Fredric Brown: The Taos Years

This summer's cross-country trip took us to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is only 90 minutes away from Taos, where one of my favorite writers, Fredric Brown, lived for a couple of years. So of course I dragged my family up there. (Longtime Secret Dead Blog readers will be familiar with my slightly-obsessive attempts to trace Brown's former addresses in El Segundo and Venice, CA. One day, I will collect them all. Oh yes, I will.)

Anyway, we headed to Taos, but I wasn't armed with much in the way of research. My copy of Happy Ending -- the Dennis McMillan collection which includes Elizabeth Brown's memoir of living in Taos -- was at home in Philly. I had no address. But I did remember that Brown used to drink at a joint called El Patio. And sure enough, just off the town square, I encountered a place called The Alley Cantina, which used to be El Patio until the late 1990s. Did I drag my family inside for lunch? Hell yes I did. Here's the view from the inside:

So I can finally say I threw back a beer (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) in the same room where Brown tossed one (probably not a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) back. No idea if the place has been significantly remodeled since Brown's day (1949-1950), but there was a nifty vintage menu posted in the hallway. Ah, those prices:

As cool as that was, I was still hoping to pin down the actual Fredric Brown residence. I tried doing a little Google searching on my phone, but no dice. After cursing myself for not packing that copy of Happy Ending, I checked out the rest of Taos. Not far from the former El Patio was a place dedicated to a grisly bit of local history:


Seems this is where the first governor of the New Mexico Territory, Charles Bent, got his ass scalped and killed by a band of angry Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. ("Hey, kids, check this out!")

Only later, when I returned home and consulted my copy of Happy Ending did I realize:

This is where Fredric Brown lived.

Seems a writer pal named Walt Sheldon knew that an apartment in the Governor Bent House was open, and urged Fred and Elizabeth to take a look. In the words of Elizabeth Brown:

There was a legend... that the governor's ghost walked in the patio at night. The whole story made me shudder. But on seeing the place in bright sunshine one did not think of Indians and war whoops and murder and ghosts in the patio.

They moved in soon after. So, mission accomplished, in a strange way.

I also wandered by a place featured in Brown's (highly recommended) novel The Far Cry: the Hotel La Fonda.


The kids did not complain, as there was a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the ground floor. (Probably not there in Brown's day.)