'They were thrown out': Will Shuster's son talks origins, early days of Zozobra

Aug. 30—A feeling of dispassion prevailed one winter night in 1923 as Will Shuster and three friends sat in the dining room of La Fonda on the Plaza talking of low ebbs and lingering problems.

The four friends wrote down their woes on paper, piled the paper in the middle of the table and used candles to set it on fire, the flames apparently an attempt to cancel out the gloom that had wafted through the air.

The act got the restless group kicked out of La Fonda — so runs the tale — but it embodied the overarching philosophy of the burning of Zozobra, a longstanding local tradition that Shuster created the next year.

"They were sitting there. They said, 'Let's write all the things we want to get rid of, our upsets.' They just got them and put them in the middle of the table and lit them on fire in the middle of La Fonda," John Shuster, 85, Will Shuster's son, said in an interview Friday.

"They were thrown out ..." he added. "That's a true story."

For John Shuster, that moment at La Fonda symbolizes the essence of Zozobra, a celebration that marked its 100th year Friday night that draws tens of thousands of people to Fort Marcy Park.

"It was always to get rid of gloom," John Shuster said.

William Shuster moved to New Mexico from his native Philadelphia in 1920, hoping the drier air would help with his tuberculosis. He quickly established himself as a member of Santa Fe's burgeoning bohemian art scene. In 1924, he burned the first Zozobra, a 6-foot effigy, in his backyard.

For the first two years of the scorching, the celebrity ghost-monster was known in English as Old Man Groucher. Though he's increased in size over the years, not much has changed with Zozobra, whose conflagration precedes the annual Fiesta de Santa Fe.

This year marks John Shuster's first time in Santa Fe since 2011. For the centennial, he and a dozen other relatives decided to attend the burning, including grandchildren, nieces and nephews of Will Shuster.

"What we wanted to do is we wanted to bring everyone together here in Santa Fe," said John Shuster.

A resident of the Washington D.C., area, John Shuster recently attended a rehearsal of Zozobra and declared the show a lot more sophisticated than when he was a child, crawling around the inside of the boogeyman while his father worked on "putting the fireworks in."

On Friday, members of the family reflected on the inventive Santa Fe artist's legacy at an event in City Hall hosted by R&R For Vets, a nonprofit that provides free roof and interior repairs and emergency home services to military veterans and their surviving spouses.

Will Shuster was a World War I veteran, and his descendants also got to check out an art exhibit R&R For Vets installed at City Hall that focuses on the military chapter of his life. It includes photos of Shuster in uniform and documents related to his military career.

John Shuster recalled the craftsmanship and invention that went into the creation of Zozobra each year when he was growing up. He described his father as a compassionate man who wanted to give the Santa Fe community something to celebrate.

"I don't know how many times I participated in building Zozobra," John Shuster recalled.

In those years, Zozobra's parts were not manufactured separately as they are now, and the results were not as predictable.

"Something would just fall or become defective. We just had to live with it," Shuster said. "There wasn't all the electronics."