New Mexico Mercury

A message came this morning that Ian McLeod, a beloved friend, valued member of our extended family, and long time transplant New Mexican, died of heart failure, on April 5, in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Ian lived his life by his own standards. He was both frugal and philanthropic, an investor and a saver and a risk taker. He was a cosmopolitan traveler and a deeply rooted person, a violinist and a maker of violins, a stone in the shoe of mindless bureaucrats and a person of self-amused and elegant eccentricities. His kindnesses were vast, his opinions logically blunt and unbending, and his anger at political fools both pointed and withering.

He was an initial investor in Mark and Mary Beth Acuff’s  New Mexico Independent  and was also a frequent contributor to Century magazine in the early 1980s, writing on music and Arabic culture. Ian played second violin for years in the New Mexico Symphony.

I met him in 1962 at a party on land near Cerrillos, NM. We hiked up Gallesteo Wash to get away from the crowds. It was so quiet that we were both annoyed by the ticking of our wristwatches. We took them off and buried them in the sand, had a contemplative conversation, dug up our watches, and rejoined the throng. We were fast friends from then on.

Ian read French and German at Cambridge. He had one of those magical facilities for language. When he graduated, he joined Royal Dutch Shell’s personnel department, working in Ethiopia and Yemen, and eventually in Columbia. He left that world with a modest nest egg, and, with rigorous frugality and investment savvy, made it last most of the rest of his life.

He arrived in New Mexico probably in l961 and went to work as a teaching assistant in the UNM Spanish department. He eventually added to his nest egg working a short stint for the New Mexico state personnel department.

His life was punctuated with curious conflicts and developments. Once early on, after picking up a hitchhiker while driving across the Mohave Desert to California, he found himself carjacked, tied up and dragged some 150 yards off the road and left in the sun. Always grateful that the thug was not good at knots, Ian said he got free almost before the man drove away, ran up to the road, and caught a ride with a police car. The culprit was eventually tracked down and Ian’s car was returned.

Aside from being an investor in The New Mexico Independent, he also liked to invest in small mining ventures, including a gold mine near Kelly, New Mexico.

He delighted in bringing officials to their knees in conflicts they had no hope of winning. He balked at the application of leash laws in the bosque and once tricked an officer into pursuing him briefly when he thought his dog was off leash. Ian had carefully attached a light but sturdy fishing line to his well-trained dog’s collar.  Round Ten of many went to McLeod.

Ian took his leave of New Mexico in l989 when he learned of his heart trouble. He knew he would never be able to afford proper care here and went home to make use of British National Health. He carefully chose to move to Wales, learned Welsh, and practiced its almost impossible sounds before he left, and became fluent in the language. He was sympathetic to both Welsh and Scottish separatist movements.

We managed to visit him once in his little cottage in Llanon, on the Irish Sea, down the road from Aberystwyth, where he spent his last years.  He will be missed and remembered at the family gatherings and holidays he loved, and as a person with whom one could share one’s best ideas.

--VBP