The Press: El Creeps

The oldest name in New Mexico newspapering is borne proudly by El Crepús-culo de la Libertad (The Dawn of. Liberty), a twelve-page weekly in Taos (pop. 1,815), whose delirious typography and dissonant trio of editorial voices more often suggest the dawn of anarchy. Fondly known to its 2,505 subscribers as “El Creeps,” the paper was started in 1835 by a Mexican priest. Today it still has an unusual publisher-editor: wealthy Bostonian Edward Clark Cabot, 52.

Publisher Cabot (of the Back Bay Cabots), who first visited Taos as a member of a Harvard geological expedition in 1932 and soon took a summer place there, bought El Creeps nine years ago last month. Last year he moved it lock, stock and flatbed press into a pink adobe hacienda. The new location greatly improved working conditions: staffers who like drinks served with the news can walk through a door from the city room directly into a bar presided over by the mayor of Taos.

Twice-married Ted Cabot helps deliver the papers, mans the classified-ads desk at the lunch hour, frequently dons apron and relieves a typesetter, composes his editorials at a desk so cluttered with papers that he has to peck at a portable typewriter propped precariously on his lap. Says Cabot: “I’ve felt close to the people here and their problems. When I no longer had any ties back East, I just picked up and came out.”

El Creeps has no makeup editor. Every department just turns its copy in to the printers, who simply follow a policy that all the news is fit to print—even when it means running a story from one column to the preceding one. The paper may well be the only one in the world with three separate editorial pages, each allowed to pursue its own vendettas and crusades with joyous disregard for overall policy. Thus, in one issue, in addition to Cabot’s own editorial-page salute to the paper’s founder, his colleague J. B. Martinez wrote an editorial in the paper’s two-page Spanish section, bewailing the defeat of the federal school-aid bill. Third editorial, a scornful attack on parking meters, was written by a local poet and sometime newsman named Spud Johnson, who runs a private, one-page domain called “The Horse Fly” (subtitle: “Smallest & Most Inadequate Newspaper Ever Published”).

For all its lightheartedness, El Creeps under Cabot has been an outspoken, effective conciliator between the community’s three often-differing ethnic groups: the Indian, the Spanish, and what the Taosenos call the “Anglo.” Says Editor Cabot: “Being the only paper in a valley where there are three completely different outlooks is something like sitting on a keg of powder in a dark room. You know that it’s dangerous to light a match, but you have to do it to see where you are.”