On several occasions since I’ve been writing this blog, I have been surprised when someone unexpected from my past sends me a me a note saying they’ve liked what I’ve written and want to reconnect. They usually explain how they tracked me down from a friend’s recommendation, many times from people I didn’t know were following my blog.
So it was a few weeks ago when I got an unexpected e-mail from Tom Toppino, a friend from college, who caught me up on his life and reminded me of a story we experienced together when we lived in nearby bungalows in the Old Town section of Albuquerque.
In this particular case, it regarded an unusual individual who called himself Ulysses S. Grant, reincarnated. I wrote a previous blog about Grant, but the note from my college friend turned up some new details about the character.
“Ulysses” was a hippie type who lived in a commune called Lower Farm near Placitas northeast of Albuquerque. For reasons I can’t recall, he managed to draw attention to himself and then announced in 1969 that he was running as a Republican candidate for governor of New Mexico. His plan was to visit every county in the state while riding his old swayback horse, “Blue” on the campaign trail. He wore striped Civil War era cavalry trousers while campaigning.
I was working for United Press International on the evening shift at the time and decided an interview with Ulysses might make an interesting feature story. So one weekend when I wasn’t working on the news desk or fretting about upcoming college projects, I drove to Placitas to find and interview him.
He was easy enough to find and willing to do an interview. (Aren’t all politicians running for office anxious to be interviewed?) I only remember a few things about the interview. One was that he had an incredibly large barrel of soy sauce in his cabin that served as a chair and whose contents he shared with other members of the commune. I also remember that during the interview while walking around the compound, he decided to relieve himself and did it unashamedly in an open field front of a young woman who had accompanied me for the day. And the third thing was his pronouncement that when he was elected governor, he would build no more roads in the state and not repair any that already existed.
“We have enough already,” he declared.
My story about Grant was distributed nationwide by UPI and featured the photograph below:
Grant managed to get six write-in votes during the 1970 New Mexico primary.
During the interview, I must have told him where I lived and he showed up unexpectedly a few days later riding his horse Blue. He became friends with my pot-smoking roommate at the time and stayed overnight at our place at least once. He enjoyed smoking with my roommate (I was too busy with full-time work and a full college load to participate) and he especially liked riding around in my roommate’s slick Triumph Spitfire sports car.
“I’m not supposed to like modern material things like that, but it’s a really cool car,” he confided to me one day.
Some time after that, there was a report that he had shot and killed two member of the commune and promptly vanished, along with his wife who reportedly had been assaulted by one of the individuals who was killed.
I never heard any more about him, until I got the e-mail from my college friend a few weeks ago. Tom, now a retired professor at Villanova, said his son had become interested in the matter of Ulysses S. Grant, which led to the successful effort to track me down.
I found out Grant’s real name was Donald Waskey and that he was never apprehended for the crimes in New Mexico. However, his charred body and the body of a woman who was believed to have been his wife, were found 18 years later in a burned out building near Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.
On an internet search, I ran across a story written by Ron Franscell, a self-proclaimed author of some true crime novels which offered this information:
“In the rubble of a house fire near Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, deputies found two charred bodies. Both had been shot in the back of the head and the fire intentionally set. In a nearby barn, investigators found more than a thousand thriving marijuana plants—the biggest indoor pot farm Idaho had ever seen—along with a cache of assault weapons, machine guns, and rifles with night-vision scopes. They also found booby traps throughout the facility, later estimated to have produced almost $2 million worth of pot every month.“
Authorities believe the murders in Idaho were conducted by a member or members of a rival pot raising operation.
My college friend Tom also had this recollection of meeting Grant in our Old Town neighborhood.
“I remember that he stayed at your house one night. His horse stayed in my backyard! I’m not sure whether it was the same night, but he came over one time when you guys weren’t home. I was fixing dinner, so I invited him to join me, and he accepted. I was in the kitchen preparing the meal (to the extent that my culinary skills allowed), while Ulysses was hanging out in my living room. He came into the kitchen after a while to show me a picture of Ulysses S. Grant that he had found in a magazine I had lying around. I said something like, “Oh, a picture of your namesake!” He looked at me very seriously and emphatically said, “No. This is me.” I didn’t think of him in quite the same way after that.”
In another interesting twist, I also ran across another picture of Grant that was taken by another old friend of mine, journalistic colleague and photographer, Buddy Mays. Buddy now lives in Bend, Oregon, and has also written several books in addition to his award winning photographs. I’d show you the image, but it was sold to Getty Images and to use it would cost me $175. The photo shows him sitting on a log somewhere in New Mexico, with another unidentified man next to him. In the photo, Grant was wearing his traditional cavalry-issue striped pants.
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