Kaye Good (Near Santa Fe, NM, August 1986)

Elizabeth's father and his wife Kaye lived in Dearborn, MI when Elizabeth and I met (John was an attorney for Ford Motor Credit). I actually had to ask John, and thus John & Kaye, for his daughter's hand in marriage, since he had suddenly become Elizabeth's sole financial support. He said we were too young, and he thought we shouldn't, but if he said no we'd do it anyway, so, yes. I was impressed, besides thankful.

I believe we made this trip, along with Paul and family, to John and Kaye's home in Cochiti Lake, NM, to scatter John's ashes. He had died shortly before that, sadly much too soon after retiring to New Mexico. Their beautiful home was on an Indian reservation, part of a really poorly executed development between Great Western Cities, which went bankrupt, and the Cochiti Pueblo. This had two unexpected effects on John and Kaye. Since John was an attorney, he got heavily involved in the settlement between the courts, the homeowners, and the Pueblo. And all development stopped, which meant that their home had tons of beautiful desert and canyon around it, with the neighbors all at a reasonable distance. I've appended some material about the situation to the end of this entry. You can get some sense of the isolation from the very first Fisher Picture of the Day entry--that picture was from a few years before.

Kaye was brought up on a farm in Iowa. Elizabeth and I each separately recall that she studied interior design at Northwestern. She was a neighbor in Port Washington, when Elizabeth's parents divorced. Here is Kaye, the consummate homemaker, in a perfect setting:




Looks like she confused Elizabeth here:


We went to see the almost 1,000 year old cliff dwellings in Bandelier National Monument (a national park).




Show those pearly whites!!


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From High Country News ( http://www.hcn.org/issues/204/10553 )

"We have been inoculated," says Princeton-educated Cochiti Governor Regis Pecos, whose sad-eyed eloquence can be mesmerizing. Golf came to Cochiti almost by default, Pecos told me, after the pueblo's traumatic experiment with "development" and the Great Western Cities Corporation, which in the 1960s enticed Cochiti leaders to lease 7,000 acres for construction of a retirement and vacation community called Cochiti Lake. "There were going to be 40,000 (mostly Anglo) people here, plus a hospital, marina, schools and a golf course," Pecos said. "It disrupted our schools, the teaching of our native language, how our people worked, and upset the agricultural lifestyle that defined who we were as a people."

A long, litigious story made short: The first cookie-cutter home went up in 1972, but in 1984, when there were still only a few hundred residents in Cochiti Lake, Great Western Cities filed for bankruptcy and Cochiti Pueblo bought back its 99-year lease and title to one exceptional golf course designed by famed golf architect, Robert Trent Jones. Perhaps the most physically striking of all the pueblo courses, the Cochiti layout is tight and mountainous, lined with spindly ocotillo cactus and braying, baseball glove-sized bullfrogs.

Curiously, the Cochitis, who never planned to have a golf course and have rejected proposals for everything from hotels to solid-waste dumps to riverboat casinos (they have a lake), now rely on their golf course's million dollar-a-year gross for the lion's share of the pueblo's revenue. "The subject of a casino comes up often," Pecos says, "but with all that has happened ... the discussion never lasts very long. We want to define the kind of visitor who comes here. We want them to have respect. Golfers represent those kinds of values."

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And from The Albuquerque Journal, 1998

Byline: Michael Coleman Journal Staff Writer

COCHITI LAKE -- The town of Cochiti Lake, a community nestled between the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains 45 miles north of Albuquerque, is not a typical small town.

It's one of the few towns in America built on Indian lands. In essence, the town's residents are guests of the Cochiti Pueblo. The story behind the town's creation is so convoluted even those who live there don't claim to understand all the details.

But essentially, here's how it happened:

In the late 1960s, Great Western Cities, an out-of-state development company, convinced the pueblo that a new housing development would be its ticket to prosperity.

The tribe would lease -- not sell -- land to the developer, who would then sublease the lots to "buyers," who in turn would build homes on them at their own cost. The town was never incorporated -- instead it is governed according to agreements, mainly a master lease, forged between the developer and the tribe.

The development was supposed to grow to 50,000 people, with hotels, restaurants, schools and other amenities to follow, the developers promised. The growth would make the pueblo a national model for Indian economic development.

And initially, the promises rang true. The "buyers" -- some from of out of state, some from the surrounding area -- snapped up lots as bulldozers and hammers signaled economic growth. But in 1984, Great Western Cities filed for bankruptcy and the town on the fast track derailed.

The investors mostly blamed the economy. Pueblo leaders blamed the company for overselling the project's potential, and the grandiose promises fizzled into a much more modest reality.

Today, the town has grown to only about 540 residents who live in well-maintained homes on the edge of an 18-hole golf course that recently was rated by Golf Digest as one of the 75 best golfing values in the country.

Under a 99-year lease, the residents will be allowed to live on the Cochiti land until 2068. But at that time the land, the homes and all other improvements will revert to the tribe under a master lease drafted when the town was built.

Legal documents provide options for the pueblo to renew the leases if it so desires. But tribal spokesman Marvin Valdo said the current tribal council does not think that will happen.

Dale Ball, a town resident since 1992, says he is not concerned about being kicked off the land. After all, he'll be long gone and his youngest grandchild will be 100 years old.

"We're a very transient society," Ball says. "I don't think any of my descendants will live in any house I own."

And furthermore, Ball says he leases the land "at a fraction of the cost" of buying land in surrounding communities. Each of the town's residents pays only about $1,000 per year in rent and recreation fees, Ball says.

Of course, they also assume a mortgage required to build the home at market rates, and when the lease expires the tribe will own the land and all improvements on it.

But regardless of that fact, most residents echo Ball's sentiment, noting that the staggeringly beautiful surroundings and clean mountain air just don't come as cheap anywhere else in the state.

As for the tribe, it is simply relieved to have regained much of the land it sold 30 years ago.

When Great Western Cities went bankrupt, the tribe reclaimed control of more than 6,000 acres of the 7,500 originally earmarked for development, Valdo says.

The pueblo has no plans to develop the land it fought so hard to win back.

"We don't want any more growth," Valdo says. "It was a bad experience that the pueblo went through."

Instead of growth, the conservative Cochiti Pueblo is betting its economic future on golf. Its golf course reaped more than $1 million in profits each of the past two years, Valdo says.

If the success continues, Valdo says the development corporation may add nine more holes and build a new clubhouse within the next couple of years.