Remembering Sweet Old Bob, touchstone and timeless treasure

For many of us, Memorial Day will never be quite the same in Las Cruces.
For the more than two decades I’ve lived in Las Cruces, a highlight of the long weekend was a visit to the Picacho Street Dealers Antique & Collectible Street Sale.
We never saw it as a commercialization of the occasion, but rather as an appropriately nostalgic fiesta; a nice way to remember our favorite people, places and things, and sometimes pick up some reminders to take home with us.
Shops and shopkeepers come and go, but in my time here, Picacho’s anchors have always been Coyote Traders, the fascinating and eclectic wonderland of all things yesteryear, run for decades by Mel and Sandy Hester and their son Cam, and S.O.B.’s Antiques, the fun and rustic Americana emporium of Bob (aka Sweet Old Bob, inspiration for his store’s acronym) Gaines and his wife, Carol.
The Hesters have cut back their hours after the sudden death of their son Cam last year.
And Bob died May 2, pretty nearly with his boots on. He was on home hospice care, but still manning his shop, just a day before he left us.
“I meet lots of good people. For me this is recreation. It’s not work. This is play,” Bob told me in January. We were pondering the fate of our favorite stretch of Picacho Avenue, where he has been purveying his unique wares since the 1980s, after two previous lengthy careers in the U.S. Marine Corps and as an English, speech and drama teacher at Las Cruces High School.
Pat Beckett, his friend for nearly half a century, said Bob was uncharacteristically quiet about some of his most noble and arduous accomplishments, including a ferocious battle in Korea in which a few hundred Marines, known as the ‘Frozen Chosin,’ were surrounded in freezing temperatures by more than 10,000 enemy soldiers.
“His company had to hold the pass at 30 to 50 below zero. Canteens were frozen. They were running short on ammunition. Those guys were going through hell. But what Bob always wanted to talk about was the Tootsie Roll campaign he won,” Beckett said.
The candy company was looking for stories and Bob shared his experiences about surviving on the famed treat, which would gradually melt in his mouth and provide some nourishment when everything else was frozen.
“He said the company liked his story and sent him a ton of Tootsie Rolls,” Beckett said.
“Bob’s story about how Tootsie Rolls saved his life is a classic. The book ‘Last Stand of Fox Company’ is about the Frozen Chosin. I am lucky to have a copy autographed by Bob,” Eva Taylor emailed me, adding that “Bob celebrated the Marine Corps birthday in his backyard with 100 to 200 people for 25 years. My entire family will miss him.”
Gaines also had some great stories about a golden era in the Las Cruces theater community, when now-legendary figures like Tony Award-winning playwright Mark Medoff were coming into their own, and thespians at NMSU and Las Cruces Community Theatre were building foundations that would earn little Las Cruces a reputation as the Broadway of the Southwest.
From what I can garner, one of Bob’s own last, “official” acting gigs here was a dinner theater performance at Cattleman’s with Irene Oliver-Lewis in “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.”
Irene told me Bob inspired her as an actor, educator and historian. “He recently lent me a bunch of stuff for the recent exhibit at the Branigan on Doña Ana. When I went to get the stuff, we visited a good while. I also remember him as an incredible high school drama teacher. He had a successful traveling story theatre group that performed throughout the city. I told him he also influenced my future work by being a mentor and working with kids. He was a great guy.”
I suspect a lot of us were lured to linger by Bob’s stories, which could seamlessly segue from the Civil War to modern global conflicts, from antique agricultural implements to the state of the theater and the evolution of kitchen gadgets.
But make no mistake. Bob had some amazing stuff, too, and at bargain prices. My first years in town, I picked up some terrific, one-of-a-kind finds: frames to repaint and refinish for my growing art collection, exotic guess-what-it-is (a favorite sport of Bob and Carol) gifts for new and old amigos. Rustic table components. Old brass angels.
I always found something amazing and wonderful at Sweet Old Bob’s place, particularly on Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know if was synchronicity or serendipity or maybe just a sentimental mood that set me up to be astounded when I found, say, some sheet music that was the twin of a favorite in the bench of my mom’s old baby grand piano. Or an ornate, ancient plate commemorating Hackley Park in my old home town of Muskegon, Michigan.
It was nearly impossible to go into Bob’s shop without finding something that reminded you of something, usually pleasant, and Bob was always happy to join you in a little dance down memory lane.
“I find things at yard sales and estates sales and I’ve got a couple of pickers,” he told me.
But mostly, it was Bob’s remarkable eye, and Bob himself that kept us coming back on Memorial Day weekend, over the Christmas holidays, in a sentimental or poignant mood of homesickness, or a moment of wistful longing for exotic retail therapy with redeeming sociological value.
While many stores on Picacho Avenue closed, Bob told me this year his business remained steady, if unpredictable.
“You get kids coming back to visit their parents who remember us, and this is something to do while they’re here,” he said.
Bob was a Las Cruces touchstone, a treasure as rare, timelessly fun, uniquely weathered, reliably informative and endlessly, pragmatically and sometimes eloquently entertaining as the stories, collectibles and vintage wares he shared with us.
S. Derrickson Moore may be reached at dmoore@lcsun-news.com, @DerricksonMoore on Twitter and Tout, or call 575-541-5450.