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•   If you want to send a message, go to Western Union, John Ford said. But the message here is not the medium. Suspend judgment and cross that cynical distance.
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•   He is a monk, not a returning general, but "triumph" seems to be the word for the vindication of Thich Nhat Hanh after 39 years of exile by both sides in Vietnam.
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•   My letter to the government, which to paraphrase Emily Dickenson, never wrote to me. Submitted as comment on the finding of no significant impact in the Baca Refuge case.
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•   They could not defeat Barack Obama by copying the words. His message came from the heart, and his oratory used a "trick" that was inconceivable and too risky for most politicians.
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Column Archive >>


Book of Days
Myself

From the Albuquerque (NM) Journal, April 1999:
 
Columnist Larry Calloway, with great suspicion, has covered about 25 regular sessions of the New Mexico Legislature and an alarming number of political campaigns. His column appears like clockwork, Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on the Editorial page. An outsider, he loves New Mexico and its diverse people
but has not fallen in love with its politicians.
 
He had a promising Western wire service career going when he arrived in Santa Fe from Denver in a used 1962 Ford Fairlane junker with all his possessions in the back. He had already worked for United Press International at news bureaus in Helena, Montana, Salt Lake City and Denver, with brief temporary assignments in San Francisco and Topeka, Kansas. New Mexico ended his travels. He stuck, got married and began raising a family of two daughters.
 
His first in-depth experience with New Mexico politics was the Rio Arriba County courthouse raid on June 5, 1967. He was tied up, pushed around, paraded through Tierra Amarilla, threatened with hanging and shot at. He escaped at a State Police roadblock and wondered, ``Was it something I wrote?''
 
It has been that way ever since. Calloway has been reviled by Democrats for his ``monkey speech'' story that contributed to the defeat of U.S. Sen. Joseph M. Montoya. He has been denounced by both the regulators and the regulated for revelations about things like monopoly bus companies. He has been excoriated in letters to the editor by activists, candidates, lobbyists and governors for discussions of things like real estate deals, political hiring and no-bid
contracts. He has been castigated frequently by legislators in open sessions of both houses.
 
Before all that, Calloway was born innocent in Wyoming and raised in Colorado. He was educated in the Denver public Schools, at the University of Colorado-Boulder (BA, philosophy of science) and at Stanford University (professional journalism fellowship). He has worked and traveled in Asia. Calloway was with The Associated Press in Santa Fe through the 1970s and joined the Journal in 1980 as the founding editor of Journal North.
 
Politically, he prefers to describe himself only as ``journalist,'' meaning that he looks for the truth behind the cliches and ideologies and tries to write it. He has published a book of fiction, ``Guide to the Lost Mountains,'' and is writing a book of nonfiction on his lengthy visit to New Mexico, something that probably will have ``outsider'' in the title.





PAUL FOLWELL of Durango, Colo., painted the images on this Web site (except for the mountain goat, which is Calloway's photo). Folwell grew up in Colorado and used to ski for a living. His Web site with paintings is at PaulFolwell.com