During this teen angst period, my family moved to Albuquerque. My classmates at Our Lady of the Annunciation hadn’t heard the story of my adopted family so, even though it wasn’t as cool as being an only child, I used this legend to win points.
“Don’t you have any real sisters?” my new best friend asked. (We didn’t care about brothers.)
“Nope,” I said smugly. “All adopted.” But her contrast wormed its insidious way into my brain’s back country. It waited uneasily in the underbrush, stuck on the thorny difference between “real” and “adopted.” Then, over the holidays about ten years ago, the thorns turned to roses.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I was listening to some acquaintances complain about the weirdness of their families and how they struggled through the holidays with their imposed togetherness.
One woman said, “One Thanksgiving morning as a kid—I still remember it—I woke up and I thought: ‘This can’t be my real family. There must be some mistake here.’ But I went downstairs and there they were. As real as it gets.”
Her words struck with such resonance that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing in my life was more real than my adopted family. What could have been more real than watching Tony on his second birthday, which fell on Thanksgiving Day that year, sitting in his high chair banging a turkey leg against a metal tray, driving us bonkers? What could have been more real than Jan surreptitiously eating cookies in the double bed we shared, then falling asleep on my side, leaving me with the scratchy crumbs? What could have been more real than the six of us, hot and grumpy, squabbling in our station wagon during our annual summer vacation? What could have been more real, or more perfect, than waking up on Christmas morning to a roomful of presents, more than enough for all six of us, under the Christmas tree?
Families have more to do with common memories than common genes. They’re more about sharing experiences than sharing blue eyes or curly hair.
When I open my metaphorical treasure chest these days, I realize my parents’ investment in love paid dividends that any princess would cherish. Growing up in a big family taught me about differences and commonalties, about compassion and fairness, about the purpose of tears and the healing power of humor.
When I sit down for Christmas dinner, joined by my five adopted siblings, our parents, and our own children, I’m thankful that I wasn’t an only child. I intend to celebrate the holidays this year with my real family. I hope you’re able to do the same.
* * *
Anne Hillerman is a freelance writer living in Santa Fe
21
Inside the Ivory Tower
Skip to the winter of 1963, to the office of the acting chairman of the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, to yours truly, aged thirty-eight, applying for admission as a graduate student. The acting chairman was unimpressed by the credits I had accumulated from my two tours at Oklahoma A&M or with my University of Oklahoma grades, and even less with my fifteen years as a journalist. The fact the appointment had been made for me by the President’s Office added the negative of a possible political connection. The acting chairman set aside my paperwork and looked me over.
What had I been reading? I listed Lee’s Lieutenants, Winston Churchill’s autobiography, All the King’s Men, Profiles in Courage, and added William Carlos Williams and a couple of other contemporary poets I thought might make the proper impression. How about the English poets? I admitted that the only ones I enjoyed in that category were Keats and Yeats.
“Here,” he said, with a smirk, “we pronounce that Yeah-ts.”
I exited his office carrying a list of undergraduate courses I’d have to pass before I could be a full-fledged graduate student and an enduring psychic glitch (Is it Kates and Yeats, or Yeah-ts and Keats?). I left behind the notion of my own importance as an ex-newspaper editor, ex-wire service state manager, and a reporter who had wrenched an angry “no comment” from General Dwight D. Eisenhower and had been effective enough in the most recent Democratic presidential nomination campaign to be called a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” by Pierre Salinger (Senator John F. Kennedy’s spinmeister) and a “miserable son-of-a-bitch” by Senator Lyndon Johnson himself. The acting chairman of English had clarified my status. I was now a student. In 1963 neither civil rights laws nor Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation covered that bottom of the barrel category of citizenship.
The high points of that return to scholarship persuaded me that education is indeed wasted on the young. One was Professor Catherine Simon, who got me so absorbed in Shakespeare that I actually believed I’d found a new understanding of his techniques in Hamlet, that most thoroughly plowed of literary fields. But best of all, Dr. Morris Friedman.
Friedman taught a writing course that focused on the essay. He was himself an author, which impressed me, and he saw promise in my work—which impressed me even more. Early in this course he asked me why I never wrote in the first person. I told him journalists are conditioned to be invisible, to be what Walter Lippmann called “the fly on the wall,” seeing everything and feeling nothing. (Alas, less in fashion today than in 1964.) Try it, he said. Do me a memoir bit. I proposed a thousand words on something that had happened last month. No, he said. Memories age well. Time turns slag metal into gold. Skip way back.
I did. I found the capital I on the typewriter and described my father’s dying day as an account of myself watching this happen. It opened a new field for me. Friedman gave me an A on that paper and I was eager to know why.
For example, Friedman said, “You show us not just his books on the shelves, but the glass which preserves them.”
I said, “Yes, he loved his books.”
“From the titles you mention, I’d say they were politically inflammatory for the times. So, as your reader,” said Friedman, “I think that glass protects both his books from the dust, and his children from the books.”
Exactly!
Thus, Morris Friedman caused me to begin thinking of what can be done with those significant little details, and the value of the sort of ambiguity from which readers form their own conclusions.
My second debt to Professor Friedman came when he chaired my master’s thesis committee. Friedman knew the seven Hillermans were living on savings, a part-time salary, and my freelance writing efforts. For my thesis he suggested I do a series of essays about places, people, or situations I wished to describe and that they should be aimed at a popular audience. Doing these well enough to reach the target audience by magazine publication would weigh favorably on the academic scale. (Those essays were subsequently published as The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Legends of Indian Country.)
Dr. Friedman also helped the cause by endorsing me to his agent, Ann Elmo, and telling her to expect some of my articles.
With a toe in the door of the New York publishing world, I put a bunch of my stuff in a briefcase and flew off to get acquainted with my agent. I expected a leisurely lunch to talk about prospects and I’d tell her about the novel I intended to write. I arrived exactly at the 11 A.M. appointment time, introduced myself to a fellow in the outer office, and was waved in. Ms. Elmo, a small lady, was barely visible in her chair behind a tumbling wall of what I presumed were manuscripts. I introduced myself. She looked puzzled. I mentioned the letter Friedman had sent. Oh yes, she said. Morris said you might send me something. Did you bring it instead? I said I had. How long would I be in New York? Until tomorrow evening. Leave your stuff with the secretary, Ms. Elmo said, and give him your hotel number. I’ll call you.
On the way out I noticed that it was now four minutes after eleven—about an hour and 56 minutes less of her time than I had expected.
Her telephone call was equally brisk and efficient. She believed she could sell two of the items, perhaps three. Would I accept commissions for other story ideas if she could find them? Yes, I certainly would. Have a safe trip home.
Ann promptly sold the two for more money than I’d expected and sent back the third
with suggestions for a different approach for another mag. For several years she sold my stuff and lined up assignments until I escaped from freelancing into fiction. Then came a problem, but this isn’t the place to deal with it. I must get back to my part-time job with the office of UNM President Tom Popejoy.
22
Doer of Undignified Deeds
Journalism is a small world where word spreads fast in the network. Keen Rafferty, the chairman and founder of the University of New Mexico Department of Journalism, contacted me. He was getting old, he told me, and wanted to retire in two or three years. Professor Bud Germain, his right-hand man, didn’t want the chairman job. How about getting a master’s degree at the U and taking a shot at it. I said how about making a living in the meantime? Well, he said, after President Popejoy’s speech warning the American Legion they’d have to get him fired if they wanted to abolish academic freedom, Popejoy had asked him how many newspaper editors had backed him and you were it. Rafferty said he would see if Popejoy needed a graduate student assistant.
Guess what. He did. Some days later the call came. Would I drop down to Albuquerque and talk to Popejoy. It became one of those days Marie and I vividly remember.
The job interview involved Popejoy, Dr. Sherman Smith, who was a noted professor of chemistry, and John Perovich, who was the university’s comptroller—the trio whom I knew as the U’s lobbying team during legislative sessions. We chatted about the most recent session for a bit. Smith left to attend a meeting. A little later, a call came for Perovich and he departed. Shortly thereafter, Popejoy’s secretary reminded him he had an appointment. He got up to leave, shook my hand, gave me an envelope. It’s a contract proposal, he told me. Think it over and let me know what you think.
Thus ended the job interview. Not a word had been spoken about what I would be doing. The hours, the pay, duties, or responsibilities were never mentioned. The contract was a little more specific, but not much. If I signed it, I would begin “part-time” employment on January 1, 1963, at a pay somewhat higher than Marie and I had decided we had to have. Jubilation!
This undefined and untitled job began with settling into a very small office in the administration building, getting enrolled in classes, meeting people, doing a little work in the Public Information Office, guest lecturing to a couple of journalism classes and learning to live outside the pressure cooker of fierce competition and relentless deadlines. After a bit Popejoy would suggest I attend this committee meeting, or that hearing. Then I was added to those planning a celebration of the school’s Seventy-fifth Anniversary, which finally involved some writing. But now I was out of the real world and into the society of intellect, where one was expected to think about it first.
For example, departments interested in botany, hydraulics, herpetology, geology, mineralogy, insects, and all things natural were lusting for a few thousand acres of the Maria Elena Gallegos Land Grant, which extended miles from the Rio Grande to the crest of the Sandia Mountains and separated Albuquerque from the reservation of the Sandia Pueblo. One Thursday I was handed a bundle of documents prepared by the various departments explaining why this land offered unique research possibilities. My assignment was to write a statement summarizing all this for the edification of the owner and those advising him.
It produced the familiar nostalgic feeling of pressure. It’s Thursday, I thought. I’ll read through the stuff tonight, get on the writing Friday morning. I should have it wrapped up by midafternoon. I asked Popejoy how soon he needed it. Popejoy directed the question to Sherman Smith, who was ramrodding the project. Smith said he was meeting the important people on the seventeenth. He’d like to see it by the fifteenth. Odd. Today was the nineteenth. My puzzlement must have showed. Smith asked if that would give me enough time. When I asked him, incredulous, if he meant the fifteenth of next month, he said: “If you can have it finished by then.”
Looking back on that happy period of working for Popejoy and his little unofficial cabinet, I can’t claim many accomplishments. I would like to claim credit for the establishment of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, which quickly spawned a massive hospital, cancer research center, noted burn and trauma operation, and one of New Mexico’s largest payrolls. But that claim would have to be based on the same theory that credited losing a kingdom to losing a horseshoe nail.
My role involved burned mattresses.
You’re going to get a call from the Sandoval County sheriff, Popejoy told me. He had a fire in his jail. See what you can do for him.
Fresh from handling political news in Santa Fe, I didn’t need to be told the name of the sheriff nor of his kinship with a member of the State Senate. The sheriff called. His prisoners had acted up, started a fire in the cell block and burned eleven mattress. He had no budget to replace them and he didn’t want to alert the press to this affair. Could he get some from the university? I told him I’d call him back.
While the dorms had none to spare, we had recently completed an “Outward Bound” program for the Peace Corps. Abandonded corps mattresses were filling storage space under the football stadium. I told the sheriff where to pick them up. He did. Case closed. But that’s not the way politics works.
Months later in the Senate hallway, where I was working as a sort of “gofer” on Popejoy’s lobbying crew, I was accosted by the sheriff’s senatorial brother, whom I will call Eloy. Hillerman, he says, you’re holding my IOU. I don’t like unpaid debts. What do you need?
I told Eloy our top priority was to get the med school authorization out of the Senate Finance Committee. We were one vote short. Eloy examined my list of Ayes and Nays and tapped the name of a Nay Senator from an eastern county. Change him from No to Yes, he said. I explained that this Eastsider was leading the opposition. That’s all right, said Eloy. He owes me one.
Thus evildoers in the Sandoval jail got mattresses and New Mexico got an incredibly expensive medical school and I am one of a multitude of folks who can claim a bit of credit.
My job with Popejoy bore neither title nor authority, but university people began referring to me as the president’s assistant and I began referring to myself as assistant to the president. As the foregoing suggests this might have been “Doer of Undignified Deeds.” Here’s another example.
Popejoy called. Go down to Ecuador and inspect our little campus in Quito, he said, and give me a report. I think, “Why me?” The campus was devoted to cosmic ray research in the high Andes, to linguists studying the languages of Andean populations, and so forth. Not my fields and I speak only Border Spanish, and don’t even have faculty status. I point this out to the president. Well, says Popejoy, I also want you to take some money and contact a lawyer whose name I’m going to give you, because we’re trying to get three students out of jail.
Naturally I want to know the charges. Popejoy seems to have only vague and secondhand information: a young fellow killed, dope dealing possibly involved, our students innocent victims of a misunderstanding, and a Quito lawyer taking steps to have them freed. Popejoy suggests that the less said about the contents of the briefcase I’ll be carrying the better and that Marie should go with me.
So Marie and I arranged for someone to oversee our youngsters and made round-trip arrangements on Air Ecuador’s old turboprop—the only carrier then making daily Miami to Quito flights. We also started greeting at our door the parents of Quito campus students bringing envelopes and packages for delivery—some gifts and some of what we were thinking of as bail money. The mission was accomplished. The three students came home and the university avoided bad publicity and I accumulated a new bunch of characters, situations, and scenes for whenever I got around to writing an action-adventure novel. That book has never been written but the material awaiting it still rattles around in my shopping cart. To wit:
(1) A socially prominent U.S. ambassador who knows neither the language nor the history of the nation in which he is stationed; (2) A real estate ad in the Quito paper offering for sale a huge ranch,
with home, barns, stables, eighteen horses with equipment, approximately a thousand head of cattle and eleven families of workers; (3) Three middle-aged Ecuadorian men walking slowly down the cobblestones bent under their burdens—great sheets of plywood; (4) The tux-and-diamonds crowd in the downtown Quito casino, playing mostly roulette, watched by the silent hard-eyed men who looked exactly like the same fellows watching the blackjack tables at Binions in Las Vegas, the Moulon in Manila, the Seasons in Ankara, Club Bien Suerte in Mexico City, Trump’s place in Atlantic City, and the paddle-wheel gambling joint in New Orleans; (5) A middle-aged American carrying a Well-Tab briefcase on the airliner who, when I tell him that Barney had logged wells for Well-Tab, tells about me the recording tapes he’s carrying back to the home base labs from the wildcat wells being drilled at Ecuador’s contested border with Colombia—a laconic recitation of intrigue, jungles, Army conspiracy, danger, and immense amounts of money. Enough stuff for a dozen novels; (6) Ecuadorian Air Force officers lounging around the Quito airport after seizing the national airline on our departure day; (7) The lawyer who’d accepted the envelopes from our briefcase doing his magic with the local Braniff Airlines jefe, causing him to accept our now worthless tickets and giving Marie and me seats on Braniff’s once-a-week flight back to Florida.
Mix those and others with a plethora of images of barren Andean peaks and vast empty landscapes and all you need is a sensible plot and a central character. But that year I was added to the journalism faculty as its third man. Thus began my teaching career. Heavy-duty writing had to wait because I couldn’t escape the lure of campus politics.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 23