TOBE TURPEN INTERVIEW

   



   [BEGIN SIDE 1]

   

   This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona University.

It's December 13, 1998.  We're at the home of Tobe

Turpen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  We're going to talk

to him about his years as an Indian trader.  Also

present in the room is Karen Underhill from NAU, and

Lew Steiger is running the sound equipment.

   

   Cole:  Well, to start off with, Tobe, maybe you

could tell us a little bit about your parents and how

they got into the trading business.

   

   Turpen:  My father got into the business.  His

sister married C. D. Richardson.  They had all lived

down in a little town in Texas outside of Fort Worth,

named Alvarado.  His older sister married

Mr. Richardson, and Mr. Richardson had been out in this

country and had been an Indian trader.  Everybody in

Texas was having a hard time making a living.  They

were kinda starving down on those little farms, so she

brought her brother, my father, Tobe, out to teach him

to trade.  He tells some rather interesting stories

about his arrival.  He came into Flagstaff and they put

him on a wagon, and there was an Indian driver, a

Navajo driver, and it took 'em a week to go from

Flagstaff to Shonto.  The Indian couldn't speak any

English.  So for a week as a boy about fourteen years

old, he was in the wagon for a week getting there.

When he got there, he was there a few days, and the

trader--I'm not sure who the trader was, I suppose one

of the Richardsons--said, "Tobe, I need to go to

Flagstaff, so I want you to run the store."  He said,

"I can't run this store.  I have just arrived and I

don't know how to trade, I can't speak Navajo."

"Well," he said, "this Indian helper we have here, he

knows the prices, and he'll do the talking.  All you

have to do is just don't let everybody carry everything

off.  Just watch everything."  So he said, "They left

me there and they didn't come back for six months."  He

said, "That's how I learned the business.  When they

got back, I could speak fluent Navajo, and I just went

from there."  I don't know how long he traded at

Shonto.  I spent some years....

   I'll have to back up a little there.  Then he went

to the war.  He went to World War I for a time, came

back, and then married and came back to Shonto.  I

spent some early childhood days--I was born in

Flagstaff.  In those days, any time a lady was ready to

have a baby, they had to go to Flagstaff because that

was the only hospital.  No matter how far it was,

that's where they had to go.  I suppose they could have

gone to Winslow, but Flagstaff seemed to be the main

town.  (brief pause)  He continued to trade there, and

then he changed places.  He went to Leupp for a while,

and he went to a trading post called Blue Canyon, that

is no longer in existence.  It kind of sat out there

between Tuba City and those Hopi villages.

   He had a very tragic existence at Blue Canyon.  The

flu epidemic came--that great flu epidemic that

everybody talks about.  And his mother-in-law and

brother were visiting from Texas, and the brother-in-

law died from the flu epidemic.  So he took the body to

Flagstaff, and when he got back, which took him a week

or ten days later, the mother-in-law had died.  He

spoke to me about that many times, how hard that was

for a person his age to handle.

   Then he was hired by the McAdams Company in Gallup,

New Mexico, to come and work for them.  McAdams was a

very, very famous trader.  At that time there were

three big firms in Gallup--Charles Ilfeld, Gross-Kelly,

and McAdams.  What their business was mostly was really

supplying Indian traders out on the reservation.  So

when you supplied these people, there was very little

money around, very little cash, so you were paid for

these supplies by usually rugs, and in some cases, some

of the traders made jewelry.  So you had to take the

rugs and jewelry.  Then of course you had to find an

outlet for it.  That's where my father was very

instrumental, I think.  Then he started what we refer

to as "working silversmiths."  We had a shop there.

There was a shop at McAdams in the back of the store

where eight or ten Navajo silversmiths worked by

piecework.  And then of course it's always been a

tradition to work silversmiths at their home.  You

issue them the materials, tell 'em what you want, and

they make the jewelry.

   He then moved on to a store of his own for a very

short time, and then he was hired by Gross-Kelly to

come in and take over what in those days we called the

curio department.  We didn't know what arts and crafts

were, I guess, because it was the curio department.  It

was a large department, he ran that for several years.

[He] moved on to another store in 1939, rented the old

Hubbell building--Lorenzo and Roman Hubbell had a store

in Gallup across from the Kirk brothers, which were

very, very famous traders.  They rented that store.  I

was in about junior high at that time.  His business

there was really Indian trading.  They handled arts and

crafts of course, but they bought sheep and they bought

wool, and they bought piñons, and they sold stoves and

they sold potatoes and they sold cloth.  It was just a

regular trading post, just like you see on the

reservation.

   I came into the business in 1946.  I hung around the

store a lot when I was a child, and I came in, in 1946.

I came back out of the service, and I didn't know what

my future was.  I wasn't too anxious to go to school.

I'd been at college for one year, and I wasn't real

anxious to go back.  So he asked me to come down and

help him.  I went down there, sort of reluctantly,

'cause it wasn't much of a store, it didn't look like

much.  He pulled the same thing on me they did on him.

He said, "I need to go to Oklahoma and look after my

sheep."  And he didn't come back for six months!

(chuckles)  So there I am.

   By that time I had really seen that there could be a

future in the jewelry, especially--jewelry and the

rugs--and I liked that.  My dad was real good about

leaving me alone.  He didn't bother me, he let me make

my mistakes.  Over a period of time, I bought him out

in about ten or fifteen years--probably about ten

years.  And then I transformed the store from a trading

post into an arts and crafts store.  The other was just

too much.  I never did see any profit in the sheep.

When you buy sheep, you have to hire a herder, and you

have to go out every night and make sure the herder's

still with the sheep.

   There was just all kinds of problems.  Piñons, you'd

buy piñons, and when it came time to sell 'em, the

market had gone down.  You buy wool, and you were at

the mercy of a buyer, who came from Boston once a year

to take the wool off your hands.  By the time he got

there, the price had gone down.  I never saw any profit

in that end of the business.  Of course the reason that

the old trader, like my father, ran it, is that they

were just trying to help the Indian.  The Indian had to

have a place to get rid of those products.  Times had

changed, it wasn't that necessary.  I didn't feel it

was necessary for me to have to do that.  There were

other places that they could move their merchandise;

life was changing for them, they were taking jobs.

   And so we went into the Indian arts and crafts

business.  I stayed in that location for twenty years.

The Highway Department took the location away from us,

and I moved out south of town, a mile south of Gallup,

and built a store.  We are still in the business.  I

have spent now fifty-two years in it.

   Would you like for me to touch on what I've seen

happen in the jewelry business?

   

   Cole:  Uh-huh.

   

   Turpen:  Well, when I first came into it, when I

came back from the service, it was very difficult.

People had placed no value on Indian jewelry--the

tourist is the person I'm speaking to, the public.

They just didn't see any value there.  So every time

you sold a piece, you had to convince them that it was

really kind of worth something, and that maybe somebody

else would admire it and like it.  And that was really

hard to do.  And we spent a lot of years just educating

the public.  And finally, in about the sixties, it

started changing.  All of a sudden, the general public

saw a value.  One of the things that changed it

dramatically, was the big hippie movement.  They

started wearing and selling the jewelry.  And the

celebrities, the movie stars all of a sudden were on TV

with it, and it just sort of changed overnight.  Now,

all of a sudden, we can't get enough merchandise.

Everybody wants Indian jewelry.

   I'll move back a little, back during World War II,

that something happened.  The silver and gold and all

precious metals--copper, everything--was frozen for the

war effort.  So there was no jewelry to be made

anywhere.  There was no costume jewelry to be made, no

fine jewelry.  But somehow or another, someone

convinced the powers to be that the Indians needed this

for their livelihood.  There were Indians that weren't

gonna make it if they couldn't perform the task of

making jewelry.  So the government allowed a little bit

of silver to be released, and the United Indian Traders

Association handled this silver and doled it out to the

traders.

   But at the same time, just like everything else,

everything finally just levelled.  There came a black

market in silver.  And that's another thing.  The

reason I backtrack is that's what started makin'

jewelry more popular or more recognizable, was because

it was the only jewelry there was in the whole United

States.  And all of a sudden, here's Gallup, this

little mecca, and dealers are comin' from everywhere to

buy this really kinda junky Indian jewelry that people

were throwing together.  One of the big dealers, [some]

of the people who were most successful, a company in

Albuquerque named Bell Trading, received a contract

from the government to make pilots' wings, and they

were stamped out of sterling silver.  Well, either they

were given extra silver, or they pulled a little off

the side, because all of a sudden there was silver for

them to make Indian jewelry, and they were Indian

jewelry manufacturers also.

   But anyway, it worked its way down--this black

market silver worked its way down into some of the

dealers in Gallup, and all of a sudden we became the

Indian jewelry mecca of the world--of the United

States, certainly.  And that's when the popularity

started.

   Then after the war, when other merchandise was

available, it just kind of died on the vine on us.  Now

nobody is interested in Indian jewelry--they want their

old fine jewelry.  So it took us a lot of years for it

to become popular.  And as I say, it did become popular

with the hippie movement, that's what really helped us.

It changed very dramatically over the years.  Way back

when I first started, every customer, wholesale or

retail, the first question is, "Is this Indian made?

Is it silver?  Is it sterling silver?  How do I know

it's sterling silver?"  "Well, you're gonna hafta take

our word for it, we don't mark our jewelry."  And we

didn't in those days.  And then as the years went on,

and now recently, the big turn in it is they're not as

interested in if an Indian made it--they're interested

in the fashion of it.  What does it look like?  And of

course many, many years ago, as I look back, we really

didn't make very good jewelry.  We weren't original, we

didn't do much to adapt new styles.  We made the same

thing over and over, changed a little something here, a

little something there in design.

   And of course the turquoise wasn't as available.

All we had was what was available.  When I say that,

what I mean is, if a turquoise cutter had a pound of

turquoise and cut it, he cut it to shapes that he

liked--he didn't cut it to shapes that you wanted.  And

there was no way of changing that, you had to accept

what was available to you.  So we worked around what we

had.

   Some of the other changes in the business--I made

some notes here....  For years, the Zunis made their

type of jewelry--the Zunis were stone cutters, the

Navajos were not stone cutters.  So a Zuni would buy a

few ounces of rough turquoise--came right out of the

mine, right out of the ground, as we call it, rough--

take it home, cut it, and mount it.  They have a little

different system, too.  They make the mounting first,

and then cut the stone to fit the mounting.  A Navajo

works just the opposite.  You give him a stone, and he

builds around it.  He did not have the talent for

cutting the stone, because he didn't have the

equipment.  Out in the hogans he had no electricity,

usually, so he had no equipment for cutting the stones.

But it goes further than that, it's just a matter of

tradition.  That's the two types.

   Well, that has changed now, down through the years.

Now Navajos are mounting Zuni-type jewelry, making Zuni-

type jewelry.  The use of coral now, we use coral where

the first time I ever used coral in jewelry, I put it

in, used it with turquoise, but in the same piece of

jewelry.  You just can't believe the flak we had from

the dealers.  They thought we had bastardized the whole

business.  "You can't do this!  This is terrible!  You

can't take a nice piece of turquoise and stick coral

around it!"  We've had a lot of things happen like that

over the years.  Then along came the stabilized

turquoise.  Stabilized turquoise is turquoise that's

been what we call "enhanced."  When a mine produces

turquoise, it produces a lot of white, a lot of light

blue, maybe some darker colors, much more no color than

anything else.  So people learned how to put color in

this by using what we call the stabilize method.  They

pressure plastic into it.  And of course again, it was

very frowned on, that this couldn't be used.  But it

made a very fine stone, it never broke, it was easy to

cut, it matched in color, it served a purpose.  It took

a lot of years, though, for the public to accept it.

They still don't completely accept it, but it is used

in many forms today, whereas other turquoise could not

even be used for it.  For instance, Santa Domingo

jewelry, the type of beads that the Santa Domingos

make.  They can't get the natural turquoise even today.

It's not even available to them.  So most all beads

that you see:  beads, and where there's beads and

shells strung together, that's usually stabilized

turquoise.  And today in that form it's pretty well

accepted.

   We went through a time when concho belts and what we

call link belts--a link belt is a belt that's not on

leather, it's just hooked together with silver.  Our

belts were selling for $15, $18, $25, $35, depending on

how much silver we put in 'em.  A fellah in Phoenix

started stampin' 'em out of nickel silver, and selling

'em for $2.95.  Well, of course every one frowned on

that, but there was a place for it.  There was a place

that the public--that was a price range and a look, so

nickel belts went through a very, very popular stage.

   We went through what we call spin cast, where you

make a mold and you use a little machine to

centrifugally spin this, and you get out a piece of

finished jewelry that doesn't need much finish on it.

We've been through that.  That's still very popular

today.  Then we started usin' gold.  Many of the

dealers frowned on gold, "Oh, the Indians never use

gold, you shouldn't use gold."  But again, these things

just take time.  As the public accepts them, the dealer

then accepts them, and now they're part of the

business.  And today, presently we're running into

something that I don't know what'll be the final

outcome.  We worked our way through many of these other

things, but now we have what we refer to as Asian

imports.  The Oriental people can make jewelry as good

or better than our Indians can.  There's no doubt about

it.  There are laws that are not being enforced, and

there's lots of Asian imports comin' in at a low price,

and I don't know what it'll do to the Indian business.

   Going back a little on the making of jewelry, I

might speak to the United Indian Traders Association a

little.  At one time, the United Indian Traders was an

organization of traders, and what organized them--in my

opinion what organized them--what I remember of it, was

that there was a firm in Albuquerk called Mazell's

[phonetic spelling], and Mazell's started dye stamping

Indian jewelry.  Followin' them was another company

called Bell, in Albuquerque.  Then there was one on the

West Coast called Pacific, and they were all taking

Indian design jewelry and stamping it out.  So of

course again it was a lot less expensive, looked like

Indian jewelry to the untrained eye.  And the Indian

traders were very, very worried about this, and they

organized the Indian Traders Association, and every

trader that joined was given a number and a stamp that

you put on a piece of jewelry.

   Well, if this worked, I am not aware of it, because

over all the years, I can't remember how few pieces

I've ever seen with a stamp on it.  And I think one

reason it didn't work, obviously, the breakdown of the

organization, I suppose.  But when you issue material

to an Indian to take home, he would have had to have

that stamp, and you're working a lot of silversmiths.

Well, back then, even that stamp was fairly expensive,

I suppose.  So maybe he didn't want to buy twenty or

thirty stamps.  But even harder than that, was to get

the silversmith to do the job.  He might tell you he

was gonna do it, but then when he brought the work in,

it wasn't there, and you ask him why and he'd say, "Oh,

I forgot," or "I don't know, I just didn't do it."

Well, the jewelry's made, you can't discard it.

   Then the Indian Traders Association, as I remember

it, I went to--after I became part of the business as

an adult, I went to several of their annual meetings.

There was never any discussion of Indian jewelry.  Then

it had changed into the discussion of the problems of

what we used to call the country or reservation trader.

And they had their own problems, completely foreign

from the problems we had in town.  There were a lot

more traders out there--there was a little handful of

us in town, and there was dozens and dozens of 'em out

there.  So it evolved itself to where it wasn't the

same organization--at least it wasn't being operated

for the same reason.

   I may think of something later, but I think that

sort of covers.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned that the UITA was selling the

silver to the traders.  Did they have a store, or what

was the mechanism to do that?

   

   Turpen:  They had a store.  They hired an operator.

Actually, the secretary, as I remember, ran it.  You

know, there wasn't a lot of paperwork, there wasn't a

lot of activity in the organization from year to year.

So they actually ran it, and they sold it to us at a

very good price.  See, we could have all gone direct

and bought the silver direct from where they were

buyin' it.  You buy silver from a supplier.  There were

only two suppliers in the United States--one on the

West Coast, one on the East Coast--and that's where you

buy your silver.  Any of us could have gone and gotten

it direct, but you had to buy in quantities in order to

get a good price.  So they got the quantity price and

passed it on to us at about a 10 or 15 percent profit.

That's how we got the silver.

   

   Cole:  Do you remember anything about when your dad

was the secretary of the organization?

   

   Turpen:  I don't remember very much.  I just

remember him explaining to me the reason they

organized.  My dad had a little different outlook.  I

remember him telling me this, he said, "You know, we're

all concerned about this, and some people are really

concerned.  I am not as concerned, because I'm not sure

we're even doing the right thing, because our big

problem is teaching the public what Indian jewelry is.

And we don't have the means to move this merchandise

out into the United States."  See, most all the Indian

jewelry in the early days was sold in little stores,

little Indian curio stores in Phoenix, Denver, places

in the Southwest.  Of course the national parks always

carried it.  That's where most all your jewelry went.

And his thinking was that we can't get it out to the

public, we can't expose it, and these people are in a

position to do that.  They're in a position to put it

in dime stores and drugstores and places and little

jewelry stores, and it'll make it more recognizable.

And he had a theory on that, and I think very possibly

he was correct.  But that's what I remember of it.

   

   Cole:  Maybe tell us a little bit about your

relationship with your artisans, your silversmiths.

   

   Turpen:  They're very easy to work with.  I always

found that Navajos were extremely easy to work with.

They were hard to direct.  Way back, you would tell 'em

you wanted something, and they'd take it home and

change it.  When I very first came in the store--maybe

even before that--I remember my dad doing this.  You

see, they pounded silver--what we call "pounded" it--

because the sheets and the wires and gauges were not

available.  So we gave 'em what we call slugs.  They

were about an inch square, and the thickness of a

silver dollar, and if you wanted what we call a ten-

ounce belt made--which was a concho belt maybe two

inches by an inch-and-a-half, that would be equivalent

to a ten-ounce belt--you'd throw 'em ten ounces, you'd

throw 'em ten slugs.  They did weigh about an ounce,

and they had to go home and pound that.  And of course

it was really hard when you got down to making like a

bezel that would hold a stone, and you'd have to pound

it almost tissue paper thin.  So way back, makin'

jewelry was physical.  There was a lot of work in it.

   And as far as the silversmiths we worked, a lot of

times, sort of families.  The husband would come in and

you could usually get them to show you, you'd say....

One thing about a Navajo silversmith, he never saw

anything he couldn't make--or at least he never

admitted it, because when you'd say, "What do you

make?" [he responded], "Anything!  I make anything."

"You make bracelets?"  "Sure."  "Rings?"  "Sure."  "Can

you make little bowls?"  "No, but maybe my sister can."

See?  And you'd give 'em something--very seldom did

they have a sample they could show you, so you just

kinda took 'em at value, but over a period of time,

everybody knew them.  And of course what happened, too,

was we all worked the same silversmiths.  There weren't

that many.  There are lots of silversmiths today--

hundreds of 'em, maybe thousands, I don't know.  Back

then there was, I really thought, sort of a handful,

and they just kinda moved from store to store.  They'd

take my silver and then they'd go get some from someone

else, and then if they spent a little more money than

they should have, all of a sudden he's takin' my silver

and makin' the other trader's jewelry, and then he's

takin' his and makin' mine.  And they were very slow,

they were very undependable as far as time.

   We never got beat out of a lot.  Needless to say,

over a period of time, someone's gonna get in financial

trouble and not bring your work back.  But that

happened very seldom, it wasn't a big problem.  They

had great personalities.  They were fun.  Navajos have

a great sense of humor.  They seemed to always pick the

busiest time, Saturday afternoon, to bring their work

in, and you had to take care of 'em, because they had

to be paid, they had to have their money.  It just

seemed like they never brought it in at a slack time.

And of course a lot of 'em had to come a long way.

They traveled.  We had silversmiths workin' thirty,

forty, fifty miles away from Gallup.

   The Zuni silversmith was a different situation.  The

Zuni, we never contracted to the Zuni.  I suppose you

could have, but it seemed like that just wasn't in

their makeup.  They bought the materials, went home,

made it, brought it in and shopped it around, sold it

to the highest bidder.  So it was a completely

different situation doing business with them, than

doing business with the Navajo.

   

   Cole:  Do you remember some of the silversmiths,

their names?

   

   Turpen:  Well, sure.  In one family we had a girl

who still works for us today.  She's worked for me now,

I guess, for over fifty years, named Marie Silver.

Glenn Adakai [phonetic spelling] was a very fine

silversmith.  I've been out of it for a few years, so

the rest of 'em escape me at this minute.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned that they had a good sense of

humor.  Do you remember any humorous stories that you

could tell us about?

   

   Turpen:  Let me give that a little thought for a

minute.  (pause)  I'll think about that and come back

to it.

   

   Cole:  Sure, that'd be fine.  I've gotta maybe back

up a little bit.  You mentioned you were born in

Flagstaff.  What year was that?

   

   Turpen:  In 1923.

   

   Cole:  And then I was curious as to what your

mother's name was.

   

   Turpen:  My mother's name was Irene Harris.  Harris

was her maiden name.

   

   Cole:  Was she from Flagstaff or the area, or where

did she come from?

   

   Turpen:  No, that's another kind of a nice cute

little story.  My father was in the service and one of

his close friends, when the war was over, he was from

Oklahoma, and he said, "Tobe, I'm gettin' ready to go

home.  You only live a few hundred miles from me.  Why

don't you come up to my house first?"  And my dad said,

"No, I need to get on home."  And he said, "Well, I got

a good-lookin' sister you'd like."  So he went there,

and that's who he married.  (chuckles) Kind of a nice

story, isn't it?

   

   Cole:  Uh-huh.

   

   Steiger:  You mentioned being in the service, too.

Were you in World War II, and your dad was in World

War I?

   

   Turpen:  Yes, that's right.

   

   Cole:  So what are some of your earliest memories,

then, of bein' at the Shonto Trading Post?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I was so young I really don't

remember much there.  I was only from about one to five

years old.  But I remember the Indians, the old, old

Indians.  I have photographs of them with me.  My dad

said that when I would get in their hair, there was a

canyon there that was sort of protected, and he'd take

me down there with an old mule and leave me with that

mule all day.  He said, "We'd just leave you there and

then go get ya' in three or four hours and bring you

home."  I have been back to Shonto, because even at

that age I was able to remember enough that I wanted to

see it again.  And when you go there, it's just like

out of the past.  It looks the same to me as the photos

I see now.  Of course Blue Canyon is nonexistent.

   I used to enjoy goin' to the reservation after I got

so into the arts and crafts business so heavy.  I made

a deal with Babbitt Brothers of Flagstaff to supply

their reservation stores.  And so I personally made a

trip out there twice a year and sold [to] six or eight

of their stores.  I always enjoyed it.  I went to Cow

Springs and of course Tuba City.  I can't think of the

others, but they were country-type traders running

those places, and they really weren't too interested in

jewelry, however they knew they could sell it.  It was

easier sellin' a can of tomatoes than it was a piece of

jewelry, so it wasn't easy selling, but it was a good

business, it worked into a very good business for me in

some of the places.  So I did go back out there.

Kayenta was a big store for them.

   

   Cole:  What time period did you start that?

   

   Turpen:  Probably....  Let's see, when did we move

to that store?  Sixty-six [1966]?  Probably about 1955,

and for the next ten years.  Then they started selling

off some of those stores, and we moved and we got so

busy that it wasn't necessary anymore.  The person that

I was doing business with at Babbitt, passed away, so I

lost my contact.

   

   Cole:  Who was that?

   

   Turpen:  Ralph Bilby.  If you'll give me a minute,

I'll look here.  Maybe I'll see something also.

(pause)

   

   Cole:  What did your mother think of Shonto Trading

Post?

   

   Turpen:  Well, there's another little anecdote on

that a little bit.  At Christmas, my father had gone to

Flagstaff and had brought her a Christmas present, and

he kept it hidden.  She knew he had brought something,

and she was so anxious to see what it was.  When she

opened it, it was a clock.  And she said, "Of all the

things that I didn't need, is a damned clock out here!

Time doesn't mean anything!"  It was one of those

shaped like that, you know, a mantle clock.  "If

there's something I didn't need, it was a clock!"

   They used to have a lot of fun out there.  They only

saw a white person every six months, guaranteed.  That

was the postmaster, the mail carrier.  He came every

six months, and that was the only guaranteed white

person that they knew for sure they would see.  And you

can imagine, living out there, in case of illness, it

took you days....  There was no doctor, there was

nothing there.  It must have really been hard.  And

then the archaeologists kind of started comin' in

there.  There was a lot of ruins out there, and a few

times a year, those archaeologists would come through,

and they just loved that, that there would be people

out there.

   And then some of the photographs I had, evidently a

little later they drove their cars out there, 'cause

there's old cars in the photographs with me.  And I

notice in the photographs, most of 'em they took, they

usually had some Navajos in it, too.  They were with

the Navajos in the picture.  And the old Navajos were

really old-time people back then.

   Cole:  Would your parents ever talk about what their

kind of economic conditions were when they were in

Shonto?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I don't think there was any economy--

there just wasn't anything there.  You know, that

carried over.  That just carried right over into Gallup

and through the Depression.  There wasn't any money.

Actually, after we moved into Gallup, for twenty years,

my mother, in order to supplement her income, she took

care of boarders.  We ate out of the store a lot.  We

lived right next to the store, the McAdams Store.  Our

rented house was right next door to the McAdams Store,

and we lived out of the store a lot.  Down on the

corner, a block away, was a meat market and a grocery

store that issued credit.  Back then, everybody lived

on credit.  Gallup, of course, was always a good town.

Gallup is still one of the finest towns to make money

in that there is.  It's just a great economy there,

because of the Indians.  But times were very, very

hard, I think.

   

   Cole:  I don't know if you mentioned exactly what

year was it, if you remember when your parents moved to

Gallup.

   

   Turpen:  Well, I'm not sure, but I think it's

probably about 1928.  I think I was about four or five

years old, maybe a little older.  I do remember

something as a child on that trip.  That was a dirt

road from Winslow to Gallup, and we left in the

wintertime.  There was snow, and it was very muddy and

very rutty, and we slid off into a ditch, and I

remember this so well, who pulled us out--a Greyhound

bus stopped and hooked to a chain and pulled us out of

that snow.  And we stayed somewhere over there between

Gallup and Winslow.  It was more than a day's drive.

It might have been a full day or more drive, but we did

stay there.  It was probably a two-day drive.  It was a

long way in those days.

   

   Cole:  Maybe tell us about some of your early

memories of Gallup, then.

   

   Turpen:  Well, Gallup was a very integrated town.  I

went to school at--it was integrated to the point where

we had lots of Italians, lots of Slavs, some Irish,

because it was a coal-mining town.  Back then, we

didn't have any Indians in our school.  The Indians

either went to an Indian boarding school or a

government school.  So there weren't any Indians in our

school system.  I just went through the grades.  I went

through elementary school and went through the things

that everybody goes through with the tough kids chasin'

the skinny guys like me.  As I went through high school

I became active in sports and played almost everything.

Fair student.  Came out of the service, took a job

almost the day I came out of high school, and almost

the day I came out, took a job at what was then the

Gallup Gamerco Coal Company.  They needed a person in

the office.  And I'd been recommended by one of the

teachers.  And everybody wanted a job, of course.  So

they hired me, and I worked there for two years at

eighty dollars a month, and quit because I couldn't get

a raise.  They said, "Well, we'd like to give you a

raise, but if we give you one, we have to give all the

older guys one, and you're the low man on the totem

pole, so no, can't do it.

   So I went to work at the munitions factory.  They

were building a munitions factory, ordinance factory,

like the one in Flagstaff, and I went to work out

there, building it; then became part of it when they

started storin' ammunition.  Went to college for a

year, and then went into the service and stayed in for

four years.

   

   Cole:  Were there a lot of Navajos or Native

Americans that worked at the ordinance?

   

   Turpen:  Lots of 'em.  Very, very qualified and very

capable, as far as handling munitions.  They came up

with some ideas to handle those munitions that were

just terrific, to move 'em faster, easier.  The

Navajo's very good at that.  The Navajo adapts.  He can

do anything mechanically.  They can fix automobiles,

they can....

   A cute little story about what they can do

mechanically:  I used to go out on the reservation, and

there was a period of time there for about ten years

when we ran out of Navajo rugs--they quit makin' 'em,

and the demand went up.  So we had to go to the

reservation, to the trading posts--we never went direct

to the Indians--and bought these rugs.  And when I'd

go, I had a friend who was in the car business.  He

said, "I want to go with you when you go.  I want to go

out there and see if I can repossess any cars.  I'm

always lookin' for a car or two."  And we went out

there one day, and it's hard to find a car out there.

They won't tell you where it is.  But when you finally

do find it, here we are at the hogan way out there, and

there's about six old car bodies sittin' there, and my

friend keeps lookin', and there's an Indian there we're

talking to--he's a Navajo guy we're talkin' to, a

little young child almost.  He said, "You know, that

looks like my car, but there's somethin' about it."

"Well," he said, "they took the top off of this one and

put the bottom on this one."  (laughter)  So they had

taken to combinin' cars to get a car.  That's why he

couldn't recognize his car.  So they're very capable of

doing anything mechanically.

   

   Underhill:  When did you learn to speak Navajo?

   

   Turpen:  I never learned to speak Navajo.  I tell

ya', my dad suggested that I not learn.  That may sound

strange to you, but the trading business had changed.

It would have been a help--don't misunderstand me--it

could have been a great help in a lot of cases--but he

spent a lot of his life listening to what I call Navajo

"sad stories."  He was a very generous man, they always

had a sad story for him because they wanted to borrow a

little money, and he had to listen to the whole story

in order to work his way through what they wanted.  He

spent a lot of time in his life that he would rather

have been doing something else.  And one day he turned

to me and he said, "You know, you don't have to listen

to this, do you?"  And I said, "No, I don't."  And he

said, "Well, then, it might be a good idea that you

never learn, so that you don't have to."  Now, I

understand it fairly well, what I'd call "counter

Navajo," but I never learned to speak it.  Plus he

always said that it was almost impossible to learn it

after you were fifteen, sixteen years old.  He thought

you should learn it as a child.  I don't think that's

true, because I know people today--I don't know anybody

who learned today--but I think it could be learned.

But he said it became much harder.  That's the reason I

never learned it.

   He was very fluent, and very loved by the Navajo.

He made a statement to me one time....  My dad went

through life goin' broke.  The only job he ever had was

with Gross-Kelly.  Other than that, he was always a

private entrepreneur.  But he was always goin' broke.

He'd run it for a while, and then he'd go busted.  He

never took bankruptcy, he was a very proud man.  He

never did that, he always paid off.  And I was just the

opposite.  What I made, I kept some of it, and wondered

how much more I should have kept.  And I asked him one

day, "Dad how come you don't ever save money?  I don't

understand that."  He was comin' to me again and

sayin', "Listen, I need some financin', I want to open

another store."  And he'd come to me, and I said, "Dad,

how come all these years you never saved money?"  He

said, "Because I know I can always make a livin'."  And

I said, "Well, what makes you think that?"  And he

said, "I can go anywhere where the Navajos are and make

a livin'.  From the minute I open that store, I'll make

a livin' with 'em."  I thought that was really an

interesting thing to say.

   

   Cole:  You were telling us earlier about the

Ceremonials.  Were they already started when you

______________.

   

   Turpen:  Yeah, the Ceremonial was a great thing for

us.  The Ceremonial was the biggest thing in our life.

We did as much business in four days as we did any

other month.  First, that monetarily was a great thing.

But it was a great thing for the town.  The people that

put the Ceremonial together, put it together for the

Indians.  They didn't put it together for themselves.

They didn't put it together to make money.  They put it

together as a celebration for the Indian.  And then it

worked.  When it first started, the Indians came in to

the dances, they started bringin' different dance teams

in.  They like to see each other dance.  And they fed

them.  It didn't cost them anything to see the show.

It was for them.

   And then it became aware that this would be a good

place to show arts and crafts.  So they opened what we

call an exhibit hall.  It was a wonderful place.  It

was a great big old wooden building, sitting over there

at the Ceremonial grounds where the stadium was.  And

the traders from the reservation and the traders from

town would come in and show their wares and make

beautiful exhibits.  So it was really, really

authentic.  The public learned about it, the people

overseas learned about it, and all of a sudden it

became a pretty good-sized event for a little town.

   We had a parade every morning at ten o'clock for the

three or four days of the show; a rodeo in the

afternoon; and the dances at night.  And the dances

were wonderful.  All the Indian groups would come out

on the field, and they'd have about six or eight big

campfires all built.  It was dark, there was no

lighting, there was no cameras.  It was just as

authentic as it could be.  And then each team stepped

out and danced.

   It has changed dramatically, as times have changed,

as everything changes.  Now there are no traders there.

Now we have arts and crafts dealers that want to sell

something retail for a few days.  The arts and crafts

and painting show is quite good.  But it's changed very

dramatically from what it was when I knew it.  And it

was just a wonderful celebration for the town.

Everybody dressed in velvet costumes--the men, velvet

shirts; and the women, squaw dresses.  Just about

everybody in town dressed.  It was just a wonderful,

wonderful event for people back then, because, of

course, people weren't as mobile then.  You didn't go

to Albuquerque for lunch, and you didn't fly to San

Francisco.  You were in Gallup, and that's where you

were gonna be, and that's where you stayed.  It just

united the people.  I was on the Ceremonial Board for

several years, and then president of the Ceremonial

Association after I was in the business.  Even then, we

fed the Indians.  I'm not sure what they do now.  But

then of course we started chargin' 'em to get in, so

it's changed very much.

   Another nice story about the Ceremonial.  I was the

president, and we had our committees, we had the food

committee, the concession committee, the exhibit hall

committee, and our sheriff was the head of feeding the

Indians.  He had a woman that ran a café that always

did it for him.  And so about the week before, I said,

"How we doin' on gettin' the Indians fed?"  "I think

we're gonna be all right."  I said, "What do you mean

you think we're gonna be all right?!"  He said, "Well,

the guy that does the cookin', we always have trouble

with him.  He's a Mexican fella here, and he drinks a

lot.  We're not sure of him all the time."  And I said,

"Well, what are you gonna do?"  "Oh," he said, "I'll

take care of it.  I'll arrest him about three days

ahead of time, and then we'll let him out of jail when

the Ceremonial starts, so he can do the cooking."

(laughter)  Nowadays, things like that aren't accepted,

but that was a fact, then.

   

   Cole:  What do you think of the future of the Indian

trading business?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I guess we'd have to differentiate

between the Indian trading and Indian arts and crafts.

   

   Cole:  _____________.

   

   Turpen:  I don't know.  I wish I could answer that.

You know, we worked our way through so many things that

I mentioned earlier, things that have happened to us

and have changed the business dramatically, and we

worked our way through them.  I suppose we'll work our

way through this, too.  But in my opinion, the business

has just been bastardized so bad by people that are in

it.  They have no feel for the jewelry, they have no

feel for the Indian artisan.  All they are, is there to

make money, and I'm not sure we can survive that, I

don't know.

   Of course, the Asian imports, the government keeps

sayin', "Oh, we'll do something about that."  They're

not going to do anything about that.  That's not going

to happen.  I'll guarantee you that will not happen.

There's no way to control that.  If you can't control

guns, who's gonna spend the money and the time to

control Indian jewelry?  It's not that important.

They'll have movements, and they'll have paperwork, and

they'll spend a jillion dollars, and they'll never get

it done.  And it's popular enough now, there's enough

of it moved to where it pays to bring it in and use it.

   As I say, these stores, you go to these retail areas

like Santa Fe--Santa Fe is probably the most popular

tourist spot in the United States today, and there are

stores up there that are just full of this junk.  And

they're not tellin' the truth about it, they're sellin'

it for real when it isn't, and there's no way of

stopping it.  So either the public becomes aware that

it has to be Indian-made or I'm not gonna buy it.  I

want some sort of a guarantee.  That's the only thing I

see.  I don't know how else to control it.

   I'm glad that we have just closed out the Indian

arts and crafts part of our store.  I ran out of family

to run it, and I didn't know anyone to run it, and with

times the way they are, too, a little tougher, I closed

that out.  We still are in the same building, we run

what we call our Indian pawn business out of it.  I'm

glad I'm not fightin' the battle today.

   

   Cole:  Have you always had a pawn aspect to the

business?

   

   Turpen:  Yes, we have.  When we opened in 1939, we

started takin' Indian pawn.  I might elaborate on that

a little.  When you say "a pawn shop," it has a

connotation of VCRs and jewelry and diamonds.  The

Indian pawn is just totally opposite of that.  We only

take about a half a dozen items.  When I say "take," we

loan money on about a half a dozen items.  We loan

money on jewelry, Pendleton shawls, guns, saddles,

baskets.  The rug business is kind of not so good right

now, so they're pawning Navajo rugs to us a little bit.

But that's the basis.

   Many of the people who pawn need the money, of

course, but some of 'em pawn just for security reasons.

They want it to be where....  There's a lot of

pilferage on the reservation.  The hogan left alone,

people break into it.  Family members sometimes steal

from the other family members.  So they leave it for

safekeeping in many cases.

   And we're regulated by law.  We have very tight

regulation.  We're checked, watched over.  It's kind of

a way for a Navajo person--Navajos pawn, mostly--Zunis

hardly ever pawn anything.  It's sort of a way for him

to bank.  See, hardly any of 'em have a checking

account or a banking account, so if they want quick

money, they have to take a piece of jewelry or

something and borrow against it.

   

   Cole:  There used to be a lot more pawn on the

reservation.  Would it be run pretty much exactly the

same as an off-the-reservation store?  Do you know if

there was much difference there?

   

   Turpen:  No.  You know what, there really never was

a whole lot of pawn on the reservation.  The Indians

had the jewelry to pawn.  But on the Arizona

reservation, the pawn laws were so strict, the rate of

interest that you could charge, that it wasn't worth

doing.  And so there was never what we call the large

pawn shops.  See, a large pawn shop in Gallup will

have--we have some pawn shops in Gallup that may have

$2 million worth of loans.  And have several that maybe

have $200,000 to $500,000.  A reservation store, they

might have $10,000.  So it never was big.

   You see, there never was much jewelry made on the

reservation.  There were hardly any traders out there

that made jewelry.  There was a handful of 'em.  All

the jewelry was made in Gallup and by Indians who lived

on the reservation, or who lived in Gallup because they

had a steady job making jewelry.

   

   [END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]

   

   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  It's December 13, we're in Albuquerque,

New Mexico, at the home of Tobe Turpen.  Also present

in the room is Karen Underhill from NAU and Lew

Steiger, our sound person, and this is Tape 2.

   Tobe you used the term "country traders," people on

the reservation, versus to your business in town.

Maybe if you could compare and contrast those for us a

bit.

   

   Turpen:  Yes, I'll be glad to do that.  The

reservation trader had pretty much of a different

agenda than the Gallup trader, you might say.  Another

thing I might touch on a little bit is Gallup was the

mecca.  There was a good trader in Winslow, the

Breckman [phonetic spelling] firm, Babbitt had a branch

there.  Farmington had a trader or two, but Gallup was

the town that the Navajos loved, for whatever reason,

so that's where the real traders were, at Gallup.  The

different agenda bein' that the reservation trader sort

of had the Indian customer under his control.  He lived

within ten to fifteen to twenty miles....  Now, we're

goin' back a long way, to where the pickup truck wasn't

so popular and there wasn't near as much

transportation.  They had to come by wagon a lot of

times.  And that was the only place they traded.  They

didn't go from trading post to trading post, they

weren't mobile enough.  So that trader had that

customer pretty well under control.  He could give him

credit and know that he was gonna get a rug, maybe a

piece of jewelry.  They weren't really very jewelry-

minded--mostly rugs, sheep, piñons, cattle, something

to pay their bill off.

   The city trader was rather different.  It got to the

point where a lot of it was done on cash.  Again, if it

was done on credit, it was usually done because of the

person was making jewelry.  It was real easy to lose

your credit.  I mean, you give credit, and way back

there was lots of losses, and that's what broke most of

'em.  And then it changed.  Then the government checks

started coming for all these different subsidies.  And

again, the country trader was in control, even though

the customer could move from store to store now, he's

more mobile, they still knew him well enough that they

realized that he just had to come back there.

   And we didn't get many checks.  The checks didn't

come to town, they came out there, where they lived.

I've been in those country stores where there'd be

several feet on the wall of single-spaced names of

Indians, and an amount up there, and that's how much

that customer could expect every month, so that's how

much he was allowed a certain percentage of that in

advance on groceries, or whatever he wanted to buy.  So

there was a different agenda.

   The country traders lived out there long periods of

time, and they'd come to town.  And I'll tell you this

true story.  The man would come to town, because

usually he'd leave the wife there to run the trading

post.  Usually it was a husband and wife deal.  And

they'd come to town and they'd get drunk and they'd get

on a party.  Boy, Gallup was a big party town.  There

was open gambling, we had Las Vegas-type open gambling.

There was everything in Gallup that a man could enjoy.

And after about five days--I remember this as a child--

the phone would ring, or someone would knock on the

door.  "Where's your dad?"  "Well, he's here, just a

minute."  "Tobe?  Bill's been gone for a week now.  Go

find him and get him the hell back out to the store."

(laughter)  And almost to the man they were that way.

They were heavy drinkers and partiers, because boy,

they were out there a long time, and when they got to

town, they'd let it all hang out.  So they were a

different bunch--very interesting bunch of guys.

   But, you know, overall, they were out there for a

reason.  They were out there to make a living, and it

always worked down to the point where they were out

there to take care of the Indian, too.  I think, to a

person, that that's the way it was.

   And of course the Hubbells were just about the most

famous, I guess.  There may be some others I don't know

about, but they were just tremendously famous.  They

had the store at Ganado, they had the store in Winslow,

they had a store in Gallup, and they were educated

people.  They had college educations, where most of our

traders, many of them probably never got through high

school.

   And then we had sort of a transition period, too, I

don't know, maybe in the forties or fifties.  The

Mormon people found the reservation, I would say, and

all of a sudden it just seemed like all of the stores,

practically, were run by Mormon people.  And they were

good traders, very good traders.

   

   Cole:  Would the in-town traders, like your father,

when he was running the post, would they extend the

same kind of credit as the reservation traders?

   

   Turpen:  They didn't extend it....  We didn't have

any guarantee, because most of us didn't get a lot of

checks.  We might have got a few.  We extended it on

the strength of who the person was.  And you had to

give some credit.  There just wasn't any way of doin'

business unless you did.

   

   Underhill:  You mentioned that your father allowed

you to make your own mistakes.  (Turpen:  Yes.)  What

kind of mistakes did you make when you were just

starting out in the business?

   

   Turpen:  Well, as I look back, I didn't make a whole

lot of 'em.  (all chuckle)  I was too tight!  No, I

didn't.  But he just let me make my own decisions, and

I did make some.  When I first came back, I made some

jewelry that you couldn't have sold to anybody, and I

got burned with it good.  I made jewelry that men would

wear--tie clips and things like that, that I thought

would be real good, and after bein' in the jewelry

business for a while, you find out that 1 percent goes

to men, and 99 percent goes to women.  And I really

made a bunch of that stuff in the first few months, and

I got burned with it real good.

   I was always very careful.  I'm tryin' to think....

You always make a few where they may not be your

mistakes--every once in a while you get taken advantage

of.  I had a very good customer, the Mazells.  You

know, I mentioned that the Mazells were the ones that

the traders were worried about, the United Traders

Association.  The Mazells, they were Jewish people, and

that's who they were worried about was going to

infiltrate and ruin the market.  Well, when I came in

the business, they were my best customer.  They had a

store down here on the main street, Central and

Albuquerk, a big store, and they moved lots of jewelry.

I was kind of one of their favorites, and I sold 'em

lots of jewelry.  But they had their Jewish ways of

buying.  They would come to Gallup and kind of descend

on me as a family.  They'd come in, the father, the

mother, the daughter, her two friends, and they'd kind

of scatter around the store on me and start asking

prices.  "How much is this?"  A lot of things weren't

marked, and I'd have to make up my mind what it was.

And they'd just kind of confuse me over a period of

time a lot of times.  As they were ready to leave that

day, the father says, "What's all those boxes up

there?"  I said, "Those are boxes of pottery."  "What

kind of pottery?"  "Hopi pottery."  "Gee, it's late in

the day.  I need some pottery, but we can't look at it.

Will you bring it to Albuquerque?"  "Sure, I'll bring

it to Albuquerque.  I'm always lookin' for a reason to

go to Albuquerk."  So I filled my car full of boxes and

I get over here early in the morning and they come in.

The person who opened the store was there, and he said,

"Mr. Mazell isn't here yet.  Bring the pottery in."  He

always puts the pottery in his room.  Every piece is

wrapped in a piece of newspaper to protect it.  There

was lots of pieces, maybe a few hundred, and I unpacked

it and laid it out there, and just as I finished the

last piece, almost, I'm sitting over there waiting, and

he walks in.  He didn't even see me--or he sees me but

he doesn't say anything.  He yells out, "Who's pottery

is this?"  "Oh, Turpen brought that from Gallup."

"Why'd he bring that?"  "He said you wanted it."  "No,

I don't want Hopi pottery!  I want Acoma pottery.  I

don't want that.  We've got a warehouse full of that

pottery.  Tell him to pack it up and take it back."

(chuckles)  So you sell it at a really cheap price and

walk.  Little things like that happen to you.

   Of course the biggest people in the business was

Fred Harvey.  Fred Harvey was just....  They were the

savior of the Indian pottery business in the early

days.  They moved jewelry.  My dad took me one time on

a train.  The train would come through, and it always

stopped in Gallup for an hour for everybody to get off

and go inside.  They went in the restaurant and ate in

those days.  We sold a lot of merchandise to the Santa

Fe Railroad, and some important people were coming

through, and they had their own club car, and they'd

let my dad know in advance, and he would bring

merchandise down, and he'd ride with 'em to Winslow and

show 'em the merchandise, and they'd pick out some

pieces for their wives or whatever.  He took me on one

of those little trips one time, and I remember how nice

that club car was, and those kind of tycoon-type

people, smoking their cigars and lookin' at that

jewelry and chislin' on the price a little.  (chuckles)

That goes back a long way.

   Another thing we used to do--this is another little

side story--we had two or three Navajo ladies, or men

too, and the train would stop for an hour and we'd give

these people a few pieces of jewelry, a small suitcase

full of jewelry, and they'd go up and sit on the

platform and sell it to the tourists.  And then when

they'd come back, they'd pay us and we'd give 'em a

little commission.  My dad told 'em one day--they

weren't sellin' very good--and he said, "Are you

tellin' 'em it's old?"  "Yeah."  "You gotta tell 'em

it's old.  Tell 'em it's old, that's what they want."

"Okay."  So they come back the next day, and this one

lady says, "This one almost sold, but he didn't buy

it."  He said, "Did you tell him it's old?"  She said,

"Yes."  "How old?"  She said, "I told him it's a

hundred years old, and he said 'that's just too damned

old.'"  (laughter)  So we made a little money that way.

When I say things were hard, that's how tough they

were.  A little sale, two or three times a day at the

train station was a great help.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned Hopi pottery and your Navajo

rugs.  Would you actually go out on the reservation and

buy that?  Or did you buy it through....

   

   Turpen:  No, the only time we ever went on the

reservation was that one, about a ten-year period,

maybe five-year period of time, when all of a sudden

rugs just dried up on us.  No, we never did that.  The

Hopis would come all the way in and sell us the

pottery, and the weavers have always come to Gallup to

sell the rugs.  Of course at one time it wasn't so

competitive.  Now, one brings a rug in, and they may go

a half-dozen places before they sell it--they usually

check the prices.

   

   Underhill:  You mentioned customers who were buying

jewelry?

   

   Turpen:  Back even into the forties and fifties,

there were a lot of people with big, big money that

placed a value on Indian things, where the general

public didn't.  And even earlier than that, evidently,

because there's some wonderful collections out there

today that were collected way back, must have been in

the twenties or earlier.  Now, of course I don't go

back and remember that far, but you know, we had

customers like the Schwinn bicycle people.  They placed

a value on it.  I'd like to think of some others.  I

can't think of the name now.  For instance--I never

knew this, of course--but in one of the recent New York

auctions by Sotherby's, Mr. Marcus of Neiman-Marcus

collected this merchandise all these years, and he was

selling it through this auction.  And there's wonderful

collections of rugs, pottery, jewelry, in California.

California was close enough to New Mexico, I guess,

that these people came out.  The Standard Oil people,

Millicent Rogers, she was one of our best customers.

Millicent has a museum in Taos or Santa Fe--Taos.  And

she was a wonderful customer.  And those people that

had really, really big money, collected this

merchandise and placed a value on it where other people

didn't even know what it was.  And they wore it,

displayed it, and used it, and were very proud of it.

   I think that's changed a lot.  I don't see it today.

Of course maybe the reason is, I don't know, we make

better merchandise today than we made then.  Our

jewelry today is better than it ever was.  But by the

same token, there's so many more people making it.  I

don't know how you'd collect a piece of jewelry today.

I mean, buy it on the strength that there wasn't gonna

be another one like it, because that can't be.  So

there really isn't much reason to collect today, unless

it's just something that people see it personal.

   Now, rugs are a different thing.  However, rugs

today are better than they ever were.  The weavers

today are weaving rugs that fifty years ago they didn't

even know how to weave like that.  Very few of 'em did.

   

   Cole:  Why do you think that is?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I think one of the things is, I think

it's the yarn.  And again, that's a transition that we

went through like we did in jewelry.  They used to spin

the yarn, and then all of a sudden commercial yarn

became available--good-lookin' commercial yarn, not

this real fine cheap stuff.  And when that first

started bein' sold on the market, "Oh, you can't do

that.  You're just gonna destroy the business."  But

what it did, it just made a better rug.  And I don't

know why there would be better weavers.  I think maybe

there's just more of 'em.  There's lots of Navajo

people.  There's a lot of 'em out there.  Plus, a good

rug really brings money.  I mean, they can make money

weavin' a rug today, whereas used to they couldn't.  I

think they lost money.  It didn't cost 'em anything, of

course, sittin' out in a hogan and weaving.  They

didn't have a job, there was nothin' else goin' on, so

whatever they got....  They sheared the sheep.  That

didn't cost anything.  But it was kind of a lost cause.

But now, today, there's rugs that bring hundreds and

thousands of dollars right to the weaver.

   

   Cole:  Would you say that the trader has had as much

influence over the jewelry as they have had over Navajo

weaving?

   

   Turpen:  I don't think they have had as much

influence in design.  There wasn't hardly any of us

capable of designing.  None of us had that talent.

Dean Kirk was the only one I knew of who could really

sit down and sort of sketch out a real nice piece of

jewelry, and show 'em exactly how to make it.  Most of

us just adapted.  We'd take something and show it to

them and say, "Change it this way, do it this way."

Maybe a picture out of a catalog or something.

   I think the rug people really have worked with 'em.

Our silversmiths are so flexible that you don't have to

direct 'em very much.  They'll take a piece of jewelry

and change it over and over and over.  I think we've

had a lot to do with it as far as marketing, of course,

but as far as design and actually gettin' it made, I

don't think we've been too influential.  They're still

makin' the same--except for the very fine inlay work

that we do today, our Navajo jewelry is basically where

we take a stone and work around it, or multiple stones

and work around 'em.  It's pretty much the same as it

was.

   

   Underhill:  You mentioned the annual meetings of the

United Indian Traders Association.  (Turpen:  Yes.)

What do you remember about those annual meetings?

   

   Turpen:  Well, they weren't very impressive

(chuckles), I'll say that.  You know, they all had

little complaints about, usually, how they could

collect their money better.  Things like that.  As I

say, they never talked about arts and crafts--mostly

just complainin' about how, if they were givin' credit,

how they could keep from not losin' the money on it.  I

have a nice little anecdote to tell you on that.

   This one meeting I was at, they was complainin', one

of 'em spoke up and he said, "You know, we get these

checks, and 'Hosteen Joe's' credit is good for $200, so

we give him $200.  So the check is coming, but Hosteen

Joe dies.  So now, he's got our canned goods, and we

got a check we can't cash, and the government won't

cash it, they won't make it good.  So we've lost that.

We have to take and turn that around, send it back.

And we wonder if there isn't some way we could go to

the government and explain this situation."  So they

hashed it around, two or three others jumped in and

said, "Yeah, that's what happens to us."  "Yeah, I've

had that happen.  Boy, I lost some money that way,

that's right!"  (laughs)  So there was a trader down in

Fort Apache, been there forever, and he was a real

quiet guy.  He [was asked], "Do you ever have any

trouble with the Apaches on this?"  He said, "I find it

very hard to get a good clean thumbprint after rigor

mortis has set in."  (laughter)  You know, we used to

thumb people all the time.  Still do, a little bit, but

nowadays everybody has a census number and a Social

Security number.  But thumbprinting was just--gosh, we

wore those pads out thumbprinting stuff.

   

   Underhill:  It's coming back in vogue.

   

   Turpen:  Is it?!

   

   Underhill:  Sometimes when you cash a big check.

   

   Turpen:  Really?!

   

   Underhill:  In the mainstream banks.

   

   Turpen:  Oh, yeah, nowadays they can trace that

within a flash, can't they?  (Underhill:  Uh-huh.)

Yeah, I think I saw that on TV the other day.

   

   Underhill:  What characteristics do you think that

traders have in common?  You've talked a little about

some of the differences between being out on the

reservation and being in town, but are there....

   

   Turpen:  Well, the old-time traders had in common, I

think, that they wanted to be in business for

themselves.  They wanted to be an individual

entrepreneur.  I think a lot of 'em wanted isolation.

I'm talking about more the reservation traders.  They

weren't too big socially.  And I think they had a great

feel for the Indian.  I think that's the most common

thing.  They all seemed to stay with the same wife

forever.  I don't remember any divorces to speak of.

Maybe that was the times more than anything else.  The

wife, many times, was just as important in that store

as the man was.  She could speak Navajo, and many times

kept the books--very important to the store.  And, you

know, way back, like when my dad was tradin' at Leupp--

and I remember this real well--they opened the store at

eight in the morning and closed it at six in the

evening, I guess, and the Indian customer would come in

from miles out, and he'd hang around there all day.

They'd keep askin' him, "Are you ready to do your

buyin'?"  "No, I'm not ready yet."  And then about 5:30

or a quarter to six, when they were ready to close,

then he'd start doin' business--and not just him, you

know, maybe a bunch of 'em.  And that was a major

complaint, that they couldn't ever get them to do their

business.  They wanted to visit, and they visited with

each other and visited with the trader.

   You know, they're great card-players, the Indian

people are.  They love gambling, they're gamblers.

They had eating habits that to me, to this day, are

strange.  You know, they love canned tomatoes, but most

of 'em put sugar in it--buy canned tomatoes and put

‘ásh__ _ikan in it.  Vienna sausage is very popular,

that Unetah [phonetic spelling] biscuit cracker.  That

was their staple.  And of course lots of soda pop.

   The trader, Carl Heine [phonetic spelling], that I

spoke of, he ran Pine Springs or Wide Ruins for a few

years during the war.  He had to go into the service,

but before and after, and you couldn't get soda pop--

there was no soda pop available because there was no

sugar.  And so he made Kool-Aid and put it in bottles,

and the bottle was the most important thing he had.  He

wouldn't let 'em leave the premises with the bottle,

see, because he had to refill it again.  But, you know,

it just shows you how they could think and what they

did to make money.

   Another little thing that happened out there that I

thought was....  I was there one day, and it was a

Friday, about four o'clock in the afternoon.  All the

little school children, the little girls and little

boys from elementary were comin' in.  There was a big

long line of 'em, must have been fifty or sixty of 'em.

And they were allowed to come in and pick out something

they wanted, a candy bar, mainly.  But then I noticed

that just about every third one, they got a little

package of somethin'.  I couldn't see what they were

getting, a little package.  And finally, when it was

all over, one would take a pop, one would take a candy,

and the next take a package.  And I said to Carl, "What

are they taking?  What's that package?"  He said,

"Bobby pins."  (chuckles)  Those girls wanted bobby

pins.

   

   Cole:  We've heard quite a bit, in talking to other

traders, about the impact of the FCC hearings in the

early seventies dealing with pawn on the reservation.

Did that have any effect on the Gallup traders at all?

   

   Turpen:  No, we never had to live under their laws.

We only worked under state laws, and then of course

there's federal usury laws, but the State of New Mexico

has no usury law.  So no, that never bothered us.  As a

matter of fact, what it did, it drove all the customers

into Gallup, so we kind of said, "Hey, that's good for

you guys, we'll take advantage of the situation."  But

you've heard a lot about that, huh?  (Cole:  Uh-huh.)

That's strange.  I don't remember ever havin' any

discussion about that much with anybody.  I do know

that most of 'em didn't take pawn, because they just

weren't given enough percentage to make it profitable.

   

   Cole:  A lot of the on-the-reservation traders we've

talked to, that's one of the big things they really

remember.

   Turpen:  Well, I'll be darned.

   

   Cole:  They feel like that was a pretty watershed

issue for them, 'cause it really drove 'em out of the

little bit of pawn business they had going, which maybe

was that one tie to keep customers intact.

   

   Turpen:  Sure.  I just never realized they took that

much pawn, to be honest with you.  We're used to seeing

what we called a pawn vault.  You walk into a room, and

that's all you see.  Back there, you'd walk in their

vault, and maybe a few feet over here there'd be a few

pieces of merchandise.

   

   Cole:  I was kind of curious, we've heard a little

bit, too, about the Navajo Shopping Center and what a

big deal that was in Gallup, and if you remember much

about that?

   

   Turpen:  Well, that was a big deal.  They came in

and they kind of....  Let's see, why was it such a big

deal?  What was he doing?  Well, the first thing he was

doing was overlending.  First he came in and started

cuttin' prices.  You know, a shopping center-type

operation.  We hadn't had that up until [then]--not in

the Indian businesses.  As a matter of fact, I'm not

sure we even had much of a shopping center in Gallup at

that time--we might have.  Again, that's how things

change.

   I'll go back a little.  About one of the first

shopping centers we had in Gallup, the fellah came from

Durango and put one in.  And the day that he opened on

Sunday, I thought they were gonna hang him.  You know,

all the competitors complained, the churches

complained, and of course he just told everybody to

mind their business, stayed open, and was no longer.

But when the shopping center came to town, he started

cutting prices.  But mostly he was overloaning on pawn.

He would loan much more than the item was worth.  And

when you overloan on a piece of pawn, you're gonna get

it eventually, it's gonna be yours, and then you have

to get rid of it.  That happened to him.

   And you know the Tanners were so--they were really

good traders.  What I mean is, the Indians really liked

'em, because they spoke Navajo so well, and they

advertised on the radio a lot.  They could both sing a

little, and they sang in English and Navajo--they

combined it--and the Navajos loved it, and they just

flocked in there.  And of course, you know, there was a

lot of action.  There was just action everywhere.

There was people and cars.  But he finally got burned

really good on the pawn.  And there wasn't enough money

to keep him afloat.  He kept borrowin' from everybody.

   I'll tell you another story.  There was an insurance

person over here in Albuquerk that put some money in

it.  He started havin' to reach out and raise money.

If you ever went out and looked at it, you could hardly

keep from puttin' your money in it, because it really

looked good.  A lot of people who knew nothing about

the Indian business put money in there, invested in it.

And this insurance guy one day called me and he said,

"Tobe, you don't know me, but you and I have a lot of

common friends.  Would you come out here?  We've taken

this place over from Buddy Tanner.  The stockholders

are taking it over, and they've given me the job of

runnin' this damned place.  I don't know anything about

it.  Would you come out here?"  And I said, "Sure, I'll

come out there."  So I walked out, and he said, "Here's

the main thing I want to ask you.  You know, these two

boxes just came in today--my mail.  I opened 'em, and

they're full of turquoise beads.  Look, they're just

thrown in on top of each other."  They were so heavy,

they were coffee boxes--a coffee box is pretty big.

Full of it.  "What is this?"  I said, "You got an

invoice on it?"  "No," he said, "there's no invoice."

Well, what Buddy had done, he had given this to a

traveling....  There's always been people travelin'

with Indian jewelry--always.  And he had given this to

some guy and told him, "You go out and sell this stuff

and bring me back some of the money and you keep some

of it.  Just get rid of it."  Well, he couldn't get rid

of it, so he mailed it back.  (chuckles)  And he asked

me, "What am I gonna do with this?"  I said, "Well,

today, you can't sell it at all.  Just put it in a

corner and forget it, 'cause it's not saleable."  And

then, son of a gun, in about two years when the hippie

movement hit, and beads became popular, he was able to

sell that stuff.

   But that's what happened to the Navajo Shopping

Center.  Those guys were country traders that came to

town, and they just burned us all up for a while.  They

didn't hurt us much.  They hurt us in the pawn a little

bit, but we weren't sellin' groceries, we weren't doin'

anything like that, so that didn't have any effect on

us.

   Pawn customers are kind of strange.  Once you get a

pawn customer, they don't leave you very easy.  The

only reason they leave you is they just know for sure

they can get twice what you've already given.  They

might do that.  But they stick with you pretty good.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned they were advertising on the

radio.  How would Turpens advertise their business?

Was it word of mouth?

   

   Turpen:  We didn't ever do a whole lot of it,

really.  Everybody in Gallup had to do a little radio

advertising, yeah, but word of mouth is always the

best, that's number one.  But all of us had to do a

little advertising.  Every once in a while we'd take a

little ad that we pay cash for pawn.  That's about all

we had, really.  We had nothing else to sell the

Indian.  That's the only thing we could advertise.  The

one thing that was very successful for us one time,

though, when rugs got so scarce, we went on the radio

in Farmington.  I had a Farmington radio person come to

see me one day, and I said, "Why, I don't want to

advertise in Farmington!"  He said, "Isn't there

anything you need up there?"  I said, "I need rugs."

He said, "I'll get rugs for you.  You give me some ads

and I'll get rugs for you."  And he really did.  It

kind of turned around at the same time.  They started

weaving.  And again, why did they start weaving?  They

started weaving because the price got right.  All of a

sudden rugs disappeared, we had to raise the price of

'em, pay more for 'em.  But he really got me rugs.

   You talk about that radio advertising--let me hit on

that a little bit, how good that is.  That is really

payday, rug advertising.  I'll give you one little

perfect instance of how well it works.  One day I go

out to the side of the store and my pickup's gone.  I

used to leave my key in the pickup, I didn't want to

mess with it in my pocket.  Well, they'd driven my

pickup off, and I thought, "Aw, heck, we'll find it

tonight, or they'll bring it back, some kids took it or

somethin'."  Well, it didn't come back.  You know, I

really didn't think a whole lot about it.  I kept

thinkin' it'd show up.  About five days later I got

really alarmed.  I said, "You know, if my pickup's

gone, I'd better do somethin'."  About the second day,

I called the police, and that didn't do any good.  So I

thought, "You know, I'm gonna advertise!"  So I put it

on the Navajo Hour that my pickup, such-and-such make,

such-and-such color, and there'd be a fifty dollar

reward.  And in about ten minutes, a young Navajo kid

called and told me it was out here in a ditch about

five miles out of town.  Somebody had stolen it and

gone out there, played the radio 'til the battery ran

down, and left it sittin' there.  And if I'd left it

there much longer, it would have probably got stripped.

But within about ten or fifteen minutes, I had the word

where my pickup was.  They really listen to that radio.

   And today, the big thing with the Indian people are

those videos.  They come into Gallup and they walk out

with a ten-pound bag of videos, go home and watch 'em

all week.  New business.

   

   Cole:  How would you describe the Navajo economic

system?

   

   Turpen:  Cash and carry.  They never save a nickel.

They don't know what it is to save money.  It just

isn't in their philosophy.  They only live for the day.

That's why Gallup is such a good town, is that none of

that money ever gets put in a bank or in a sock or

anything.  If it's available, it gets spent.  It just

doesn't....  They have no philosophy as far as

tomorrow.  I shouldn't say all of 'em--there are a few,

I'm sure, but the big majority get their wages, they

spend it.  And they're very generous with their

children, they buy their kids most anything they want.

   Nowadays, they're big restaurant eaters.  The story

in Gallup is that that Furr's sells more steaks than

any Furr's in the United States--Furr's cafeteria--

because they bring the whole family in and buy 'em a

steak.  And their eating habits have changed

tremendously.  They go to salad bars now, they eat

Oriental food.  Really, truly, the Indian has always

wanted to be like the Anglo, and probably for economic

reasons and maybe others, they weren't--but every time

they get a chance, they do.  They just make that next

step forward.  And today they're just as much like we

as anybody.

   

   Cole:  Would the same be true of the Zuni?

   Turpen:  No, the Zuni handle their money much

better.  I'm not sure they're savers, but they seem to

handle their money much [better].  That's why they

never pawn.  They're able to figure out that they have

to pay interest on that pawn, and the Navajo, that

doesn't bother him.  Doesn't bother him at all.  Payin'

that interest doesn't mean a thing to him.

   I'll go back a long way and describe Gallup to you a

little bit.  It's kind of interesting.  It was divided

into the north side and the south side--the railroad

tracks divided it.  The north side is where all of the

trading posts were.  There was nothing on the other

side of town.  The stores over there were restaurants

and men's and women's clothing stores, dime stores,

places like that.  The north side is where the trading

posts were, and that's where the Indians did all of

their business, all of it.  There were no restaurants

for them to eat at.  Later on, some Oriental people

came in and put in a couple little small restaurants

where they would eat a little.  But they spent all

their time on what we call the north side of town.

   Of course, one of our big problems early on was

bootleg days.  They couldn't go in a bar, so there was

bootleg.  And we had lots of heavy-weight drinkin'.

They would just drink so much that there was a lot of

layin' around, problems in the store.  They'd come in

and you'd ask 'em to leave, and they didn't like that.

That didn't appeal to 'em at all, especially in cold

weather.  And we had some real problems when they

wouldn't sell it, when they couldn't buy it.  Of

course, you see, they couldn't buy liquor openly, in a

bar or in a package store for a number of years after

World War II.  There was a lot of years there when they

couldn't buy liquor.

   During the service, my mother wrote me a letter....

This'll really give you an idea of what a separation we

had.  She wrote me a letter and said, "Son, things are

really changin' here.  The Indians are eating in the

restaurants and going to the theater."  They had never

done that up until then.  Probably the war mighta had

somethin' to do with it.  You know, these GI kids

started comin' back, and they'd been places where this

was happening, so now they're part of it.

   But Gallup has always accepted the Indian people,

wherever.  We've never excluded 'em.  They've excluded

themselves way back.  But Gallup has always accepted

them completely.

   

   Cole:  I should ask you, also, when you met your

wife.

   

   Turpen:  Oh, my wife--I was back from the service

and she was in a nurses' training program.  They were

training nurses for the war effort, and she was from

Minnesota.  When they finished their schooling, they

had to take six months in a hospital somewhere, and

they sent 'em all around the United States, and she

drew Gallup.  She drew Fort Defiance.

   

   Cole:  And what was her name?

   Turpen:  Doris Stanich [phonetic spelling].  She was

a Slovanian.  She had an interesting experience.  The

sheriff there--these girls all came in on trains, and

eventually we ended up with about fifty of 'em out

there.  They came from different hospitals around the

country.  And she and her friend were sent on the train

to Gallup, and they got in there at night, and the

sheriff would meet them and take them to Fort Defiance,

which is thirty miles away.  And these girls get off of

the train, boy, they're all dressed up in their fur

coats.  You know, they're from Minnesota, and it's cold

in Gallup, it's wintertime.  He said, "Well, c'mon

girls, I'll take you out to the fort.  But listen, I

got a little somethin' I've gotta do first.  The two of

you are gonna hafta jump in the front with me.  I got a

couple of drunks in the back seat, and I've gotta take

'em up and put 'em in jail before I go out there."

(chuckles)  Of course this vehicle had a big wire in

it.  So that was the first time they'd been to Gallup.

   

   Underhill:  And do you have children?

   

   Turpen:  Yeah, we have four children.  Yes, we have

four grown children.  I have one daughter who runs the

pawn store in Gallup.  And my son was in there with us

for four years, and decided that he wanted to do

something else.  So he's moved to Las Cruces.  But none

of my other children....  Well, they married and moved

away.  My youngest daughter has an Indian store in Sun

Valley, Idaho.  She was a dental hygienist, and she

kind of wore out on it.  I said, "Why don't you open an

Indian store in Sun Valley?  You'll do good there."

And she's been there now about three years, has a nice

natural touch for it, natural ability.

   

   Underhill:  Why did you stay in it for fifty years?

   

   Turpen:  Oh, I loved it!  I loved every minute of

it.  You know, there's always times when you....  Plus,

it was very successful financially for me.  But I just

loved it.  I went down there at eight in the morning

and stayed until six in the evening almost every day,

five days a week--six days a week, early on.  I think

the thing that makes it almost the most interesting

were the customers.  We had great, great customers,

except early on when we had such a hard time sellin'

that they weren't so great.  But, you know, we

finally....  I did something that worked out.  When we

moved our store, everyone said, "Why don't you open in

the middle of town?  Why are you goin' out there?"  And

I had already learned, because we were three blocks

from the center of town, and when someone walked in our

door, they had gone to the trouble of asking someone

where they could buy a particular item, or where they

could get a good deal, or whatever reason.  When they

walked in our door, they were almost pre-sold.  And

that's one reason I moved out there.  I thought, "You

know, we'll have the same thing."  And that followed us

over the years.  People that walked in were usually

ready to buy.  If we had what they wanted and they were

willin' to pay the price, we made a sale.  And another

reason I moved out towards town, was Zuni jewelry was

becoming very popular and very competitive--very

competitive for us to buy--and I wanted the first shot

at 'em as they came into town.  So that's the reason we

went out of town.  And today, it's kind of a drawback

today.  I think you'd be better off in the center of

town today.  The heart of Gallup moved over on the

north side where that shopping center is.  So we're

kind of isolated now, it isn't as good as it was.

   But the people we dealt with really....  And over

the years we took everybody's check.  I don't care who

they were, we took their check.  We ask 'em for

identification or something.  We never took a driver's

license or anything, and we didn't lose a half a dozen

checks in all those years.  And we didn't get beat out

of much money wholesale-wise either.  Most of the

dealers paid us too.  So it was a good business from a

lot of aspects.

   And it was fun makin' the jewelry.  Early on, a Zuni

came in one time with a sun face.  It was pretty good-

sized, about two-and-a-half inches in diameter.  It had

the face, and it had rays around it like the sun.  And

I looked at that thing and I asked him to put it in

silver. and he brought it back and the silver was real

flimsy, it wasn't very good.  I tried another Zuni, and

he did the same thing.  Zunis don't use much silver--

they use very little silver in anything.  So I had a

Navajo mount it, and it mounted heavy and it came out

really beautiful.  I'll tell you, for about three

years, I could not make enough of those things.  I had

about three silversmiths makin' 'em, and they could

make about three or four a day, which doesn't sound

like many, but that's a lot.  And I had the point where

I had maybe a hundred of 'em on display, and I had

buyers come in and buy twelve, fifteen of 'em at a

time.

   Then when jewelry really got good--I'll give you

another little story here that's one of my favorite

stories.  One of my biggest sales ever, quick.  We were

lookin' anywhere we could find Indian jewelry.  I heard

there was a young man out at Thoreau that had some

silversmiths working.  So I went out there and I said,

"You have some squash blossoms?  They tell me you're

makin' squash blossoms."  "Yeah, but none of 'em are

for sale.  They're all sold."  I said, "Well, let me

see 'em, maybe I'll get on your list."  "Well, here's a

sample."  So he showed me one.  Boy, it was really

lousy.  The [tonal?] stones were terrible, and the

silver was terrible, and I said, "Gees, this is

terrible."  "Yeah," he said, "but they sell good."

(chuckles)  About that time, he said, "How many do you

want to buy?"  I said, "Well, after seein' those, I

don't know, but I guess if I bought any, I'd buy a lot

of 'em.  It depends what the price [is]."  He gave me a

price and I said, "I'd buy a lot of 'em at that price."

He said, "Would you buy a big paper sack full of 'em?"

"Well, I might."  So he came out with a great big paper

sack like that, full of 'em.  There was about seventy

or eighty of 'em in there.  And I bought 'em, and he

said, "You gonna pay me cash?"  I said, "Yeah, I'm

gonna pay you cash."  He didn't know who I was.

   So I came back to town and the buyer from Fred

Harvey came in, and those were sittin' there.  "God,

where'd you get these squash blossoms?!"  "Oh, we've

got a bunch of silversmiths working."  (laughs)  And he

said, "Can I have some of 'em?"  "How many you want?"

He said, "You wouldn't let me have 'em all, would you?"

"Well, as much as you buy from us, yeah, you can have

'em all.  I've got 'em promised and everything...."

And he bought those and gave me a nice profit in just

one big transaction!  (laughter)

   And I made a sale one time, early on.  A reservation

trader came in with a bunch of....  He came in with a

big stake body full of Navajo rugs.  You know what a

stake body is?  (Cole:  Uh-huh.)  Full of Navajo rugs.

And he told my dad, "Your boy's tryin' to get in the

rug business.  I'll consign these to ya'."  And they

were all big rugs, six by eight, eight by ten, eight by

twelves--rugs that were hard to sell.  Dad said, "Well,

you got nothin' to lose, son.  Take 'em!"  So I took

'em and I said, "Where do you sell these rugs like

this?"  He said, "Well, Fred Harvey buys 'em sometimes.

That's about the only place."  So I cleaned those rugs

up, I vacuumed 'em, they had mothballs on 'em, and I

cleaned 'em and vacuumed and pulled 'em and

straightened 'em and folded 'em nice, and worked for a

lot of days.  Finally one day I loaded my car up and

took 'em over here, and my dad came with me.  He said,

"I'll introduce you to these people.  I don't think

you're gonna sell any of those rugs, though."  Well, I

just hit 'em perfect, and I really had a good price on

'em.  This guy started buyin' those rugs, and he bought

about $1,500 worth, which today would be $200,000, I

think.  And when we walked out of there, my dad said to

me, "Son, I want you to remember this day.  That's the

biggest rug sale, dollar-wise and size-wise you're ever

gonna make in your life."  Well, he was wrong on the

dollar, but he sure wasn't wrong on the size.  He said,

"Boy, you hit a home run."

   

   Cole:  And that was to Fred Harvey then?

   

   Turpen:  Yeah, that was Fred Harvey.  They had a

buying center here.  They bought for all their stores

right here in Albuquerque.  And of course they were

very particular.  It had to be handmade.  If it was

jewelry, they looked at every stone.  They were very,

very particular--but everybody was particular back

then, everybody was hard to sell--particular on

quality, particular on price.  Other than that....

They were the big people.  We hated to see them go.

The day we lost them, we lost a big customer.

   And of course the national parks have always been

good.  They've changed a lot now.  They've got these

commercial buyers and they don't want to buy unless

they have the privilege of returning what they don't

sell.  So that takes a lot out of it.  End of the

season, you get your merchandise back.  Most of it

sells, but there's always some that doesn't.  Maybe

they got a bad clerk, maybe he don't sell much of it.

You don't have any control over that.

   There's even customers out there today, one of our

big customers when we closed was not Disneyland, but

that other park out there--Knotts Berry [Farm] was a

big customer.  They wanted us to pay the wages of a

person that stocked our stuff out there, that looked at

it and decided if they needed more and put it out for

show.  They wanted us to pay that wages.  I said, "We

can't do that.  We don't have that kind of markup."

But that's the kind of things you get requested today.

That's how it's changed.

   

   Cole:  If you could change anything about your life

or work, what would you change?

   

   Turpen:  I wouldn't change anything about the work

or the life either--neither one.  I've had a really

good full life.  The business was perfect, couldn't

have been in a better place.  Gallup was a wonderful

place to live in.  We had a lot of good people there.

There was lots of sociability when we weren't very

mobile and didn't have enough money to go anywhere

anyway.  So there was a lot of friends.  And again, you

just get a jillion laughs with the Indian people.  If

you know how to visit with them and draw them out a

little, they just--they're really funny.

   You asked me a couple of things.  I was teachin' my

boy the business and showin' him, so we went to

Cameron, and we were eating there, and this Indian

girl, the waitress, told her, "I want cherry pie."  And

she brought the pie and I said, "You know, I wanted

cherry, not apple.  You brought me apple."  "Okay," she

says, "but apple is just as good."  (laughter)  Kind of

their philosophy.  We went on up to Tuba City to stay

that night, and we checked into a motel, and this

little Indian girl was behind the counter, and there

was a guy ahead of me that registered, and the minute I

started registerin', he walked off and turned and he

said, "This room is gonna be eighty-nine dollars?!"

"Yeah," she said, "that's the rate."  "Eight-nine

dollars for Tuba City in this place?!"  She said,

"Well, you're on the Rez.  You'll either take it or

leave it."  (laughter)  He came to me and he said, "You

gonna stay here?"  And I said, "I got to.  What do you

mean?  The next place is Flagstaff!  Cameron's full."

   One not too long ago came in.  What do they call

that thing?  They call it....  Gee, it's no good unless

I remember it.  The dish you get--PrimeStar?  She came

in the store and I happened to be there that day.  She

asked me, she said, "Toby, I've got a problem."

"What's the problem?" I said, "Maybe I can help you."

"I get my mail here, and I get my PrimeStar here.  My

name is Mary Tsosi, but there's another Mary Tsosi, and

she's taking my PrimeStar, and why I'm really mad is

she don't even have PrimeStar!"  (laughter)  That's the

kind of humor they have.

   

   Cole:  I should clarify one thing, too.  Were you a

member of [United] Indian Traders Association at one

point?

   

   Turpen:  Well, yeah, the store was, sure.

Certainly.  We had a meeting in Flagstaff one time, and

I remember it well because I drove in a snowstorm all

the way there.  Goldwater was supposed to come and

speak to us, but he couldn't get there because of the

storm.  I was a member.  I think Ralph Bilby got to be

president or somethin'--was president.  So Ralph kind

of made sure that a lot of us showed up there.  But we

had a big meeting there that night.  There was a lot of

people there.  In Gallup there were meetings, but

nothing the size of that.  You know, as I think about

it, after the war, that thing got pretty big--at least

the yearly meeting did.  The two that I remember going

to--and I think I went to more--they were big--you

know, banquets.  But I didn't go to the business

meeting the next day.  That's why I don't remember

much, I didn't go to the business meeting, I just went

to the banquet.

   

   Cole:  Lew always has a good question.

   

   Steiger:  Oh, I was just curious where you ended up

in the service during the war.

   

   Turpen:  I joined the Navy.  My father was in the

Navy and he wanted me to join the Navy, which I did.  I

ended up bein' a gunner off of a torpedo bomber on

aircraft carriers.

   

   Steiger:  In the Pacific?

   

   Turpen:  In the Pacific, uh-huh.  You asked me if

there was anything I didn't want to do over--I wouldn't

want to do that over.  I just barely got home from

that.

   

   Steiger:  You ended up in the thick of all that?

   

   Turpen:  Yes, we were in that big Philippine Sea

battle, and we lost a lot of planes and a lot of ships.

As you look back, it was a great experience, but you

wouldn't ask for it again.

   You know, just to show you how important money was,

I volunteered for that.  I went to gunnery school.

They put me in gunnery school, didn't give me much

choice.  You go through gunnery school and you learn

about the guns and so forth.  And then one day they had

a bulletin board there, and they said, "We need

volunteers for, air crewmen," they called 'em.  And

they said, "You'll get flight pay."  That's double your

pay.  "Plus if you go overseas, you'll get extra hazard

pay."  So now you're gettin' almost 300 percent.

You're gettin' 200 percent more than you wouldda made.

And that's why I volunteered--for the money.

(laughter)

   

   Cole:  Is there anything else you'd like to add?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I don't think so.  I think we've

covered everything that I wrote down here that I

thought would be interesting to you.  (pause)

   You know, way back, the traders were a very close-

knit group, and they were very generous.  When you'd go

out on the reservation to do business with 'em, they'd

always ask you to come in and eat with the family, and

if there's anything in the store you wanted--a cold

drink or something to eat--they always handed it to

you.  They were very generous people, and a lot of good

people.  Those people out at Thunderbird Lodge--I can't

think of their name now.  You know, there's a big

difference--has anybody ever spoken to you of John

Collier and the sheep business and the rugs?  [Cole:

Uh-huh.]  That was a big problem.  That became a big

problem.

   

   [END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

   

   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  We're at the home of Tobe Turpen in

Albuquerque, New Mexico.  It's December 13, 1998.  Also

in the room is Karen Underhill and Lew Steiger.  This

is Tape 3.

   You were just telling us a little bit about what

kinds of rugs you would get in your store, versus how

some of the traders would just develop....

   

   Turpen:  Yes.  The trader on the reservation a

number of years ago was pretty isolated as to the type

of rug he would get.  If he was at Ganado, he got

Ganado reds.  If he was at Chinle, he got what we

called the Chinle rug.  In Shiprock, about all they had

were Yé’iis or Yé’ii bicheii rugs.  And the weavers

didn't travel that far.  They wouldn't travel from

Ganado to Shiprock.  Today, that's all changed.  But

they would come to Gallup.  So we always had a real

variety of rugs.  Some of the rugs were much harder for

us to get than others.  The red rugs always came in.

Again, the trader on the reservation, also, if he found

a good weaver, he wanted to try to get all of that

weaver's rugs.  And the way he did that was by

advancing that weaver money on the next rug that was to

be woven, so he could control that rug.  And we never

operated that way.  But by the same token, there were

just so many weavers, they worked their way into us.

For many years, the Shiprock rug was one of the hardest

to buy.  I guess the hardest rug to buy ever for us was

the Teec Nos Pos.  Somehow or another, they controlled

those, or there just wasn't that many of 'em woven, I

don't know which.  Most of the others came in pretty

good.  And we always had on stock several hundred rugs

at a time, for the dealers to buy--dealers and the

retail person.

   We were not influential in the weaving of rugs.  In

other words, we never commissioned a rug or gave 'em a

pattern or suggested what they wove; whereas the

reservation trader would do that.  I think way back,

that some of the traders actually sketched some

patterns for them.  My dad said they did.  I have a big

rug that I saved, my father gave me, and he told me his

sister designed that rug.  He said she actually

sketched that rug and gave it to a weaver.  I think

what she did, of course, I think she took another

Navajo rug and made a variation of it.  But he told me

that rug was woven at her--that she asked the weaver to

weave it.  It was a big rug, big beautiful rug, woven

by Ugly Devil's wife.  (laughter)

   

   Underhill:  One thing we didn't ask you is if you

have a nickname in Navajo.

   Turpen:  No.  You know, I'm kind of ashamed of that,

because my dad said that they only give nicknames to

those that they like.  And they never gave me one.

I'll tell you what, I never dealt with the Navajo very

directly, once I got established in the business.  I

did, early.  For the first ten or fifteen years, I did.

I worked every silversmith, I bought every rug.  If

they would have called me anything, they would have

used my father's name and then added yazzi, "little

boy," on the bottom.  But since I didn't speak Navajo,

they never gave me....  They called my father Hosteen

Nez, which is "tall man."  They would have called me

Hosteen Nez Yazzi if they'd have given me one--I think

they would.

   

   Cole:  Did you have any Navajo employees in your

store?

   

   Turpen:  Oh, yes.  We had almost all Navajo

employees.  My uncle worked with us.  My father was

never very good at stayin' in the store.  He loved the

outside and he loved livestock, so once I came in, he

just kind of disappeared.  My uncle worked with me, and

then everyone else in the store was Navajo--the art

clerks.  And we worked our silversmiths--we always had

at least six or eight silversmiths poundin' away right

in the back of the store, plus the ones that worked

outside.

   

   Cole:  Would customers be able to go back and watch

the silversmith's work?

   

   Turpen:  Yes, and they really liked that.  That was

a big selling point.  That worked very well.  And when

we moved to our new location we're in now, I designed

that store so when you walked in, there was a glass

wall on the left, and a big long room with about twelve

or fifteen silversmiths workin' in there.  And that,

again, overcame that question, "Is it handmade?"  And

then most every customer, we would offer to let them

walk through there, and we'd take 'em through, and just

about every customer would go through and watch, 'cause

it's fairly interesting.  It's very simple, really, but

it's really quite interesting to see a piece of jewelry

being made.

   

   Cole:  Were those silversmiths working by the piece,

or paid by the hour?

   

   Turpen:  They worked by the hour.  The ones inside

we always worked by the hour, and the ones at home we

worked by the piece.

   

   Underhill:  Were people seeking the opportunity to

work in the store?  Did you find that was preferable to

being paid by the piece?

   

   Turpen:  It just depended upon the particular

individual situation.  Some of 'em lived so far away

they couldn't come in every day.  And some of 'em

didn't want to live in town.  They wanted to be out in

the country.  Maybe their kids were going to a school.

Maybe the children were going to a school out there or

something.  Usually, it's just a matter of where their

residence was.  If they had a little place in Gallup,

they worked in Gallup, they were willing to work in

Gallup.  Otherwise, most of 'em preferred to go home.

The only problem with working at home was, see, they

had to use a blowtorch that operated on kerosene.  It's

a lot harder to develop heat than the kind of torches

we use, the natural gas torches.  So it was a much

bigger job.  Not today’s–we have these little tanks

they take home.  They have the same gas that everybody

else has.  But when they had a blow torch, they had to

pump air into it to make it work, and it was a lot

bigger job.  (Steiger adjusts equipment)

   

   Cole:  Do you remember any of the Hubbells yourself?

   

   Turpen:  Well, I remember Roman Hubbell.  He was

kind of a dapper man.  He always wore kind of a fedora-

type hat--maybe a stylized western hat.  He was short

and kind of pudgy, had a little weight on him.  Lorenzo

was before my time.  Roman was noted for being very

generous with the Indians.  As a matter of fact, he was

kind of frowned on by some of the traders because he

always paid a little too much for everything, they

thought.  Roman had some great contacts back East.  As

I say, he was an educated person, and he knew people

that none of us ever would have known.  So he had

contacts for sales and for friends and places to move

merchandise the rest of us knew nothing about.

   

   Cole:  What about C. N. Cotton?

   

   Turpen:  Well, C. N. Cotton was the head of Gross-

Kelly, and he was a very, very distinguished, wonderful

man.  Everybody loved C. N. Cotton.  My father worked

for C. N. Cotton.  He worked for him at Gross-Kelly.

He owned a big, big home in Gallup.  He was wealthy

back when people weren't wealthy.  He owned a big home--

fine, fine home full of Navajo rugs.  I expect he was a

very well-educated person.  I remember him, but I was

too young to have ever visited with him or anything.

   

   Cole:  How about C. G. Wallace?

   

   Turpen:  C. G. was the trader of the Zuni Tribe.

C. G. came out here from North Carolina.  He rode a

train out here.  As a boy he had read Indian books, and

he fell in love with the Indian lore, and he decided he

wanted to be....  Now, I'm quoting what he told me.

I'm repeating what he told me.  He came out here and he

stopped in Albuquerque and went to some of these

pueblos.  He wanted to be an Indian trader.  I don't

know, he told me, "I wasn't very impressed with those

Indians.  I just wasn't impressed with 'em."  And so he

came on to Gallup and he got on a wagon and went to

Zuni, and he fell in love with Zuni and he stayed

there.  Early on, he was the leader of the Indian

jewelry business.  He was more instrumental in making,

developing, selling Indian jewelry than any person that

ever was.  Very successful bussinessman.  Built the

first really nice motel in Albuquerque back in the

early forties, when motels were just being built.  He

had the foresight and built a wonderful motel that

lasted--it's still there--but lasted in popularity for

forty or fifty years.  But he really knew Zuni jewelry,

he knew every Zuni by name, he knew every family.  He

lived there and spent his life there, except at the end

when he came here to Albuquerque.

   

   Cole:  How about the Staples?  Burton Staples?

   

   Turpen:  I remember the name, but I didn't know him.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned the Kirks earlier.  What about

Mike Kirk?

   

   Turpen:  Well, across the street from us we had the

Kirk brothers, and I suppose early on John and Mike

were partners.  That's a little bit before my time,

because by the time I came into the business, John was

in Gallup and Mike was out at Lupton--both very

prominent in the making of jewelry, the buying of rugs.

Very prominent people.  Just two different

personalities, but big in the business.  John had two

sons.  He had Tommy and Dude, who were in the business,

big time.  When we opened our store in 1939, the store

that I've spoke of a lot, we were right across the

street from them.  I think my dad chose that location

realizing that there'd be a little overflow from their

business, because they had it all.  They closed at noon

for lunch 'til one o'clock, and we stayed open, because

we'd get a customer out of there now and then.  And we

almost really just about built our business on the

strength of what they were, and they were very, very

fine people.  And again, as I look back, I don't know

how those traders made that much money, because there

wasn't much cash.  But they had the biggest, finest

home in Gallup, too.  We never did, we always lived

very humble.  But those people that were in that

business early on all had big homes and lived very

well.

   

   Cole:  Any other....  Why don't we look at all the

other names ___________.  We're looking at a list of

the incorporators of the United Indian Traders

Association.

   

   Turpen:  That's pretty well the ones that I really

knew.  I knew some of 'em, but I never spent any time

with 'em, to know anything about their background.  And

of course, you see, both Gross-Kelly and Charles Ilfeld

and the Kirk brothers, who were the big firms in town,

all had their, as we called it, curio departments--big

departments of Indian jewelry and rugs and whatever

else the Indian was making--big departments of it.  And

back then, even when I came in, the buyers, the people

who owned stores--that's what we would call buyer,

more--and the national parks--they came to Gallup to do

their buying.  A lot of 'em came exactly the same time

of the year.  Others varied it a little.

   Estes Park, Colorado, was a big place at that time.

There were several good stores there.  And they would

come in, in February and March, and do their buying.

And then you'd have to give them until the end of the

summer to pay you.  They took a billing.  But they'd

come in and select their merchandise.  But we did not

have to go to them, they came to us.  That really made

it very nice.  Then it changed.  Then all of a sudden

we....  Well, for a long time, even in the good days,

everybody came to our front door.  Now, there's

probably more jewelry made in Albuquerque than there is

in Gallup--certainly as much.

   Kachinas were always hard for us to come by for many

years.  They pretty well control those kachinas out at

Keams Canyon.  For us to have any stock of kachinas at

all was kind of strange.  They just didn't get in that

far with their kachinas.  They controlled 'em pretty

good, so they were very hard....  But then what

happened, we had a crossover, the Navajos started

makin' kachinas.  Once a Navajo starts makin'

somethin', you've got mass production now.  (chuckles)

It's like a water faucet.  Of course you can't sell a

Navajo kachina as a Hopi Kachina--however, many of 'em

are sold that way.  But some of 'em got to be very,

very good carvers.  The Navajo can do anything.  And

today, our inlay work, our multi-color or channel or

whatever you might want to call it, done by the

Navajos, is as good or better than any ever done by a

Zuni.  They really have talent.

   

   Cole:  Were the traders out at Keams Canyon ones

that were....

   

   Turpen:  Yes, they'd control it.  Plus, that's a

long way to come, you see.  That's a three-hour drive

almost.  You could go out there, and they'd have

shelves full of 'em.  So they pretty well had control.

   

   Cole:  Is there anything else you'd like to add?

   

   Turpen:  No, I guess that I've talked for a long

time here.  I hope you have something there you can

use.

   

   Underhill:  Absolutely.  Very good.

   

   Cole:  Thank you very much.

   

   Turpen:  You're welcome.  This might drum up a

little business for me!  (laughter)  Don't know who's

going to see this, but you never know!  (tape turned

off and on)

   In all these years, the one thing I did do, when I

was finally capable financially, I saved a lot of fine

jewelry, both old and new, and I collected Navajo rugs--

not particularly by weaver, but just rugs that I liked,

rugs that appealed to me, that I knew were good, and I

thought would become scarce.  And I collected probably

130 or more, maybe 150 Navajo rugs.  And I know they're

good ones, because Eddie Foutz came and spent a whole

day with me, lookin' at 'em, a while back, and at the

end of the day he said, "You know, Tobe, you're smarter

than I ever thought you were.  You did a good job

here."  So I pass that on to you, that I did do

something, I was thinking in some way, because I really

think that I might have one of the biggest jewelry

collections that there is--and a nice collection of

rugs.

   

   [END OF INTERVIEW]