Juma Archuleta: March 6, 1942—October 7, 2013
Our Friend Departed a Year Ago: we miss him and post this fond remembrance.
On Oct. 7, his spirit, aided by the scent of crushed pine, escaped out the open bedroom window at 2 pm. Later, around 6 pm, his head clad in bandanna, he was carried by mortality’s stewards away to last rites, where his body will be prepared to rejoin his spirit. He touched us all, body and soul, in mind and in spirit.
Some of us, only one or two hair-cuts removed from his impromptu garage parlor in Vegas de Taos last summer, want to remember him as the jolly barber above, dispensing sympathy and wisdom, leavening life with quips and questions, alternately teasing and serious. A reader wrote yesterday, “He could talk about anything.” Indeed.
During the first decade of the 21st Century, I frequently stopped by the barbershop less for a haircut more for the conversation, sometimes to laugh or lament the latest issue of Horse Fly but more often just to discuss football, baseball, or the latest episode of The Wire or Treme. Juma could be all things to all people.
He read Harpers’ magazine and a variety of fiction and nonfiction, which we discussed as easily as we did his knowledge of the 1960s Chicano movement in Denver, or later, his work with Ben “Changing in Midstream” Nighthorse Campbell, the senator from Colorado, who switched from democrat to republican. Juma, needless to say, was a true blue democrat. And in Denver he knew the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos who stayed out late and partied. His barbershop on Capitol Hill was home to cops and judges, doctors and, some say, the occasional drug dealer. My son Fitz and his stepbrother David got their first haircuts from Juma in Denver.
A beautiful woman walked by one day the Capitol Hill barbershop and asked if he would cut her hair. “No,” said the barber. But she became his wife, Linda. In a concession to a longtime El Prado neighbor, he cut my wife Deb’s hair—shaved her head early one morning—when she was undergoing chemo treatments.
In Taos, retired admirals, Moly Mine workers, high school football and basketball players, coaches, deputy district attorneys, artists and writers like Wagner and Nichols, bankers and judges, all sat in his chair. None were immune to the darts that remind us we’re human: “Hey, Sam, I hear you can’t get a job at Taos Pueblo,” said the barber after Judge Sanchez, in a fit of temper, threw 32 Indians in jail for contempt and he got thrown out in turn. Still Sam laughed when the barber teased him. Friends from out of town sent him books by John Nichols so he could get the writer to sign them. A big Jim Wagner painting hangs over his living room couch. At the barbershop I ran into old National Guard friends, not seen since the 70s.
Juma knew everyone’s nickname, family name, and the best and latest stories about la familia and los politicos. He was a veritable department of human resources when it came to the latest restaurant doings: who was in the kitchen, who worked the front of the house, who was selling, buying, going broke, getting rich, and whether the doings were legal or illegal. Whenever I entered the barbershop and somebody was in the chair I didn’t know or in the chairs waiting, I waited to speak, waited for my cue. As publisher and editor of Horse Fly I had almost as many enemies as fans. But most everybody loved the barber.
The barber was dedicated to kids. He asked them about school and sport in the chair. He carried the chains at football games and was loathe to give it up despite the ravages of cancer. He voluntarily participated in drug court and raised money as tokens of respect for clients as long as possible. The mix of judges, DAs, members of the probation department frequently turned to Juma when the question of a new street drug turned up and they weren’t familiar with the substance or the behavioral abuse that accompanied the toxin.
In other words, he was familiar with all things human.
Juma, as I understand it, was born in Las Animas, Colorado. (In the Spanish-Catholic tradition, Anima represents the spirit of the person, even the soul during its trials and tribulations in purgatory or, figuratively, in this life.) His mother died when he was very young and his older brother made a promise to his Mother to look out for Juma. And he kept that promise. You might say Juma had a little extra social security, which only added to his aura. Meanwhile Juma went to high school in Denver, learned to be a barber, and followed his trade for nigh on 50 years.
That’s how he met so many people and, for our purposes, Willie Watkins, a New Mexican, whose life interweaves with so many of ours in Colorado, Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. Willie says he was working in Aspen, circa 1965 but the only barber was a trained Air Force buzz cutter. A mutual friend sent for Juma in Denver.
So Juma flew in to Aspen on Friday evenings, set up shop in the back of a leather shop for those seeking a trim and special attention to the long-haired fashions of the day. After a weekend of working and parties (everyone partied hard in those days), he flew back to Denver on Mondays. A life long friendship was born between Willie and Richie Hall, Juma, their wives and acquaintances.
So when I met Juma in Taos at the end of the 90s, here he already knew old friends of mine, Willie, Dick Smith (RIP), Lewie Wickham (RIP)—the La Cocina crowd from the 70s. He knew the stories and the characters. The conversation felt right at home. And yesterday, after hearing the news, I drove up to Juma’s and saw Willie there in company with Juma’s Linda, and felt the better for it. Richie and Juma’s family had all visited in the weeks prior but in the end, Taos style, there was Willie, his wife, and Linda. (Steve Kilborn went by these last months and cut the grass.)
Almost all of you will remember how stylish, the bandanna or beret, how well dressed and you’ll also remember the stylish motorcars parked by the barbershop. Juma withdrew as he struggled with cancer and admitted fewer and fewer friends. He didn’t have the energy to be himself. More than one mutual friend or barbershop customer said to me at the grocery store, “How’s Juma?” And, “He’s so private, I don’t want to intrude.”
Yes, he’s going, I said or thought, and we all respected his wishes. He listened to and talked to everybody. He was our barber.