Christmas mystery solved: The Santa with cowboy boots
Note: The following column was first published in The Sun on Christmas Eve, 2005.
By Roy Ockert Jr.
On Christmas Eve 1972 our family’s quiet evening was interrupted by the doorbell.
Pat and I had been married less than five years and had been back in Jonesboro for a couple of years because I took a teaching job at Arkansas State University, where we both had graduated.
Having left town as newlyweds, we were a real family by 1972 and lived in a rent house on Bernard Street. Our older daughter, Toni, was 4, and our younger, Lori, not quite 4 months. My mother and brother were there that Christmas Eve as we prepared for the big day ahead.
Toni was at a magic age, much too excited to get to sleep. But we had just put her to bed to try.
Hardly expecting company, I opened the door and found on our small porch a bearded man, decked out like Santa Claus, except that he was wearing cowboy boots.
“Are there any little kids home?” he asked in an Arkansas accent.
I invited him in and went to get Toni up — she was surely still awake anyway.
When she spotted our visitor, she was surprised and delighted; the rest of us were astounded, no one even thinking to get a camera. Santa gave her some candy, told her he’d return later and sent her back to bed. Then he quickly departed, leaving us with no clues as to who he really was or why he visited our house.
Toni almost never got to sleep that night, and neither did the rest of us.
We never heard anything more from our Santa or about him. His identity would remain a mystery to us for nearly 33 years.
By 1977 I was editor of the Batesville Daily Guard and wrote about that Christmas Eve experience in my weekly column, “Behind the News,” partly because Lori was at the magic age and Toni had temporarily lost the faith.
The column ran under the headline, “One year Santa Claus wore cowboy boots.”
By the time Pat and I moved back to Jonesboro in 2001, our daughters were grown and had children of their own. As the new editor, I brought my column to The Sun and that first Christmas resurrected the “Santa who wore cowboy boots” column in hopes of solving that old mystery.
No one came forward.
But a certain Jonesboro man clipped that column and put it on his refrigerator, where it stayed for years.
I wish he had called or dropped by the office because I would have loved to say thanks for that special night that had become a part of our family’s own Christmas story. However, he was having health problems, and I never got to meet him.
Harold Lee Walden died Friday, Sept. 25, 2005, at St. Bernard’s Medical Center at the age of 73.
That Sunday evening his niece, Anita Akers, who now lives in Brandon, Miss., called me at the office. I happened to be there to edit a story and obituary about the death of a prominent Jonesboro citizen, Flo Jones.
“I want to solve a mystery for you,” Anita said. “The ‘Santa who wore cowboy boots’ was my uncle, Harold Walden.”
She couldn’t see, of course, but I was astonished at what she was saying. I had all but given up hope on solving the mystery.
Harold’s wife, Linda, told me this week that her husband played Santa Claus every Christmas Eve for about 10 years, starting in 1970 or ’71. He and his brother-in-law, the late James A. Blalock, decided to do it because there were quite a few small children in the family. But the Santa visits went well beyond family because James, a Craighead County Farm Bureau agent, had many clients in the Jonesboro, Trumann and Bay areas.
Harold, who worked for 20 years at the Crane Co., later joined James as a Farm Bureau agent.
“We would just fill a pillow case with candy, and they would take off and go to people’s houses,” Linda recalled. “Sometimes they barely got home in time to take care of our own Christmas. They might even be out until midnight.”
“We always said that James was his sleigh driver,” she said. “He’d drive Harold around, and the people would open their front window so James could watch while he talked to the kids.”
We didn’t expect Santa that night so we didn’t know to open the curtain on the front window. As it turns out, the Blalocks were our neighbors, and Linda said they probably visited every house on the block.
The reason he was wearing cowboy boots that night was that the Waldens lived out in the country, and Santa forgot the black shoes he usually wore.
That, no doubt, was the reason that Deanna, the Blalocks’ middle daughter, wasn’t fooled. After Santa left, she told her mother, “That was Uncle Harold.” Deanna (now Bryant), who lives in Jonesboro, said she spotted those boots and knew immediately who it was.
“I got in a little trouble because I started to blurt it out,” she remembered. “I knew those cowboy boots.”
Later Deanna accompanied Santa and his sleigh driver on their annual mission in her dad’s red truck.
“A lot of times when we were going to see family, my mother and I would go inside first and talk,” she said. “They’d get their cameras ready and open their curtains, and then Santa would arrive so we got to see it all.”
“My dad and Uncle Harold just loved to see the reactions of the little kids, and they’d go outside and laugh about it,” she said.
Linda recalled one story her husband told about going to a home where they weren’t expected. “They didn’t know him, but they invited him in. Harold asked the little boy, ‘Have you been good this year?’
“He said yes, and Harold said, ‘Well, you’d better get to bed right now,’ and the little boy took off running to bed.”
The Santa runs stopped when the children in the Walden and Blalock families got too old to appreciate such visits. That’s a shame, but over the years they must have thrilled many children and their parents, as they did that night in 1972 at our house.
Someone said you couldn’t do such a thing today — that people wouldn’t open their doors to a stranger in a Santa Claus suit. If not, we’ve really lost something.
Merry Christmas to all and especially to those who shared Santa and his sleigh driver with so many people on those Christmas Eves long ago.
Roy Ockert is retired editor of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.