When storyteller Joe Hayes was a kid, he loved to chew bubblegum. His teacher always made him spit it out, but he kept another pack in his shirt pocket. That caused his mother some consternation because he’d forget to take the gum out of his pocket before putting his shirt in the wash and the clothing would be ruined.
“But then, one day, something happened, and it changed her mind,” Hayes says of his mother in a recorded performance of his short story “The Gum Chewing Rattler” (youtu.be/mruSVrlyIVg). ”She never got mad at me again for keeping bubblegum in my shirt pocket.”
Out in the desert, chewing his gum, not paying any attention to where he was going, Hayes stepped on a rattlesnake. With its fangs aimed at the boy’s heart, the snake lunged but struck the bubblegum pack instead.
“As he was working his jaws around, trying to get his fangs out of the bubblegum, the bubblegum started getting softer and softer and softer.”
And now that rattler blows bubbles too.
“The Gum Chewing Rattler” encapsulates the ways that Hayes combines a Southwest setting with a childhood memory to craft a tall tale. One of the greatest listening pleasures is to hear a story well told, to let its images materialize in your imagination as your own experiences color how you see it. Hayes knows this and spent much of his career telling tales to children and adults while carrying the torch for one of humankind’s oldest forms of art and entertainment.
“I first started dedicating myself to storytelling full-time in 1980,” says Hayes, 76, a former high school English teacher who spent four decades as a professional storyteller at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian on Museum Hill before retiring last year. “Santa Fe was a smaller city at that time. It’s hard to believe now, but that was sort of out of town.”
Hayes comes out of retirement to tell more stories up on the Hill, but he has a new gig. Starting with a 7 p.m. performance on Sunday, July 17, at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art (MOSCA), you can hear Hayes weave his tales as part of a five-week summer series. Additional performances follow at 7 p.m. on July 24 and 31 and Aug. 7 and 14.
“As a vocal proponent of the rich storytelling tradition of Northern New Mexico, which stretches from the Spanish Colonial era well into the late 20th century, Joe and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society are a perfect fit,” says Museum of Spanish Colonial Art Executive Director Jennifer Berkley. “Joe has introduced generations of New Mexico’s children to the traditional tales of our state, and we are so glad to welcome him back out of ‘retirement’ to tell stories on our campus this summer.”
Hayes is a fixture in Santa Fe. Many adults have fond memories of his visits to their childhood classrooms, and Hayes has the testimonies to prove it.
“I’ll be 35 on Saturday, so this is long overdue, but I just wanted to tell you how much your storytelling meant to me as a child and how much it means now,” wrote a fan from Salinas, California, in a note shared with Pasatiempo. And a Houston, Texas-based college student wrote, “You really inspire a lot of people, and you’re one of the best writers ever according to me.”
While none of the performances fall on the anniversary of Hayes’ special day, the one on Aug. 7 comes close. Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber declared Aug. 8, 2021, to be “Joe Hayes Day” by official proclamation. It was the occasion of Hayes’ retirement and final performance at the Wheelwright.
Hayes’ storytelling has always been connected to the Southwest. But he doesn’t really tell true stories. Maybe he did love bubblegum as a kid but that bit with the rattler was pure invention.
“Even if I attach a story to my childhood or something, it’s always fictionalized or exaggerated,” he says. “Personal narrative has become a very popular kind of storytelling, but it has a different kind of flavor to it. People respond in a different way than they do with traditional stories, which have a universality about them, and they function on so many different levels.”
Tales told to children young and old
“I came here from Arizona where I had a lot of contact with Mexican American cultures,” says Hayes, who worked in mineral exploration in the mid-1970s, doing field work in Spain, Mexico, and the United States. When he relocated to Los Alamos in 1976, Hayes returned to teaching, getting into storytelling because he had children of his own.
After a divorce, Hayes ex-wife took the children to California. Hayes would learn stories and record them on cassette tapes and send them to his kids. And, he found, when they spent summer vacations with him, he’d want a collection of stories to share with them, and his passion grew.
“I was teaching at the high school, but there was an elementary school across the street. I started going over to the elementary school and telling stories to children there.”
It caught on. People in the community would ask Hayes to tell stories around the campfire or to the Cub Scouts and similar groups. But a full-time teaching career made it impractical, until a statewide teachers conference changed everything.
“Every school district in the state had the day off, and the teachers would all come to Albuquerque for the conference,” Hayes says. “They would send out these circulars ahead of time, asking for ideas for presentations.”
Hayes suggested a storytelling presentation, which was accepted. As it turned out, a majority of the attendees were elementary school teachers and, after the conference, the requests to bring Joe to their schools poured in.
Initially sponsored by the now-defunct Bank of Santa Fe, Hayes was told that if he could get 50 people on his opening night at the Wheelwright in 1982, then they would sponsor a continuing series.
“We ended up having about 150,” he says. “That was beyond all of our dreams.”
In the years since Hayes turned professional, the storytelling field has only grown.
“In 1980 if I would say to someone, ‘I’m a storyteller,’ they’d say, ‘What’s that?’ But now if you say, ‘I’m a storyteller,’ they go, ‘So am I.’”
As Hayes’ storytelling opportunities grew, so did his arsenal of fiction, and Hayes began to write the stories down. Today, he’s the author of more than two dozen children’s stories and short story collections, including The Day it Snowed Tortillas (Cinco Puntos Press, 144 pages, 2003), Watch Out for Clever Women (Cinco Puntos Press, 160 pages, 2019), and The Gum Chewing Rattler (Cinco Puntos Press, 32 pages, 2006). Most of Hayes’ books are bilingual.
“Being published has been really helpful, especially in my work with the schools,” he says. “It gives me a double whammy because now I’m a visiting author, as well as storyteller. One of the things I love about a story being told is that, truly, everybody’s having a different experience. You make the pictures.”
