Case Alegre ‘landmark’ sold newspapers in neighborhood for over a decade

When news spread on Nextdoor, a social media app, that Mary Russell had died, messages from dozens of neighbors poured in.

“She was a landmark and always with a smile,” Doug Potter wrote.

Russell, who sold Santa Fe New Mexican newspapers in the city’s Casa Alegre neighborhood for at least a decade until late November, died Wednesday around age 71 at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, said Nancy Kruger, her roommate of five years.

Russell had battled cancer for months, Kruger said, and had been in the hospital since around New Year’s Eve. Kruger visited every day to “fuss” over her.

“She was a crotchety little thing,” Kruger said fondly, noting many of Russell’s eccentricities, such as refusing to tip at restaurants and starting to remind friends about her birthday about two weeks in advance.

Her papers “I’m sure are sorely missed,” Kruger added. “She was kind of watchdog for the whole neighborhood.”

Russell was very secretive about her past, said a regular customer, Jane Frederick, who did not know when Russell moved to Santa Fe.

She was born March 23, 1953, and grew up in upstate New York, friends thought. She then spent a few years in Arizona and Albuquerque before coming to Santa Fe, Kruger said.

Russell has a daughter and one or two grandsons in New York but had not been in close contact with them.

Kruger, who is organizing funeral arrangements for Russell, came to know her as a customer and invited her in 2018 to spend a few weeks in her home near the corner of Osage Avenue and Hopi Road, where she sold her papers, because Russell was afraid she might be evicted from her apartment.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you come and stay with me till you get it figured out?’ thinking that would be the end of it,” Kruger remembered. “Well, that was five years ago.”

“Mary had friends who would take her shopping and friends who would help her wash the windows,” Kruger said. “She was very strong . ... I think anybody who can get up at 4:30 in the morning seven days a week is pretty amazing.”

Although she was “a little prickly,” Russell was a constant friendly presence who waved at everyone who went by, Frederick described. “Everybody’s going to miss her.”