Features

Talk of the Town

Ashleigh Morris


Back in 1972, when local magazines were few and far between, two entrepreneurial women launched The Santa Fean Magazine—because they loved their adopted town and the people within it. Thirty-five years later, the publication is still going strong. We invite you to take a look back at the early years—in honor of founders Betty Bauer and Marian Love, their efforts, and lasting legacy.

In a world where magazines tend to come and go, Santa Fean is a bit of an anomaly. Launched in 1972 by two women in a small town, this publication has been going strong for 35 years, 24 of those under its original owners.

To put the efforts of founders Betty Bauer and Marian Love in perspective, consider this: New York magazine was launched only four years prior. But that’s New York, which, by the late 1960s, numbered 1.5 million people in Manhattan alone—quite a far cry from sleepy Santa Fe, which, around that time, could count 54,000 citizens in the city and county. In 1972, Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up, the Apollo 17 mission landed on the moon, Richard Nixon was reelected president, the average home price was a mere $27,000, and the average salary was $11,800. The Volkswagen Beetle was the country’s most popular car. Atari released the revolutionary game Pong. And HBO launched the country’s first subscription cable service.

Here in Santa Fe, just a blip on a map above Albuquerque, many of the city’s roads were unpaved. Gerald Peters was opening his first gallery. The living history museum El Rancho de Las Golondrinas was founded on the outskirts of town. Joe Valdes was mayor, and today’s head of city hall, David Coss, was donning a cap and gown to receive his diploma from Santa Fe High. It was also the year that two determined women embarked upon an unlikely endeavor that, too, would make history.

Betty Bauer was in love with the Land of Enchantment at first sight. “I came to Santa Fe by accident in 1948,” she wrote in her 2004 biography My City Different: A Half-Century in Santa Fe. Raised in Missouri, Bauer was visiting Colorado when her friends insisted she take a detour south. “Santa Fe was unlike any place I’d ever been or imagined,” she recalled. “We went to the Pink Adobe, which, at that time, was in Prince Patio. … The sky was so blue, breathtakingly blue and clear and clean. I had never missed St. Joe, but I missed Santa Fe the day we left and every day thereafter until in 1953 I came home.”

When Bauer returned, she first took a job at the Santa Fe New Mexican, but it was an unlikely partnership she’d soon forge with another transplant that would alter her path. “Marian Love had come to Santa Fe in 1943 with her three little boys—six-year-old John, Fred, who was four, and Ralph, not yet two. She was a New Yorker, had worked for Time/Life, and had come west because John was an asthmatic,” Bauer penned. “I met Marian during the summer of 1955 when, being briefly out of work because I’d left the New Mexican in a huff, I was waiting tables … and Marian, to help out and earn a few extra bucks, was doing the same.”

While the two would see each other in passing over the years, it was an afternoon at the opera in 1968 that changed everything. She recalled: “I spotted Marian, whom I hadn’t seen in some time. She was with Carrie Kelly. I raced over to them and Marian threw her arms around me and kissed me, as did Carrie. Santa Fe was a very kissy town. I asked them to have dinner with me at El Nido. Carrie had other plans, but Marian said she’d go. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and collaboration.”

They first embarked on an advertising agency. “Big talents, but small pickings” is how Bauer described it. “After a few years of near starvation, we decided to bite the bullet and see if we could launch a magazine. How naïve we were.” Back in those days, city magazines were rare, though one did exist here already—La Tourista, “an 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 pamphlet that carried a little advertising and a few trite and often inaccurate paragraphs about Santa Fe and its environs,” she recalled. The two decided they could do it better themselves. “We knew Santa Fe well and we were both writers—the hitch was, to fund our endeavor, we had to have advertising, which meant one or both of us had to go out and sell it. Marian adamantly refused, so that left me. … I knew, if we were to have this magazine, I had to do it.” So it began. “We wrote about Santa Fe through the voices of its people, and we told their stories,” Betty wrote. “We told about their unusual houses and hidden gardens. We spoke of the zesty food, the continental cuisine, and the strangely unique restaurants. We promoted the artists and the galleries. The magazine grew and grew, as did the town. And the more we talked of art, the more artists and galleries migrated to Santa Fe until Santa Fe had become a renowned art center.” And oh, the stories they would tell.

Open Santa Fean Magazine’s debut issue and you step back in time. Published December 15, 1972, it features the work of painter Janet Lippincott on its cover: a sepia-and-yellow abstraction created especially for the launch. On the inside of the cover, in Lippincott’s own scrawl, are the words black feather with marker, lippincott.

The 16-page issue included a profile of this modernist legend, who moved to the region in 1949, and, by this time, had just embarked on works in bronze, casting her sculpture at the Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque. In “Lippincott: To Live Well,” no byline provided, they write: “Some mornings she starts right in painting in her inimitable rich bracing colors; on others she draws on the canvas with children’s crayons, working out her powerful shapes of contemporary art.” Pictures include Lippincott smiling as she feeds the birds. The issue is quaint, local, and yes a little quirky—and it sets the tone for what would follow.

“This magazine is directed toward you, the Santa Fean,” the two announce in their opening letter, which also includes this bit of wisdom: “We certainly cannot and have no intention of excluding the tourist in Santa Fe, because he, too, has and will continue to lend his shorts and his camera … a bit of mirth and a lot of economics to our city.” They also raise issues still lingering today: “How long has it been since you, a Santa Fean, took a walk up Canyon Road?” they ask. “Right here in your own back yard are sights and smells, gifts and delicacies, the quality and quantity of which, you could travel the world and not find on a single road in a single place … Yes we are the oldest capital in the United States. Yes, we build homes with mud, but our uniqueness and fascination does not stop with the past—it’s ever present and ever dynamic.”

A painting by Fritz Scholder graces issue number two. Number three includes a visit with Aline and Eliot Porter (he of photography fame), architect Myrtle Stedman, and artist Vlada Stiha. Although the photographs are often dark and out of focus, the text a little more informal than today’s standard reporting style, each publication provides a glimpse into the past with a charm all its own. In July 1973, they show Shidoni’s founder Tommy Hicks as he walks the reader through the lost-wax method of bronze casting. Next comes a short bit on Canyon Road, with a profile of local icon Tommy Macaione. “Tommy painted outdoors in the sun, the rain, the snow, warm or cold,” Bauer writes. “He haunted Canyon Road and would set up his easel wherever a scene pleased him, no matter how inappropriate or inconvenient it might be to the owner of the premises. … but Tommy had become a Santa Fe institution.” Today, he’s still a presence via a life-size bronze in his liking installed in the park that bears his name at the corner of Hillside Avenue and Paseo de Peralta.

From koshares and La Tertulia restaurant to recipes for bran muffins and performances at the Santa Fe Opera, the two championed their favorite causes. They were never political and always cheerful, whether celebrating Fiestas or saving an ancient cottonwood tree. “My wife and I were in the magazine for a Christmas issue,” says Mike Cerletti, now the head of the state’s tourism department. “We used a live tree, and after the shoot we planted it in the yard; it must be 17 feet tall now. That’s got to be 25 years ago. Every time I see that tree, I think of them.”

Most memorable, though, as you flip through the volumes of back issues, are always the people: from mayordormos and master artisans to celebrities and everyday citizens. “They loved everyone in town and everyone reciprocated,” says Max Martinez, a longtime neighbor of the pair. “They were characters, and they knew everyone.” Over the years, the list of individuals they featured grew long. Some names have passed into the annals of history, while others have become household words, at least in our community if not the world at large: Michael Naranjo, Fremont Ellis, Helen Hardin, Connie Tsosie-Gaussoin, María Benítez, Betty Egan, R.C. Gorman, Laura Gilpin, Allan Houser, Witter Bynner, Amado Peña, Glenna Goodacre, and Dave Grusin, to name but a few. “Back then, Santa Fe wasn’t a divided community. I remember meeting Georgia O’Keeffe at Alexander Girard’s house serving hors d’oeuvres from the Pink Adobe,” recalls photographer Herb Lotz, who moved here in 1970 and took numerous portraits for the magazine over the years. “Most of these people I was shooting were friends. … It was a wonderful time.”

The magazine also had its quirks. The headlines could be quixotic: “Winter in Santa Fe Is a More Accessible, More Relaxed Time: And While There Is Still Plenty to Do, There Is Less Pressure to Do It,” promised an article from January/February 1989. Or repetitious, as in the often-appearing “[insert name], Artist,” be it Allan Houser or Agnes Sims. They touted xeriscaping way back in 1989: “Less Water, Less Work, More Pleasure.” And oddly,  their food section, called the “Recipe Basket,” would include everything from won ton soup to barbecue sauce, with Southwestern specialties few and far between. Yet all the while, they were helping broadcast the appeal of a once-hidden city. On the magazine’s tenth anniversary, Bauer and Love write: “Santa Fe, a closely held secret for so many years, is no longer a secret. On the contrary. Santa Fe has become a household word. We are proud of having been a part of that metamorphosis.”

For 24 years, they published the magazine, and undoubtedly, helped pave  international careers for some of our creative inhabitants. Yet by the 1990s, the two were ready for a change, having written about nearly everyone and everything they ever wanted. “Marian and I sold The Santa Fean in 1994, retired, and spent the next several years seeing the world,” Bauer explained in her memoir, dedicated to all those who contributed to her life and times in the city. Seemingly overnight, the quirky, homegrown publication turned into a city magazine much like others of its time, taking on controversial topics in full color and with a modern redesign. Politicos like then-Congressman Bill Richardson were put on its covers. Yet more change was to come, both in content and ownership, until 2002, when Santa Fean magazine was bought by its current owners, HPJ Media.

When Bauer and Marian moved on, they took with them a guileless charm rarely seen in today’s media. In 1987, for the magazine’s 15-year retrospective, they penned: “Fifteen years of homegrown effort. A little flower that bloomed. Two women who thought they could and did … preserving an image of old Santa Fe. Changing and being changed, from sepia to color slick. What’s next, Santa Fean, what’s next?”

Six years after selling the magazine, Bauer would lose her partner. “The millennium New Year arrived with Marian in the hospital fighting double pneumonia,” Bauer wrote in her memoir. “She lost her battle and died January 5, 2000. With her death, I knew my sojourn in Santa Fe had come to an end. It was time for me to leave my beloved city, but I was confident that those who came after me would find ‘my city different’ just as captivating as I had found it half a century before.”

Bauer passed away this year, on July 28, at the age of 79. The last time she’d visited was for a book signing three years ago. The obituary her family sent the Santa Fe New Mexican noted: “What began as a pamphlet in 1972 grew to become a four-color glossy magazine with subscribers in 30 countries.” And, in late October, as we were putting the final touches on this issue, Love’s grandchildren invited the pair’s longtime friends for a festive memorial celebration at La Fonda, complete with a mariachi band. “They would have loved this,” remarked D.J. Packard, widow of trader Al Packard. Bauer’s ashes were buried next to Love’s at a cemetery in their beloved city.

In a poignant 1987 editor’s note, Bauer reflected: “I’ve lived in Santa Fe such a long time, almost 35 years, that people frequently say to me, ‘I guess you’ve seen an awful lot of changes.’ You bet there have been changes. Streets have been paved. Buildings have been remodeled and spruced up. Litter is under control. … There are many superb restaurants—I remember when we had a choice of three. There is an internationally famous opera and an equally famous chamber music group. Yes, there have been changes. But some things haven’t changed. The mountains are still majestic. The sky is still boundless and very blue. The air is still fresh and clean, and colors are still vivid. And most important, the people are still just as tolerant, indulgent, friendly and interesting—there are just more of them.” Twenty years later and, for us, today’s Santa Feans, the same still rings true.

Note: Betty Bauer’s 2004 book, My City Different, A Half-Century in Santa Fe, a collection of remembrances, is available through local publisher Sunstone Press, sunstonepress.com.