So Long, Doc

A familiar face on Santa Fe Plaza won't be there anymore since the sudden death of the man everyone knew as 'Doc'

A

longtime Santa Fe character known as “Doc,” whose life walked that blurred line between homelessness and living off the grid, with his long beard and his cowboy hat, died Tuesday afternoon after he collapsed on the first floor of the Santa Fe Arcade just off the Plaza.

He was 77.

He was born Thomas Murray, a fact only close friends were privy to, because mostly he liked to introduce himself as "Doc" to the Plaza's tourists before he'd take a few of them on tours—whether it was to Canyon Road, the Santa Fe Botanical Garden or even Bandelier National Monument.

In a sense, Doc was the unofficial concierge of the Plaza, a guy who, reportedly shunned by an abusive father and a relatively uncaring grandfather, came to Santa Fe in 1962 from New Hampshire in his early 20s, then lived in a cave in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

And from that point forward, he became a sight to behold among those who chose civilization over the woods, and some of them would marvel at how Doc would walk several miles to get to town, then sit at the same park bench in the Plaza for hours, which would eventually turn into years.

"He became a never-ending part of the city's web cam" aimed at the public square, notes Stephen Fox, the owner of New Millennium Fine Art, in business since 1980. "But more than anything, he was a survivalist, without a doubt, and tourists loved to hang out with him and listen to his stories.

"He was a real story-teller."

But everyone who knew Doc took the tales with a grain of salt, especially the part where Doc would send back scripts to Steven Spielberg, then holler at him, telling him that he didn't get it right and that he should go back and fix it.

"And we'd all wonder," says Fox, who says he will miss Doc. "We knew that part of it was was apocrypha, that he was a big embellisher."

And yet perhaps no one was more close to Doc than Jeff Tabor, who trusted him enough to throw him the keys to the Art Exchange Gallery inside the Santa Fe Arcade, where Doc worked and where he would fatally collapse in what friends are now speculating was a heart attack.

The state Office of the Medical Investigator wheeled him out of the building just after 4 pm, but no word has been issued yet on the cause of his death. Police set up yellow tape around the scene for nearly two hours as they interviewed Tabor and called the entire affair "an investigation."


Tabor says it was just before 1 pm that he asked Doc to go get a tag for a sculpture downstairs, where the gallery stores some of its artwork, and then bring it back upstairs so that Tabor could ring it up.

But when Doc never came back upstairs, Tabor started to wonder.

"Usually, he'd come right back up with it, because he knew he was going to get a commission for the sale," says Tabor. "When he didn't show, that's when I went downstairs to check on him and found him, crumpled in the corner."

Tabor is heartbroken over the death of his friend, which didn't come without a few warnings. Doc had spent some time in hospice in the last few years and had even stayed at Tabor's house when stricken with pneumonia from time to time.

As fate would have it, Tabor says he just completed an acrylic painting of Doc, from a photograph he'd had taken of him in February.

"It's really strange, but I'm not going to call it a premonition," says Tabor. "For the most part, I always just took photographs of him. But for some reason, this time I thought, I'm going to paint him."

He just finished that portrait last week and was proud enough to post it on his Facebook page.

Here’s another strange twist: Andrew Koss, 32, a creative writing student at the University of Santa Fe Art and Design, just completed interviewing and videotaping

on Doc for the student-produced

. And just last Sunday, Koss handed over the flash drive of his finished work.

"At first, I'll be honest, he kind of scared me the way he looked, and I was put off," says Koss, who now finds himself blessed with having conducted what was possibly the very last interview of a man who shared his colorful way of life with so many.

It wasn't until Doc started showing up at Collected Works every morning, where Koss works, that he started to get to know him better, and he felt less timid. The two began to open up.

As Koss tells it, at the age of 9, Doc beat up his father with a baseball bat and put him in the hospital for beating up his mother. The family lived in New Hampshire, according to interviews with Doc.

Then, Doc went to live with his grandfather, who let him live in a teepee on his property. Doc apparently lasted a few years before moving to Santa Fe.

Of course, there are a lot of gaps in between, but business owners who've come to know him say Doc has lived here for more than 50 years—in a cave in the mountains, in secret locations, then most recently behind Ten Thousand Waves (with the business's permission), then, lastly, helping the elderly man.

He was also married for three years, according to Tabor. At one point, Doc had also said he'd worked in the landscaping business in Española, but for the most part, he will always be known as the guy who sat on that same park bench in Santa Fe and guided tourists around town for a buck or two.

And now his spirit will live on in webcams, in portraits and in tons of photographs.

"He was an icon," says Sam Abweh, owner of Samsville Gallery. More than once, Doc would bring him customers interested in Native American art. "He'd bring me a lot of business," Abweh adds, "and he will be missed. He was a very smart man."

This version corrects an earlier version in which Stephen Fox's name was misspelled.

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