JOHNNY, THE BARBER OF TAOS BY JOHNNY TAFOYA Johnny Tafoya TABLE OF CONTENTS Intro - Johnny, The Barber of Taos Chapter 1 - Going to School Chapter 2 - My First Fish Chapter 3 - Canon School Chapter 4 - Sheephearding Chapter 5 - My Pal, Sam Chapter 6 - Mesa Larga Chapter 7 - Making Adobes and High School Chapter 8 - My First Car and The Fighter Chapter 9 - California Bound Chapter 10 - The Army Chapter 11 - Going Over Seas Chapter 12 - I Met Anita Chapter 13 - Civilian Life Chapter 14 - Heading To California Chapter 15 - Barber College Chapter 16 - Back To Taos Epilogue - October 23, 2008 From The Taos News, 10 year anniversary for Johnny’s Barber Shop A note about this book In 2006, while visiting my brother and sister at military school in Roswell, New Mexico, my grandfather called me to his truck parked outside the hotel where we were all staying. He told me had something special for me and wanted my help. Naturally, I said yes, but I don’t think I was prepared for what he handed me. Papa handed me two standard notesbook, full of handwritten stories. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. The writing was in perfect cursive and I could tell some- one had taken a great deal of time writting it. I asked what it was and he explained to me that it was his life story. He had recently retired and I guess he had some free time on his hands! I was excited to have these books. I remember hearing a lot of these great stories from my Papa when the family would get together at dinners for the holi- days, but to be able to have his life story in one spot was such a blessing. Not to mention, my Papa had a 10th grade education, and here he had hand-written over two hundred pages of stories. I looked through them and asked what he wanted me to do. He aksed me if I would proof it and type it all out so they could read by everyone, and this is the work of over five years I was still in school at the time at Texas Tech and soon after that I started working. I would work on the book when I had free time. At first, I thought it would be simple to just re-type what was written. There was care put into each story, but it needed some work. I struggled to find the right voice, whether it should be written in past or present tense. I toyed with leaving all the little sayings and fragments that he wrote, or if it should be changed into a formal text. After countless edits, re-edits, sending copies back and forth for correctness, tracking down old photos and restoring them to add, I think the book is ready. Such an amazing story and just reading it reminds me that when I think life gets tough, it could be a lot tougher. Thank you Papa for giving me the opportunity to write this book. I hope you like what I have done and that everyone who reads this will appreciate your life and work. - Mike Devlin Johnny Tafoya, age 8 JOHNNY, THE BARBER OF TAOS I am writing this to my children and grandchildren, so they will know more about my life; so they will know what it was like growing up before indoor plumbing and the Internet. Sometimes I want to tell them all about my life, but kids don’t listen. They always tell me, “Those were the old days.” Nowadays, kids have so many material things that they fail to realize what people went through in the early 1900’s just to survive: two world wars, the Great Depres- sion, unemployment, and poverty. Although it all sounds pretty bad, when I stop think about it, I have lived an exciting life. I was born October 23, 1936 in Billings, Montana. My parents had three kids be- fore me, Leroy, then Evan, and then Rachel. Leroy had passed away when he was five months old. Rachel was only 1½ years old when my mother was pregnant with me. My parents were originally from New Mexico, but there was no work there. Be- fore I was born, my father heard about plenty of farm work in Montana, so he and my mother, and my sister Rachel left to Montana. Evan was left with my mother’s parents at their ranch in Sofia, New Mexico. It was a big ranch with a lot of cattle. My father found work at a farm working from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week. Although he worked more than 80 hours a week, he still did not make much money. My mother stayed home with my sister, waiting for me to be born. My father came home in the evening from work October 23, 1936 to find my mother already in labor. He picked her up in his arms and carried her to the back seat of his car and drove three miles to a midwife’s house. I was already born by the time he arrived and opened the car door. He picked up my mother and me and took us into the midwife’s house. He asked the lady, “Is it a boy or a girl?” The lady opened the blanket and responded, “It’s a boy!” Dad ran out to the car, grabbed Rachel, and told her she had a little brother. There wasn’t much farming work in the winter, especially in Montana, so we re- turned to New Mexico in the middle of December. My mother was anxious to see my sister Evan and my father was excited to show everyone his new son. They called me “Montana” rightfully so. My father bought an acre of land in Taos, New Mexico. There he built his own two-bedroom adobe house. By that time, I was 2 years old and had a little brother of my own, Arthur. My father worked construction. There was not a lot of work to be done, but we were okay. We ended up moving to Colorado in 1938 because Taos had little work for us to do. There my father worked on a sugarcane farm. Soon after that my sister Irene was born. We stayed for two years, but before moving back to Taos, one more child was born, Gill. We stayed in Taos for a year and a half then moved to Superior, Wyoming where my father went to work in the coalmines. There were already a few people from Taos that moved to Wyoming, all with kids of their own. We headed north in a four door Model-A, loaded with a couple of mattresses, extra tires, a few dishes, pans, six kids, and my father and mother. This was how people traveled and moved around during The Depression. To move a family of six nowadays would require a full-size trailer and two vehicles. CHAPTER 1 GOING TO SCHOOL I was enrolled in the 1st grade at B-Hill Elementary in Wyoming. The children didn’t know much English when we got to Wyoming. My mother would teach us when she had time, but she was always busy cooking, cleaning, and taking care of babies. My father had no time to help us with our English because he would come home tired from being in the coal mine all day, so we spoke only Spanish. The other families from Taos lived on the other side of Superior and their kids went to a different school. The first day of school came and all the gringos called us names. My sisters, Evan and Rachel, took me to the 1st grade room and all the kids looked at me strangely. We would go out for recess and they would say, “Mexicans eat tortillas and beans.” Well, okay, we did, so I didn’t say anything. I would come home and tell my father what the gringos said and he would say, “Tell them we eat tortillas and beans, you eat slop.” They finally quit calling me names. I was the only Spanish boy in 1st grade. There was one freckled-faced, red-hair boy who always picked on me. He would accuse me of carrying a machete under my coat, and I was only in the 1st grade! I was going home after school one day and walked down a pretty steep hill. We lived about a half-mile away from the school. I was at the top of the hill and there was the red haired freckled boy wait- ing for me. I walked by and he pushed me. Well, I was pretty good at fighting because I fought with my brother Arthur all the time. He pushed me again, so, I started punching him. He fell on the ground and I got on top of him and punched him till he started crying. The ground was covered in snow so his face was full of snow and tears. The next day I had a few new friends and people didn’t call me names anymore. Half the year passed and a new little boy had come to school. A quiet Negro boy named Albert. The same thing happened to him as did to me; all the gringos called him names like, Little Black Samboo. I told him not to pay any attention to them because they did the same thing to me, and from that point on we sat next to each other and carried our lunches to school together everyday.