Longtime Journal printer had a way with words
Patricio Cruz recalled as a man who appreciated the beauty and force of writing
Patricio Antonio Cruz was a word guy.
The retired Albuquerque Publishing Co. printer was an obsessive reader, an author, poet, magazine writer and Scrabble player extraordinaire. He was also f luent in English, Spanish, French and American Sign Language.
Cruz died on Feb. 20 at his home, surrounded by family. He was 90.
Born in Springer, Cruz was the only boy among eight siblings. Coincidentally, later in life he and his wife would also raise a family of seven girls and one boy.
Cruz began sweeping floors in the pressroom of a Springer newspaper at age 9 and by the time he was a student at Springer High School had worked his way up to being a printer, said his daughter, Joy Jones. Shortly after graduation he enlisted in the Navy on D-Day, 1944, and served in the Pacific and Europe.
Upon his return to the United States, and thinking he might like a career in the military, Cruz received appointments to both the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He accepted the West Point appointment but soon decided the regimented military life wasn’t what he wanted after all. He left after his first year.
Cruz resumed his job as a printer in Springer, and in 1948 he attended a social gathering in the nearby town of Roy, where he managed to have the final dance of the evening with the former Tillie Maestas. He informed her that “you’re the girl I’m going to marry,” said Jones, relating the often-told family story. “She told him that she wasn’t looking for romance. For the next week, she received a letter from him in the mail every day. And every day, she wrote him back.”
Within a couple of weeks they were dating, “always with a chaperone,” and nine months later, in July 1949, they married. Their first child arrived the following year.
“My dad was very good with words, and my mom still has those letters, but she will not let us read them,” Jones said.
Cruz subsequently worked as a printer at two newspapers in Taos before moving to Albuquerque in 1957 to take a job at a private printing and advertising company. When the company went out of business in 1960, he went to work as a printer for the Albuquerque Journal and remained with the publishing company for 32 years, retiring in 1992.
During those years Cruz operated the Linotype hot-type machine, was an engraver, an advertising typographer and an advertising computer programmer, for which he had to attend special classes to learn.
“My dad understood that with the changing technology, the art of printing was also changing,” but not the beauty and force of the written word, Jones said. “He always encouraged us to read the daily newspaper.”
In retirement Cruz pursued his hobbies as an artist, creating wood carvings, religious retablos and oil paintings, mostly of landscapes, flowers and animals.
He also wrote poetry and was a freelance writer for La Herensia, the journal of the Hispanic Genealogical Research Center of New Mexico. Shortly before his death, Cruz self published a book titled “A Walk to Anahuac,” a fictional story set in the early 1500s about the conquest of Montezuma, Jones said. The book was handwritten in 1977 on 359 pages.
As further proof of her father’s command of language, Jones said he was nearly unbeatable in family Scrabble competitions.
“I’d say, ‘Dad, I don’t think that’s a word.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, it is. Look it up.’ So we’d look it up and, of course, it was. I don’t remember my dad ever getting a challenge in Scrabble that he didn’t win.”
Cruz is survived by his wife, eight children, 23 grandchildren, 34 great grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren.
Burial has already taken place.