Pop Chalee
IN 1985, JACK CRUZ HOPKINS JR. GOT A CALL FROM ALBUQUERQUE AIRPORT OFFICIALS SEEKING HIS permission to retouch some murals that had fallen into disrepair from years in storage. The Masonite-board murals had been done in 1945 by Hopkins’ grandmother Merina Lujan Hopkins. Better known as Pop Chalee (a Tewa name meaning “flower blue,” given by her Taos Pueblo grandmother), she had painted them for the city’s first modern terminal, a Spanish-Pueblo style building designed to convey both New Mexico’s place in commercial air travel and its image as the Land of Enchantment.
As Hopkins tells it, it was aviation titan Howard Hughes and
