Father Stanley: New Mexico's Priest and Historian

 

In 1940, a 38-year-old former Franciscan named Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola arrived in Taos to take his position as assistant pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The journey to Taos had been a long and complicated one, but his arrival marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to influence how people study the history of New Mexico.

Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola began life as Louis Crocchiola.  The sixth child in a family that eventually grew to eleven children, he was born in Greenwich Village, New York on Halloween, October 31, 1908. His parents, Vincent and Rose Crocchiola, were Italian immigrants.

During his junior year at the all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School, Crocchiola decided he wanted to become a teacher. However, since teaching positions were few and far between in the late 1920s, his parish priest suggested he join the church and combine teaching with the priesthood. Despite his father’s objections, Louis enlisted in the Franciscan Order of the Atonement and began his seminary studies at St. John’s on the Hudson in New York. He was ordained on February 10, 1938 at Immaculate Conception Shrine in Washington, D.C. and began teaching at the same seminary from which he had graduated.

Then, God intervened. Three days after being ordained, doctors found two spots on his right lung. Crocchiola, who had added Frances and Stanley to his name when he was ordained, had developed tuberculosis. Antibiotics had not yet been developed, and the cure for tuberculosis was to live in a place with a dry climate and low humidity. Church officials allowed the priest to choose where he could go to recuperate and Crocchiola, who had been fascinated by tales of the Old West, chose Hereford, Texas, in the flat and arid Llano Estacado.

Crocchiola, who now went by the far easier to spell and pronounce name of Father Stanley, did not arrive in Hereford to propitious signs for his recovery. He stepped off the train in February 1939 during one of the region’s black dust storms. Furthermore, while the Archdiocese of New York wanted their priest to heal, they also needed his services. By fall, he found himself back in New York, again teaching at St. John’s. For two years, he bounced back and forth from duties on the east coast and brief respites on Texas plains as his health deteriorated.

Finally, Father Stanley sent an urgent request to his governing board, the Commission of the Archdiocese of New York, to find a permanent place for him in a southwestern climate. Since they were not able to meet his pleas, they granted him permission to find his own solution to his problem. Father Stanley left the Franciscans and became a diocesan priest. He then appealed to the Archbishop of Santa Fe, R. A. Gerken, for an assignment in New Mexico, arguing that he was fluent in Spanish. The archbishop assigned him the assistant pastorate of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Taos.

A year later, Father Stanley became the pastor of San Miguel Church in Socorro. He later served parishes in Raton, Villa Nueva, Sapello and Pecos. While he was serving at Pecos, he was sitting in a restaurant owned by a man who had formerly been a policeman in New York City. Stanley asked about a bullet hole in the restaurant’s front window and the former cop confessed that the hole had a real story and the one he told because it was good for business. The truth was, someone, he did not know who, had accidentally put a bullet hole in the window. But when people asked about it, the owner said it was from someone who was shooting at Jesse James. This prompted Stanley to begin questioning whether the stories he heard from his parishioners were true or mythic.

In 1946 Father Stanley became the fifth pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church, a small adobe structure on Martinez Street in the eastern section of Raton, New Mexico. His rectory had been a coal camp house in a town filled with a lot of mining and history of immigrants who came to work those mines. He contacted the Santa Fe Archives Department requesting information about the town, and received a six-volume set of books. Only one page was about Raton.

 Stanley decided to do his own research, interviewing Raton natives, searching through documents in the county clerk’s office, the public library, and the files of The Raton Daily Range. This resulted in a steady stream of articles about Raton and other Colfax spots published in Catholic and historical periodicals.  In 1948, he published his first book, The Raton Chronicle. He convinced several women who worked at local banks to transcribe and type his handwritten manuscript and got a local artist to design and illustrate the cover. Knowing that Father Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola was too difficult for most people to pronounce or spell, he published with book under the pen name F. Stanley. While most people today assume the F is for Father and refers to his priesthood, it actually stands for Francis. 

But if The Raton Chronicle was F. Stanley’s first book, it certainly wasn’t his last. He decided to write a book about every town in New Mexico, even the remote, thinly populated ones and the ones that had ceased to exist. Stanley wanted readers to be able to understand what life was like, even in the most out-of-the-way places in New Mexico. He wanted readers to have the opportunity to glimpse the minutiae of life in a bygone era.  “Now and then people talk about places like Yeso,” Stanley writes in his introduction to his book The Yeso New Mexico Story, “but no one seems interested enough to preserve its history on paper. It may not be exciting or interesting, but it is a place, it has a name, it has people. Yeso may not be important to the man at the wheel trying to make it from California to New York in three or four days, but it is very important to the people who call it home or once called it home.”

Stanley’s dedication led to the publication of 177 books. While his The Civil War in New Mexico is a whopping 544 pages, most of his titles run from eighteen to twenty-six pages. Printed on folded-over 8.5 x 11 paper which has either been stapled or saddle-stitched in the cross-section, these little editions are a kind of historical chapbook. Most have the same, simply-designed cover featuring a red zia symbol on a bright yellow background, and a title that states the name of the subject, a town, village, or ghost town in a format such as “The Wallace (New Mexico) Story” depicted here and published in 1962. The information in these booklets include snippets of old-timer gossip, and facts gleaned from newspaper clippings, old hotel registers, and the records of early explorers to the region. 

A few years back, I received a large assortment of F. Stanley’s books. Looking through them, I found them an amusing and sometimes charming collection of gossip, recollections, and detailed minutiae that fascinated me. Even though it is relatively close to where I live, I had never heard of Wallace, a town that Stanley said was thirty-three miles northeast of Albuquerque and three miles east of Santo Domingo pueblo, along the Galisteo River. Wallace, he said, was along the stagecoach trail that also linked San Pedro and Golden and was an important station along the A.T.&S.F.R.R railroad. Stanley provides the names of the leading businesses of the town and the positions of those who were in town government. He talks about how the locals built their own school, and what they did for entertainment.

But the most interesting bits of information were the ones about J. H. (otherwise known as Ellis) Conway, who was the town’s fourth Justice of the Peace. Stanley states that Conway, whose real name was O. L. Hale, was arrested in Silver City, New Mexico in February 1883 by an Iowa Sheriff who wanted to extradite him to Lucas county, Iowa on forgery and jailbreaking charges. On their train trip back east, a second sheriff, this one from Trinidad, Colorado, tried to wrest Conway from the Iowa sheriff so that Conway would face manslaughter charges dating back to 1878. Also included in Stanley’s telling is corruption in Wallace, including a bunco ring. (Bunco then must not have been the fun game it is now.) Stanley’s story was just too fun, and it became the basis for my novel The Winding Road to Wallace.

After decades as a priest in New Mexico, Stanley was sent back to Texas, where he served in the Texas communities of Rotan, St. Francis, Canadian, Stratford, White Deer, Lubbock, Friona, Dumas, Pep, Amarillo, and finally, Nazareth. On his days off he did research at West Texas’ A&M University Library. He often used his vacations to visit with older residents of small western towns to gather more information for his books. 

The former New Yorker, sent out west by his superiors to recover his health, became fascinated by the heritage of New Mexico. He loved the state, and apparently the state loved him back, for instead of dying young, he lived until 1996, when he died at the advanced age of 87. He is buried in the Nazareth, Texas cemetery.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle school and high school English and History teacher who now writes contemporary and historical fiction for middle grade through adult readers. Her next book, an historical Western romance set in the ghost towns of La Madera and Wallace, New Mexico, will come out in the late spring of 2026. Some of the characters in the book are based on people written about by F. Stanley. She will be giving away some of Stanley's yellow books when her own novel is published. 

If you'd like more information on her novels and her book giveaways, join her email list.