Celebrating Lives, and Life

A week ago Friday, we signed our old friend, Orville “Bud” Wanzer, into hospice. Then on Saturday we attended a memorial for Edna Lucero, who'd died recently and peacefully at 96, making soup in the family farmhouse. Early Sunday morning, Bud died. (His obit is in today's Sun-News. Edna's appeared February 10.)

I knew Bud extremely well for half a century. I met Edna once, immediately wanted to visit her, and her husband of 73 years, Enrique, for a column, but never did.

Though very different, these were special people who prized education, exceeded what might have been expected of them, and affected many lives for the better. Bud and Edna were each widely and deeply loved. They continued to learn all their lives. Each greeted strangers with warm curiosity, not intolerance.

Born in Chihuahua, Edna urged her five children to go to college. Enrique was a shy kid at the small schoolhouse in Hill. He joined the Navy, and he and Edna saw the world. In Europe, they hungered so much to see and learn more that they traveled the continent, from Spain to Denmark, camping out with the kids. Enrique, after retiring from the Navy, joined the Federal Bureau of Prisons; and when he realized he needed a college degree to advance, he got one, at 50 – with Edna's support. He then became the system's first Mexican-American prison warden.

Bud grew up lower-middle class in Queens. His father and mother had never gone near a college. His father was a cop. Bud joined the Navy, then used the GI bill to get a B.A. and a Masters, and became a writer, film-maker and much-loved college professor. Even in his last year he was rereading Herodotus. 

 

Deaths bring the pain of loss, a sense of vulnerability, and an enhanced awareness of life's fragility. Life and death are two faces of one coin. If we can't face death, likely we don't face life too well either. The deaths of close friends or family are a powerful reminder to be grateful for – and savor – each moment. 

 

Midweek brought another vivid reminder of life's fragility: I spoke with former NMSU basketball star Shawn Harrington. His mother sent him to our desert to escape Chicago's street violence. Then she got shot dead when she walked in on two neighbors being robbed. In 2013, Shawn was shot by gang members who thought he was someone else, and paralyzed from the waist down. His warmth and resilience impressed the Hell out of me. So did the good he does, coaching and counseling kids in Chicago. 

 

The Buddha compared lifetimes to lightning flashes. Dogen wrote that in each moment we should think only of that moment, because no future is guaranteed. Keifer Sykes, a player Shawn coached, said, “fast as you snap your fingers, my life could go down the drain.”

We know we should value each moment. Not merely savor it, but make an impact. Life's too short for unnecessary friction. We can do surprising things if we dare try. 

 

The challenge is to remember and feel those truths in the moment. Recalling Bud's unique attitude toward life, how funny he was, and how loved, as Edna's kids recall how her love of learning and her caring inspired them, helps. 

We mourn people best by emulating the best in them – and supporting others, as Edna supported Enrique and Bud his students.

                                      -30-

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 3 March 2019, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on KRWG's website.  A spoken version will air on KRWG and KTAL 101.5 FM (Las Cruces Community Radio -- streamable at www.lccommunityradio.org.)  I should note also that the column is accurate in stating that Bud's obituary is in this morning's Sun-News, and provides a link to Ms. Lucero's on-line obituary, this morning Bud's obit was not in the on-line obituaries, because the newspaper apparently hasn't yet figured out its new system.  By the way, Bud was also mentioned in an earlier column: September 2012 post "Teachers, Actors, Time"] 

[Not sure this column was a good idea, combining as it does at least three situations, each of which warrants a column and more, which means I do justice to none of them here.  But . . . it was a challenging week.]

[Bud's kids called yesterday and said that the Sun-News was struggling with its new system or site or something and that the obituary on Bud would not be in the paper.  Sad.  There's a lot more to say about him.  (Bud also did two of the first live local TV shows on KRWG, for example.)  I'll insert what I guess was the nearly final version below, and the obit also appears on KRWG's website.  One thing we didn't mention in it was that although Bud had expressed progressive political views decades ago, he had not voted since the 1970's, and insisted politics was all bullshit; in prior years, he mockingly rejected pleas to re-register and vote; but in 2018, after nearly two full years of Donald Trump, Bud repeatedly requested registration forms and an absentee ballot.  And voted.]

Orville Joseph “Bud” Wanzer left us early Sunday February 24^th, after stating that he was quite ready to do. He remained funny and fiesty to the end of his life. A former NMSU professor, he was best-known in Las Cruces for making a feature film, The Devils Mistress, in 1965, and for starting and running, with John Hadsell, the NMSU Film Society. He also wrote a fantasy novel called The Elfin Brood and made award-winning photographs.

Professor Wanzer was born in Queens, NY December 5^th, 1930 to Sophie and Orville J. Wanzer. Wanzer, Sr. was a New York City policeman and an Olympic-class shot-putter. Bud was a mischievous city kid. As he described it, in his gang “college was for [unprintable]s.” He served in the U.S. Navy from 19__ to 19__. Highlights were being a movie projectionist aboard ship and exploring places and people in Italy that came unrecommended by the Navy.

Having come to love literature, movies, and photography, Bud used the GI Bill to attend the University of Miami, gaining a B.A. and an M.A. He also met and married Joan Stapleton (year). He received teaching offers from the University of Hawaii and from a place in the New Mexico desert. A veteran who'd been stationed in Hawaii warned him that he might get island fever there, and the NMSU English Department sent him photos of Organ Mountains, so he and Joan arrived here in 1959.

A daughter, Katya, arrived in 1966 , and a son, Kip, in 197 (1 or 2?). He loved both deeply. Although his marriage to Joan ended in divorce in 197x, they remained fast friends.

After teaching English literature for several years, he received an invitation from Professor Harvey Jacobs to join in starting the NMSU Journalism Department. Bud was to teach photography, film history, and eventually film-making. Because he had such a range of interests that he could discuss Bergman and Fellini and also repair camera, he was able to turn the Film Department into a wonderful institution, way ahead of its time. When few universities offered film-making courses, the more famous ones didn't let students touch actual cameras the first year or two, and CMI was undreamed-of, his students used military-surplus 16 mm. Cameras to make films right from the start – and Bud used a surplus processing system to process footage free.

Meanwhile, Bud wrote a screenplay called The Devil's Mistress. Four escaping bank-robbers happen on a stone shack in the Organs occupied by a long-bearded and suspicious older man and his beautiful young wife (played by Joan). (The cabin is still there, more or less, if you know where to look.) They kill him and kidnap her, but unexpected events soon kill all four robbers, and the murdered man reappears to rejoin his wife.

A professor presuming to make a feature film, which only Hollywood did in those days, was such a novelty that the AP story on it, with a photo of Bud examining frames of movie film, appeared in many newspapers around the country. Bud and others invested in finishing the film, with high hopes of making profits that would allow them to continue making films here.

The film premiered in Las Cruces, to great local acclaim. Unfortunately, the would-be distributors defrauded the locals, who made no profit on the film.

Bud came to love the desert. Camping in the Gila. Wilderness and macrophotography became almost a religion with him.

Wanzer was a much-beloved professor to generations who enjoyed his film classes. Among his grateful students were Bernie Digman (Milagro), Denise Chavez (eminent Southwestern writer), consultant Nancy Barnes-Smith, and former Mayor Tommy Tomlin. Another Sterling Trantham, emulated Bud by teaching film and photography at UTEP. Among Bud's less grateful students was an LCPD cop who stopped him one day as Bud was driving. The cop said, “You probably don't remember me, but I was one of your students in Film History.” “How did you do?” Bud asked. “You gave me a D,” the cop replied, handing Bud a ticket.

Two Kuwaiti students ultimately started a movie business in Kuwait, and hired Bud to run a processor and otherwise help them, and he took a sabbatical in 1977-78 to spend a year in Kuwait.

When Bud retired from NMSU in 1985, he wanted to live in nature. On land he co-owned on the river west of Derry, he built a small house, doing all the work himself. He lived there for the next 28 years, off the grid, as somewhat of a hermit about whom rumors swirled in the rural northern part of the county. While there he finished and published The Elfin Brood, and later taught himself stained-glass and created unique and beautiful pieces, some of which he sold to customers as far away as New Hampshire. With few windows, he built perhaps the world's first stained-glass carport; and when he'd completed that, he just constructed stands with 2 x 4's around his portion of the desert and placed stained-glass in them – although kids with BB-guns could easily have destroyed them.

Eventually health issues forced him to move back into town, where he reconnected with old friends, but remained somewhat of a hermit because of his increasing deafness. Recently he became less and less mobile, and was grateful for the help and friendship extended by folks at Memorial Medical Center, Good Sam's, Home Instead, and Village at Northrise.

On Friday, February 22, he went into Hospice, and on Sunday, February 24, he died. He is survived by Katya and and Kip, as well as by his daughter-in-law, Anna, and granddaughter, Claire.

At Bud's request, his remains received a natural burial -- no chemicals, no box, no sheets, just into the ground to be processed as nature processes its own -- at La Puerta Natural Burial Ground in Valencia Counry, New Mexico. 

The kids say the place is beautiful.