New Mexico Mercury

New Mexico Mercury

Book Review - Leaving Tinkertown: The story of a father, a daughter and a museum

October 25, 2013

By Wally Gordon

Judging a book by its first sentence can be almost as dangerous as judging it by its cover, but still a good first sentence never hurts. The first sentence of Leaving Tinkertown,—“I was conceived in a pickup camper on the New Mexico State Fair Grounds when my parents were on the road with the carnival.” — is definitely a keeper. You immediately sense you are going to hear about some unusual people.
And you do.

This memoir tells the story of Ross Ward, the artist and collector who created the unique Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park. It is also a story of Ward’s developing Alzheimer’s disease, of his daughter’s love and effort to cope with her father’s decline, of a young woman coming to terms with the end that awaits us all.

Tanya Ward Goodman, the Los Angeles writer who is Ross Ward’s daughter, delivers a lot in this recently published little 220-page memoir (University of New Mexico Press, $19.95 in paperback with 24 illustrations).

At 28, Tanya Goodman’s TV writing career was stalled, she had broken up with her boyfriend of three years, was heavily in debt and had just been forced to move out of a handsome house into a small apartment in Los Angeles. She is back home in New Mexico with her father and step mother. It is 1996.

By this time, Ward, “a born showman” who “had always wanted to run his own roadside attraction,” had opened Tinkertown as a permanent home for the miniature western town he had been carrying around the country as part of his carnival show. In the first year, 1,000 visitors drove up to the door and paid $1 each. Over the years, the idiosyncratic collection had grown and so had the crazy-quilt building in which it was housed.

Father and daughter made a road trip together, as they had often done when she was growing up, driving with scenic detours back to her home in Los Angeles. On the way, however, she notices the first signs of her father’s incipient illness. She writes of that time, “Change is blowing in the air like so much desert sand. Something is wrong with Dad, but I don’t know what. I blink my eyes hard against the tears.”

Six years later, Tanya Goodman’s son Theo is born and a week later her father dies. “For my whole life,” she writes, “I have had nightmares about hearing this piece of news. Where once I could let these night visions evaporate in the morning sunshine, they have been slowly gaining weight and now here they are, fully realized in the wan gray light of the seventh morning of my son’s life. I start to sob.”

 

 

(Photos: Sign by Ethan Kan; sign by Francis Storr; Ross and Carla Ward by LISgirl)

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.