Oral History Interview of Inez Russell Gomez

Interviewed by: Andy Wilkinson March 15, 2016 Santa Fe, New Mexico

Part of the: General Southwest Collection Interviews

Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

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An oral history release form was signed by Andy Wilkinson on March 15, 2016. This transfers all rights of this interview to the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University.

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Preferred Citation for this Document:

Gomez, Inez Russell Oral History Interview, March 15, 2016. Interview by Andy Wilkinson, Online Transcription, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. URL of PDF, date accessed.

The Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library houses almost 6000 oral history interviews dating back to the late 1940s. The historians who conduct these interviews seek to uncover the personal narratives of individuals living on the South Plains and beyond. These interviews should be considered a primary source document that does not implicate the final verified narrative of any event. These are recollections dependent upon an individual’s memory and experiences. The views expressed in these interviews are those only of the people speaking and do not reflect the views of the Southwest Collection or Texas Tech University.

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Transcription Notes: Interviewer: Andy Wilkinson Audio Editor: N/A Transcription: Candace Smith Editor(s): Katelin Dixon

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Transcript Overview:

This interview features Inez Russell Gomez, a Texas Tech graduate and editor at The Santa Fe New Mexican. Gomez discusses about growing up in Las Vegas, New Mexico before moving to Lubbock, her interest in writing and journalism, and her work at various newspapers across the country.

Length of Interview: 02:08:46

Subject Transcript Page Time Stamp Background 5 00:00:00 Moving to Lubbock area 12 00:11:30 Developing an interest in journalism 16 01:18:00 Lubbock east side and segregation 18 00:20:38 Pursuing writing as a career and the University Daily 22 00:27:51 Standard Times and entertainment writing 24 00:32:22 San Angelo 30 00:41:04 Going to Santa Fe 32 00:45:16 Graduate school 34 00:46:56 Florida and moving back to New Mexico 36 00:48:50 Taos and Santa Fe 40 00:54:00 History of the area 48 01:02:50 Texas Tech 51 01:07:20 Music program at Tech and Lubbock music 64 01:24:38 What’s next? Prospects for local newspapers 73 01:40:09 Religion in Lubbock and conservatism 81 01:53:30

Keywords journalism, Lubbock, Texas, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Taos, New Mexico, Texas Tech University

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Andy Wilkinson (AW): Yeah, I just—it always happens that, when we’re visiting, good things occur, so let me just say— this is the ides of March, isn’t it? It’s the fifteenth—

Inez Russell Gomez (IG): Yeah. It’s the fifteenth. It is.

AW: —of 2016. Andy Wilkinson with—is it proper to say Inez Russell Gomez?

IG: Yep. That’s it.

AW: Okay, perfect. And we’re in her office at The Santa Fe New Mexican, a newspaper that’s still in business (laughs)—

IG: That’s right. Successfully.

AW: —which is a really important thing. And we’ve been talking about, as people from our part of the world always do, about all the people we know, together. And it turns out it’s a whole stack of them. But you were starting to talk about your ancestors the Bacas.

IG: Well, it’s—my grandmother was descended from the Thera [?] Bacas and part of the land grant was out in that area of eastern New Mexico which became ranches.

AW: Yeah, and so is there any story about how it became the Bell Ranch , and—so no—

IG: Robin probably knows it—the owner of our paper—because that’s her family, but we don’t. We ended up in Las Vegas and just continued on with life, kind of.

AW: Pretty interesting. Well, we met in a very interesting way through an article—a review that you wrote when you were eighteen. Yeah, which is just amazing, and it’s still a wonderful piece of writing. Incidentally, Terry Allen says—passes on his regrets for today. He’s got a big project

5 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program that they’re—he’s trying to finish up this week. But he and Jo Harvey both really want to get to meet you. They read the article in Lubbock last month, and he says it’s the best review that anyone’s written about the album, Lubbock on Everything.

IG: Oh. That’s something. I’ve loved him since I was, well, seventeen.

AW: Yeah? Well, there—

IG: A long, long time.

AW: So tell—well, before we get to how you did that, tell me where you grew up, where you were born, and when, and all that sort of thing. And you understand archives so I don’t have to go into them.

IG: No, I get it. My mother’s family is from New Mexico, and my roots are in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And through a fifth cousin that I met online, I have the fortune of having our ancestry traced back to 1609, at least, on my mother’s side.

AW: And that’s the Baca.

IG: Well, that’s the Gallegos, Martín, Aragon—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It goes back. Through this particular line, it goes back to a man called Hernán Martín Serrano who was one of the people in the first families that came to Santa Fe. And he married an Inez—or lived with her. They’re not sure exactly which. She might have just been his common-law wife—and there’s about 10,000 people in New Mexico that are descended from that family, but one of the things I noticed, when we did stories in the founding families of Santa Fe at 400, was that his wife was names Inez. And we had always had a story in our family about a grandmother who was really Indian and not Spanish. And my mother had thought it was her grandmother whose name was Juana [inaudible] Martín, and when I started doing research I told her, “Well, that story’s not true because she’s just a regular Spanish girl from Wagon Mound, so she’s not Indian. She was not adopted by a Spanish family.” But when I did the research, it turned out that that story was true, it just had happened 400 years ago. And if you look at my line of ancestors, there’s always going to be an Inez. There’s a—like, my grandpa was Alfredo Inez. My aunt was Inez. Two of my

6 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program great-great uncles were José Inez. You know, different things like that. So the name stayed all those years.

AW: And so you’ve still got it. Did it drive you crazy when you came to West Texas and we call it Inez (pronounces [I-nez])?

IG: No. It was fine. It was fine. And I have—my niece is Kendra Inez and my great niece is Sierra Inez, and they both live in Texas, so it’s continuing.

AW: That’s good. So were you born in Las Vegas?

IG: My mother and dad were living in Albuquerque, and my dad was from Arkansas. He was from out of state. We always say he was not from here. And he was at a bar one night—and my dad was over six foot four. He was huge—and a very angry off-duty policeman tried to pick a fight with him, so my dad picked him up and stuck him on, like a hook, to make him stop. And they told him to get out of town, so he left. And my mom stayed in Albuquerque working, and one day she went to work and fainted and discovered that she was pregnant. And she called my dad and said, “Carl.” And he said, “Okay, I’ll come get you.” So they left, so I happened to be born in California.

AW: Oh, really?

IG: Mm-hm.

AW: Where?

IG: Outside of Fresno in a little town called Dos Palos—Two Sticks. My dad was a foreman on a—

AW: Dos Palos?

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IG: Uh-huh—on a ranch.

AW: What year and date?

IG: Nineteen sixty-one, January 11. Although technically—

AW: Oh you just had a birthday.

IG: Yeah I did. I was actually born at five minutes to midnight on January 10, but the nurse said, “If you put January 11, you’ll save a day at the hospital.”

AW: Oh, so—but the will confound your astrologers.

IG: It does. Forever. So, I’ve have the wrong birthday my whole life, but I always celebrate the eleventh.

AW: That’s pretty good. Fresno, which is where Terry Allen taught for a long time. So did your family—and Carl Russell, that’s interesting. I have friend in Lubbock whose name is Carl Russell—did you grow up in California or did you—?

IG: No, we moved back. I was two and a half.

AW: Two and a half, back—

IG: Two and a half, three—something like that—to Las Vegas, and I grew up in the house that my mother grew up in that her mother grew up in. We lived on Seventh Street which is in the new side of Las Vegas because it’s a split city. There’s a river that divides it, and there’s old town Las Vegas, which was the original Spanish settlement—

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AW: Uh-huh. With the plaza and—

IG: With the plaza. Exactly. And then there’s new town which is where the university is and the railroad. So we grew up there, and my mom was a waitress and then she had a café. My dad had a gas station and a garage. He did lots of different things. He never could really keep a job. And they did not actually get along very well. They were very, very different people. And so when I was in fifth grade, they got divorced. My mom remarried, and my stepdad had roots in Lubbock and connections in Lubbock.

AW: Okay, and what is his name?

IG: His name is Samuel Thomas Ansley. Tom Ansley.

AW: Tom A-n—

IG: -s-l-e-y. And they did not want us to be effected by divorce, which in those days was kind of scandalous. People didn’t do it. So we—

AW: Yeah, my parent’s got divorced, also, when I was in high school. It was—

IG: It was a big deal.

AW: It was a big deal.

IG: Where were you?

AW: I grew up in Lubbock.

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IG: Oh, so you did. Where’d you go to high school?

AW: Monterey.

IG: Ooh. Ooh. We’re going to have fights.

AW: My wife, however, was a Coronado girl, so—

IG: Oh, I don’t like either one of those.

AW: Oh, you’re a Lubbock High—

IG: Yes. Yeah, you can tell.

AW: All my kids—both my kids are Lubbock High, so—

IG: Yeah. I think it’s the best high school ever. I loved it. And when we moved, we moved to Lubbock.

AW: When you were how old?

IG: Ten—something—it was right after the tornado. So we couldn’t get a—

AW: Oh yeah, the tornado back in ‘70.

IG: Yeah, we couldn’t get in Lubbock because there were no places to live, so we actually lived in Slaton for a year and a half.

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AW: City of my birth.

IG: Oh, you’re kidding.

AW: No.

IG: Oh, I hate that town.

AW: It was—well, it—I’m not back there.

IG: Well, they just weren’t—they were not nice people to strangers. They were not.

AW: Yeah. It’s a very clannish place, and it’s a rough place, too. It’s a rough town.

IG: It was a rough town. And it was a real—I mean, it was fascinating coming from Las Vegas where I was related to everybody, where—people don’t just know you. They know you by who your grandparents are, and who your parents are, who your cousins are. So you have like a place and a connected society. I went from that to someone else’s connected society that wasn’t mine, and we were particularly viewed as suspicious because we were catholic, but we didn’t go to the Catholic school because Slaton, in those days, had a Catholic school for elementary school where the German-Anglo—to me, anybody that’s not Hispanic or Indian is Anglo, but they were really German. So those people were in Catholic school, well I wasn’t. My name was Russell, but my mother was very dark, so they knew she wasn’t, you know. And they—the first thing they ask you is “Are you a Mexican?” And I was like, “What” And I didn’t know what that was because we didn’t use that term in northern New Mexico—especially in those days—and I was like, “No, I’m not a Mexican!” And I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being a Mexican, but we weren’t. And then they would get angry and they’d say, “What’s your mother’s maiden name,” because they thought that would be the trump card. Well, they didn’t realize that—northern New Mexico—we had Fort Union which brought people from all parts of the world. And her great grandfather was a Scottish immigrant who married in, so his wife was Hispanic. His son’s wife was Hispanic. His grandson’s wife was Hispanic. So by the time you get to my mother there’s not a whole lot of Scottish left, but her maiden name was Wallace. So then they really got

11 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program confused, and my mom was very bilingual, so they couldn’t understand how she could be a Wallace and speak Spanish. So it was very—it was an interesting year and a half. And during that time my mom got cancer, and she almost died. So it was a really traumatic couple of years.

AW: And you’re ten or eleven years old?

IG: Yes. I’m ten or eleven years old. Everybody I know is somewhere else, and I’ve—I knew my stepfather because I’d known him since I was little because he’d been in and out of the café. He was one of our customers. But it’s not like I knew him knew him, you know, like—not to trust. And we were very afraid that my father would come try to take us and move us to California with his mother which was not something we wanted because we were Hispanic Catholics, culturally, and they were Pentecostal people from Arkansas. My grandma practically spoke in— well actually, she did speak in tongues, so I would say they were one step up from holding snakes. And they did not believe in books and reading and education, and fifth grade was when you dropped out of school to go to work. And, in fact, my parents’ marriage really started going south when my brother got to fifth grade because my dad didn’t know why he was going to keep going, and when they finally got divorced, I was in fifth grade. And that’s when it all hit the fan, and plus, I was a girl and girls didn’t need to know anything anyway. But they didn’t—he didn’t come—he came one time and my stepdad, who was a little man, picked him up and threw him out of the house which was awesome because my dad was huge. So I don’t know how he did it, but he did, and we never saw him again. And as soon as houses went back into being—you know, able to get—we got a house in Lubbock, and I moved in the middle of sixth grade.

AW: Yeah. And so what did your folks—your stepdad and your mom do in Lubbock?

IG: My dad was an electrician. He worked for AMCO Electric. Andy Anderson, I think, was the guy who owned—I’m trying to remember, but I think that was his name. They had been friends forever. And daddy had retired, but when he married Mom he had to go back to work, so he could support us. So he gave up retirement and a nice ranch in northern New Mexico to start raising kids all over again. He was a crazy man. And momma had a business. She would—in Las Vegas, like I said, she was a waitress and a cook, basically, and had her own restaurant. And then we bought a laundry. I remember dad wanted to get one on Thirty-Fourth Street and Mother said, “People here have washing machines. Why would you want a laundromat where’s there’s no washing machines?” So we had a laundry in east Lubbock right across the street from Alderson Junior High, around the block from Brooks Supermarket.

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AW: Smart crooks rob Brooks used to be the joke because they always got held up.

IG: They did. We never got held up as long as there was a pimp named Mr. Gideon who became a regular customer at our laundromat, and as long as he was free, we never got any trouble. But they finally caught him, and after that we—

AW: Then you got rob—

IG: She did, and she got robbed at gunpoint once, and that was—the first time, they just snatched her purse; and she got really angry, and ran after them with a hammer, and picked it up, and beat their door down to get her purse back. And that became a TV story.

AW: I’ll bet.

IG: Because the cops almost arrested her for breaking and entering, and one of those TV—Keith whatever-his-name-was from Channel 28 saw it, and came out and did a story. And it was in the Lubbock Avalanche Journal.

AW: About what year was that? Just out of curiosity.

IG: I was, like, a junior or so in like’77, ’76—I was so embarrassed because I had to go to school and everyone knew my mother had beaten a door down. And I just could have died. It was not fun.

AW: Now, did you live near Tech Terrace Park because I know you were good friends with Jenna Milosevich.

IG: Well, I was in band with her. Yeah. We lived on Seventeenth Street. I lived almost in back of Lubbock High—just around the block.

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AW: Have you been by there lately? That’s—they’re starting to gentrify.

IG: I was going to say. It’s not the Tech ghetto anymore.

AW: No. It’s—well, there’s some, just, beautiful homes in that area.

IG: It was nice. We got a—you know. Your basic Lubbock brick house: three bedrooms, one bathroom—

AW: Two bath—yeah.

IG: Just one. We just—we had to share.

AW: Had a two car garage?

IG: Yeah, in the back. It was in the back. Yep, we did. And we lived there—I went through high school, college there, and then they sold it when I graduated. So I was there a long time.

AW: So you graduate from Lubbock High. In what year?

IG: Seventy-eight.

AW: Seventy-eight?

IG: Seventy-eight. I always say that—see, Carol Thompson was three and a half blocks from my house, so I walked there. And then Lubbock High was a half a block. And then I went to Tech and it was five blocks.

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AW: That was great.

IG: Yeah. It was really nice. It was very convenient and very accessible. And I always loved when I read the stories about the early days of the flatlanders and all the Lubbock musicians. They all lived on Fourteenth and Fifteenth Street.

AW: Yeah, right just around the corner from you.

IG: And I used to laugh. I ended up reviewing them, but I used to ride my bike in their yards (Andy laughs) because I was in seventh and eighth grade. And there I’d be, up and down with my girlfriends, going up and down the streets. I didn’t know—they’d sit in the yard sometimes. You’d see people playing guitars. I don’t know if it was them or whatever, but that was a—

AW: It was certainly some of them, I’ll bet. There was quite a crew that hung out there. I edited a book by Michael Ventura called If I was a Highway, and—I don’t know if you’re familiar with his writing. I’ll try to find you a copy of the book and send it to you, but he is from Brooklyn— from New York—but he lit on Fourteenth street. And just by this strange set of accidents—and then he wound up being a writer for Rolling Stone and for The Chronicle in Austin and did a lot of rewrites in Hollywood. He was a brilliant writer. But there are some wonderful passages about that time in Lubbock. I think you’d—

IG: Oh, I would love to read that. Yeah.

AW: I’ll see if I can scrounge up a copy.

IG: And I’ll write that name down myself.

AW: You’ll—it’ll really hit home. Literally, to you. Well, what did you—so you were in band in high school, but, as we talked on the phone after I read that article, you were studying journalism, I assume, because you were working for—was it The University Daily then?

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IG: Yes. It was the University Daily.

AW: Yeah, it’s back to being The Toreador.

IG: I know. And as I say to everybody, “What the heck is a toreador.” I hate that name.

AW: Well, we were the Matadors and the Toreadors until somebody called us the Red Raiders, and it’s complete confusion, but at least we’re not one of those odd mascots, you know, that no one really knows what it is at all. So what interested you in writing and had you been writing before because that—as I said before we turned on the tape—that is a really great piece of work that you did in summer of 1979. And you were eighteen years old. And it’s the kind of work that someone does who’s been writing, so I assume you’d been writing for some time.

IG: Well, I started at the Westerner World when I was fourteen. I was a sophomore. So I worked on my high school paper, and then I went to Tech and volunteered and got on with the University Daily. But I think, even before that, it really crystalized. This job helped me remember some things that I had forgotten. In 1965—in 1966, Las Vegas is a hotbed of political action, and there’s a move to remove the mayor and to bring in a reform slate, and my mom was very involved in politics. And I always remember that part of it but what I had forgotten is she had a friend named Jane who was the stringer for The New Mexican, and I’m doing—I do the histories for the paper: a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago—and all of a sudden I see Jane’s byline on the front page of those papers, and I’m remembering that I used to go with her on her interviews when I was five and six.

AW: Really?

IG: Yeah. When I was just a little girl. And I really think that, subconsciously, seeing a woman be a reporter and write stories and actually get threatened for some of them—because she got in a fight with the police department because they weren’t releasing records properly—really had to have affected me, and that’s really the beginning. That, reading superman comics and Lois Lane—the fact that I—

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AW: (laughs) I like it. Lois Lane for a—

ID: She was a girl reporter. She got to do things. I always loved to read—

AW: —and hung out with Superman.

IG: Yeah, that was not a bad thing. I always thought she should have liked Clark because he was a good reporter, but yeah. And I think, when you're a kid who wants to write, you want to get paid to write—because I was very practical—and journalism is a way to get paid to write. It was also a way to find out stuff before anybody else knew it. And I was literally the—

AW: It’s addicting, isn’t it.

IG: It is. It’s the most fun you can have, I think.

AW: Yeah, I was in police work for twelve years, and people say, “Well, what about the power?” And I’d say, “You don’t understand. The power has nothing to do with the gun. It has everything to do with knowing what’s going on in your town.” That is addicting.

IG: The knowledge.

AW: Yeah, and I always—in fact there was at least in my day, back in the sixties and seventies, there was a real connection between reporters and cops. They were on the same side of the—you know, although they were adversaries sometimes. I’m not going to tell you this, that kind of stuff, but that—having that knowledge was something they shared, and that’s very interesting—

IG: Were you a policeman in Lubbock?

AW: For six years, and then in Lakewood, Colorado.

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IG: Oh, wow.

AW: When your mother was beating down the door, I was in Lakewood, Colorado.

IG: Okay. You weren’t the one who arrested her.

AW: No, I was a police lieutenant. Although, I worked that east part of town for a while with a black partner, right before I left, which was a revelation.

IG: Isn’t it something?

AW: Oh, it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. Being a white guy over there was not so good. But being a white guy with a black partner was terrific, and I really learned a lot.

IG: Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this about Lubbock, and I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve always believed it, is that—they have the canyons. It was the most segregated city in the country after, I think, Birmingham or one of those places in Alabama. And the canyons separated it, and the busses operated so they could take people—you know, domestic employees to west Lubbock.

AW: Oh, yeah. That’s the entire reason for the city bus, and it was also why if you try to go north and south—like, I remember when I was going to Tech I thought, I’ll be frugal. I’ll take the bus. And I lived over on Forty-Sixth Street. It was mathematically impossible to go from the south part of town to the north part of town on a bus. You could only go east and west.

IG: Right—because they wanted people to get there. And I used to take—I used to leave Carol Thompson, once or twice a week, and get on the bus and ride to the laundry to see my mom and help her, you know—I washed machines and folded clothes and things like that—and I remember the further you got the blacker it got, and by the time you got to the other side there were no non-black people except for me. And what I didn’t know for years is that, when I would go back is Mr. Gideon would send one of his boys to watch me to make sure I got past hub homes [?] okay, so I always had, like, little helpers making sure I was safe.

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AW: Yeah. You know, I’ve been doing a number of oral history interviews about people in what we call the flats, or what, actually, people who live there call the flats—which was just east of Avenue and pretty much just south of Nineteenth—what’s called Manhattan Heights—Dunbar and Struggs and that area. And it was really interesting to hear people say something that I’d known as a young police officer which was that the pimps and the bootleggers, in particular—the bootleggers are a little more acceptable than the pimps, but both served a couple of interesting roles. One being, as you noticed, the peacekeeper over their area, but the other was they were the banks.

IG: Oh, yeah. That’s right. That’s right. You get loans from them.

AW: Yeah, because they had money, and you couldn’t get a—if you were black you couldn’t get a loan from a regular bank, you know. You could go to a pawn shop, but you were really getting taken there. So it’s very interesting to see how in that sort of altered social circumstance, the people that step up to fill the roles.

IG: —the roles. That’s right. It’s a necessity. It was really interesting, like, if we would—we would do laundry and then we’d take it to people, and I remember one of the ladies that was a real good friend of my mom’s was a lady named Q. B. They always had a lot more interesting names than we did. And we’d take it in—and I took the clothes in. Well, her front room was a pool hall, and so she was operating a pool hall and bootlegging out of here house. And I remember really noticing somebody almost coming up to me and she looked at him and say—and she told my mother later that I couldn’t go in anymore because it wasn’t safe.

AW: Really?

IG: Yeah. Because that’s—they thought the girls who went there were not nice girls, so—and my impression of Stubb’s Barbeque was completely different from Tech student’s impression. You know, I loved the barbeque, I loved the music, and I knew it did those things. But my mother had been told that they ran girls out the back. And I have no idea if they did or not, or if someone mis-told her, or if it was independent operators or whatever. And the first time I was going there to do a music review, she had a fit. She did not want me near the place because to her it was not safe. And I told her I wasn’t going to go in the back, so it was fine. And we got in a big fight, and I went. After that, she let me do what I needed to do for work, but it was—and I was only—I

19 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program think I was just seventeen still. So I wasn’t actually legal, but when you were going from the paper they didn’t ask you for your ID—so you got in.

AW: Well, and at Stubb’s they—I don’t think they ever asked anybody for an ID anyways so—

IG: They didn’t.

AW: I don’t remember. Now, Stubb’s was—is a barbeque place. I left there in seventy—spring of ’73, and went to Colorado. But it wasn’t a place of any kind of problem—

IG: No. I don’t think—

AW: Before then, so it was—

IG: Yeah. I don’t know that they had problems. They just had extras available if you knew how to ask for them.

AW: Well, and that would have been anybody—I mean, it would have been a customer of Stubb’s. Stubb’s was—he was ecumenical. He didn’t care who came in, which was very unusual. For either side of town, back then.

IG: It was one of the few places where all sorts of people went because Lubbock was very segregated, and you kept to your place. You know, whichever place it was.

AW: Oh yeah, in fact—which, this sounds odd, but it made it a lot easier for police work because when someone wasn’t in their place, it was perfectly apparent. A white person on the east side stuck out like a sore thumb.

IG: No. No, they would ask—they’d say, “What are you doing here?” And I’d say, “I’m going to the laundry.” And they—by the time all the policeman knew my mom, then it was—that was fine.

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And I think one of the things that also interested me in journalism was the Avalanche Journal’s police reporters because they were really, really good, and we had that series of unsolved murders.

AW: You knew Max and—let’s see. Who else would have been working? Max—what was his last name? No, he had moved over to KFYO, I think, maybe by the time you were there.

IG: I just knew the bylines. I was in junior high. But do you remember those women that kept getting killed? And they tried to say Henry Lee Lucas did it, and I don’t think he really did.

AW: You, know. We actually arrested Henry Lee Lucas in Lakewood.

IG: Oh, you’re kidding.

AW: Yeah, a sergeant that worked for me later was the guy who broke that case, and—

IG: Oh.

AW: —traced back all the different places where they had been. Yeah.

IG: I covered his trial in San Angelo because they moved—it was a girl—they called her Orange Socks from Georgetown, and they moved the trial to San Angelo because there was never anyone tried there that they did not convict. So they knew they would get him. But I think he probably—I think he did do some of them, but I don’t think he did as many as they cleared.

AW: No, there was—it’s very difficult when you have a serial anything. A series of burglaries. You know, first of all, there’re lazy cops who try to pin everything on whoever they have, but you also have the perpetrators who confess to all of them. (laughs)

IG: Yes. And Henry liked the attention.

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AW: Oh, yeah. Exactly. And especially people who are—you know, burglars aren’t quite as excited about attention as murders, but—as you well know.

IG: He used to hold court. I can’t believe they let him. He would talk out the backdoor of the courthouse, and he’d be eating a hamburger and he’d say things like, “Want a bite? Oh, you think I poisoned it? I never used poison.” Then he’d start laughing. I mean, it was just so strange. But he couldn’t have done that murder that he got convicted for because he was actually in Florida, and to do it he had to drive all that way, kill the strange woman, then drive back and go to work the next day. But this jury would have convicted anybody because that’s just what they did.

AW: So, writing—so you actually thought about writing as a job, but that the way to do that was—for it to be a job—in journalism. That’s also a very mature thinking—most people who—when I wanted to be a writer in high school, I wanted to be a poet. It’s taken me a long time to be a poet, but I thought at the time—I didn’t think anything about the practical side of it.

IG: I was—my mother always joked I was born old. I was a very practical child, and I liked newspapers. I liked the way they felt. I liked the way they smelled. I liked knowing things, and that was a way to find out. And, when you’re young, you’re going to be a foreign correspondent and travel the world and all that kind of stuff. And I didn’t do that, but I did move around the country a lot of places, and worked at papers in different states.

AW: Well, before we get to that—chronology. One of the things you mentioned that really was a surprise to me, on the phone you said that writing—listening to that music and writing that story changed your life. Now, what did you mean?

IG: When we moved to Texas, obviously it was a big shock to me because it wasn’t like New Mexico. I didn’t know everybody. My mom was a big deal in Las Vegas. We were not big deals in Lubbock, which is fine, but it was just—it was a different kind of world. And I never liked it very much. It was flat. It was ugly. I appreciated the schools and the teachers, and I made nice friends and things, but I was always homesick. But when you start listening to music like people—Terry Allen or Joe Ely or Butch Hancock—you begin to see a beauty in the hard scrabbleness [?] of it and kind of a fierceness in the people because they had to survive in a place where, really, there shouldn’t have been people, and you start to appreciate it. So I think that’s

22 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program what made me appreciate it. And Lubbock got everything. Terry Allen is so good at getting past the hypocrisy and the pretense—because in Lubbock appearance is so important—and he gets to the—kind of the heart of the people. And I think that’s was I really liked about that record. One—my—one of my brother’s friends had it, is how I—I had heard it before I even reviewed it for the paper, and it just was like so true. And, you know, to know a place and to own a place like that and to be able to make poetry out of Lubbock—it just. It was like—that’s the kind of writing I wanted to do.

AW: Yeah. Cool. Well, so after writing that what happened now with your writing career? How did you—you graduate from Tech. What year—?

IG: Eighty-two. I went straight through. What happened is I went, I started doing entertainment reviews. I worked for Doug Pullen who was the entertainment editor. He was like a famous person in that small world of Tech because he did it for like several years. So the next year I was entertainment editor.

AW: At the university—

IG: —at Tech. And then I became a political reporter in 1980. That’s when the election was going on. I quit at Christmas because I didn’t like the—the editor was too conservative, and he was best friends with the regent. And that seemed—the opposite of what journalism should be. So then I worked at the TV station for a while—for Channel 13—and I got to actually work on the documentary they did on the Maines Brothers because Sharon Hibner—I don’t think she was married to Kenny yet, but they were dating and she decided she wanted to do a documentary. So we did the interviews, and I wrote about half of it.

AW: Really?

IG: Yeah. It was pretty awesome. It was fun. And I keep thinking that what’s-her-face was a little girl in that—and I don’t know if she was born yet but—

AW: Natalie?

23 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: Yeah. I’m not sure if she was born yet, but she might have been. It was eighty. I don’t remember when she was born.

AW: Yeah. No, she was born before 1980 because my daughter was born in ’80, my son in ’74, and she was in between them. She was—she may have been born in like ’76 or ’77.

IG: Then she was one of the little girls in the room running around when we were taping the interviews. So I was going to stay in television because it was fun and I had a job, and they called me at—I’d applied for internships before I quit the paper, and I got a call from San Angelo to go be an intern.

AW: The Standard-Times.

IG: The Standard-Times with the rooster on the front, and they said, “Do you want this internship?” And I said, “Yes. I do.”

AW: Did Patrick Buren work there then?

IG: No. He’s on my page though. I don’t know him, but we have a Standard-Times ex page and he’s there. I know that name. What did he do?

AW: Well, he was a reporter for the Standard-Times and then moved to Midland, and he has done a whole series of books about the Trans-Pecos.

IG: Okay, that’s right.

AW: And so that’s probably what he’s best known as but I know he was a reporter. Another guy who was a reporter at the Standard-Times was Bill Kerns—

24 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: Yes.

AW: —who’s still the entertainer editor at the A-J.

IG: I always joked that he was my grandpa because he was the entertainment editor at Tech, then Doug, and then me. And then he was my—I took his film class that he used to teach at Tech, and he was my teacher. And we’re friends on Facebook but not—he’s really different than he was when I knew him.

AW: Yeah, he’s had a—

IG: So sick.

AW: —slew of health problems that have really had an impact on him which is sad, sad to see.

IG: I always admired how he created a job doing entertainment.

AW: Well, I did an article about him once for the Texas Techsan ’ex magazine, and I did a simple thing which turned out to be profound. I didn’t intend for it to be profound. I looked at the number of theater companies we had in Lubbock before Bill Kerns started being the Avalanche Journal editor—entertainment editor—and how many we had afterward. And it was astonishing. It was like the moment they had an entertainment editor, all of a sudden the theater scene in Lubbock blossomed.

IG: —blossomed. That’s something. That is.

AW: And I think it’s—and I think it’s real. I don’t think it’s just—and I don’t want to say this to Bill, but I don’t think it’s just because of Bill. I think the fact that when you—the generic group you—in journalism are paying attention to something, people do pay attention to it. And it—

25 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: Well, it gives it legitimacy, too.

AW: Yeah. And then people say, Well, gosh, I can do that. or, We can have a company doing that— you know, that sort of thing—so it’s been a real plus for our city to have had that over the year— we have a great art scene now, and we’re not nearly so segregated now. And I think all those things work together.

IG: No, I think that’s totally true. I—when we moved, one of the things I’d done when I was in Las Vegas is I always took ballet. So the first thing my mom did is find me a place to take ballet, and I was at—I did Suzanne Aker’s for a little bit, but it wasn’t as serious as I thought I needed. So we switched over to Mr. Band.

AW: I took dance from Mr. Band when I was in junior high.

IG: Wasn’t he something? Oh.

AW: He was something. We learned to—in junior high school, we learned to do the Foxtrot. Now, let me tell you, I never had an opportunity to do the Foxtrot again in my whole life. (laughs)

IG: But you knew how. You knew how.

AW: I knew how. Yeah, Mr. Bandzevicius, Mr. Band.

IG: Yep. I could never say his whole name, but I remember going there twice a week.

AW: Yep. It was right down the street from Lubbock High. As I remember, when we were going it was just off Nineteenth and about R or something like that.

IG: Oh, wow. That would have been more convenient. He moved, like, to thirty-something. He was

26 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program further away when I went, but it was a really interesting bunch of people because that’s where you mixed with people from all over the town. And, like, Terri Eoff, who went on to be Miss Texas—she was in class. You know, just different people that I would meet again in life—there they were. And I quit in junior—at the end of eighth or ninth grade—because I was on the basketball team and it interfered with practice, and I didn’t want to miss my basketball. But I sure had a blast. He was a good, good teacher.

AW: Yeah. And he was exotic.

IG: Yes.

AW: You know? And in Lubbock there weren’t many people that—there was a woman who lived down the street from me, when I was first in Lubbock, who was Polish and had been a concentration camp inmate, and then across the street, the mother of one of my best friends was a French war bride. So they were just like celebrities to us because they come from somewhere else. It was just amazing. Well, so you—you’re writing in junior high—I mean in high school— and then at Texas Tech, and you get this internship in San Angelo.

IG: Right, and I go off, and I work—

AW: Had you graduated already?

IG: No, I was just—it was junior and senior year, and I started something different because I was going to be—I was editor of the Westerner World , then I was editor of The University Daily. And usually you started that summer, but I wanted to do my internship because I thought having professional experience was better. So because I left, someone else got to be a summer editor, and that kind of shared the fun a little bit. Although, when I came back and he had to work for me, he didn’t like it as much. I had to squish him. (both laugh) So I came back and then I was editor of the paper. And San Angelo called me like February of my senior year and said, “Do you want to come back?” And I had a job, so off I went. And I went to work, I think, not even two weeks after I graduated.

AW: Wow. That’s good.

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IG: It was nice. And it was—there was—it was the Regan recession, so a lot of my friends did not get jobs right away.

AW: Yeah. Did you get to know Elmer Kelton?

IG: I met him, yes. Yeah, he was a here. What a wonderful writer. I—The Time It Never Rained was one of my favorite books when I lived there.

AW: For two years Waddie Mitchell and I owned the option to that. I wrote a script for it. We never got anything done, and gave up the option—which we shouldn’t have, but I’d gotten to know Elmer over the years. What a wonderful guy.

IG: He was. San Angelo was an interesting place because there’s a guy named Bart McDowell, who was a National Geographic writer, who was from there, and so there was—

AW: I don’t know him. Bart McDowell?

IG: Yeah. Hobart McDowell. He was a—because you always remembered anybody who did anything that went through your paper or went through your town because—I think Ernest Tubb had a connection and different—San Angelo had—oh, who was it? Foote. Horton Foote.

AW: Horton Foote? Really?

IG: I think that’s right.

AW: I’ll be darned. Now, I had some—my wife’s best friend growing up married a San Angelo guy, Bill Holubec, and so we spent a lot of time going down there. And I had an aunt and uncle who lived there during the tornado in the fifties.

28 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: Ooh. That was a big one.

AW: Yes. It was. I was interesting. We went down to help them out, and I remember still, even as a little kid how, you know, what a thing that was. But that’s also a town that has—would’ve been a lot more like Las Vegas because there are a lot of old families in San Angelo.

IG: Yeah. There were, and it was an interesting place because— I mean, coming from Lubbock at that point, I thought it was green and lush—

AW: Oh yeah, right. And it actually had hills.

IG: —which is it. It had hills. So I thought it was a really pretty place. And it was interesting because that was about the time when all those eastern people started moving to Texas, and they just thought San Angelo was dry and dusty. And I was like, “No, are you kidding? Go to Lubbock.”

AW: And San Angelo is also a place where there was a sighting of the Blue Lady.

IG: Yes.

AW: So that would tie it right back to New Mexico.

IG: That was one of the first stories I did as an intern, and it was—they used to have these little tests for you, and they would say, “There is a placard to the Blue Lady somewhere in town. We want you to find it and then find out why it’s not better marked.” So I found it, and they were so impressed that I found it. That’s one of the reasons I got another job. And, yep—Maria de Agreda. She was something, and that’s why the Indians there were ready to be converted to Catholicism according to the legend.

AW: Yep, and also at Show Low, Arizona, and also—she appears all over the place. It’s great, but I just think it’s interesting that there she was in San Angelo.

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IG: It was, and her marker was in kind of an arroyo. It was in a dry bed, so it was kind of a weird place for them to put it to begin with.

AW: Yeah, in fact these friends of mine lived on Vista Del Arroyo, just on the south side of it.

IG: Did you know Gus Clemens?

AW: No.

IG: No. He’s a historian who worked at the paper, and then he writes all these history books. And he came back. He was from one of those old families. And it was—but I liked it, and I worked there three and a half years. And—

AW: And what was your—what was your beat?

IG: Education, mostly. And I became assistant and I—city editor—just like a couple of years in. It was one of those weird confluences where everyone that was more qualified was loathed by the other reporters and they wouldn’t work for them. (Andy laughs) And they couldn’t hire from outside, and the person who was the night city editor got arrested for having too many parking tickets. And they took him in handcuffs from the newsroom, and they decided to fire him for embarrassing the place. So I ended up getting his job and getting—so I edited two days—or three days a week and reported two days a week, something like that. And I had a lot of fun. It was a great place to work. In those days, the circulation area was about the size of the state of Ohio and we sent out trucks in the morning—six hours each way.

AW: Yeah, Texas newspaper history is interesting because you have the Standard-Times, you had the Star-Telegram, you know—one time was one of the bigger newspapers in the western United States. It’s very interesting.

AW: Well, and the Dallas Morning News sold in every county in Texas at one time, and our paper was started—or taken—I don’t know if it was started, but Mr. Harte made it a big paper, and that’s

30 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program why it was owned by Harte-Hanks, and he combined with the guy from Abilene. But I mean, President Johnson used to call Mr. Harte on the phone and say, “Houston, I didn’t like that editorial!” So it was a—you really understood the responsibility of being a journalist because we went to places where they sold ten papers, but Mr. Harte wanted people to have a paper. And by the time I got there he was long gone, but that legacy was very much impressed upon us that we had a responsibility, that we weren’t there just to make money for the corporation. We were there to serve the community. And it was a lot of fun because there was all sorts of strange things happening. When you have hundreds of miles as your area, you can do all sorts of stories: oil well fires and murders and everything.

AW: Well, and the cultural tectonic plates kind of met in the Trans-Pecos, and I’ve always thought of San Angelo as sort of the gateway to the Trans-Pecos, you know, Texas changes.

IG: Well, it becomes more southern, I think. Totally, as opposed to—I always—I never thought we lived in the south in Lubbock. We were in the west. You know, there was some southern stuff but it was western, and you get to San Angelo, you start getting more to the south.

AW: Yeah, no I never thought about the—us being the south. I always thought of it—in fact, still today I identify much more with Albuquerque than with Austin. And a part of that was living in Denver—the Denver area.

IG: Right, because you were a mountain person. Yeah.

AW: Well, yeah. Although I like—I have to confess I like flat land, but it’s—I guess it’s imprinted on you when you’re growing up—but the culture here is more natural to me than the culture in south Texas.

IG: Yeah. That makes sense.

AW: And that—I think we’re—you know, eastern New Mexico, West Texas. I can’t tell the difference, culturally.

31 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: No. It’s the same, but we call that area Little Texas. That’s what it’s called. What I remembered about San Angelo is that it was more rigid than I was used to. And, at a newspaper, you come into a town and you don’t know anybody there, so your friends become the people at the newspaper. It’s very incestuous. It was really interesting time because it was the eighties, the Houston Oilers were still training there. So you had people meeting football players in bars and—it was just kind of a messy world. I used to sit at the paper and figure out who had slept with who, and I traced it back to my brother, one time. (Andy laughs)—because a girl I had dated—a girl he had dated in college came to work there, and then she slept with two other people. And I was like, Okay, this is too weird. I was very happy to—I got a job in Santa Fe, and moved back here, the first time, to be an education reporter here.

AW: Yeah. So you went from San Angelo to Santa Fe.

IG: Yep. And, and as I was told later when I was interviewing for a job, that was a step backwards because you went from a bigger paper to a smaller paper. You went from being an editor to being just a reporter.

AW: Yeah, but you’re going to the most important newspaper in the—

IG: The state.

AW: In the state. That’s right.

IG: Well, and my grandma was—

AW: That’s a big deal.

IG: It was a big deal. My grandma was sick. We had—we lived with her when I was little, and we were very close. And my folks at—by then, had moved back to Mora County. They lived on the ranch that my dad had, and they built their own house. And my grandma was just starting to fade.

32 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

AW: So by the time—while you were in San Angelo, they moved from Lubbock back to—

IG: They did it when I was in college.

AW: Oh, when you were in college.

IG: My senior year. By the time I was done with college, they had moved back full time. So they were back. And I’d come home and go home, and you know, home was no longer in Lubbock. It was Mora County. They lived in a little place—you’d go up the road on 518, turn left at mile marker 19, and go past the white house until the road ends. It was one of those places—in La Cebollita.

AW: Ah. Yeah, I have a friend who lives in Chacon.

IG: Yeah.

AW: It’s one of those kind of places too. The road stops there.

IG: That’s right. That’s right. And Chacon is past Mora, and we were just this—we were on the other side.

AW: Yeah. You were on the other side.

IG: Yeah. On this side. If you’ve gone to see his house, you’ve driven past my parents’ place.

AW: Yeah. Actually, her house. Sharon Stewart, photographer.

IG: Okay. Okay.

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AW: Yeah, it’s really terrific.

IG: Yeah, it’s beautiful up there. It’s really pretty.

AW: Yeah. It really is, but, boy, you’ve got to know where you’re going.

IG: Yes. Yes you do. You get lost. But—so I worked here for, I think, almost two years, and it was owned by Gannette in in those days. And it was just like a factory. We cranked out five stories a day, six stories a day. Once—a week I wrote down in my diary, “I wrote fifty-four stories this week. They were not very good” They were awful.

AW: How could you write good—fifty-four good stories?

IG: You do—you couldn’t. They were terrible. And I thought, I’ve got to go do something else, or I’m going to become a hack. So I went to graduate school at that point.

AW: Did you? Where?

IG: American University in Washington, D.C. I wanted to go. I wanted to see something completely different.

AW: So that would have been about what year?

IG: Eighty-seven.

AW: Eighty-seven.

IG: Eighty-seven, yep. Yeah, I wanted to see another part of the world. New York , I decided, was

34 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program too big for me, so I didn’t try to go to Columbia, and I had met someone in a bar at a conference who had gone to American and liked it. So I decided, I will do what that guy did, and I applied and I got in.

AW: Well, D.C. is an interesting town, too. It’s actually pretty easy to get around in, and—

IG: Yes, and I liked politics—

AW: So there you were.

IG: So that seemed like a natural place. And I interned that spring at the Dallas Morning News at the Washington Bureau. So I got to work for a big paper and see what that was like, and I decided it was really interesting but I didn’t like big papers. There was too much bureaucracy. And I graduated, and—

AW: What? In ’89?

IG: Eighty-eight. It was one year.

AW: Eighty-eight. Oh, really?

IG: Yeah, it was quick. I was very happy to get done. And they had a—in those days they had a post- graduate fellowship at this place called the Poynter Institute, which is a journalism think tank. And it was a long one. It was three months. And you were supposedly learning how to manage newspapers, and it seemed easier to do that than to actually get a job. (Andy laughs) So I did that, and I got to be in Florida, and you know, live by the beach and all those kinds of things. And I liked it. And during our training we went to visit this paper in Bradenton, Florida which was in this brand new building. It had a great editor. It was beautiful.

AW: Bradenton?

35 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

IG: Bradenton.

AW: Yeah, is that in—what, near Tallahassee area? Where is that?

IG: Tampa. Tampa Bay.

AW: Tampa area. Tampa.

IG: Tampa. Tampa Bay. It’s right over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge from St. Pete. So you have Tampa, St. Pete, and then Bradenton, and then Sarasota, and then you go down the west coast. So I ended up getting a job there, and I stayed there two years. I was an assistant city editor, and I edited a bunch of stuff, and did all—we had a—it was a great, great paper. There were newspaper wars going on, so we had—had head to head competition with Sarasota. St. Pete had a bureau. Tampa had a bureau. So you had four papers just going at it every single day. And if you missed something, it would be circled in red and they’d wave it in your face and say, “You idiot. Why didn’t you get this?” And I really had a great time, and I lived on Anna Maria Island.

AW: Wow

IG: So, I was a block from the beach, and I spent every morning that I worked at night running or getting a sun tan and went over a drawbridge to work, so if you were late you’d always say, “The drawbridge was stuck.”

AW: Yeah. (laughs) So, and you left that job? Why would you leave that place?

IG: Oh, because I was homesick. I missed the mountains, and I wanted to be in New Mexico. And I used to go to the library when I was working at night to look in editor and publisher in the want ads, and the Albuquerque Tribune, which is now closed, was hiring an assistant city editor. And I applied, and I got the job. And I came from, like, seventy degree beautiful winter weather in Florida to Albuquerque—on New Years that year—and it was zero. So it was freezing. It was absolutely freezing.

36 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program

AW: Wow. So this would—early nineties?

IG: Yeah. Ninety-one.

AW: Ninety-one.

IG: Ninety-one. The Gulf War got started the day I quit. That—we were at my going away party when war was declared, and we had to all go back and put out our extra edition because we had a plan for the front page. And we got it ready, and then a couple days later, off I went. And I thought, What if I can’t get there because what if there’s gas rationing? You know, there’s a war. I thought something would happen. And it turned out, nowadays with wars, you notice them unless you turn on the TV.

AW: That’s right.

IG: Isn’t that awful?

AW: It is awful.

IG: Yeah. It’s not right.

AW: No wonder we can’t win them.

IG: Well, it’s not costing us anything.

AW: Exactly.

IG: Unless you’re the people serving, and that’s just wrong.

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AW: Well, as my grandfather used to say, “To be successful, you have to be committed, not involved.” His example was the chicken was involved in breakfast, but the hog was committed. You know?

IG: Yes. That’s a really good way to put it.

AW: If you're not committed, you’re not going to win those things. Well, so Albuquerque, that was a really big change because Albuquerque’s—I mean, it’s Albuquerque. It’s not Las Vegas or Santa Fe. It’s a whole other kind of animal.

IG: Yeah. It’s a—it’s urban and it’s gritty. There were a lot of the—when I moved back, my mother said, “Well, be careful honey. The police there shoot you.” And that was before recently, and it was—

AW: Right, that was before people were talking about that.

IG: Yes. And it was still going on, but again it was a newspaper war situation. The Morning Journal, the afternoon Tribune head-to-head. I had great editors. I mean, the people I worked with were just brilliant. So it was a lot of fun.

AW: Yeah, and I don’t know what it was like in the early nineties—I didn’t spend that much time— but I go there a lot, now. And I actually like it. Did you grow up to—did you like it?

IG: I liked it. I never liked it as much as northern New Mexico because I just like—I think it’s prettier here.

AW: Well, it’s—Yeah. It’s different.

IG: But, no, I had a blast. I did. I had a—we had great stories. I had a lot of friends. I had a lot of—I have a lot of relatives in New Mexico. So my cousin was going through a divorce, and I was

38 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program babysitting his kids, and we were hanging out. I bought my first house. It was just a really fun time. No responsibilities, and just lots of work and lots of fun. And there was a nightlife. You could go dancing. You could go out for coffee. We went to, like, hiking and—there’s all these incredible ruins around Albuquerque when you go to the East Mountains and stuff like that, so you just go see everything that’s there.

AW: And you know the other thing that strikes me about Albuquerque is I don’t think I can think of a city that large that is still kind of a university town.

IG: No, that’s true. And it—well, Lubbock was when I lived there, and I don’t know if—

AW: Oh yeah, Lubbock. Oh, it still is, but Lubbock’s not anywhere near the size of Albuquerque.

IG: No, that’s true. That’s true. It’s like half the size.

AW: Yeah, but Albuquerque’s pretty big—

IG: No, it definitely—

AW: —and it still—I always get the feeling—I mean, as long as you’re, you know, not in the wrong end of town, but it still feels like a university town, to me. It’s kind of interesting.

IG: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think we—so, yeah. And then I came here to be the city editor in the nineties.

AW: In what year did you—?

IG: Ninety-four, I think. Ninety-four.

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AW: Ninety-four.

IG: And I did that for three and a half years. And in the meantime I got married. And my husband’s from Taos, and he was working as an environmental lawyer up there. And we lived in Española, and he drove one way and I drove the other way. We had a baby. It was getting more complicated, and the owner of our paper—or the daughter of the owner, in those days—Robin, owned the Taos News, and she wanted me to go be the editor there—which I didn’t want to do because I didn’t want to work at a weekly paper, so I said no. And then in a year or so after that she asked me again, and this time I was getting really tired of commuting, so I said yes. So we moved to Taos in ’98. And my husband promised me that he would never want to leave. He loved his job. Blah, blah, blah. And he had two more years at it, and he didn’t love his job. (both laugh) So we came back to Santa Fe. And then I was home for, like, four years, and I was a stringer for People Magazine, and did freelance work for different places, and was basically able to stay home with my son until he got to third grade. And then I came back here to run the specialty magazines—all those things I was telling you about when we walked in.

AW: And that would have been about what—?

IG: Two thousand six or so—something like that—and then four years ago, the editorial writer— editorial page editor—resigned and I got his job. And I’d been filling—I always filled in for him when he was on vacation. I’d done that for about ten years, so it was kind of a natural progression. So I’ve been—this job, it will be four years this fall.

AW: So was it difficult to leave Taos?

IG: Yes. I love Taos.

AW: Me too.

IG: Yeah. I would go there in a second.

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AW: Yeah, I’ve got to say it’s one of my favorite places on the planet. Now I’m not there enough to know the bad part of it, but, gosh, I really like it.

IG: I don’t think there is a bad part of it. I love it.

AW: Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that.

IG: No. I love Taos.

AW: I stay at the El Pueblo, so I can go down and walk and—the cemetery and the old cemetery is just—

IG: Yes. Oh, isn’t it something? Kit Carson’s grave—everything? We stay at El Pueblo, too. I mean, David’s family lives there but it’s just easier to have your own spot. Yeah. Oh, how funny. One day I was working, we always had these—

AW: Well, Michael Hearne’s a friend of mine.

IG: Oh, okay. He played at our wedding.

AW: Oh, did he?

IG: Yes, he did.

AW: Oh, well cool. Yeah, and why he moved to Texas, I have no—

IG: I didn’t know he moved.

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AW: Yeah, he’s living down—my mind’s just gone blank. The little—a little old town just south of Austin between Austin and San Marcos.

IG: Oh, wow.

AW: I think he still has his place in Taos, but—

IG: Yeah. We loved him. We didn’t actually hear it because we were inside getting talked to by the elders come and tell you how to be married when you get married at the pueblo, and that’s what we got.

AW: Oh, really?

IG: Yeah, but they did it in Tiwa, so I didn’t understand them.

AW: Oh, does your husband have native—?

IG: He’s from Taos Pueblo.

AW: Oh, really? Oh, cool. I spent a wonderful afternoon with John Rainer, Jr., once.

IG: Oh, yeah.

AW: And what a—

IG: He’s a s—yeah, he’s something.

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AW: Yeah, he was. Terrific. Well, that’s very cool. So, what does your husband do here?

IG: He does—he’s a lawyer with a law firm that VanAmberg, Rogers, Abeita & Gomez—he’s the Gomez—and he does federal Indian law and tribal law. You know, different clients in Indian country, basically.

AW: Yeah, well this would be the place to do that.

IG: Yeah. Yeah, it’s been—worked out. He did—he was at the Western Environmental Law Center up there, so he did a lot of environmental law. And now he does a little bit of that, but mostly Indian law.

AW: The buffalo that Taos Pueblo has came from my uncle, Charlie Goodnight.

IG: Oh wow, I’ll have to tell them that.

AW: There’s a wonderful photograph of Goodnight and, I think, his friend was a Taos Pueblo man named Standing Deer, and I think he had died by the time this photograph was made because it was very late in Goodnight’s life, but it’s just an incredible photograph.

IG: Oh, wow. I have to ask—I‘ve had that buffalo because when it gets butchered we get to eat it sometimes.

AW: Yeah, I—let’s see now. I’ll think his name, who ran—who runs Indian House Records, is—

IG: Oh, I know who that is.

AW: Yeah, his son—because his wife was Taos Pueblo, and his son brought some buffalo to us one night. We ate dinner at house. It was really—

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IG: Nice. It’s good. It’s good.

AW: I’m going to send you a copy of my album about Charlie Goodnight, too.

IG: That’d be something. I love those stories about ranch trails.

AW: Yeah, well it—you were talking about everybody in New Mexico being kin. You know, there was a time, too, when everybody in my part of Texas and your part of New Mexico knew each other because they traded or they, you know—you can still see Goodnight’s name on the ledger at St. James in—

IG: At Cimarron.

AW: —Cimarron, yeah.

IG: Well, see, my step-dad’s mother’s people were from Cimarron, and they—she ran the other hotel. There was another hotel there.

AW: Really?

IG: Yep, and she ran that, and her dad was a man named Zenis Curtis, who was an old mountain man, kind of, and he helped run the Chase Ranch. And her sister, Genevieve, married Mason Chase. And all of those people were all connected. And my dad, when he was a little boy, he used to go with his grandpa to trade at Taos Pueblo. And I have these old brownie pictures that my stepdad took when he was a kid running all over the Pueblo. And access that you can’t get now, you know? He went in and out of the kivas and everything because it wasn’t all closed off. And I always joked that, probably, you know, his ancestor—or he met David’s ancestor, probably—you know, my husband—because it was a small place, and it was connected. And when they went through Las Vegas, you know, my great grandma was there working in the hotel, and they all knew each other.

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AW: Yeah. How is Las Vegas doing? I think I told you, I played at their big thing this last summer. There was a weeklong celebration, and I played music and it was interesting. It looked like downtown was sort of perking up and—

IG: I think that’s true. There’s a man—I can’t remember his name—Alan something, but he bought the old Castañeda Hotel, which was an old Harvey House that never got torn down, and it’s getting redone completely.

AW: Yeah, I—we went by and looked at—I mean, it’s in—

IG: In progress.

AW: And I played at a theater downtown that’s just been renovated. It’s right next to a really good restaurant.

IG: The Serf? Or is it—?

AW: Yeah, The Serf.

IG: It’s next to Charlie’s Spic & Span.

AW: Yeah. That’s exactly—

IG: Well, I grew up a block and a half from there, because Seventh Street is the next street over. And in the olden days, that empty parking lot was a Safeway. There was actually a grocery store there that’s gone now. And then we were one block up. There was a Baptist church on the corner. First Federal was the bank, and then my grandma’s house is now an empty lot, but—that’s.

AW: That’s really—I was really impressed. I’ve always liked Las Vegas, and it was nice to see.

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IG: Yeah, I think it’s going to pick up again.

AW: Kay Peck.

IG: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

AW: I’ve gotten to know when she was in Amarillo, and she’s the one that brought me to do the thing.

IG: Nice. That’s fun. So what do you play? What kind of music?

AW: Good.

IG: Good. Oh, that’s the best kind.

AW: I also write. I’m going to send you some—the Charlie Goodnight because it’s got “Standing Deer’s Lament”—the song that I wrote—and it’s got stories about the buffalo. But then on another live album I did that took me forever to record, but I recorded the song that I wrote about a horse named Rayado.

IG: Okay.

AW: And I recorded it in Rayado.

IG: Oh, wow.

AW: At the—it was the creek.

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IG: That is something.

AW: We had to run an extension cord like three hundred feet to get to plug in the recording machine so we could do it, but it was—

IG: That’s nice.

AW: It was really fun to be able to do that.

IG: That is.

AW: So, those are things that connect me to those places. And having grown up with—we were all scattered out, but my grandmother and my great-grandmother—who I didn’t know quite as well as my grandmother—but each had spent summers as little girls on Goodnight’s ranch—in Goodnight, not the JA’s—but in Goodnight. So I’d grown up listening to them talk, you know, about those kind of relations and that sort of thing. So, always gave me a connection to this place because of Goodnight’s connection which was—

IG: Was huge. I live near a street called Siringo here in Santa Fe.

AW: Named, like, in—as in Charlie Siringo?

IG: Yes. Yes, and it was—

AW: Is it named for him, or Willy?

IG: Yes, it’s—

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AW: Oh, really.

IG: it’s named for him, and it used to be part of his ranch. And now it’s just houses. It’s right in the middle of town. It’s not even far out. And he was kind of a rat, though.

AW: Oh, yeah. No, he’s not—

IG: So, I was like, “I don’t think we should have it named after him.” (both laugh)

AW: No, he—but he’s one of those rats that wrote things down that we wouldn’t know about if he hadn’t written them down, so—

IG: That’s right. He saved a lot of information.

AW: Yeah, I mean, I think the jury’s still out on Kit Carson, you know.

IG: Well, in our family we have convicted him. We didn’t like him because my husband’s half Taos, but his mom’s Navajo. And she has relatives that took the long walk, and it’s not a—it’s really not a—it’s an open wound to this day. I did a story, when I used to cover Indian Market, one of the winners one year was a belt and it was about successes, and it was by a Navajo couple, Darryl Begay and his wife Rebecca because they said, “In our culture, we’re always thinking about defeat, and what we think is important to remember is that we survived that we came back and we still have a culture.” So they had everything from that baseball player who’s Navajo to just all the things they’ve done that have contributed to the world. The weaving woman—all those things. And they want Navajo’s to think about being successful, and I think that’s true. It’s not that you went on the long walk, it’s that you survived it.

AW: Right, well not only survived it—and I don’t know all the native cultures by any stretch—but I’ll tell you. I don’t think I’ve met a group of people with a better sense of humor than Navajo. I’ve never been around so much laughing and cutting up and joking in my whole life. It’s amazing.

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You would think, coming from that history—to not only survive but survive with a sense of humor. How do you do that?

IG: They do, though. One of the stories I did for New Mexico Magazine was a thing on Indian humor and just how they find the humor in things that are difficult for other people. We’re very proud, at the New Mexican, that we have the only daily comic strip by a Native cartoonist.

AW: Oh, really?

IG: Yeah. “Without Reservations.” It’s—(Andy laughs) yeah. It’s—he—if I have any of his books because I used to have a bunch of them—but he’s had a couple of books and it’s been going on for seven or eight years now, and it’s really funny. His very first cartoon strip was an Indian dad telling his son “Someday, son, none of this will be yours.”

AW: (laughs) Oh, that’s great.

IG: Yeah, he’s good.

AW: What is his name?

IG: Ricardo Caté.

AW: Oh, man. I’m going to have to look this up.

IG: He’s got a really funny one that I got from my mom for Christmas of one of the characters is the General who looks a lot like you do—imagine Custer’d look like—and the Chief. So they’re looking at each other kind of crossways, and the general’s wearing a Cowboys jersey—no, the chief is wearing the Cowboys jersey and the general is wearing the Redskins jersey. And they’re like, Wait a second.

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AW: Yeah. (laughs)

IG: So, he’s—and he’s kept it up, you know, for all these years. Eight years. Ten years. Whatever it is.

AW: That’s—you think you’d run out of those—what seem to be obvious jokes—after a time, but not so—

IG: No. He keeps going, and he’s had—he does a lot on Facebook, so if you’re on Facebook you can find him.

AW: Yeah, no I’m an early abandoner.

IG: Yeah. I like it because I get to talk to all my friends from high school, so it’s been interesting. When you live in Santa Fe, you’re in a real liberal bubble, but, when you talk to everyone you know from Lubbock, you realize why the rest of the world likes Donald Trump. And it’s very useful for your—

AW: Yeah, and if you’re a liberal in Lubbock—let me tell you this from experience—it’s a tough life.

IG: Oh, I know. I remember those days just watching, you know—at was her name? Carolyn the lady City counselor.

AW: Carolyn Jordan.

IG: Yes. Yes. I mean, they were not nice to her.

AW: No. No. Well, she was a liberal and she was educated and she was a woman.

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IG: I was going to say—she was outspoken.

AW: And just there were strikes all the way across.

IG: One of things I wanted to say about Tech is that I really appreciated the journalism department because they had very good professors. The experience working at the paper—when you graduated, if you worked at the paper, you could go to work anywhere and you were ready to work. Yeah. You were as experienced and as credentialed as anybody could be, and I just—I really—I had Bob Rooker Freda McVay.

AW: Yeah, Freda. We were—

IG: I adored her.

AW: Yeah. We were really good pals.

IG: Yeah. She was awesome. I mean, she started right when I was like a sophomore-junior, so I had her from the beginning. And then there was a guy named Herman Morgan who was the editor— taught editing, and his class was notorious for being difficult. And they were just really solid, solid professors. And, I think—I didn’t want to go to Tech because, you know, you always want to go away, but my daddy always said, “You can go wherever you want, but I’m sending the checks to Tech.” (Andy laughs) So it made my decision much easier, and I never regretted it once I started because it was just really a great place to get experience and to learn a lot.

AW: Well, at—what was Texas Tech like at that time? Not just journalism, but what was it like as a university?

IG: Oh, gosh. It was—there was the social side of it which was—it was a party school—and there was this incredible musical element that you could go hear something wonderful every night of the week—which is mostly what I did. There was also the fun of going dancing. You know, going to Coldwater was still open. Then there was Fat Dawgs, The Rox, and I spent a lot of time

51 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program hearing music all of the years I was there. I loved going to Stubbs and seeing Stevie Ray Vaughan when Miss Lou Ann was still singing with him. I never thought of all the people I saw, that he was going to be the famous, famous one.

AW: I know it.

IG: It was such a shock. I mean, I thought he was great but I didn’t think that the general public would appreciate it.

AW: Right, and he was just a kid, and besides, he was playing blues.

IG: Yes, exactly. You just didn’t—and especially when she quit singing with him, I didn’t think it would be his singing that would do it, you know. And I just—I tell me husband, “Lubbock was halfway between everything.” So Phoenix and Dallas, Chicago and Dallas, whatever. So we’d always get groups on Thursday nights. And that year, we saw, like—the Talking Heads came through town. The Planets were an Albuquerque band that were there all the time—

AW: —but a lot of Lubbock guys.

IG: Yes they were, because the McLartys were in The Planets . They were awesome. That—they—

AW: Mm-hm. Joe Don.

IG: That’s right. That’s right. I saw Muddy Waters at the Cotton Club.

AW: Did you see U2 when they came through?

IG: No. I can’t believe I missed that because I saw everything else.

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AW: Well, nobody knew who they were. In our archive, we have photos and they looked just like babies.

IG: They were babies. My husband saw them on that trip in Denver.

AW: Oh, really?

IG: And I was looking up something, and I realized that they had gone to Lubbock, and I was like, “No!” So if I saw them, I don’t remember it. And I went to almost everything, so I think I would remember that.

AW: They were at Rox, I think.

IG: I must have seen them there because I saw—because Carlo and I were like this because I covered them, you know?

AW: Oh, yeah. I knew Carlo quite well. I helped start the West Texas Music Association.

IG: Oh, wow.

AW: In the early eighties, and Carlo—and then, plus, he would hire—I would play. And he was just a great guy, but he was a great guy that you really had to make sure the check was going to clear.

IG: Oh, yes. No, he was a—player.

AW: Yeah, he was a wheeler dealer.

IG: Yeah, he was.

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AW: And he had his place over there—the old ice skating rink on Thirty-Fourth. What was that called? Then he had Abbey Road out south. All these before Rox. The place on Thirty-Fourth was—

IG: That’s right.

AW: —very interesting—past Slide road where Thirty-Fourth kind of drifted off, and it—no one ever thinks about this, but when I was in high school in Lubbock, there was an ice rink, and we had hockey.

IG: That’s right.

AW: And we had hockey teams in Lubbock. (laughs)

IG: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s as good as those Ski Lubbock shirts with the bump.

AW: I know it. It’s kind of the same thing. And the funny thing—here’s the really funny thing, is that none of us thought that was odd. You know, growing up there we didn’t think it was odd that we had ice hockey.

IG: And it’s something, actually, you need because it’s so much fun.

AW: Oh, yeah.

IG: You know, Santa Fe has—we have a hockey—we have an ice rink, now, in the Chavez Center, and it’s just, like, the most awesome thing.

AW: I love to go watch. We don’t have it anymore. We had it for a while, a semi-pro team in Lubbock.

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IG: Nice.

AW: About ten years ago, and—

IG: It’s fun. We had one for, like, a month.

AW: Yeah, well, we had a whole season, but that was it. But—I’ve never—there’s not a game, I guess, that’s as fun to watch and is not as fun to watch on the TV at hockey, I mean live hockey is—

IG: It’s a blast. It is a blast.

AW: Now doesn’t Albuquerque have a team?

IG: I think they do, that plays in the Santa Ana—in Rio Rancho. I think they might still. So what I remember about Lubbock in those days is that it was a lot of fun. It was interesting. There were, you know, just great opportunities.

IG: Being a woman on campus—was that difficult?

IG: No. I mean, it might have been, but I never let that bother me. There were times where you were no—like, you felt uncomfortable walking at night and stuff, but for the most—and I walked to school, and I walked home at night. So I was kind of stupid. I lived—where I lived was like three blocks away from where John Hinckley lived when he was a student. So I rode my bike past his house, too, when he was there. I just didn’t know he was there. So I was actually in some kind of ratty neighborhoods, but I just did what I did.

AW: Yeah, in those years South Overton was a real spotty neighborhood. I mean, you have the nice houses right around where you lived, and some of those—

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IG: No, but once you went over to Sixteenth and Fifteenth and up they were, no. It was creepy. It was definitely—but I knew so many people because we’d lived there. Like, our next door neighbor, Mr. Woods, had been mayor of Lubbock at one time. My teacher, Nancy—what was her? Henry was her maiden name, but she was Phillips by the time I knew her.

AW: Oh, yeah.

IG: Yeah, she was my junior high English and then my speech teacher, and then she went to Lubbock High and was a counselor. So I babysat her girls. I mean, I knew them forever. So there were people that kind of watched out for you wherever you went. Did you know her? Do you know Nancy?

AW: Yeah, and say her maiden name again.

IG: Henry. And then she became Phillips.

AW: Yeah. Did she have a twin sister?

IG: I don’t think so.

AW: Okay, I’m thinking of a different Phillips.

IG: She had two daughters, Brooke and—what’s the other—Brooke Ann and something else. And she was at—her mom was, like, the registrar at Lubbock High forever. And she was a counselor probably even until when your girls went because she didn’t retire until pretty recently.

AW: Yeah, and when my daughter and son both graduated there, and they had—my wife’s first cousin was counselor—Sharon Mouser, but she wouldn’t have been there when you were. I don’t think they moved back to Lubbock, but yeah.

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IG: Was Mr. Cates there when—?

AW: Oh, yeah.

IG: Yeah. He was my Drama teacher. That’s how I knew him. And when I found out he became the principal, I thought, That’s perfect. He was just—he was a great, great guy.

AW: Well, I knew Lubbock High kids when I was at Monterey because the girl I dated went to—she went to Monterey, but she was—went to Central Baptist Church. And so all of her friends were—from church—were all Lubbock High kids, so we would go to the Lubbock High parties. (Inez laughs) You know as well as the—so I got know them. Lubbock wasn’t that big, even then.

IG: No, it wasn’t that big.

AW: You know, for you to not know any of them.

IG: No, that’s true. That’s one thing about Catholics is we didn’t have nearly as good of youth groups as the Baptists and the Church of Christ. St. Elizabeth’s was my church, and I went there from sixth grade until I graduated.

AW: Yeah, because it was right downtown.

IG: Right there.

AW: Yeah, well I was Methodist, so we went to everybody else’s church.

IG: That’s right. Did you go to United Methodist, or—?

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AW: No, we went to—my family helped start Oakwood Methodist out on the south side. And we lived by it, so—

IG: Okay. My stepdad was Methodist and my grandma was one of the big United Methodist ladies, and her friends—she was so old when she died—she was like ninety-six—that Mrs. Hodges’ daughter Louise never married—was her best friend that was still alive, and she was sixty.

AW: Wow.

IG: Because everyone else had died, and all those ladies had the little Methodist sewing circles, and cooking things, and—

AW: Well, we were—my mother was from Slaton, and my father was from Slaton. And they met— they were Methodist. And that was also unusual. You were talking about how bad it was to be in Slaton when they couldn’t decide. If you were Catholic, you had to be either German or Mexican. You know—

IG: Yes, that’s right.

AW: But if you were a Methodist, they really didn’t know what to do with you, so it was a— interesting.

IG: That was a nice church. When we went to Slaton, the Catholic Church was not very friendly. And the Mexican Catholic Church was in a scandal because supposedly the priest was sleeping with his secretary—or something awful was happening— and we ended up going to the Methodist Church in Slaton a lot. And what I remember the most is that the preacher at that time wouldn’t pray for victory, and they ended up getting rid of him eventually.

AW: Oh, really.

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IG: He would pray for their safety and for a good game, but he would not pray for victory. And his daughter became one of my really good friends for a while, and he was just one of the nicest— his name was Bruce Parks. I still remember that. And, gah, he was a good man. What a good man of God.

AW: Yeah, well the itinerant ministry of the Methodists allowed them to move off people. If they didn’t—

IG: Well, you’re controlling your congregation which isn’t a bad thing. But there was a little girl that was making—was telling me my parents were going to go to hell because they got divorced. She—and I went crying, and he saw me and stopped me. And we talked, and he told me they weren’t going to hell. And I always appreciated that because, you know, things like that can hurt.

AW: Yeah, especially when you’re of the age to not have an alternative way to think about it.

IG: Yeah, that’s right. The thing—the other thing I remember about Tech, is just how affordable it was. The tuition was like $200—$235 a semester for fifteen classes—or fifteen hours. You know, my books were seventy-five dollars. Everyone talks today about, “I worked my way through school. Why don’t these kids do it?” Well, it’s because you could.

AW: Yeah, but—Yeah, right.

IG: You can’t do it now.

AW: I worked my way through school working at the grocery store. You couldn’t do that (laughs)—

IG: Yeah, which one did you work at?

AW: Piggly Wiggly at Monterey Center.

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IG: Oh, yes, yes, yes. My brother worked at Furr’s.

AW: Number 263. Oh our archrivals. Which Furr’s? At Caprock?

IG: He worked at all of them, actually. He worked at the one on Nineteenth Street to start, and then he worked at the bigger ones. Yeah.

AW: Yeah. No, it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had in my life. It was the best dating service on the planet. The mothers would—you’d get to be their favorite sack boy or checker and then they would introduce their daughters to you. (laughs)

IG: Oh, that’s perfect.

AW: It was. It was like—it was incredible. But you learned to work hard and be polite to people that weren’t nice to you, and those are pretty valuable lessons.

IG: They are—and to do your job. And when my brother was there it was when inflation was hard.

AW: Is he an older brother?

IG: He’s an older brother. He’s five years older. He stayed in Lubbock.

AW: Yeah, what does he do?

IG: He became a bus driver. He worked for CitiBus for a long time. And now he’s a truck driver, and he delivers milk all over Texas and Oklahoma. And he married two different women. He married twice. And one of the reasons I know that Lubbock is much less segregated is because his wives were black. So he has interracial children, and they grew up there and there wasn’t—there weren’t any problems.

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AW: You know, here’s an interesting comment on that. My—one of my dearest friends growing up— still one of my dearest friends—Byron Price, who now runs the Oklahoma University Press—

IG: Oh, wow.

AW: His little brother, Troy, worked—stayed in Lubbock. And Troy had a son, and his son is now the minister of Second Baptist Church in Lubbock. And his son married a black woman. They met in seminary at Duke, and—

IG: Wow.

AW: And, first of all, the family that was most opposed to the marriage was her’s—not his—and, secondly, he told me that his—they—the two of them traveled the world, and the only place that they have been where no one looks twice at them is Lubbock which is so incredibly different than when I was growing up there.

IG: Yes. Yes.

AW: And I—I’m interested to think about why that—and plus, when I do these oral history interviews with people from the Manhattan Heights area—The Flats—they don’t complain, in those interviews, so much about the racism as they do complain about the current loss of their neighborhood.

IG: That makes sense. That makes sense.

AW: Yeah. It’s very interesting. It was almost worth it to them to live in a segregated society where they had their own neighborhood, which is—it’s not what I expected.

IG: No, that’s definitely—I know—because in Las Vegas, there were almost no black people when I was a little girl. So we moved to Slaton. There’s obviously, you know, a sizeable black

61 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program population. Then I moved and I went to Carol Thompson which was, in those days it was a very, very poor school. It was right before it closed. And had my parents paid more attention to where I was going to school, that’s probably not where I would have gone. But my mom believed that you should go to the school in your neighborhood and that should meet your needs, and that was it. So I went. And I became friends with one of the girls that lived in Hub Homes. And I would go to her house, and I learned how, you know, black girls did their hair because she would do her hair. She came home—and I’ll never forget this as long as I live—my mom’s washing up after we had a snack, and Valerie starts to cry. And I’m like, “Why are you crying?” She said, “Your mom did not wash my dish twice.” And I was like, “Well, why would she do that?” And she just looked at me and she didn’t say anything else. But when she was at friends who were not black, their mother would wash their dish twice. And I was just like—I didn’t know people did that, and that’s not how I was brought up, so—I didn’t but it was just—it was a shocker. There was a lady who lived around the block from me named Hattie—who was somehow my dad’s third or fourth cousin somehow or the other—and she saw me and Valerie coming home. And she would call them and say, “Your daughter’s hanging out with a black girl.” And my mother would say, you know, “Go away. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.” And it was all—it was never a big deal. And they always liked—everyone liked coming to my house because my mom would feed them, didn’t bother them a lot, and never treated anybody any differently. And I had—Carol Thompson had some really rough kids, I mean. It was a—I didn’t realize until—there’s a lady named Bobbie Gutierrez, and I don’t know what her maiden name was, but she went to Monterey. And she ends up in Santa Fe and became superintendent of schools. Gutierrez is her maiden name— and when she kept talking, I thought, she’s got to be from Lubbock because her accent was so familiar. So I finally said, “Where in Texas?” And she told me, and I started laughing. And I said, “I knew it.” Of course, she went to Monterey. And I told her it wasn’t until years later that I realized that police presence at games wasn’t like that for everyone. It was when they played us that they had that many cops. I just thought, Oh, we’re so protected. Isn’t this nice? But it wasn’t. It was because we were rough. And that was life—I wasn’t rough, so I didn’t care, but it was definitely an experience.

AW: Yeah. Carol Thompson was tough, although, there was a time when it was the—

IG: It was the school. It was the original Lubbock High, and—I went—I haven’t been back in a long time, but I went and I went by there and saw that it’s an aquatic center, or something, now. And it looks—it’s completely different.

AW: Yeah. Lubbock High is—they’ve maintained Lubbock High quite well.

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IG: Oh, I think it’s nicer than when—I hadn’t been inside. When I got married—when we got engaged, I told David, “You’ve got to see where I lived. You’ve got to go to Lubbock.” And he was like, “I don’t want to go to Lubbock.” And I said, “You’ve got to see my high school.” And I made him go, and we went. And I couldn’t believe it was better than when I was there. And this is, like, ’96, so it was like twenty years later. And it’s still gorgeous. And for a school that almost got dumped—because I went there right after they almost shut it down to—to integrate the whole town—and they saved it and Mr. Cates brought the International Baccalaureate and all the stuff that they did.

AW: Well, and made it a magnet school. That’s why my kids went. You know, when I went to Monterey in the mid-sixties it was a terrific school. Academically it was—I mean, those of us who graduated from there were equipped. We could write. We knew mathematics. We had I don’t know how many—my senior class had like five National Merit scholars. That was an extraordinary number at that time, but it didn’t last very long. And by the time my kids started, we knew that we couldn’t have them going to Monterey or Coronado, and they had a great experience at Lubbock High.

IG: I just think going to a school that beautiful makes you happy anyway.

AW: Oh, yeah. And bless its heart, Monterey for all the good memories I have of the time I was there—it is an ugly—

IG: No, it was ugly. It was ugly.

AW: It’s still ugly. I was there the other—well, we took Terry. Terry Allen and Joe Harvey are graduates of Monterrey, so we took them—when they were in town for Lubbock Lights, we took them to Monterey and did a program, which was a lot of fun.

IG: Yeah. Sonny Curtis, I think, went to Lubbock High. And, of course, Buddy Holly.

AW: Well, Sonny Curtis actually graduated from Slaton High School.

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IG: Oh, did he?

AW: Yeah, because he grew up in Meadow and then graduated from Slaton, but—

IG: Okay, but didn’t he go to Lubbock High at any time? Who—which—one of The Crickets did.

AW: Well, all three of them. J. I. and Joe B and Buddy all went to Lubbock High.

IG: Okay, that’s right. So I got—

AW: And Niki Sullivan, the cousin, I think he may have grown up in California or something—

IG: Right, I don’t remember.

AW: Yeah. But now, when I was at Monterrey, Lubbock High was still—it was still a very good school. In fact, a graduate the year after me is a terrific musician—he’s a great pal of mine—Bob Livingston, who was part of the Lost Gonzo Band and was on the original—

IG: Oh, I didn’t know that.

AW: Oh yeah. He was a jock, in fact. He was a football player at Lubbock High, but he was a—or is—a terrific musician, still. Yeah, so he was part of a—

IG: I knew that Bobby Keyes was from Slaton. I always remembered that, but I didn’t know Sonny was, too.

AW: Yeah, he—he’s the reason I play guitar because he dated my cousin, Ann, all through public school. And we called him Robert, and I would go over to hang—they were four years older than

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I, so I’d go over to my granny’s house. She was two doors down from Cousin Ann. My cousin Ann was and still is a gorgeous woman. And I just loved to go hang out. So he would—the last thing they wanted was me to show up—so he did this like two or three times, like Charlie Brown kicking the football. He’d say, “Did you ever want to play a saxophone?” and take me out to the—I’d always say yes, and he’d give me the sax and go back up on the porch with my cousin. And he put the mouthpiece on it but—and I would blow until my ears hurt and my eye’s would bug out, and nothing would happen. It was years later I found out they had to have a reed. (both laugh)

IG: Oh, no!

AW: And so when it came time to sign up for band, I said, “I’m not going to do that. I have no idea how those people do that.”

IG: That’s too funny.

AW: Yeah, so Bobby Keys. He was quite a character. I got—later in his life, but to—really to—well, until my aunt died—my cousin’s mother—when Bobby was touring with the Stones and he was in Texas, he would call her on the phone.

IG: Nice.

AW: It was very interesting.

IG: Yeah. He always remembered people. That was something. My English teacher sophomore year, Lois Marie Keaton, had Buddy Holly as a—

AW: Oh, really?

IG: She was at the end of her career with me and it was at the beginning of her career. And she would talk about what an annoying person—he would do bird whistles to bother her and distract

65 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program her because she loved birds. And she’d say, “Oh is that a—?” And it’d be Buddy Holly doing the bird whistles.

AW: Really? Oh, that’s a story I haven’t heard. The bird-whistle story.

IG: Yeah. I loved that. Well, my gym teacher—her name was Bobbie Blocker, and I think she’s passed away—but my gym teacher in middle school—she was my basketball coach—she was like the student body secretary who booked him for one of his first gigs. I mean, I got—because I had grown up in Lubbock, I got all these—when they started doing the Buddy Holly shows and stuff, I had all these stories that nobody else had because I knew different people. Nancy, my teacher, was the student body secretary, so she had stories. And all of these people had their different stories, and they were ones that hadn’t been told before. So that was kind of fun when—I was at the University Daily at that point, and I did—oh that Bill Griggs, who came—he interviewed all those people and did those stories.

AW: Who then moved to Lubbock. Strange guy.

IG: That was strange. It was like—I don’t like anybody that much who I, you know—

AW: No, I actually—about—did you—let’s see, you graduated ’82. No, it would have been right after. It was ’85 when we had Don McLean come, and that was when I was the West Texas Music Association president.

IG: Oh, that wouldn’t have been something.

AW: We had Don McLean come, and I took him, the next day, around town. And he, oddly, what he wanted to do was visit a saddle shop. He was—evidently, had taken up leatherworking. So I took him to a saddle shop and a hat shop, and he was all excited. But we went to—Buddy’s mother was still alive, and so we went to Buddy’s mother’s house. And that was a very touching thing, but I’ll never forget when we got in the car that—because I’d picked him up at the airport and gone straight to the gig, and got everything working. And that was a real busy night. So the next morning I picked him up to drive him around, and we both kind of eyeballing each other warily for a while. And finally Don McLean looked at me and he says, “You’re not one of those, are

66 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program you?” And I said, “No, are you?” And he said, “No. Thank goodness.” So we were able to be pals, but he of course would run up to those, like the Bill Griggs of the world.

IG: Yeah, who were just fanatics. It was a—

AW: Well, and made—Bill made a living selling certified copies of the death certificate. I mean, now that’s weird. That’s just weird.

IG: No, it was weird. It was weird.

AW: But Sonny—what a nice, nice guy. Still stay in touch with him. He’s just a wonderful human being. Just a great guy.

IG: One of the things, I think, that was always true about Lubbock, with all of its issues and stuff, is that people there were very good. I think it’s because it’s such a harsh atmosphere.

AW: I think you’re exactly right. One of the things that is interesting to me is this idea of the frontier, and by the frontier meaning you’re on the edge of where it’s comfortable. I think it’s no—it should be no surprise that women gained the vote, first, in Wyoming—not in Connecticut or New York State or something, but in Wyoming. And I always wondered, How did I grow up in a family where my father used every epithet on the planet—how did I grow up not like that? And finally one day it dawned on me that that was the way my father talked, but the way he behaved was very different. You know, in fact he started working —I was born in Slaton because he was—well he and my mother were there, but he was working at the Cotton Oil mill. And there was a black man that worked there named Joe, and they all called him Uncle Joe. Well, of course that’s an epithet, you know. He was probably nobody’s uncle, but as a little kid I thought he was my uncle. And no one set me straight on it, you know. So there—and they were always kindly toward him and he was kindly toward—so it was like all these—the name calling all was sort of—I guess it was what people did, but—at one level—but at another level I just didn’t—people try to be good people by other people in a difficult circumstance.

IG: They were good neighbors.

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AW: Yeah, and so— think a lot of that—especially the ranching tradition. And you know that because of your connections. You know, you treat people like your neighbor, and everybody’s your neighbor, and so whether you like them or don’t like them is not the issue.

IG: No, it’s—and that’s how my step-dad was. He was just such a gentleman. He didn’t swear at all. He never—he didn’t drink, he’s Methodist. He came home, once, from a company party, and I think he’d had like a drink. And I thought he was going to become an alcoholic, and I just started crying. It was like—and everyone’s laughing at me. But he just was such a good man, and he taught me that you treat people the way you want to be treated, and everything will work itself out. And he had a lot of interesting jobs when we went back. His first job, when he was younger—one of his first jobs—he helped wire the administration building at Tech as a young—

AW: Really?

IG: Yeah, because he was born in 1909, but he’s in his twenties. So one—it wasn’t his first job but one of his first jobs. So he did that, and then one of his last jobs was when they redid the Colosseum. He helped do that. He helped wire the South Plains Mall. They had that job before— so there wasn’t a mall when we moved to Lubbock, and he did that. So he had a lot of interesting things that he did.

AW: Yeah, and got to watch things right up close.

IG: And see the town go from nothing. You know, one of the things we loved when we moved there is that it had brick streets. And are they still there on Broadway?

AW: Yeah.

IG: Oh, good. I love those.

AW: Yeah, we have to fight that battle every so often, though. Somebody comes in, wants to tear them

68 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program up, but there’s a—you know, and it’s only downtown that you’ve got them and mainly on Broadway.

IG: Yes. And they’re special. They’re special. Yeah, he did that tall building. He worked on that.

AW: The Great Plains Life.

IG: Yes, he worked on that, too. And one of the funniest things I remember as an intern in San Angelo is I went home for the weekend, and that’s when they had an old-folk’s home there. And they were doing drag shows in the basement, and all these old people thought it was like a touring show, they came. And I’ll never forget this old lady saying, “I wish women dressed like this nowadays.” And it was all men in drag, (both laugh) and it was so funny because they didn’t realize it was men in drag. And that was—that was a great night. And I thought everyone can get along as long as you don’t realize what you’re at.

AW: That’s right. So a certain amount of blindness—

IG: It can be helpful. I saw The Clash, so that was a really important show in Lubbock.

AW: Well—Jesse Taylor was with them when you saw them there. That’s when they were touring with them.

IG: That’s right. And Joe opened for them, and—and then I used to go see this group called Smokey Joe and the Cookers a lot.

AW: Oh, yeah. Smokey Joe.

IG: Well, the bass player, Mike Roberson was his name, his younger brother worked at the school paper with me.

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AW: Yeah, I don’t know Mike. Didn’t know Mike.

IG: Yeah. And then Mike played the bass in Joe’s band for a while, and he toured with them when Joe was touring with Linda Ronstadt.

AW: Pete Daya [?]. Was Pete Daya playing keyboard with Smokey Joe at the time?

IG: He could have been. I just remember Smokey and Mike because I knew his brother. And Mike had a really interesting job because he did that but then he played in the symphony orchestras of Lubbock, Midland, and Amarillo, and he would drive with his bass to go do those jobs. And we talked a lot about what did it mean for towns like that to make sure they had a symphony orchestra? When, you know, big cities didn’t have those.

AW: No, it was—it’s still a big deal. Lubbock spends a lot of money to keep their symphony up. And they still feel second class because they don’t have a full time, you know, the players still go between Midland and Lubbock and Amarillo, and they’re teachers and professors and what- have-you. But it is a big deal to keep that going. We keep—

IG: They had a great band tradition there, I mean, because Tech had such a good music department.

AW: Yeah. I wish someone would write a history of that. We had a guy named “Prof” Wiley who ran that program at Texas Tech. And he was one of the first people, after the second World War, to realize there are a whole group of people about to hit the streets who played in bands and they’re veterans—and they had the G.I. bill. And he actively recruited them. And not only that—he had a friend who was band director at Plainview Public High School, and that person was from the Michigan band tradition which is, I guess, was at—for a long time, the premier university tradition, and they had connections to Sousa. So they—“Prof” Wiley and this band director in Plainview—would have a summer band camp for high school and college. And Sousa came, or not—he wouldn’t have been alive then. It would have been whoever was his pal in Michigan would come—and so the result—Texas Tech wound up graduating all of these band directors that went out and in fact, the whole band tradition in the state of Texas.

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IG: Wow.

AW: You can trace right back to—

IG: Tech.

AW: Texas Tech after the second World War. And for—it’s not so much that it’s a big feather in our cap because nobody seems to even know it anymore. But I think the lesson is, you know, when you have a school that really does a job—like you were talking about your journalism professors—the success is measured in people like you who go and make a career out of it and do well, and kind of impact that has in a much larger sense.

IG: That’s true. I know at our high school—Jerry Starks was the band director, and he went to the south for some reason. And he came back and said, “We’re not doing enough.” And he changed all of the Lubbock schools and West Texas, and got them a little flashier—a little more big flowers. We got flags. The Home ec teacher made all the flags and they taught them that summer, and they didn’t do very much but we were the first school to have all those kinds of flags, and it was fun but we were kind of jealous because I was a baton twirler, and we were kind of like, Wow. They’re taking all the attention off of us. But we kept going and we had our thing, and it was just so much fun, and he got his 1 in marching, and then we got our 1 in concerts, so my senior year we got 1s across the board. Everybody was happy, and that was fun. And it’s really interesting how one person can change things—just a little bit, keep going. And, funny, some of those band directors—my son was in high school, and he had a teacher that kept giving him grief. And we started talking on Facebook. And it turned out Mr. Schneider had gone to Tech, and he was a classmate of my band director. And now he’s in Santa Fe, and he’s a good Santa Fe Liberal. And there’s a lot of ex-Tech musicians that are in Santa Fe for some reason.

AW: Yeah. Yeah, and in fact, one of—let me think of his name—Paxton. He was a professor in the school of music and we worked together on a project. But he came—left Tech—and went to the college in Santa Fe. And then—I don’t—he is probably retired by now.

IG: Probably.

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AW: And Ken Dickson who came here—the same college—he’s choral arranger.

IG: Yeah, I remember his name.

AW: And they both came here because they wanted to get out of the redneck.

IG: That’s funny. Well, Juaquin’s my son—his kindergarten music teacher was a lady named Ms. Gabriel, and I didn’t realize until really recently that she went to Tech, too. So I’m just like, Okay.

AW: So, your son is how old now?

IG: Nineteen.

AW: Oh, so what is he doing?

IG: He is a two-time college drop-out and artist. He hates school. He’ll do something eventually, but he’s taught—

AW: What kind of arts?

IG: He’s a painter and he’s a self-taught blacksmith.

AW: Really.

IG: Mm-hm. He’s making a knife right now in my fireplace.

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AW: Well, he—blacksmiths, in our part of the world, can still make a living.

IG: They actually can here, and I think he was going to do blacksmith—we have a school here, and he was going to go, but he hurt his ankle really badly, so he can’t stand up that long. So as soon as it gets well he’s going to go back and do some training and then see if he likes it.

AW: Yeah, an artist friend of mine in Lubbock, Steve Teeters, taught blacksmithing and had workshops. And in fact, when he’d get a little money, he’d organize a blacksmith workshop.

IG: That’s smart. Well, what Juaquin was saying is he can do gates for rich peopleand make big gates, and then do smaller things, and that way he can keep a living, but his big thing is his painting, but that’s—even in Santa Fe, which is an art place, you’ve got to have something else to bring in money.

AW: Oh, yeah, well because so many other people—it’s like trying to be a musician in Austin. Too many people go there, very tough.

IG: Well, there wouldn’t be an Austin music scene if everyone hadn’t left Lubbock, though.

AW: That’s exactly right. What’s next, for you?

IG: I don’t know. I—my—we have a joke—

AW: You’re bound to be getting a little bored. You’ve moved around—these great jobs for so many times, so—

IG: I did. I have the best job that I could have in journalism because I’m—this is more or less a hometown paper for me because we got it in Las Vegas when I was a little girl. I delivered it when I was a child. So I’m getting to work in a community that I care about—that I love—where my roots go deep, and the things we write about make a difference. We—

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AW: You’ve got a lot to write about now.

IG: It’s—there’s all sorts of stuff happening. But two weeks ago we wrote an editorial about—the mayor had a plan to start a special green fund to help fight climate change and poverty. He was going to use fifty million dollars of excess money that was in the water fund. And we wrote an editorial saying it’s lovely to fight these things, but the water fund is for these things, not for that. And it took three days for him to change his mind and to use something else to do his fund.

AW: Wow, that’s—

IG: And, it’s like—

AW: Yeah, that’s—talk about power.

IG: Yeah, it was quick. It was—and I didn’t think it’d happen that quickly, but it did. And we’ve got politics. We’ve got the state capital. And we have a really good editor who’s very aggressive at covering all those things. You know, the last guy who had this job had it for twenty years, and I seriously doubt I can last until I’m seventy. But if I could work until I’m ready to retire, that would be something. And this newspaper is locally owned. We do as well as you could do in the journalism climate today. So I think we’ll last longer than most.

AW: Do you—can you talk something about what you think about the prospects are for local papers because we don’t have such good paper. And we have some good people, but it’s not such a good paper. It’s part of a big chain. But I take it anyway just because—

IG: You want to keep it going.

AW: Yes. Same reason, when I come to Santa Fe, I go to an artisan and I buy something, whether I need it or not, just because—

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IG: It’s a local.

AW: Not—and not everything should be on the web. People should have local places.

IG: And it—and where else can you see the check from Georgia O’Keeffe.

AW: Right.

IG: Right, by the—the deal.

AW: Well, and where else can you pick something up and say, “Yeah, I like that,” or, “I don’t like it.” So what’s going to happen when the local papers are gone, and—or is that going to—day going to come? What’s—?

IG: I don’t know. What I think is going to happen is that there will always be journalism, and that’s what’s important. It’s not whether you get it in print or whether you get it on the web—that there will always be reporters asking questions, and finding out stuff that authorities don’t want you to know. The key is is that we have no way of paying for that on the web right now, so the reason you still have print newspapers is because they still make more money than an internet site. So if someone can figure out how to pay for it on the web, we’ll go there.

AW: Yeah, well, you know, I subscribe to the New York Times on the web because in Lubbock you can’t get it any more in print.

IG: Oh, deliver it here. Home delivery.

AW: Well—used to in Lubbock, and now you can’t. So I take it on the web, but I really like it on the web because I can read it anywhere. I don’t have to worry about it—I would subscribe to the Avalanche-Journal on the web, if I—if it gave me the same thing that the paper does. And they don’t yet do that.

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IG: We have that. We have an app that does that.

AW: Yeah. Does that make money for you? Subscription?

IG: I think it’s get—yeah. They’re doing better. Like Ray always says—he’s our editor—what it does is it’s free because you don’t have any cost of delivery, so everything you get’s gravy.

AW: And presses don’t break down, but can you—charges. One of the problems with the web is everyone expects everything to be free, or cheap.

IG: No, you can’t charge as much, and that’s the key is you're not going to—and you can’t get as much—advertising is what supports us, not subscriptions, and we’re not going to get enough advertising, at this point, to pay for what we need to pay for. And some people think that like at the Taos News, which is a weekly paper, things like that will always stay in print, or at least longer because they’re the only place covering their community at all. So I think they have a future. I think even a daily paper like us—we’re a town that has really successful local bookstores. So we have people who read. We have an aging population of retirees who like print. So we have a lot of factor going in our favor, and so—

AW: And you’re in the capital. That should have some—I would think you would have some—

IG: Yeah. Hope—We hope. And you just, all you can do it just do a good job covering stories. And that’s what Ray at the new—he’s been the editor now for three years, and his focus has been putting resources into reporting. So we still have more reporters at a paper our size anywhere else. And we have a bigger staff than a paper our size anywhere else. We always did because we always made a lot more money, frankly, than other places because—we have specialty publications. We have an arts magazine once a week. We have an Indian Market magazine that’s 200 pages in the summer—and those things are very successful journalistically and advertising. And that’s kept us—niche publications have kept us going. And we’ll just—you just keep it up until the day that it happens. My theory is that someday, someone will figure out a business model that works for the web—maybe not as well as it did in print when we were successful, but enough. And that day, all the print will go away. It will almost go like that (snaps) overnight.

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AW: Well, they’re going to—the web model’s going to have to come because people like myself, in music and writing, you don’t make any money off of your product anymore. It becomes like a business card, so you can get a live performance where you get paid, or you get another job or something—commission job. I make—where I make money writing plays is when people commission me to write a play. You get paid one time, and so you have to get paid well. But the old model was, you write a play and it’s gets published, and people—

IG: Keep doing it.

AW: Yeah, and same with songs, but everybody wants music for free on the web. So it’s going— somebody’s going to have to come up with a model.

IG: And they’ll figure out something. I mean, I read all the time now because—I think kindle’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I love it, but I’ve got to be a reviewer, so I can get books for free because I was paying too much money. Even paying three dollars a book—if you read ten books a week, that’s thirty dollars. That’s too much. So, that’s helped me, but I can—three dollars, I think, is too much, but it really isn’t when you talk about what the writer’s getting. So I know that with my head, and I just keep thinking, Give them to me free.

AW: I have a dozen titles in the series I edited at Tech, and I got—my royalty check, for the year, is like eighty bucks. (laughs)

IG: Oh, that’s so painful. Well, I’m just the editor, but still it’s—

IG: But still.

AW: It’s crazy.

IG: When David and I were engaged, he got commissioned to do an article on turquoise for New Mexico Magazine, and he didn’t want to do it because he was busy, and he was a lawyer. He was too important. And I yelled at him and said, “Do the article. You can finish it.” So he finished it,

77 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program and we got five hundred bucks, and that paid for the food for our reception, because we had, like, a pueblo feast. And we just had to buy the food and the ladies cooked it. And every once in a while they reprint that, and he gets a check. And I’m like, “Aren’t you glad you did that?” (both laugh) because that’s—you know, because it’s always nice to have extra money just coming in for no reason.

AW: Yeah, it is. One of the things that we would be interested in at such a time that you think about this is—your archive of material needs to go somewhere when you’re thinking that direction. You mentioned retirement. And we’d certainly—if you don’t archive it here—somewhere in the state—we would love to have it, but we would certainly—even if you archive it here in New Mexico. And I wouldn’t argue against that one bit because there is something important about things staying where—in a place. But the parts of your life about Lubbock and Texas Tech, we’re really interested in those.

IG: Okay.

AW: Photographs—all that sort of thing—diaries, letters. We’re in the process of bringing—trying to bring in Terry and Jo Harvey’s collection. I met with Paul yesterday, and I’m going to go back over there this afternoon, too. We’re working on getting his archive so that, you know, 200 from now, they can listen to you talk. And I’ll—

IG: Who would want to? (laughs)

AW: No. I think—you know, I became a born-again archivist when I was doing—writing a play on my uncle, Charlie Goodnight and realizing the things that we don’t know, the everyday things.

IG: That’s true.

AW: For one thing, no one has any recording of his voice. No one knew how he talked. They knew he cussed a lot, but they didn’t know—they couldn’t describe his voice. Plenty—photographs of him, but—so just a thing like—as simple as listening to someone speak, you know, what’s the accent like, or those kinds of things. Those are incredibly important.

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IG: I never picked up the accent in all those years. I worked very hard to not. (laughing)

AW: Yeah, well, and you’ve had plenty of opportunities to have different accents

IG: Yes. Well, when I was a little girl—because Las Vegas has a very distinct accent. It’s like English and Spanish, and—and my mother did not let us talk like that. It was like whack, “You’re not talking like that.” So it was—

AW: Yeah, in fact, I noticed that this summer sitting in the restaurant. I—

IG: Yes. It’s a sing-songy—yes. Yeah.

AW: And moved very effortlessly back and forth. But it also made—my Spanish is pretty weak. Now, I did well in school, but I never developed a good conversational—but it made it even harder to understand the Spanish because you never knew what you were listening to. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I wonder why that is for Las Vegas.

IG: I think it’s because they speak in Spanish, and they take the Spanish lilt to English. And our Spanish is a little different. My mom always had a little trouble translating when she was in Texas because we have an older dialect that was kind of isolated.

AW: Yes, well Spanish is very, very localized—vocabulary and everything else—and that’s really very interesting.

IG: Yeah, we were—I always compare—I always tell people—because they say, “Why are you Hispanic and not Mexican?” You go into the whole thing. And some people here don’t even like the word Hispanic because they use Hispano or—we don’t use Latino. Almost no one uses that here, but I said, “Think about Appalachia. If you’re a person of English or Scottish descent and you go to New Jersey or Georgia versus going to Appalachia, you’re a lot different three hundred years later.” I said, “Northern New Mexico is the Appalachia of the Spanish world”—because

79 Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Oral History Program we were cut off. We had our own dialect, and we intermarried over four hundred years, and we’re our own thing.

AW: And it’s closer to the dialect that was here 400 years ago, too. It’s like in Appalachia.

IG: Yes. Yes, it is. And it’s a wonderful, archaic language, and the traditions are really—they’re different. And, when I moved around the country, it was really interesting—because of course in Texas there were lots of Mexican Americans—and I remember being asked to stand up in a quinceañera when I was in junior high, and my mother said, “What’s that?” And they’re like, You don’t know what that is? And we didn’t know. And then, when she heard what it was, she said, “That’s ridiculous. Save the money for college. You’re not doing that.” (laughs) And I didn’t get to be in a quinceañera and wear a pretty dress. I was very sad, but she—

AW: So, were there many Cubans in your part of Florida?

IG: Yes. Not like in Miami because we actually had—Palmetto was over the bridge, too, which is where they had a lot of Mexicans who grew tomatoes—so he had that but we did have Cubans, and we had some really interesting Cuban restaurants and people who came. But they—there’s a few Puerto Ricans, too, for some reason. I don’t know why.

AW: We have lots of different Spanish speaking students at Texas Tech, and one of my favorite pastimes is to listen to them make fun of one another’s Spanish.

IG: Yes.

AW: Depending on where they come from—

IG: They definitely—they do.

AW: Because they’re so different.

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IG: What I remember about Tech Too is we had a lot of Middle Eastern students because of the International Center for the Study of Arid and Semi-Arid Lands, and—

AW: And petroleum.

IG: Yep. And the crown prince, my freshman year, he was still studying at Reese Air Force Base. And we would see him at different bars, and that was very exciting. But kind of sketchy, too, you know. And there was that whole thing going on with Iran, and you’d go down Broadway to go to school and there was a frat house that was always hanging fake Iranis—“You have our hostages”—and they would hang effigies out the window. It always seemed kind of violent, but that was the mood, “We’re going to get you people.”

AW: Right, well it’s kind of still a mood, isn’t it?

IG: It is. Well, I always joke. I mean, used to ask people, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I mean, that campus went 80 percent for Reagan in 1980—something like that or 70 percent. It was some ungodly number. And it was like, If you’re this conservative now, what are you going to be? Attila the Hun? You know, what can you grow into? And I still wonder about those people because they were so conservative, and yet they were all getting drunk and sleeping around on weekends and acting like crazy people which is—and kind of how it’s—for me it’s not that hard to understand the evangelical voter today because they always had this split personality. As long as I’m saved, I can go do it again, and I’ll get saved tomorrow.

AW: Yeah, well, you can look at the far right and gays in the far right—especially in the fifties—you know, that’s an interesting dynamic.

IG: Talk about self-loathing.

AW: Yeah.

IG: That’s actually—

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AW: Butch. Butch Hancock’s line, you know, “When I was growing up in Lubbock, I was taught that sex was dirty and nasty, dangerous and evil, and you should save it for someone you love.” (both laugh) So I’ve always thought that that described that cultural conservatism to a—quite a—

IG: When I was a baton twirler, this girl joined the squad, and she was—had been in foster care. And she was very mysterious to me because it was pretty obvious that she’d actually had sex—which I knew people were doing, but I was a very sheltered person, and they were—my friends were really nice to me. They never talked to me about what was really going on at the school, so I was oblivious to everything. But she sat there during lunch once to tell me that I was going to hell because I was a Catholic, and that she wanted to save me, and could she help me? And I was like, “No, you can’t help me.” And I was thinking about the gossip about her—which wasn’t really nice of me, but I think she had had sex and an abortion. And that was the story. And I don’t know if it was true or not, but I was like, “But—but you did—.” And I didn’t think she was going to go to hell for those either, but all I could think was, Why do you think being a Catholic is worse than all of this stuff that you’ve been doing? And we never were friends after that. That just drove me nuts. But they wanted you to be born again and their way, and you couldn’t do it any other way. I mean, people would ask you, “Are you a cannibal?” because the body and blood of Christ.

AW: Oh, yeah.

IG: “Do you worship the Virgin Mary?” And I just—it was such a shock to my system because everyone in Las Vegas that I knew was Catholic. We would sit on the front porch and watch people go to the Baptist church and think, Oh, those poor people. Why are they going to that church? We didn’t know why anyone would.

AW: Yeah, you know, I guess growing up in Slaton, where there were so many Catholics, we didn’t— it wasn’t quite the same.

IG: No, because the German Catholics kind of ran the town in some way. They definitely had a lot power.

AW: Oh, they were all—the [inaudible Kitten]. They were all, you know—

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IG: I had a Kitten in my class.

AW: Yeah, well you would—hard not to have one. (laughs)

IG: No, there was a bunch of them. (both laugh)

AW: So it was a little different, but—very interesting. Well, what should I have asked—what topic should I asked that that we haven’t—?

IG: I don’t know. You seem very thorough. That’s—I always ask that question at the end though, too. That’s a good one.

AW: Yeah, it is a good one. Sometimes people have something they just want to say, and you haven’t gotten around to it.

IG: The one interesting thing about my house—my street in Lubbock which I—Mr. Woods was our neighbor—but I lived three houses up from the dollhouse which I don’t know if you’ve heard of.

AW: Oh, I not only did I, but my partner—my partner is Gary Satterfield—his mother-in-law ran the Doll House.

IG: Was she the lady that lived—because I knew her because I went in there. We were friends.

AW: Oh, oh, no. You’re not talking about the café.

IG: No, no. I’m talking about the house—

AW: The house that has the—

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IG: —that had the dolls that was packed full and that the fraternity prank was that you had to go in the house. Her husband was a concert pianist, and when he died it shattered her, and she retreated into this house with her doll collection and the collection of newspaper clipping about him. And there was this much space to walk. And she didn’t turn on her lights, so they thought that no one lived there. And they would go scare her. Every year they would go frighten her by going into her house and frightening her. And there was a big, kind of a bump in the front of the yard which people thought was a dead body. It was not. And it was really interesting getting to college and hearing the rumors and the stories, and then knowing the reality that she was just a nice old lady who liked to live by herself.

AW: Yeah, so you’d been in the dollhouse and could dispel the rumors.

IG: I did. And we did a story on it for the paper about—

AW: Oh, really? For the University Daily?

IG: Yes, and I told them, “This isn’t true.” That was one of the first times I got mad at an incorrect story, and I said, “What you’ve done is you’re going to scare her again because people are going to go bother her. Someone does live in that house. She does have lights. She just doesn’t like to turn them on. Leave her alone.” So that was my trying to tell them the truth of Lubbock as opposed to the myths.

AW: Dispelling an urban legend.

IG: And urban legend. That’s right.

AW: That’s very cool. I’ll look that up, too. I’d like to read that. That’s—

IG: I think it was by Eileen somebody. I can’t remember, but it was something. I think the other thing about my paper is that a lot of the people on the UD in those days—you know, Tod Robberson. The one whose brother played with Joe Ely and with Smokey Joe—he went on to the

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Dallas Morning News. He won a Pulitzer Prize. And now he’s editorial page editor in St. Louis. He’s had a very, very successful journalism career. He covered two wars and went all over the world. Who else? And then Kim Cobb was a reporter at the Houston paper forever, and now she does, like, I think for SMU she does school PR. But there were a lot of actual people who were reporters for a long, long time, and that was kind of fun because what you did mattered and it continued to keep you going. I really enjoyed that. Because of Facebook I talk to them all.

AW: (laughs) All right. Do you ever get back to Lubbock?

IG: Not very much. I went a couple of times to talk at Tech, and then I go visit my brother once in a while. But when my mom was still alive, he would come up here because she was kind of frail and she couldn’t go anywhere. And now if I’m going to go see him, I’m going to have to go back myself because he doesn’t like—he drives so much he doesn’t—and he delivers the paper, too, so when he’s off, he helps his wife.

AW: Yeah. Bless his heart.

IG: I know.

AW: Because they’re late all the time and not because of him. They’re—those presses, I guess, are getting kind of old.

IG: Yeah, I think so. It’s true.

AW: Well, if you do come back, you know how to get ahold of me.

IG: I will.

AW: And I’d like to take you around the archive, and—

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IG: Oh, I’d love to see that.

AW: And whatever else you—we can—

IG: One of my friends in junior high, her dad worked at Tech doing something, and he was in the Ag school. And because of him, we go to go visit the horse. The Red—I don’t know what it—but anyway, that was one of the biggest thrills of my life is to actually go visit and pet the horse. So there were so many interesting connections and different things to do at Tech.

AW: Well, Lubbock wouldn’t be what it is, for better or worse, without Texas Tech.

IG: No.

AW: It’s incredible how important it is.

IG: My aunt was—I don’t know when she graduated, ’31 ’32? She graduated really early on, or ’34, something. I don’t remember when she graduated, but she graduated—and daddy dropped out of school to work because of the depression, but my stepsister’s husband went there and got his PhD in Geology. You know, there’s a lot of connections, and it was huge. And then the fact that we got the medical school and the law school—I think it’s the only college in Texas that has all of them on one campus—and that was pretty amazing.

AW: Yeah, and it’s made a big difference. And—yeah, there’re really some nice things about it. It’s still a—the thing that I like about it in Lubbock is that, you know, Amarillo has a gentry—money inheriting gentry—so does San Angelo. If people had money in Lubbock, they’re—

IG: They made it.

AW: They made it. Almost exclusively, they are the people who made it. And Tech is the same way.

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The people there who are good at what they’re doing are good because they’re still doing it, and it’s—I think that’s a real great environment for someone who wants to learn.

IG: What I liked a lot—because I did political science. It was almost a double major, but it was my minor—is they didn’t mind you asking questions. And it was hard because so many people were so conservative, and they were so rigid in how they thought. But the professors really provoked you to think. And one thing that struck me about Lubbock that I’ve never understood—and I still don’t—is when I became and education reporter and I would write about banned books. I read every one of those books—that was banned—in Lubbock schools, and nobody ever banned anything. And, I don’t know, for as conservative and everything else—you know, don’t have anything on a Wednesday night. All of that stuff—it was incredibly curious and free-thinking at the same time.

AW: Yeah, it’s a—it’s a conundrum and a paradox. (Inez laughs) I’m presently writing a history that’s—my working title is The Water Road—talking about the fact that we’ve had people living that—you mentioned, “Why is anyone here?” And Barry Lopez said, “Every city has a mystery.” And I said, “Well, then the mystery of Lubbock is, Why is anybody here?” The answer is because, I think because there’s been water there for twelve thousand years. When there was water nowhere else there was still water there. They never stayed there but they traveled back and forth. And I think that mobility—of course I’m a child of the sixties. I think the vibes of all those people traveling around—there’s still something about that in our part of the world that— that mobility of ideas is still alive. And in spite of the cultural conservativism which it’s pretty much cultural because like you say that it’s also a beer drinking culture. It also a honky-tonk culture. It also all those kinds of things, but yet—in spite of the fact that in the thirties there was a group of people in Lubbock who tried to get a whole slew of Texas Tech professors fired because they were liberals. In spite of that it has tempered, as you understood, the whole climate, and so many of our teachers in public—in Lubbock public schools when I was going—I remember they were all young, and they were all fresh out of college, and they were fresh out of Texas Tech. And they stayed there for at least for a time while their husbands or wives were finishing their degrees. And so you had this young group of university people that were our teachers, and I think that helped us a lot. And maybe it’s that way everywhere, but it certainly seemed to be a factor.

IG: Well, you didn’t have to go from somewhere else to get there because you had the university right there that was feeding you and helping you grow. I just remember them being so—because so many school teachers I meet nowadays aren’t that curious, necessarily, and the ones I had were just always curiou,s and they were poking you to do better and do more.

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AW: Yeah. Well, curiosity has taken a real beating of late, and I—and especially in schools, I think. And, of course, I’m willing to lay the blame on the testing regimen. I teach songwriting, and I have seen, over the fourteen years or so I’ve been teaching it, I see the declining curve in how well students read and how well students write and how curious they are about things. It’s, you know—

IG: That’s the only reason I haven’t killed my kid for not wanting to go more to school is that he’s incredibly curious, and every day he’s telling me something else that he’s learned or he’s found out or that he’s taught himself. So as long as he’s doing that—

AW: Oh yeah. The curiosity—it’s the first step in creative work. If you’re not curious, you may replicate something, but you’re never going to do something new. You’ve got to have it.

IG: Yep. And you have to have the desire to break out. And I think that was—one of the things I always think about Lubbock versus Santa Fe—and I think Santa Fe, to me, is the best place to live. I can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else, but our public buildings here, except for perhaps the capitol, are not very pretty. And one thing about Lubbock—when you think about Lubbock High School or the courthouses—they have—and Tech buildings. They have beautiful public buildings, and I’ve always admired that the people there made beauty in an ugly place.

AW: Yeah. Well, you know, my daughter, Emily—the one who’s born in 1980, and a little older than Natalie—Emily is now Director of Public Art for the university system, and in this really—and so I know all these facts because of—she tells me. But we’re one of the top few universities in the nation in public art. Now that is an interesting—

IG: That is.

AW: —idea.

IG: And it’s more than the Will Rogers statue.

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AW: Yes. We have a—although that’s our first piece of public art. She told me that too, but—

IG: Oh, that’s awesome.

AW: —in fact, she got married this—just this past Saturday, and she got married in front of the first piece that she got to shepherd through the system.

IG: Oh, nice.

AW: Yeah, so that was kind of cool. So it’s also—here’s—you have this very conservative area where the public art is a big deal, and that’s another one of those mysteries.

IG: Well, our art teacher at Lubbock—I can’t remember her name—but our art teacher at Lubbock High was a sculptor, and we had a westerner in the courtyard that she made. And there was always, I mean, an emphasis, and Lubbock had the murals—I mean it was such a pretty—

AW: Yeah, the Holden murals.

IG: —the tile, everything. And it was a WPA project, a lot of it—the auditorium. And when I went to work in San Angelo, I’m in the city hall and looking at their city auditorium, and it was—it was the same. It was my auditorium in high school. It was the same one. So that was kind of fun. I love the mural at Hodgkin Hall. I think that’s—is that the political—?

AW: Oh, no. No.

IG: What’s the name—?

AW: At—Holden Hall.

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IG: Holden Hall. That’s it. That’s it. Holden. I like that mural because our doctor, when we moved back, was Sam Arnett.

AW: Well, Peter Hurd, you know, I mean, he’s a New Mexican.

IG: That’s right. Well, his daddy was the rancher in the picture. And Dr. Arnett went against the family because he was supposed to be a rancher too, and he didn’t want to be a rancher. He wanted to be a doctor. And he broke off and went off to medical school.

AW: You know, Peter Hurd had more women in that mural and they made him—

IG: Oh, no.

AW: —so he moved—he just moved them back, so if you ever see the mural again, you’ll see the women. They’re not standing up front, but there are still women there.

IG: Oh, that’s—I’ve got to go look at that. That’s awesome.

AW: Yeah, it’s very interesting.

IG: There’s a lot of pioneer spirit that they left, and they kept there.

AW: Yeah, well very interesting.

IG: Well, thank you.

AW: All right, I know you’ve got work to do, so I’m going to say thanks again.

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IG: Well, it was not of you to take so much time.

AW: Oh, no, this is—you’ve got your job. This is my job which is terrific. Thanks.

IG: What a fun job.

End of Recording

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