Setting the Story Straight

Annual Event Not Shuster's Idea, Foundation Says

By Phil Parker And Mark Oswald
Journal Santa Fe, 8/27/09
http://www.abqjournal.com/north/2712082797north08-27-09.htm
Photo credit: Journal File

In Santa Fe, it sounds tantamount to sacrilege: “Oral history interview reveals that Zozobra was not Will Shuster's idea.”

That was the headline on a news release issued Wednesday by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The foundation cited a 1964 interview with Shuster — the artist who is considered Old Man Gloom's creator, dating from the first burning of the giant puppet 85 years ago — that's in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

“That first year (1924) ... well really, the seed of the idea was sown by Kate Chapman and Dorothy Stewart and someone else was in on that deal,” Shuster said. “They tried to revive an affair similar to the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia.”

Chapman was a self-taught architect who worked on many east side properties, the foundation said. Dorothy Stewart was an artist who moved to Santa Fe in 1925 with her sister, Margretta Dietrich. The sisters lived together at the compound known as El Zaguán on Canyon Road, now the headquarters of the foundation.

Elaine Bergman, executive director of the Foundation, said Wednesday she found the Shuster interview a few years ago and had been meaning to introduce the women's names into the Zozobra history conversation.

“It's something I've had on the back burner, thinking it would be nice to have as part of the Zozobra story,” Bergman said. “There's usually a big Zozobra history published each year for Fiesta, and I always think I should have gotten the information out.”

The 2009 burning of Zozobra, consuming another year's worth of troubles, takes place Sept. 10, kicking off the annual Fiesta de Santa Fe weekend.

Stewart and Chapman, Bergman said, “were lively, interesting women of the '20s in Santa Fe, and we're always interested in having their memory preserved and recognition given to their names.”

Apart from the brief mention of these two names in Shuster's comments, Bergman said, there's no knowing how the conversation between Shuster, Stewart and Chapman may have gone.
“They were all pretty lively people with active social lives,” she said. “We can only imagine the context.”

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