One of the burdens an arts critic has to bear is that of suspicion from and by her readers: "Does she really know what she's talking about?" When it came to Margaret M. Barela, there was never really any question that the answer was yes. Barela not only knew what she wrote about; she also knew how to express herself in lucid, thoughtful prose. You might not agree with what she had to say, but you could hardly find fault with how she said it.

Barela had plenty of professional credentials as a pianist, violinist, teacher and scholar to back up her critical opinions. She wrote articles for national and international journals, served on National Endowment for the Arts grants panels, and lectured and taught at many colleges and universities around the country. In New Mexico, she regularly reviewed books and music for both the Albuquerque Journal and Albuquerque Tribune.

As a pianist, Barela performed concerto and recital repertoire widely and collaborated with chamber musicians at the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Oklahoma, Louisiana State University, Roosevelt University and at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, among others. She performed in contemporary music festivals at Texas Tech University, the University of Kansas, Florida State University and Tulane University.


"Dick" Howard may have been best-known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Native American pottery and artists, and his many collections. But he had other facets to his character, all polished to a notable sparkle by his keen mind and insatiable interest in life. He was a faithful friend who never forgot a name or a face; a longtime National Park Service employee and public servant; a foster parent to many troubled teens; and a mentor to countless Indian artists throughout the Southwest.

In 2004, Howard gave a 50th birthday party for the first piece of Native American pottery he ever bought: a jar made by a man known as Eagle Plume at San Juan Pueblo, now Ohkay Owingeh. The 21-year-old Howard paid $2.60 for that find. It was the first in a series of purchases that eventually led to an immense and valuable collection. In 2000, 500 of Howard's pots, many of them by San Ildefonso potter Tonita Roybal, were bought by gallery owner Nedra Matteucci for more than $1 million.

"When he told my parents that he spent $7.50 on his first Maria (Martinez) pot, they almost hit the ceiling and went through it. They said, 'How could you waste money on that stuff?' He's laughed at them ever since," said his sister Judy Gillen.

Besides his government career and his intensive work as an art dealer and collector, Howard was a longtime member of the Southwest Association for Indian Arts board and served for a term as its chairman. He chaired SWAIA's Indian Market judging committee for six years and received a 2007 Povika Award from the organization.


As the Santa Fe Desert Chorale's music director from 1983 through 1998, Larry Bandfield influenced thousands of singers, staff members and concert-goers. His love of choral music was as deep as his wit was dry; and while his own conducting was not always technically perfect nor his taste impeccable, his commitment to quality was unyielding and his sense of how to build a program first-rate.

Bandfield's chance to give all his time to the voice came in 1974, when his family's company — whose main product was Pearl Drops Tooth Polish — was sold on terms that left his father and sister financially secure, and him able to go back to school to study music and choral conducting.

Bandfield moved to Santa Fe in 1981. He once told an interviewer, "I was not looking for a place to settle; I was looking for a place to start a professional choir. And I had read an article in Time magazine that summer touting the success of the then-Santa Fe Festival Theatre and heralding Santa Fe as the Salzburg of the Southwest. So I came out and took a look. I didn't know a soul here."


Ed Grothus went to work as a machinist in Los Alamos in 1949 and left in 1969 because he had become so opposed to the nuclear work there. He formed the Los Alamos Sales Company to buy and resell surplus equipment from the lab. That company later became known as the Black Hole because "everything went in, and not even light could get out," an obit written by the family said.

Grothus was a notorious prankster, a habit that got him in trouble with the authorities more than once, said his daughter Barbara Grothus. One of the more famous stories is when Grothus sent cans of "Organic Plutonium" to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, she said. Her father replaced the label on an ordinary can with a fake label for Organic Plutonium designed by a Santa Fe artist, then sent them to the White House, Grothus said.

"That got the attention of the Secret Service, who came to pay him a visit," Barbara Grothus said. "When they came, they called me and asked me if I would vouch for my dad."

Grothus also kept a "Top Secret" stamp in his store, which he used on various disks that he picked up at yard sales, a habit that also got him in trouble, his daughter said. "He got a little visit from the FBI for that one," she said.


Schwartzman began his career in New York working in the plastics industry, but then he started hanging out at the Izzy Young Folklore Center and decided to go into the guitar business. "That's the only thing I know anything about — acoustic, steel-string flat-top guitars, " Schwartzman once said. "That's my area of expertise. Outside of that, I'm just a businessman."

After traveling the country looking for a place to open a guitar store, Schwartzman found a Water Street location in Santa Fe previously occupied by a record store called Rock of Ages. After The Candyman burned in 1981, Schwartzman reopened it on Galisteo Street and then on Marcy Street before relocating to the "Candyman Center" on St. Michael's Drive in 1985.

Santa Fe attorney George Adelo said, "The Candyman was one place that everybody would get a fair deal and without regard to financial circumstances."

Schwartzman employed about
16 people at the store, which sold musical instruments, home electronics, CDs and DVDs, and other items. He joined the Santa Fe Opera's board of directors in August 1983 and was a member at the time of his death.

Schwartzman was president of the Santa Fe Opera Club from 1993 to 2004 and held two opera-related CD signings at The Candyman. The first was with French superstar soprano Natalie Dessay when she was here for a concert in 2003, and the second was in 2008 when famed American countertenor David Daniels sang the title role in Handel's Radamisto.


Carol Jean Vigil was the first American Indian to be elected as a state judge in New Mexico and the first Indian in the U.S. to be elected as a judge of a general jurisdiction court. When she was sworn in as a 1st Judicial District judge in 1998, she wore a black robe with beaded Pueblo Indian symbols of mountains, lightning, clouds and rain embroidered on the shoulders.

"She was very serious about her work, really concerned about getting it right, " said Santa Fe attorney Bryant Rogers, who served as her treasurer in that election. On the bench, he said, she was "very thoughtful and well prepared."

After passing the bar — the first Pueblo Indian woman to be admitted — she went to work for Indian Pueblo Legal Services Inc. She served as assistant attorney general under Jeff Bingaman and in the mid-1980s went into private practice. She served as a tribal lawyer for Tesuque Pueblo, and wrote the tribal codes for Tesuque and Taos pueblos.

In 1988, Vigil was hired by the 1st Judicial District to be a child-support hearing officer. In 1994, she was named special commissioner for domestic violence and mental competency. She retired from District Court in 2005.


Eric Treisman first came to New Mexico in 1968 to work for the Navajo legal-aid office, then went to Micronesia and Alaska to work for other native legal-aid groups. After serving as in-house counsel for an Alaskan-native corporation and living briefly in Seattle, he returned to Santa Fe to practice law around 1980.

Mike Gross, who shared an office with Treisman on St. Michael's Drive, said he first worked with him on a complex case involving a brokerage house. "It turned out badly, but it was an exciting case," Gross said. "We still joked every once in a while with each other about our phantom fee split."

In 1996, he ran for the U.S. Senate in the Democratic primary. In addition to his legal practice, Treisman was a mountain climber, adventurer and writer whose articles have been published by Harper's, Rolling Stone and The Wall Street Journal. Treisman was an ardent supporter of Tibetan independence, helping hundreds of Tibetan refugees obtain visas for the United States and organizing a meeting between the Dalai Lama and then-President George H.W. Bush.


Less than four months after the death of his beloved wife, Paula, artist Eliseo Rodriguez died at the home the couple built together out of handmade adobes on Camino San Acacio. Carmella Padilla, guest curator of the first one-man show of Rodriguez's paintings at the New Mexico Museum of Art ("Eliseo Rodriguez: El Sexto Pintor") in 2001 called Eliseo and Paula "soulmates."

"I think he left when she left," Padilla said.

Rodriguez was known for his paintings, furniture, reverse-glass pieces, church murals and straw appliqué, an art form he revived in the 1930s as a painter for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.

He drew inspiration from his religious faith and from nature. Alone and with Paula, Rodriguez was awarded some of the highest honors for his art. In 2004, they together received a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in a Capitol Hill ceremony in Washington, D.C. He also won the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and the Santa Fe Rotary Club Distinguished Artist of the Year award. His work is in many museums, including the Smithsonian.


Marilyn Bell was born into a family of Polish and Russian Jews who had immigrated to Birmingham, Ala. One summer, she rented a room at the Barbizon Hotel for Women in New York City, where she attended plays and musicals and got to meet Joe DiMaggio and Henry Fonda.

Around 1960, she traveled West to visit her brother, Leroy Bearman, a sports editor with the Albuquerque Journal. During a trip to Santa Fe to visit Leroy's fraternity brother, she was introduced to one of the city's young business leaders, Irving Bell whose father, Morris, an immigrant from Lithuania, had opened a general merchandise store at 114 W. San Francisco St., in 1926, then branched out to Taos, Tierra Amarilla, Grants and Española, where Irving was born.

They married after a short courtship and ran Bell's Department Store, which sold shoes, luggage, clothes, Stetson and Resistol hats, and more Levi jeans than anyone else in Santa Fe. The store soon moved next door to a larger building at 116 W. San Francisco St.. In the 1970s, Irving remodeled the store to add "Marilyn's Place" for young women.

"Mom loved to help these young girls pick out the perfect outfit and was never afraid to give unsolicited advice on fashion," her sons wrote.

After Irving's death in 1981, Marilyn continued to run the store until early 1984. She learned to love her adopted home and soon added red chile to her repertoire of Southern dishes, Jewish delicacies and sumptuous desserts.


Those who were fortunate enough to watch Katherine Bryce work with canines would often just step back and let the magic happen. She could read animals better than anyone," said Kathy Jackson, owner of Lucky Dawg Daycare in Santa Fe, where Bryce led classes for the past four years. "She was a fabulous trainer."

As a child, she trained horses, raised rabbits and always had dogs, cats and birds as companions. She felt a connection to animals and was "never happier than when she was in the company of nonhumans," according to her memoir.

Although her love for canines wasn't breed-specific, she had a special place for poodles, and went on to breed, groom and show them. Eventually she shifted her focus to the average pet owner and began doing standard-poodle rescue.


After military service in World War II, Frank Zinn earned his law degree and returned to New Mexico to join Zinn and Zinn, a law practice owned by his father, former New Mexico Supreme Court Justice A.L. Zinn, and uncle, Dean S. Zinn. At age 38, he was elected to the post of New Mexico attorney general. He served for two years — 1959-1960 — before accepting an appointment as district judge in the Gallup-Aztec area, where he worked until his retirement from the bench in 1975. One of the more notable cases during his time as a judge was a 1974 murder case that involved the killing of three Navajo youths by Anglo teens who lived near the reservation. The case was the subject of the book The Broken Circle, by Rodney Barker in 1992.

After his retirement from the bench, Zinn continued to work in the judiciary for another 20 years as a special master and an arbitration judge.


Calling someone a Renaissance man has become clichéd. But in the case of John Michael O'Shaughnessy the term rang true. Besides being a noted publisher, photographer and philanthropist, the Winnetka, Ill., native — a longtime Santa Fean — was well-versed in the intricacies of the financial and nonprofit worlds. His appreciation for Hispanic and Native American arts was more than equaled by his deep knowledge of their traditions and the artists who brought them to life.

He founded Red Crane Books in 1989 with his wife, Marianne, as editor. After a successful run of nearly 20 years, the O'Shaughnessys donated Red Crane's catalog to the Museum of New Mexico Press in September 2007.

Its most controversial and wide-reaching book was undoubtedly If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans, by journalist Peter Eichstaedt.

O'Shaughnessy's grandfather was oilman Ignatius Aloysius O'Shaughnessy who founded the I.A. O'Shaughnessy Foundation in 1941. Through the foundation, Michael funded many worthwhile projects throughout the country. In Northern New Mexico, he made possible a rehearsal hall at The Santa Fe Opera and the O'Shaughnessy Performance Space in Benildus Hall at the College of Santa Fe. He was also a donor to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Other gifts included $250,000 to the Palace of the Governors endowment fund in 1998, and underwriting the Salt of the Earth Conference on political filmmaking and freedom of expression at CSF in 2003.

In recognition of their support of so many local organizations, the O'Shaughnessys received a Mayor's Recognition Award for Excellence in the Arts as Outstanding Contributors to the Arts in 2000 and a Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2001.


Born in Denver, Judy Basham began her career in New Mexico state government working for the Court of Appeals. In the early 1970s, she was hired as special assistant to first lady Alice King during Gov. Bruce King's first term. Later, she was named state personnel director under King and Gov. Toney Anaya. In recent years, she had worked for the lobbying firm of Butch Maki, who worked with her in Richardson's district congressional office. Maki said Basham worked the political side of his office, where she was valuable because of her great number of contacts.

House Speaker Ben Luján, who employed Basham in his office during recent legislative sessions, said Basham epitomized what is good about politics. "Judy was loyal, hardworking and compassionate," he said. "I don't think she ever had a bad word (to say) about anyone she ever met. She had a big heart."

Former state Rep. Patsy Trujillo, who traveled to Iowa with Basham to work on the governor's (presidential) campaign, said, "she was just a Northern New Mexico girl who lived life to its fullest."


When he began with what is now Dixon Apples in 1944, Fred Dixon had nothing but "a red horse, a white mule and a stone boat," his granddaughter, Becky Mullane, said. "He built everything from that."

Over the years, Dixon created two varieties of apples, the champagne and sparkling Burgundy, which he patented.

He was raised in an apple orchard owned by his father in Austin, Colo., and before he settled at Rancho de la Cañada near Peña Blanca, he had worked as a roofer in Napa., Calif. Mullane joined her grandfather in the business in 1985.

The only place to buy a Dixon apple is at the 60-acre orchard. You can't order them over the Internet. The family tried shipping apples as a gift venture, but the apples just weren't the same by the time they arrived at their destination. And they gave up on selling them in grocery stores because the "Dixon" name became diluted with apples from other areas — such as Dixon, for example.

Dixon apples taste better than others grown in New Mexico or other parts of the country, Becky Mullane said, because of the lava-rich Cochiti soil and the altitude.


Dwight Hume, who began working in the restaurant business while he was in middle school, went to culinary school where he began sculpting ice, chocolate and lard. People who liked his work encouraged him to move on to wood, clay and rock, which was his favorite.

Beside making art, he worked in the circulation department at The New Mexican and had a gig at Hotel Santa Fe. He started selling real estate in 1999.

Hume's most recent sculpture show, "Transformation, " opened last August. In a 1997 interview Hume said, "The one thing I want to do before I die is sculpt hot lava as it comes out of the volcano."


William Darkey was only 17 when he first set foot on the St. John's campus in Annapolis, Md. He won a scholarship thinking it was a regular liberal arts school, according to his stepson, Peter Nabokov.

He became enthralled with the program in which students read and discussed great works of philosophy, literature, theology and mathematics. "He never recovered from falling in love with ideas," Nabokov said.

Upon his graduation in 1942, Darkey was asked to join the faculty. He accepted the $500 salary and free board at the college.

During World War II his Army job involved teaching people, "useful things like how to throw a grenade." After earning his master's degree from Columbia University, he returned to St. John's in 1949 and busied himself building benches for the cafeteria. He was a member of a small team to investigate the idea of opening a sister campus in Santa Fe. Darkey was the second dean of the Santa Fe campus and taught there into the 1990s.


In the late 1980s, Alan Jordan acquired Santa Fe Walks, renamed the business Aboot About Santa Fe, and then expanded into destination and event management as Access Santa Fe.

Sharon Maloof, executive director of the state Film Museum, said that shortly before his death, "He conducted a 2,000-mile, state-of-New Mexico tour for me. He was fabulous. He was a brilliant person and very people-oriented."

Jordan, who was born in Santa Monica, Calif., joined the banking and finance world after graduating from San Diego State University and later moved to Santa Fe.


Ned Hall was an anthropologist who studied nonverbal communication and intercultural relations and the author of seven books.

A local boy made good, he lived and worked with the Navajo and Hopi for a number of years and in the 1950s he was director of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute program that prepared diplomats to work in different cultures.

Eric Hall said his father loved to make people aware of the unconscious processes that affect people's perceptions and help them figure out why others perceive things differently than they do. He also excelled in making tricky things understandable by simplifying them. "He always had the motor running about something," Eric Hall said.

Gladys Levis-Pilz, a former teaching assistant, said Hall's classes at Northwestern were so popular, "I had to beat students off with a stick." She helped him with a federal research project in New Mexico in which her assignment was to live in a Hispanic community in Northern New Mexico (Costilla) and observe how Hispanic Americans and Anglo Americans approached problem-solving differently. The idea was to learn how those differences get in the way of understanding across cultures.


After serving for decades in various parishes in northeastern New Mexico, Serafino Bortolotti was assigned by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to be chaplain at the state penitentiary. There he met some Christian Brothers from the College of Santa Fe who taught at the Pen and invited him to be their chaplain in return for room and board. He remained on the campus for 35 years until his death which came as the school was closing.

"He was a very adventurous person," said Brother Brian Dybowski, citing an anecdote he heard recently about Bortolotti's time in the small village of Villanueva. "The last thing he did at Villanueva was buy two wrecked cars and put together one that ran," Dybowski said.

Bortolotti was born in Italy, ordained a priest in the Congregation of the Oblates of St. Joseph of Italy in 1947, and moved to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 1966. He retired in 1989.


Eloy Martinez built a reputation as a young man in a hurry. He worked as city attorney, special attorney for the Santa Fe police and assistant attorney general assigned to the state Highway Department before becoming an assistant district attorney for the 1st Judicial District. He left to practice law by himself from a small office off Burro Alley, then was elected district attorney in 1976. His promising career was sidetracked by the 1980 riot at the New Mexico Penitentiary, which resulted in the deaths of 33 inmates.

David Berardinelli, who was one of the first assistant district attorneys to join Martinez's new office, said, "He was a very nice guy, a terrific politician, and he knew how to let other people do the real work."

In 1985, Martinez's successor charged that he had failed to file criminal charges in more than half the felony cases that law-enforcement agencies referred to the office the previous year. After losing his license for misleading a client, Martinez worked as an investigator for the Santa Fe Public Defender's Office. His license was eventually restored, and he went to work for the Public Defender's Office in Alamogordo. During the
six years before his death, he was deputy district attorney in the Truth of Consequences office of the 7th Judicial District, covering Sierra, Socorro and Torrance counties.


Born in Berlin, Zara Kriegstein studied art in Germany and in 1973 moved to Santa Fe, where she became known for her murals — on Empire Builders on Cerrillos Road, on the old state archives building on Guadalupe Street and inside the Santa Fe Municipal Court building. She left a legacy of public art that blends German expressionism, Mexican magical realism and American social satire.

Longtime acquaintance Jo Basiste, previously known as Eli Levin, recalled meeting Kriegstein in the late 1970s at a show of her art at Forrest Fenn's gallery. "She looked like a Russian countess," he said. "She had a mink or some kind of animal fur thing with the head and everything. ... I was just blown away. I hadn't seen such a good artist and such a fancy-looking lady all at once."

One of Kriegstein's better-known murals is the four-part piece depicting the history of the Santa Fe judiciary on the interior of the Santa Fe Municipal Court building on Camino Entrada. The last piece portrays former Municipal Judge Tom Fiorina dismissing parking tickets in exchange for turkeys and other foodstuffs donated to the poor at Thanksgiving.


William R. Federici was born in Cimarron, the son of Narcisco and Divina Federici, who immigrated to the United States from Spezia, Italy, in 1903. For years, his family operated a dance hall in the tiny village of Colfax, five miles south of the once-booming coal-mining town of Dawson. He wanted to be a veterinarian or an engineer, rather than a lawyer like his older brother, but ended up going to law school and then working as an assistant attorney general in New Mexico before joining the Army during World War II. After the war, he worked as an aide to New Mexico's U.S. Rep. A.M. Fernandez in Washington, D.C., then returned to New Mexico to rejoin the Attorney General's Office.

In 1948, after Federici lost a case to J. Oliver Seth, the older lawyer asked him to join his firm, which later became Montgomery & Andrews. Federici spent the next two decades working on corporate, oil and gas, real estate, probate and negligence defense cases.

In March 1977, then-Gov. Jerry Apodaca appointed Federici to the New Mexico Supreme Court. The next year, Federici ran for election to the high court and won. In 1983, he was elevated to chief justice and three years later, after authoring more than 500 opinions, Federici retired from the Supreme Court. He began to spend more time on his boat at Navajo Lake, fishing for trout, northern pike and bass.


Alice Kagawa Parrott, a well-known weaver and Santa Fe resident since 1956, operated one of Santa Fe's earliest craft shops, The Market, on Palace Avenue adjacent to The Shed restaurant. She also designed the original Santa Fe Opera ushers' uniform (an eye-popping yellow-green, orange and hot-pink color scheme worn for nearly 30 years) and was an active member of the Acequia Madre ditch association.

Her achievements as a textile artist received acclaim in features that appeared in Life and Smithsonian magazines and the book Santa Fe Originals: Women of Distinction. Her works are included in a number of museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Norway. She was the subject of one-woman shows in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York.

In a 1962 article, The New York Times described her work: "It takes thousands of marigold blossoms, black walnuts, onion skins, peach leaves and small bugs to achieve some of the colors in the hand-woven wall hangings, rugs, blankets and pillow covers that now hang in the Museum of Contemporary Crafts." It was from those sources that Parrott, who was born to Japanese-American parents in Hawaii, made many of her dyes.


With her husband, Frank Ortiz, mayor of Santa Fe from 1948 to 1952, Lucy Ortiz owned and operated a grocery store, Frank's Supermarket, at the intersection of Paseo de Peralta and Galisteo Street.

Lucy Ortiz went to Mass daily for many years and became president of the Third Order of St. Francis at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. She also belonged to the Catholic Daughters of America and had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Francis.

She "was a good example for her children and other people. She followed a true Christian Franciscan life," said her daughter, Angela Lopez. "It was common to see a rosary in her hands, especially toward the end of her life."


A leading New Mexico water and energy lawyer who directed the Carter administration's attack against "Big Oil" price-fixers for bilking Americans out of billions of dollars, Paul Bloom was known in New Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s for his work on behalf of several tribal communities — particularly the Zuni, who credited him with saving the Zuni Salt Lake from a coal strip-mining operation proposed by an Arizona utility company. In 2003, the company, the Salt River Project, abandoned its efforts to create the Fence Lake Mine.

Former Zuni Gov. Malcolm B. Bowekaty said in a letter to his family that Bloom's "honest interest in Zuni culture kindled some sense of affinity to his own Jewish heritage. ... My Tribal Council used to tease him that he was a reincarnated Bow Priest — our historical front-line warriors."

Before joining the Carter administration in 1978, Bloom served as the chief counsel for the New Mexico state engineer. In 1966, as a young lawyer, he filed the Aamodt water-rights lawsuit in federal court. Congress is only now, 43 years later, considering a proposed settlement, designed to resolve water-rights issues for pueblos and non-Indians in the Pojoaque Valley.


After moving to Santa Fe in 1970, Peter Cate and his wife, Marsie, opened an arts-and-crafts school, then started a cooperative art studio and gallery on Canyon Road named Los Llanos. That was the name they gave to the bookstore they operated between 1981 and 1993, first on East San Francisco Street and later in Sanbusco Center.

Cate, who was known for his quick wit, stock of corny jokes and his twinkling eyes, coached Santa Fe Preparatory School to two state soccer championships and refereed the game well into his 80s. "He was very easygoing and not critical. Kids appreciated that about him," said Steve Machen, chairman of the school's language department.


Benjamin Martinez was stationed in the Philippine Islands when war broke out with Japan. He was captured and forced on the 60-mile Bataan Death March. During his imprisonment, Martinez was severely beaten by his guards numerous times, including once when he was caught wearing a pair of boots taken from a deceased soldier. In captivity, he did everything from mining to farming to manufacturing steel said his son, David Martinez. "It was everything the Japanese didn't want to do themselves, so they forced the prisoners to do it."

After the war, he worked in construction and later for the U.S. Postal Service. He was active as an usher and in other capacities at Cristo Rey Catholic Church. "But there were a lot of things he didn't want to share," his son said. "It was just too painful."


George Anthony "Ants" Gonzales, the general manager of KSWV 810 AM, or Que Suave Radio, was born into the radio business. Both his uncle, Blackie Gonzales, and his father, George Gonzales, a former Santa Fe mayor were broadcasters. He also helped found Hometown News, a community newspaper, three years ago.

"He was always wanting to use the businesses to focus on the positive things taking place in the community," said Gonzales' brother, Javier Gonzales. "He believed that Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico had so much good going on that wasn't discussed or reported enough in the traditional media."

George Anthony Gonzales was on the city Planning Commission and sang every Sunday morning at the 8 a.m. Mass at San Isidro Catholic Church. He played the guitar and trumpet and often sang with his father and sons at weddings, funerals and family gatherings. The group, called Tres Generaciones, also recorded several CDs of mariachi music.


Gene Edward Franchini, a former state Supreme Court justice, collapsed and died while addressing first-year law students at The University of New Mexico during his annual lecture on ethics.

Former Gov. Jerry Apodaca appointed Franchini, a Democrat, as a Second Judicial District judge in 1975. In 1981, he resigned to protest the Legislature's decision to make some sentences mandatory — something he compared to Nazism. "The administration of justice has always been and still is one of the great loves of my life," he said. "I personally cannot and therefore will not now prostitute it or myself."

After returning to private practice for almost a decade, Franchini ran and won a seat on the New Mexico Supreme Court. After retiring from the high court in 2002, he began to speak out more openly on issues. He showed up at the 2003 Legislature to tell the House Judiciary Committee that a flawed legal system prevents "fair and equal application" of capital punishment.


A cattle rancher and lifelong resident of Stanley, N.M., Bruce King, who served a trio of non-consecutive terms as governor over three decades, was a man who stuck close to his country roots and his cowboy hats, once riding his horse to the state Capitol in a move to both save gas and attract a little publicity for the state's tourism industry.

He served as governor from 1971 to 1974, again from 1979 to 1982 and finally from 1991 to 1994, the only governor in state history to serve three separate times. Those terms in office included some major moments in New Mexico's recent history, including the 1980 riot at the state penitentiary, the state's recruitment of Intel to build a computer-chip plant here and New Mexico's budding relationship with Mexico.

At King's funeral, former President Bill Clinton said that King was one of the first people he consulted when he began planning his first run for president. "I knew I'd get a laugh, and I'd get a lesson. A lesson in politics and a lesson in life."

"The greatest legacy of Bruce King is that Bruce was the people's governor. Bruce never put himself before the people," said Senate President Tim Jennings, a Roswell rancher. "He was the standard really by which ethics in politics should be held."


Artist José Cisneros, some of whose images on tile are on permanent display at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe, had humble roots and a fifth-grade education, but became widely known for his illustrations of aspects of Spanish colonial history. His images of Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars with their carretas hang on the walls at the El Camino Real State Monument south of Socorro.

At one time, he helped support his family by painting streetcars and buses for the city of El Paso. Although colorblind, the self-taught artist created much of his work in color by relying on the names of the colors. "He probably illustrated over 1,000 books," said granddaughter Margaret Connerly.

Among other honors, Cisneros was presented with a National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2002 by President George W. Bush. King Juan Carlos of Spain knighted Cisneros for his contribution to the understanding of Spanish history in the New World.


Eli Senna was known as a big man with a big heart, his friends and family say. Some might call him a "political animal" who loved the strategizing and the grunt work, as well as the friendships and human contact that come out of a campaign.

Senna was a 1995 graduate of Santa Fe High School and 2000 graduate of The University of New Mexico. He first become involved in campaigning at the age of 10 when he volunteered for a state Senate race. As a UNM student in 1998, he worked for Democrat Phil Maloof's unsuccessful race for Congress, doing "opposition tracking" on Republican Heather Wilson, who won that election. He ran for office once himself, campaigning in the 2006 Democratic primary for a magistrate's seat.

"The guy was Santa Fe through and through, " said Sisto Abeyta, a longtime friend and fellow activist in the Young Democrats organization. "To Eli, it was God, the Democratic Party and Santa Fe County — in that order."


Jason Hill, a city of Santa Fe police officer, was diagnosed with leukemia in August 2008 after going to the doctor for back problems. Doctors gave him three months to live, but after extensive treatments, including a bone marrow transplant, Hill was told by doctors that his leukemia was in remission. However, the disease returned in October.

Hill began his service career as a firefighter in Los Alamos. He then moved on to work for the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department where Sheriff Greg Solano said, "He was one of my best deputies. He really cared about being an officer. It was more than just a job to him."

Police Chief Aric Wheeler said Hill, "was willing to give the shirt off his back to anybody in the community at any time. He was a top-notch police officer. The pride and honor he brought to the Santa Fe Police Department — I don't know how we'll ever replace that."