Patricia Rutherford and Wayne Rutherford

[00:01] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Hi, I'm in Taos, New Mexico. My name is Patricia Ann Martinez Rutherford. I moved here in 2017, and my husband, who is with me today, and I were married on August 18, 2018. And that's what we would both remember our anniversary date. I grew up in New Mexico, southern New Mexico, in a town by the name of truth or consequences. New Mexico. Prior to 1950, it was hot Springs, New Mexico. I grew up there, then moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico for the rest of my life until I moved up here and went to New Mexico State University and remained in Las Cruces for that time until 2017. There, my husband, who passed away in 2008, and I had a construction business building rammed earth homes. I continued that business with my son and daughter in law from 2008 till 2017. And so here I am today with Wayne Rutherford, my dear husband.

[01:25] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Okay, well, I am Wayne Rutherford, and the age is optional, but I'm proud to say that I'm going to hit 71 next month, and I feel like I'm 17 sometimes, so that's actually good. Today is March 28, 2023. We are in Taos, New Mexico, at the Taos Public Library. And my lovely bride Pat is the interview partner, and I already said my relationship to her. I moved here in 1978. I drove out here in a vw bug, 1959 vw bug from northern California to check out northern New Mexico. I thought about eastern Arizona, eastern Oregon, and decided to come here instead for various reasons. Drove around in January, camping in my vw bug, and I got three really nice job offers. When I got to Taos, there was a good food co op and a good library and a really interesting culture and beautiful landscape and mountains. And I decided to go back to California, made $4,000 laying concrete block, and move to Taos with 3000 of it left. And that 3000 lasted for two years. When you pay $35 a month for a three room adobe, you can make your cash stretch.

[02:40] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Great. Well, there's a lot to talk about in our lives, but today we're here to talk about something special for Taos that lives in Taos, and that is our historic carousel, known by the name of Tio Vivo. Tiovivo means lively uncle, and this is a carousel that we take care of and bring out into the public two or three times a year. We being the Lions Club of Taoshe. Wayne has been involved with it for his total time being a lion or 30 years or so. And of course, I started becoming involved with it when I moved here and became involved with the lions in 2019. So Tio Vivo carousel. Wayne, you've been taking care of it for a long time, and it's very dear to you. Let's talk about it. What it is and where it came from and what it is, how it's such a strong part of our community.

[03:52] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Okay, well, I'm going to have to segue occasionally, because there are so many stories associated with this carousel. It's a true Taos icon. Almost everybody knows what it is. Anybody who had kids and raised them here, their kids rose, it wrote it. Most of the adults here who raised in Taos, they rode to vivo carousel every now and then. I'll ask an older person while we're running this carousel. Well, did you ride this when you were a kid? And they put their hands on their hips and they look at me and they go, of course. I'm like, oops, sorry. It didn't mean to imply anything. It is an absolute Taos treasure. There is nothing like it still moving around the country like this one does. It's a county fair carousel. It's designed to be set up in the middle of a week, run for a weekend, for a fiesta or a festival, or for some other event, and then packed onto freight wagons and taken by draft animal over the mountains, through the rivers, over the hills, to the next town where there's going to be a fiesta. And it was a seasonal event. People would start getting it out in May or June, and they would run it all summer, well into October, and then it would go back to its winter quarters. The carousel is somewhere around 125 years old. I have a copy of a newspaper article from the fifties where a man who knew about it when he was growing up talked about seeing it on Taos Plaza in 1896 or 1898, somewhere in that range. It was not brand new when it got out to this part of the country. It was the golden age of carousels. People built these really glitzy ones with four rows and music boxes, and they were really a big deal. As the gilded age of the United States unfolded, industrialization gave people time off. Recreation was a major economic activity. There was carousel set up all over the country. There was at one point, I think the census says 2000 or 2500 carousels.

[06:07] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Wayne, do you remember the first time you laid eyes on the carousel? On the flying Jenny carousel?

[06:14] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: The flying Jenny carousel. A quick segue on that is that this is shaped like an umbrella. The horses are suspended, like from the ribs of an umbrella, and the umbrella spins. That's why it's called a flying jenny. And as the horses spin, they spin outward from centrifugal force. Some people call it centripetal force. I'm not physics major, so I don't know which, but I don't remember taking my son to it, other than, you know, it was part of the Taos fiesta, which is the third weekend in July of every year, and it's a three day event on Taos Plaza. And I know I took it to him. He remembers it. I just don't. However, after I joined the Lions club, I was hanging out at one of their meetings and thinking, why did I join this club? I'm a businessman. I got talked into it. It's kind of boring. They're talking about things that happened in the thirties and the forties and the fifties, and it just wasn't very interesting to me. Well, a couple months later, along came Fiestas, and they said, you're assigned to work on the to vivo carousel. And I remembered enough about it to remember that they have to assemble it each time. It shows up on the plaza on a flatbed trailer with a couple of trucks with the horses in the back of it, and anywhere from ten to 20 lions would assemble it each and every time, just like it was manufactured to be back in the 1880s, I guess. So I thought, well, I guess this is the reason I joined this club, because I'm pretty mechanical, I love history, and I got a chance to assemble this thing and realize I was part of a continuum all the way back to the 1880s, and however far forward we can keep this carousel operating. And the other funny comment is that at the time, I was the youngest and spryest member of the club. I was 40 or so, and my job was to take this heavy canvas canopy up over the top of the umbrella like the top of an umbrella. And here I am 30 years later, and in some ways, I'm still the youngest and spryest guy. We take that canopy up every year. It's now made out of balloon fabric instead of canvas, so it's very nice that it is a lot lighter, and it dries out quicker because we get thunderstorms at that time of year.

[08:31] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Is the carousel look basically the same as it did when, you know, in 19 hundreds, then early 19 hundreds. And in 1938 is when the Lions acquired it, right?

[08:46] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: That is correct, yes.

[08:47] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: 1938, there was in a barn, and Mister Ernie Martinez, who was alliance member, went in and said, what? Here is the teal vivo. Let's bring her out, and let's take care of her and bring her to the fiestas again.

[09:06] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: So, yeah, that's the thumbnail finding of it, absolutely. It is 90% original, which is a huge percentage for something this old and that has been dragged around over hill and Dale and owned by probably four different entrepreneurs before it came to us. I know of two and I almost. I'm certain of three. Four is more likely, given its age and how long people lived in those days. So it is the original horses. It was originally three gondolas and twelve horses. We now have 16 horses and two gondolas operating, because in those days, more kids wanted to ride on a horse than they did in a ho hum gondola with their big sister or their mother or whoever. So we have those twelve original horses. We have the original spokes. They're like spokes on a wheel, if you looked up at them. We have the original hoop that goes around the outside, all the original drive components, all of the suspension mechanisms for each individual horse. Almost everything is original on this. There's been some repairs, but very, very few for the. For the age of this carousel. Part of that is that it is no longer set up six to twelve times per summer. It's set up three, two to three times. We might hit four this year, which is going to be a peak number for the years I've been involved with it.

[10:29] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: One of the major changes in its operation is that it's no longer hand cranked, like in the early days, which makes it easier for us to bring it out and give kids rides on it, right?

[10:42] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Yeah, we bring it out, we assemble it just like they used to, and then we plug it in. Instead of having to recruit strong farm boys, farm men, to turn that crank. We have a picture from the Library of Congress of a couple of guys working the to vivo crank. One of them cranking it, the other one waiting to step in when the first one got tired. The guy cranking has got his fedora pushed back on his head because it's hot, even though he's under a canopy. It's summer in Taos. It's easily going to be 80 degrees, if not higher. And they work hard at it. What I love about the picture is that it sets the time. This was taken in 1939 by Russell Lee, who was a farm security Administration photographer hired by the federal government to go around and photograph festivals and events and religious observances. And he was fascinated by teo vivo, of course.

[11:41] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: And then it also had, in order to stop the carousel, the lions had to actually hold it back, grab a.

[11:51] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Horse, or grab a chain supporting a gondola and kind of lean backwards. And use our body weight, three or four or five of us, to slow this 1500 pound rig down enough so kids could get off safely. We now have a break, and we didn't actually have to because this is a historic carousel, so we're not really beholden to standard carousel ride safety practices. But we did want to improve it. The Lions Club were getting too old, and we were starting to fall down trying to stop this thing.

[12:30] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: So it was first restored when the lions acquired it in 19. 38. 39, right?

[12:36] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: That's correct, yeah.

[12:38] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: And somewhere in there at that time, it's our understanding that some of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists painted some of the horses. What do you know about that?

[12:55] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: A fair amount. The significance of the Tao Society of Artists is twofold. One of them is they brought a focus nationwide and somewhat an international focus on the art that they were creating here in the southwest. They wanted to live here. All of their patrons were back east and in the midwest, and so they would go back after painting here for a season and sell a zillion paintings and come back and bought houses and contributed to the community, brought in apprentices, all that sort of stuff. Understudies is more the case, I think. So their involvement got some recognition because not only did they paint the Native Americans and the hispano population, and to some degree, the Anglos, but they also painted teo vivo. I know of at least 15 paintings done by these Taos founders, the founders of the Taos Society of Artists. And their paintings go for well past the six figures into the seven figures. So backing up a little bit, when it was time to restore these horses, they were restoring the entire carousel. They asked six of them out of the eight or nine if they would each paint one of these little ponies. And they responded, yes, I have black and white photographs of almost all of them, if not all of them. And underneath the third or fourth paint job in the next 60, 70 years is a painted horse done by a founder of the Tao Society of Artists. So what are those six or seven horses worth? Touching on that a little bit. The National Carousel association census director came out, this is 25 years ago, to see our carousel. I spoke with him, and I asked him what he thought the carousel was worth. He said it was of inestimable value. There is nothing like it. There are two other carousels similar. One is 1860s, and it's a permanent museum in Lawrence, Kansas. It's the oldest one known on this continent, made in this country, and the other one is permanently set up in Watch Hill, Rhode island. It's very similar, just about five years older, but this is the only county fair carousel flying. Jenny Carousel that is still set up, moved and reset up like it was designed to be done.

[15:24] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Well, tell us a little bit about its assembly and takedown. You know, how long does that take and what is it like?

[15:35] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Well, it's hard physical work. It's six to ten lions. And now we're bringing in what we call the friends of to vivo Carousel, because the lions themselves are getting too old and too few. And if I'm the youngest and spryest at 70, almost one, we need younger people involved. And a quick segue on that. Is that because of COVID Because of the pandemic, we had many fewer lions in our club, and we had fewer able bodied people. And most of the folks who had been setting this carousel up were no longer with us on one level or another. Retired, moved away, passed away, just couldn't get engaged anymore. Last May, I was the only person left who knew how to set it up. We brought in several people, newer people, members of our club, and a retired mechanic who just loves this thing like the rest of us do. So we now have a team that can bring this thing forward from the. Well, I started working on it, and it was kind of ensconced in the 19th century. Well, we brought it into the 20th. There's a long story behind that. And we're now on the 21st. The eye is on a 22nd. We want to build a permanent pavilion for it to be in, but still be able to take it to Taos Fiestas on Taos Plaza.

[16:52] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Every year it feels like we're in a new era coming up. There's new interest in it in the town. There's 30 and 40 year olds who grew up here and know Teal vivo, and they are now becoming very interested in Teal vivo and its history and wanting it to continue on for their children. So I feel pretty darn optimistic about it. In our efforts to find a permanent home for it is gaining popularity and interest and support.

[17:31] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: And in support, I've got kind of a shirt tail promise of $50,000 of seed money to do the design and to come up with the funding and all the administrative stuff it takes to build a pavilion. This is a half million dollar minimum, more like a million if you want to add bathrooms and someplace for a caterer's kitchen. So we can rent it out off season or during season for parties and civic events, etcetera. So, yes, there is new interest in it. But when I first started with this thing, a couple days before Fiesta, they went down to the place where it was stored, kind of blew it off, and said, do we need to fix anything? And everybody went, nah. And they put it on the flatbed, dragged it down to the plaza, set it up, and said, next year, we'll fix. And it went that way for about 20 years. It's been changing for the last ten.

[18:19] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: So it's come to the Taos Fiestas since 1939, except for three years in 1969, we're not sure what was going on. The hippie invasion in Taos. And something happened that didn't allow that carousel to be set up. And then, of course, in 2020 and 2021, when Covid, the pandemic was here. So we did not set it up there. But there is all those many years that it has been set up since 1939.

[18:53] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Well, it is an icon. If we don't take it to Taos Plaza, Taos Plaza for the fiesta, I suspect we'll be run out of town on a rail, because it is an absolute Taos tradition, and everybody knows about it, and everybody is thrilled to see it, and they all thank us. But we get the chance at that point to say, can you help us with it? So we're looking for younger people, especially to help us, and people with mechanical aptitude. I'm more of a good resource manager as a retired contractor, and I have some mechanical aptitude, but there are people who are more focused in on it going backwards for just a second. It takes about 4 hours to set it up, sometimes five, depending upon how hot it is, how many people show up, and about 3 hours to take it down. And I have a time lapse photograph series on a dvd that shows it getting put together. And it's just the coolest thing. It needs to go to the National Carousel association archives, which is where we have photographs of everything I have found on this carousel. And that's a lot of photos, but also, we want to get it in the Library of Congress, just like I want this recording to be, because it talks about an artifact that is very clearly central to Russell means segue here in 1939, and it's an absolute icon here.

[20:18] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: So that's like seven generations of children that had been writing this. So when I first did my first actually working the carousel, when we were giving rides, Wayne said, you wait, somebody will come up to you that's, you know, in their eighties and tell you that they rode this. And sure enough, that day, this gentleman, clearly in his eighties, came up and chatted with me, and he says, can I ride that carousel now? I said, well, you know, we have our weight limit on it. Well, I wrote it when I was a kid, and, you know, he clearly remembered it and felt so strongly his connection to it, as well as the children. Now that ride it, and we allow them to ride it over and over in any given weekend, they just have to get off the carousel, get back in line, and then they can ride it again. And many children take advantage of that. The rides are free. So at the end of the day, this one fiesta, I was watching this mom and her daughter off to the side, and the daughters very distraught, crying, crying. She was so upset that we were putting the carousel away. She just. She just wanted to write it again and wanted it to be. And she wanted to be able to continue enjoying it. She was quite upset. And then the pink unicorn, the favorite of mostly girls. Yes.

[22:00] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: So little girls get in, pushing matches as they race from the gate to the pink unicorn, and somebody else is bigger and stronger or faster, and then one of them is really disappointed. So what we do is try to break up the fight and then get that little child into the gate line. So they're first in.

[22:19] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Next time around, we save it for them.

[22:22] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: We save it for them. And one of the lions will walk over there and stand by it and wave to the child to make sure they know they get the next right to ride it.

[22:30] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yeah, it's really touching.

[22:32] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: It is very touching. And seeing an 80 year old with a walker surrounded with kids, grandkids and great grandkids and sometimes great, great grandkids watching the carousel with delight in their eyes. There is just nothing like it.

[22:46] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yeah. It's so simple. And, you know, it's one of those treasures that no iPad can compete with.

[22:54] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Yep. And kids don't tend to be on their phone when they're on it. They're looking around, just beaming and flirting. Boys and girls, they're pre teens and stuff.

[23:03] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yeah. So we've seen that preteen thing.

[23:05] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: We've seen that a lot. And we think somewhere around three quarters of a million children have ridden it. It's very much of a swag. It's. You know, how many kids can write it in a day? How many days has it been set up? 425 years. The math gets a little murky, but I'm sure half million kids have ridden this thing, and all of them, almost all of them are rural kids who, in the old days around here, they didn't have fun. They worked on farms. They carded wool. They did everything they had to chop wood, carry water, work in the fields, and this was the only fun they had. There is a video made in the early nineties by the Lions Club, a fella by the name of Arnold Trujillo, and he interviews Ernie Martinez, who's the guy who found it in that barn over in Penasco, as he put it. The chickens had partaken of their business on it, so it was kind of rough. And I have talked to people who remember going to that barn, hopping on those horses that were just sitting in the straw and riding it and pretending that they were on a real horse. So, anyway, many, many generations have ridden on it. And in this video, Ernie interviews some very elderly farmers that are wearing their bib overall, sitting in front of an old adobe shack, hardly any teeth left, and then leaning over their cane, saying, yes, I remember to vivo. And he'd say, did you ride it? And one guy says, oh, no, no. We didn't have money, but it was the only fun we had in those days. And if you turned the crank, your children could ride. There's a few other things like that. I didn't write it, but I watched the others write it. It's this beautiful, old, traditional manner of speaking where you're very polite and you don't put a lot of attention on yourself. They're just these very humble people.

[25:06] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: And then taking it to today's writers, I watched those write, probably their 1213 year olds, 14 year olds, where they're not supposed to be kids anymore. They're growing up, but yet they really want to ride it. And they do. Yeah. And you can see they're not quite being joyful as a child would be, but yet they. They want to be on it.

[25:33] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Yeah. In a similar way, we have a swing in our house that every now and then, somebody staying in our Airbnb, there'll be a girl, and she's a teenager, and she's all caught up in her stuff, and we get her on that swing, and all of a sudden she's a kid again. It's the same thing with this carousel. Kids get on it, and they just look around. Younger ones especially, they're looking up. They're looking out at the crowd. They don't know what to look at because it's all this light and movement and noise, and they're just charmed by it. And older people are charmed by it equally. You see them come up and their faces just light up when they see it. We have a member of the club who is well into his nineties, and his wife is fairly gone with dementia. He brought her to the lilac festival last May, and when she came out of the crowd, she's in a chair and kind of in a daze. She saw the carousel, and seeing her face light up was just the most beautiful sight I could ever imagine. To that end, we have a committee that's going to convert the semi retired gondola into a handicap accessible gondola, because only. Well, only two or three times a year, there's somebody who would love to ride it. And we just couldn't accommodate them. They're too heavy, they're too awkward, too unable. Well, we're going to change that. And that opportunity just pops up and we act on it. That's what the Lions Club does. They find opportunities and they act on them.

[27:01] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: I just remembered one of the scenes from that young girl, maybe twelve or so. She was blind.

[27:08] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Yes.

[27:08] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Do you remember her?

[27:09] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Yes, I do.

[27:10] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: And she could feel the carousel. So she was so thrilled to ride.

[27:17] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: It, too, you know, and wrote it more than once. I think she wrote it like four or five times in the course of the weekend.

[27:23] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: She rode the gondola.

[27:25] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Rode the gondola, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could see her, just her head just swiveling around, trying to pick up what was going on, what to pay attention to. She'd never been on a ride like this before.

[27:36] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: She is brilliant. She's very smart.

[27:39] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: She was. It's always said that if you lose a sense, the other senses step in and enhance your life. She was a good example of that. That video belongs in the Library of Congress, too, because it sets it very clearly at that place and time, and including in that it was a time when young men wore really short shorts in the late eighties. They're, like, pretty striking, shall we say?

[28:05] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: So you were telling me one time that the Smithsonian offered the Lions club some money for the carousel to take it.

[28:17] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: It did. The Smithsonian has had a suitable focus on the folk life of the american republic, of the people and the republic. And somehow they came to know of this, and I guess they came to Taos. This was before I was a member of the Lions Club. And they saw it and they immediately wanted to purchase it for the Smithsonian Museum. Now they have a folklife festival every year on the mall right outside of the Smithsonian castle, and it would be a perfect thing to set up there. However, the risk of that is that, let's say that we took them up on the $400,000 they offered us, and that was a significant amount of money in the seventies. Well, it's significant now. It doesn't matter what it was, but it was felt in the club and in the town that it would go into a basement and never see the light of day anywhere again, much less the brilliant light in northern New Mexico. It is an icon that belongs here. We have it registered now with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, so that it has some protection status. Next will be probably the National Register of Historic Places. But it's interesting because it's both an event and an iconic item. There is a similar one that gets set up every year outside of the national cathedral cathedral by the All Hallows Guild. It's another very ancient carousel, but it's much bigger and much more complicated. But it's on the National Register, as are several others. So there's a history of protecting these carousels. There's maybe less than 219th century wooden carousels left. And the National Carousel association co founder, her name's escaping me, Barbara Faz Charles, who's very engaged in working with us on this history and preserving it. She says that this one is probably the best documented 19th century carousel. And that 19th century is important because there weren't any in the 18th century here. There were some in Europe, but 19th century. These are the oldest remaining carousels, and there's fewer than 200 remaining 19th century wooden carousels, which this one is.

[30:42] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: I remember last year when we were getting ready to send it up and we had a new mayor. Pascual our mayor, said to us that having the tiovo on the plaza for fiesta is one of the remaining traditions of the fiesta. And that is so important to many people in Taos. I mean, I not lived in a community that the community values those traditions so strongly. And we're lucky that we're able to take teal Vivo and bring that, leave that tradition here to bring it into the next century.

[31:28] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: And that's our goal, and it's a worthy goal. And it takes a lot of time, and it's going to take more money eventually. We've been kind of coasting along on very little from contributions and from fees for bringing it to events. But we have a lot of work that needs to be done on it. It's an old piece of machinery. It's in good shape, but it won't stay that way without that.

[31:50] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: So talk about the music. The music, the music.

[31:54] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: There's a picture also by Russell Lee from the farm security Administration, of two musicians sitting on kitchen chairs underneath the canopy at the same day that they were taking pictures of the men with the cranks and the fedora back on their hat and children riding it. It's a beautiful collection of photographs. And they are playing a violin and a guitar. And they were known as the patitos or the Tapatios I haven't found the right translation yet, except for it's either happy feet or tapping feet. Two musicians from the little village of Canyon, which is where we live, just east of Taos, a couple of miles. And it was the traditional music that they played. Now, there's a woman by the name of Jenny Vincent who collected this music during the depression recovery era. And it was the New Mexico Writers Project administration project. And she collected all these marchas and corridos and folk dances and waltzes. And she started teaching and learning from the old timers. They taught her how to play these. Well, they are now on a recording, on an lp. It's music for la fiesta mujica para la fiesta. And it's these traditional northern new Mexico songs that people would play in dance halls and at weddings. And they're very, very traditional. Some of them came up from Mexico, some came from Spain. There's occasionally, I think there's a couple of german waltzes, if I'm not mistaken. But they've transmuted themselves here. Well, I've collected them. They're now on cd. I've had the collaboration of Jenny's heirs, Jenny Vincent's heirs, that they want it to be played at fiestas. At fiestas, it gets real loud. There's bands on the bandstand, can't hear our little music box. But when we're playing by ourselves, we get to play the traditional music. And that link is fairly rare. Again, we have this historic documentation. There are wooden models that were made of this thing. One very sophisticated and one very primitive. But it's fascinated people forever. All these photographs I have, there's just nothing like it. Every year I get to run away and join the circus.

[34:03] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Our little models. Dale rounds, man that lived in Pueblo, called us up a couple three years ago and said, well, his daughter did, and said, my father built this replica of Teovivo, and we'd like to give it to you all. And Wayne and I went up to Pueblo and picked it up. It's the best replica of the Teovivo carousel you can imagine. It's proportionally right. And the horses are the colors of the horses that are. That we have. And we enjoy taking that around. When we can't take the whole big carousel, we can take the mini and.

[34:44] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Pat and I got it preserved the rest of the way. It was painted a little funny. The mechanism was silver, like it used to be when Dale saw it and the photographs he had. And then it got painted blue and yellow, which are the colors of the lions club. And it didn't have a canopy, but had the cloth. And pat made a blue and yellow striped canopy. So there's another model that's much more primitive. And there were two carousels that came through New Mexico in those years. One of them was a track machine, which was like a little railroad that ran in a circle about 30 foot diameter. As the horses went over these little cams, they jumped, they bumped up. Well, somebody combined that carousel with Tio Vivo, and it's very clear those two different elements are captured in it. But it's a very beautiful piece of folk art, and someday, I hope it comes to us for our collection.

[35:34] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Well, Wayne, we're going to take this thing into the future, and I'm really looking forward to continuing this teal vivo journey with you.

[35:46] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Well, sweetheart, I am so glad to have you as a partner on all levels. But on this especially, look what we get to do. First of all, I love running away and joining the circus every year. And secondly, having you with me while we do that, it's a wonderful partnership. And the lions are stepping up more and more because they're realizing what an absolute, unique and priceless item we have. We can't insurance. How can you insure something that has an inestimable value? One other really quick story, very briefly, is that when I started working on it, it was stored in a storage unit, partly, and partly in a barn. Wooden barn. Well, eventually everything went into the wooden barn, including these wooden horses. That barn had a wood stove, it had vehicles in it, it had grandchildren, it had matches. It was a risk if that barn had burned down, the metal would have survived, the horses would be gone. That would have been the end of this wonderful tradition. I basically shamed the board into giving me $5,000 to buy a cargo box shipping container, got the horses in it, which is where they live to this day. That's where they're stabled. And the other quick story is that the reason this thing was in Penasco is I mentioned earlier there was a fellow from Santa Fe, he ran a freight company, and he used his wagons to move it from town to town and move produce around, et cetera. So he brought it up from Santa Fe, and they were in October over in Penasco, which is a mountain town to the south of us, there was a really early rains and snow and hurricane, torrential hurricane. The roads were all mud in those days. They got mudded in. They could not leave that town. They ran out of money. They got under the influence of a gambler and they gambled away to vivo carousel in exchange for roman board and for gambling privileges. And that's why it ended up in a barn, because the depression came along and nobody could haul it off or do anything with it. So Ernie Martinez found it because people were saying, whatever happened to that thing? And Ernie went looking for it and restored it. He was very protective of it, which I'm kind of Ernie's heir. I'm very protective of this garrison. There's nothing like it.

[38:00] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: And misses Rodriguez, her quote, she's a UNM professor of anthropology.

[38:07] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: UNM professor of anthropology emeritus, now retired. She said this teal vivo is a unique example of a completely non controversial cultural event. And that's absolutely true. One other quick, quick story, because I've only got a minute left. After that, before the barn, it was stored in a pile in front of the US Forest Service's dynamite locker in Canyon. So I have managed to get into a little bit safer location. We count our blessings every time we take this out and the community thanks us so roundly every single time. Okay, well, this belongs in the Library of Congress along with all of my archives, I think, eventually.

[38:51] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yep.

[38:52] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Pat, thank you so much. Your questions were spot on. And you keep me from Segwaying too far into the 19th century or into the 21st or 22nd.

[39:01] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Teovivo has given us a lot of pleasure and it's delightful to think that it will continue giving so much pleasure to children and those pre teens and adults. You know, we allow them to ride in the gondolas and Ernie Martinez's daughter.

[39:24] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Rode in it, and grandson and great grandchildren.

[39:28] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yeah.

[39:28] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: So, okay, we're wrapping this up.

[39:31] PATRICIA ANN MARTINEZ RUTHERFORD: Yeah. Thanks, Wayne.

[39:32] WAYNE RUTHERFORD: Thank you, Pat. And I love you. Okay.