A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

22: Taos People and How I Stretched the City Limits

22 ❙ TAOS PEOPLE AND HOW I STRETCHED THE CITY LIMITS ❙ 129 ❙ Doris finally retired from teaching and came out west to live with me. I was very fond of Doris. She was good company, very intelligent and entertaining, and I was glad to have her. In Taos back then everybody knew everybody. I knew Mabel Dodge and her Taos Indian husband Tony Lujan. Mabel took me around to her house several times and we got to be, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances. And I knew Lady Dorothy Brett, who’d come to Taos with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Lady Brett was English nobility and at first a little aloof, but then she decided I was OK and we got to be friends. She said her first date was with a young fellow named Winston Churchill. I knew Helene Wurlitzer, of the Wurlitzer Organ family, who started the Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, which invites artists and writers to Taos to do their work at the Foundation, and I met Georgia O’Keeffe. Later on I sold Mabel Dodge’s house to Dennis Hopper,who came into town a wild boy. A number of these people might have been famous, but they all just seemed like people to me. I also knew Tinka Fechin.Her father Nikolai Fechin,a painter,had come to Taos in 1920, just before I first saw the place in my Model ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ T Ford.I knew Nola Karavas and her son Saki Karavas,who’d turned the old Columbian Hotel into La Fonda Hotel on the plaza. I knew Craig and Jenny Vincent. They lived in San Cristobal, a valley up toward Questa. They owned El Crepuscalo, the newspaper. I knew Spud Johnson, also a newspaperman. So with Doris’s help, I decided to throw a party and invite everybody I knew.I invited the artists,the writers,the whittlers and carvers, the ranchers,the businessmen,the Spanish farmers,and some Indian friends. They all showed up, and they ate the food and drank the liquor, but they didn’t party well together. They just seemed to fall into groups of people like themselves and not to mix. I found out that day that everybody’s not like me. It never mattered to me who people were or what they did, I got along with them all. The Spanish people owned the land in and around town where they had their little ranches, and the Taos Indians owned the best and prettiest land in Northern New Mexico, including the irrigated land up against the foothills and Taos Mountain itself. So as time passed I kept on investing in the only land available, the sagebrush land at the outskirts of Taos valley.Then I started selling it in one-acre plots. First I developed Taos Mesa Estates, which in time became one of the nicer places to live in Taos. I sold the lots for $500. The last I heard, it was selling for about $25,000 an acre, if you can find anybody wants to sell. My idea in real estate was to sell property at a reasonable price and make a little on it. Then when the new owner got around to selling it, he could make a little on it, too.And I let people pay the only way most of them could, on time. If anybody got behind on their payments , as people sometimes did if they were out of state or traveling , I let it slide or made the payments to the bank myself till I could locate them and give them a chance to catch up. I always thought owning your own place was next to owning your own self. I never let anybody lose their land if I could help it. 130 ❙ TAOS PEOPLE ❙ I was living on the hill in Colonias, but I was still buying old places and renovating them when I discovered this big old adobe house of eleven rooms surrounded by cottonwoods on ten acres in Lower Ranchitos. It was a pretty place in the curve of the road with its own pastures and a stream running through and, down at the lower end, a little low cliff full of Indian rock carvings. The place had gone through foreclosure seven years before, and the house had been very nearly demolished by vandals.The windows were...