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Tom and Adelaide Bruce  eMail:   tom@laplaza.org  Home Page:   http://laplaza.org/~tom/  Map:  Taos, New Mexico - USA   Weather

Adelaide and I live in Taos --located north of Santa Fe .. and a few miles south of the Colorado State line (37th parallel). We are part of a unique land area collectively called, "Northern New Mexico."

Taos itself sits among the Sangre de Cristo mountains at an altitude of 7000 feet and is surrounded by pine, pinon and aspen forests to the North and East with a plain of high-desert sagebrush along our western horizon.  Unseen but only a few miles away is a 750 foot deep canyon, cut by the waters of the Rio Grande River.  Our northern view is dominated by a 12,000 foot mountain officially called, "Pueblo Peak" --but we locals call it, "Taos Mountain."

Taos is tri-cultural.  American Indians, Hispanics and Anglos make up our community of about 25,000 people. Our "industries" are art galleries (90 of them), skiing (5 ski areas), tourism and retirement.  Historically, this community has always been on the edge of "many cultures."  First it was a gathering place and a trading place between Indian nations (Northern Pueblos, Apache, Kiowa, Ute, Comanche, and Arapahoe tribes) .. and then it became a distant outpost in New-Spain, France, Mexico and finally a bridge into a new country called the United States.  From the 1900s Taos has been an important American art community and today we have a wonderful summer music program.  New Mexico --The Land of Enchantment-- became the 47th State in 1912.

We have a commuter airport (Rio Grande Air) but there are no trains here.  Roads into Taos are less than superhighways.  If you need manicured lawns, paved straight streets, fast transportation or dust bothers you ... well ... Taos can be a difficult place to live.  We are an adobe community with mud streets and mud homes (if you can afford them).  A typical Taos survivor is a building contractor, today, an auto-mechanic, tomorrow and an artist in-between.  Forget your business suits, ties, and time planners-- they aren't necessary, here. Taos is not a place for a small chi-chi business.  Many think so .. and come to live among these lovely mountains .. then leave broke.

I love Taos. I love the brilliant blue light of the New Mexico sky and I love the changing seasons and what each day will bring.  At night, a full moon will illuminate Taos Mountain and then you can still hear the sound --somewhere, in the distance-- of a coyote's bark.  If the atmosphere is right, you can also hear drums coming from the Indian Pueblo located at the foot of Taos Mountain.  Nearby is a herd of Buffalo. Have you ever seen a "Moonbows," at night, during a quick spring shower? I have.

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I was born in a small Colorado town, Canon City, situated along the Arkansas river.  It is and was a "truck-garden" community about 150 miles north of Taos. In the early 1900s, my Grandpa and Dad (as a young boy) would take their garden produce to the miners of Cripple Creek, Leadville and Climax. Then it was a two or three week trip up dangerous rocky canyons and along narrow cliff-roads. Much later I flew over this area in a commercial aircraft and could see these old trails and places in a single snapshot view. The roads are now paved but still difficult to travel in the winter.

I grew up In Canon City--a prison town--and this is where I earned my first money picking strawberries, apples and cherries.  After school, my "gang" and I would build forts along the "hog-back" hills, on the west-edge of town. Then at twilight --when we just *had* to get home for supper-- we would run past the guard-towers and throw pebbles at their windows. The guards would shine their lights down at us scampering kids and one would yell through his loud speaker, "Ok! Pat I got'um in the light ... get the machine guns out ... and we'll mow 'um down."  We often played cops and robbers on the grounds just outside the prison walls .. with real robbers (trustees who kept the prison gardens and lawns).  

Later, I attended a boys school run by the Benedictine Monks, played football, developed an interest in astronomy... and survived a youth of daily pleasures ... and wondered what "it" was all about. In the meantime, we moved to New Mexico

By 1954 (a year of great drought), I decide to go to college at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM.  I wanted to become a "space scientist" (whatever that was) and because they had a student work program that allowed me to pay my way through college. Dad talked to cousin-Mac (who lived in Las Cruces, then) and Mac talked to the Dean who talked to the Coach ... and this got me a scholarship to play football. The scholarship money paid my tuition ($45 p/semester), plus room ($45 p/semester) and board ($125 p/semester) and I lived high on the "hog" from my student work at $1.25 per/hr.  I want to report that the record of our football team will never be exceeded ... we lost every game. The next school year was much better.

One day I learned that a senior astronomer was looking for a student to scan film. Having no hope of acquiring such a position (my grades were not that great), I screwed up enough courage and went to his office, to ask him for a job. To this day, I don't remember any part of that interview. I think I "blacked out" during the conversation ... but I did get the job ... and I worked, lovingly, for this man for the next 20 years. His interests went beyond astronomy.  He was both a practicing geologists and maker of mirrors and telescopes.  From him I learned what "real science" was about.

By 1963, I wanted to see more of the world .. and so I joined the American Peace Corps as a volunteer-teacher and was sent to Srikakulum, Andhra Pradesh, India to teach Math and Science. 

However, a few years before I left for India, I had been dating a young student-typist who worked in the University Research Center where I working. Her father said that he would pay her way to college ... but only if she would study something "practical"-- and this was to be secretarial work.  She did this but after receiving her certificate she wanted something better. Her interests were in medicine and just before I left for India, she went to Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to study nursing.

It was during my second year in India and two months into a terrible monsoon season that I proposed to this lady ... using my tape recorder.  Evidently, I must have sent this recorded-proposal first by ox-cart .. then by cargo-ship.  Adelaide said that it took three months to get from Srikakulum to Johns Hopkins. She now claims to have this tape (although I have never seen it).  All I remember is that about this time I also came down with dengue's fever.  But never-the-less, I trust Adelaide for she has taken the Hippocratic oath. We were married in 1966 after I had returned to New Mexico State and reacquired my old position in the Department of Astronomy.

Only now, do I realize how opportune this 1954-70 period was for young scientists. Because of the technologies generated after the war years and by Sputnik, there was a great need for engineers, mathematicians and scientists.  In those days, you did everything the project demanded.  This meant that you built equipment by day, observed at night, and reduced data both day and night. Then you wrote papers and looked for more contracts and started the whole cycle over again.  You were expected to play both "offense" and "defense" in this Scientific game.

By 1966, access to computers were becoming available. So I decided to study FORTRAN .. but *just enough* to write competent computer programs which would be used to reduce our nightly observations.  I continued to study programming and then Computer Science and before I knew it, I had laid a foundation for a career in Computer Science. 

However, by 1974, the US space program had sucked away most of the money from traditional "grounded based" astronomy and I could see the "handwriting on the wall."  That summer, I sent my resume' off to the Pacific Northwest (among others) ... but promptly forgot about it after a couple of weeks.

During Christmas week, that year, I received a phone call from the US Forest Service in Oregon. They wanted to know if I was interested in working in the Pacific Northwest. I didn't quite know how to answer, but after talking to Adelaide, I flew up to Oregon to look the job over. There, I learned that the US Forest Service was beginning to "automate" their operations at the Forest level. They were interested in finding someone with both analytical and computer skills who could set up a computer facility to support their Land Use Planning activities. I said, "yes" and joined the U.S. Forest Service in 1975 (a year of lesser drought)

Over the next 22 years, I repeated this decision two more times-and moved to a Forest in Eureka, California and finally, back to Taos, New Mexico, in 1980. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed working with Forest Service people and the satisfaction that I have gotten from developing tools for Wild life Biologists, Logging Specialist, Road Design Engineers and Land Use Planners. I have built programs to view landscapes, layout logging roads and design cable logging systems. Three times-on three national Forests-I have help build an organization to gathered land resource information so that both specialist and managers can study and predict the effects of habitat management activities on wildlife communities.

I worked in the Forest Service organization during a time when their management paradigm was changing and when the Forest disciplines were beginning to use the tools of computer science to better manage large complex eco-systems. These tools , for the first time, gave the wildlifer 's knowledge full-weight in discussions with the more quantifiable Timber and engineering issues. Looking back, I can see that this computer technology was even changing these disciplines, it selves.

I grew in other ways, also. In New Mexico I had often acted as a lone observer and scientific analyst.  In the Forest service I was responsible for a organization with people, budgets and customers.  Today I am a advocate of Peter Drucker and Tom Peters style of management.  In the Forest Service each day I had to justify my organization to line and staff officers who were beset by changing priorities and declining budgets. My organization never lost budget support. I know the difference between management strategies and operational tactics;  the value and support of technical people; as well as "walking around with your customers."

I retired in January of 1997 (a year of minor drought) with the intention of building a garden-park around my home and painting the adobes and mountains around Taos. I am doing this while still active in various community projects: In 1993, I helped to established the first Internet Service Provider organization in Taos (www.laplaza.org); I served as past President of the Taos County Historical Society; and I am a founding member of a Science-Humanities discussion group called "The Cave."  During all this, I taught three semester of Introductory Astronomy and three semesters of Computer Programming (C and Visual Basic) at our local Community College, UNM-Taos.

.. and btw .. I finally found what "it" was all about.  It's the "people"... the Pueblo. - tomb

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