conversations and those are in the book. But one of the most interesting ones, one of the first questions he asked me was, what do you think of the chances of the United States government recognizing our socialist government here in Cuba? I said, I wish they would. And they said, we recognize socialist governments in China.

And the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia another place behind the Iron Curtain. I think we should recognize one that's only 90 miles from our shores. So he invited me to sit down. Yeah. And then we went into other detail where I've been advised to ask him if we could open up certain doors. What I would say President Carter would call windows of freedom, open up so fresh freedom Americans come in. And, but unfortunately, President lost his reelection bid and everything twisted back again. But it was a very interesting thing. And then one of his chief aides came in who had been there over two hours. And he said, we have to get to the airport, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary has only 20 minutes to get there. And we might not be able to make it. It might be late. And they'll come to turn around.

Tell them to hold the plane. Oh, well. Yes, taking a real giant. As it turned out, the plane was late anyway. But that was very interesting. So I had the State Department used me quite a bit because I am bilingual and especially dealing with Mexico. And I headed a delegation for establishing a new air flights. Back in those days, you had to get treaties to be able to fly into other countries. Now here we're open skies with Mexico and other South American countries. So there's a lot of interesting things that I've done over my life. And we decided to put them into a book. And here it is. And here it is. But I just want to get you back to New Mexico because you did wonderful national service in Washington. You come back to Mexico and there's a tap on your shoulder. And they want you to be superintendent of insurance. Oh, yes. So we're almost out of time. We'll just tell you a little about the giants you had to take on in that most complex industry.

Well, the most complex industry is I had to establish a department with professionals that were able to take on the big giant professionals of the major insurance and smaller insurance. So all insurance companies doing businesses in the state of New Mexico. Not to harass them, not to abuse them. But to make sure they're operating is supposed to be operating as a service to the people of the state of New Mexico. And I was able to very successfully do that. And there was one group that I even had to come to the legislature for a special legislation to run them out of the state and follow them and ended up placing the principles in that company in this federal penitentiary. And we had other companies that we find and other companies that we streamed out, other companies we shut down, other companies we chased out. The primary responsibility of a superintendent of insurance is the protection of the people of the state of New Mexico.

There's no other agency in government and the exception of taxation and revenue that I can think of that affects more people in the state than the insurance department. If it's not running right, the people suffer. And there you did all of your work there following your two main rules of civility and honoring the rule of law. That's right, great. I might so have to add something. And when it's rather easy, because if you do that, you don't have to remember to remember. Yes, yeah. And so I didn't have to carry ramen to notes in my pocket like carrying them up here. Yeah. Well, we're just lucky to have the time with you. I think it was former Governor Jerry Apidakis that there were very few people in New Mexico who have only gone by one name. And you, Fabian Chavez, Fabian, are one of them. Also, you were called so many times just Fabulous Fabian because of all your years of public service and you've given so much to New Mexico. So I wanted to just mention your book again. It's called Taking on Giants,

Fabian Chavez Jr. and New Mexico Politics. For anyone who loves the state and loves history, this is a fabulous reading. Right, it's great for you. I hope that university people across the state take interest in this because they will learn a lot from it, not only about state history, but about the processes of how the legislature really works. We have detailed information in there. That's very readable. I think David Roy Ball did a terrific job. Well, he had a great mentor to go from now. What would you tell a young person who's looking at public service or who's looking at politics? What would your vice be? Be truthful to yourself. Do your homework. Recognize that the state of New Mexico is composed of the spectrum of society across the board. Respect that. If you serve in the legislature, which is a body that represents the entire state, respect your fellow legislators,

the respect of their position on issues, be patient, and follow civility and decorum. And end up like St. Paul would say, if I had anything to say to people about after I'm gone, I competed well. I finished the race, and I kept the faith. And you certainly left New Mexico much better for all of your efforts. Thank you. I'm very proud to say that our guest today is Fabian Chavez Jr. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education. For bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees, New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for, 1-800-428-T-E-C-H. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation,

Taos, New Mexico. Music