Fantastic fanatic of Santa Fe had a love of insects, children and life
Oliver “Ollie” Greer was an all-star enthusiast.
He indulged in his own interests in a way few people ever do and invited others to do the same. He was always willing to share his passions — bugs, movies, music, among others — with curious friends and strangers.
“Anything that piqued his interest, he would — literally — learn everything he possibly could about it,” said Greer’s longtime friend Ryan Wells. “It didn’t have to be necessarily one of his old interests; it could be a conversation that he had with somebody at Haagen Dazs that made him think.”
Greer, the fantastic fanatic of Santa Fe, died Friday of natural causes. He was 56.
Although he was a chef by training, Greer was perhaps best known in Santa Fe for his enormous collection of insects, arachnids and other creepy-crawlies. The Crawlywood Collection, as Greer called it, is an astonishing exhibition of 2,400 mounted insects — 5,000 eyes, 8,000 wings and 13,000 legs.
The collection has traveled around Santa Fe.
Initially, it filled the basement of the Ore House restaurant, where Greer worked as a “nacho jockey,” cook and, eventually, executive chef. Beneath the restaurant sat piles of bugs and tanks of water and alcohol to mount them, said Andrew Garcia, Greer’s longtime friend.
Eventually, the collection moved out of the basement and into the light, establishing itself at the Santa Fe Children’s Museum, then at initial versions of the Santa Fe Reptile and Bug Museum at DeVargas Center Mall. The whole thing landed in its current spot at Artisan, an art supply store on Cerrillos Road, in 2022.
Regardless of the place, Greer was always happy to explain how he’d mounted so many insects, particularly to children interested in picking up entomology. Greer employed a special water and alcohol solution to soften the bugs, making them pliable enough to spread their many legs or retract their fangs, said Wells.
“It wasn’t just an entomologist putting a pin through a beetle; it was trying to display the beauty of it,” Wells said. “Even though lots of people find them creepy — and Ollie did as well when it came to spiders — he saw the beauty. His collection, the way it’s assembled, is like no other in the world.”
He had a few particularly dedicated young pupils who Greer taught to create their own collections, said Wade Harrell, owner of the Santa Fe Reptile and Bug Museum, which housed Greer’s collection for several years.
“He just really liked fostering that kind of interest in people, just encouraging them to stick with it,” Harrell said.
That was the way Greer was with
kids, Garcia said. He was patient, kind, excited so long as they were, too.
“He just had such great love for children — just because he was a big kid himself,” Garcia said.
Greer was also a lover of movies and an aspiring filmmaker, creating his own short film — shot in Santa Fe — he hoped to one day elongate to feature-length.
Wells said he first met Greer outside a showing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And Greer was outside for a reason: He stood in a cordoned-off zone, cracking a bullwhip. Until his death, Greer carried the whip, perhaps made by the same prop master who fashioned Indiana Jones’ famous whip, everywhere he went.
Greer had a few choice ideas for George Lucas about how the original Star Wars trilogy — particularly Return of the Jedi, the third film — should have been written and produced.
In a discussion with the New Mexican’s Henry Lopez days before his death, Greer recalled May 25, 1983, the day he first saw Return of the Jedi. Greer’s review of the film was withering: He hated it, particularly its focus on teddy bear-esque Ewoks.
Greer informed Lucasfilm executives of his dislike of the film. When his father introduced him to Warren Franklin — a Lucasfilm producer on The Empire Strikes Back — over a dinner at Santacafé in the 1980s, Greer sketched his criticisms on the butcher paper topping the table. Franklin took the notes back to Skywalker Ranch in California.
A few weeks later, the young Greer received a piece of mail postmarked from the northern peninsula of the San Francisco Bay. Inside was the holy grail of any Star Wars fan’s collection: a movie poster for Return of the Jedi, signed by Lucasfilm officials, including George Lucas himself. A note inside urged him to “keep writing.”
He did. Greer rewrote scripts, improving upon the 2000 film Space Cowboys and altering pieces of James Bond scripts, Wells said. He redesigned some of the ships in the original Star Wars trilogy and wrote notes on the films’ scripts. In Greer’s version, Luke Skywalker has a love interest who does not turn out to be his sister.
“Ollie had vision that other people would have a hard time understanding,” Wells said of Greer’s scripts. “He was a genius that way. He was absolutely brilliant.”
And then there was the music. Greer had a penchant for drums, particularly for drumming by Buddy Rich, and a collection of old-school audio equipment, including a set of custom Dunlavy speakers and a small mountain of laserdiscs, which he called the best audio format ever made.
In the same basement where he initially kept his collection of bugs, Greer also created a kind of acoustic perfection, Garcia said. After spending two days measuring the basement room, Greer calculated the center of sound there and adhered soundproofing foam to the concrete walls.
The result, Wells said, was “studio-quality audio” beneath a bustling restaurant.
All these things — Greer’s numerous collections, his laugh, the way he hyper-focused on his hobbies, his endless kindness for children — “made him one of the true beautiful people that I ever met,” Wells said.
Greer’s bugs, at least, won’t go to waste anytime soon, Garcia said. Friends and family have agreed to mount the last few bugs in Greer’s enormous collection, hopeful they may find their way to a more permanent exhibition space someday.
Harrell said he envisions an exhibit not just about the bugs but about the man who meticulously preserved them to honor Greer’s legacy, even if the legacy comes with many legs.