The Pittsburgh Press (April 13, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
MOUNTAIN AIR, N.M. – So many persons for so many years have been pestering me to come up here and see Pop Shaffer that I finally got sick of the pestering, and here I am.
Pop Shaffer is many things – hotelkeeper, rancher, blacksmith, playboy, contractor, jokester – but the main thing about Pop Shaffer is his animal art.
As far as I know, there’s nobody in the world who does the kind of stuff he does. He simply goes out into the woods with a keen eye, spots a gnarled treetop or a twisted bunch of roots, takes it home and saws off certain limbs, and you have a perfect caricature of a lion or a cow or a frog or whatever you want.
Pop started it only four years age, but in that short time has finished 300 pieces and has about 700 more standing around the grounds of his ranch house, waiting to be worked on. He is 62 now, and before he dies he wants to finish 1000 pieces.
The thing is completely a hobby with Pop Shaffer. He could commercialize – and might some day – but hasn’t so far. He has never sold one of his pieces, and has given only two away. They went to President and Mrs. Roosevelt.
Pop’s preposterously twisted animals range in size from a little “dog” you could hold in your hand, clear up to “dinosaurs” 40 feet long. He makes very little alteration in the stuff as it comes from the woods. As he says, it is done 95 per cent by nature.
Nobody else can do it
The trick is in being able to visualize a laughing mule in a gnarled treetop. Pop has tried to get other people to help him, but nobody else can do it. It’s just a crazy gift.
Pop Shaffer himself is quite a character. His first name is Clem, but nobody ever calls him that. He has been in Mountain Air for 33 years. He came originally from Harmony, Ind. (It is my ambition to find somebody to write about who didn’t come from Indiana.)
Shaffer moved first to Oklahoma. But the tornado drove him out. He says one night he went to bed in his cellar when a storm was brewing, and when he got up next morning there wasn’t a house in sight. So he took a train for the West.
This little town was just then opening up. Pop Shaffer homesteaded, he blacksmithed, he ran a hardware store, he contracted, and in 1923 he built a hotel. He still has the first two dollars he took in – silver dollars tacked up on the wall.
The hotel is still running and business is so good – with government men swarming the country like flies – that he has to turn people away every night. Or rather Mr. Shaffer turns them away, for Pop retired while the retiring was good.
“I turned the hotel over to Ma to get it off my hands,” he says.
Ma Shaffer – who is good-humored, too – works herself practically to death, she says. She helps cook and waits table and acts as room clerk.
‘Gonna have fun from now on’
“They keep piling more stuff on me all the time,” she says. “The other day they added two hours, so now I’m working 26 hours a day.”
“She knows she’s gotta do it,” Pop says in front of her, “or I’ll quit her. I’ll go out to Los Angeles and get me one of them redheads with lots of money. Somebody’s got to keep me.”
Actually, the Shaffers don’t have to worry about money. Pop goes to California or New York or somewhere several times a year, and never spends less than $500 on a trip.
“My heart’s bad and we’re pretty well fixed and I’m just gonna have fun from now on,” he says.
And Pop has fun, too. He likes to put on a fling-ding every once in a while. He’ll go to Albuquerque and register at one hotel and wake up next morning in a different one. He’ll go out to Hollywood and do the night clubs and have his picture taken with the cuties, then buy the picture and bring it home.
Pop is a sort of Victor Moore type – he claims to be just an ignorant country boy, and says he’s so ignorant he can’t even write a letter, but he doesn’t get fooled very much.
Pop cusses and smokes cigars and still uses Hoosier expressions and throws matches on his own hotel floor. He’s a gay fellow and has too many friends everywhere he goes. But he likes it.
Pop is sentimental about soldiers. He says they’re saving us all from perdition, and we can’t do too much for them. He’ll go to Albuquerque or Los Angeles, start rounding up soldiers on the street, and before the night is over will spend $200 on them.
I wouldn’t be able to tell all this stuff about Pop, except he kept saying to me, “Now, Ernie, when you write this up, say anything you damn please about Ma and me. Make up a lot of stuff if you have to. If you don’t make it crazy enough I won’t like it.”
So I’m not making up anything, and Pop Shaffer isn’t crazy either. But he enjoys himself about as much as anybody I’ve run onto recently, and I’m just trying to put a few of his recipes down on paper. Tomorrow I’ll get back to telling you about his crazy “animals.”