Richard Coltharp
El Rito Media

“She wears a necktie and a Panama hat.”

 – Bob Dylan, Black Diamond Bay,” 1976

For more than half a century, in a modest little shop a couple of blocks off the Plaza in Santa Fe, Milton Johnson has been writing a story.

He’s not writing it on a computer or even a 1940s Royal typewriter – although that would be closer to his style. Johnson’s story, with a cast of a thousand characters, is written on the heads of his customers, and all the subplots they’ve created.

Johnson makes hats.

The smallish sign hanging in front of his shop on McKenzie Street reads “Panama Hats” on one side and “Sombreros Panama” on the other.

These Panama hats, however, may not be what you think of when you think of Panama hats.

For example, did you think a Panama hat could sell for $25,000?

For more on Milt Johnson’s incredible life and career: ‘Magical realism’ defines decades-long career of iconic New Mexico hatmaker Milton Johnson at Montecristi Hat Works

Check out more videos of Milton Johnson’s process at Montecristi Hat Works.

Who would pay $25,000 for a Panama hat? Or any other kind of hat, for that matter?

“We use some of the finest materials in the world,” said Johnson, 81, who opened Montecristi Custom Hat Works in 1974. “And we have some of the finest craftsmen in the world.”

The hats are beautiful, works of art. But still. $25,000?

“They’re for those people who like the best, and they can afford it,” Johnson said.

But if you can’t or won’t buy a $25,000 hat, Johnson can deliver a more affordable version – and still custom-made to fit your head precisely.

The beginning?

It’s difficult to determine where Johnson’s Montecristi hat story began.

Maybe it started when he was a tiny Texan.

He can’t remember the first hat he had. But there’s a black-and-white family photo taken at Beva’s, an old restaurant in his hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, that shows Milton at age 3 or 4, holding a toy truck and wearing a cowboy hat.

Or maybe the story began when he returned home from the Vietnam War and finished his political science degree at the University of Texas in Austin.

After graduation, Johnson found himself selling textiles and traveling through South America – Colombia, Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Ecuador.

“When I traveled from Austin, and moved to Medellin, Colombia, for five months, it was a real eye-opener,” he said, recalling that the 1960s were turning into the 1970s and there was little or no tourism in Colombia.

A trip to Ecuador and a visit to the town of Montecristi flipped a switch.

He was in his early 20s, Johnson said, and wandered into a Montecristi shop where he came upon a hat unlike any he’d ever seen, or felt – soft, solid and beautiful. The fabric, he discovered, was woven from an Ecuadorian palm called paja toquilla.

That tidbit of information, by the way, unveils another discovery: Panama hat is a misnomer. Panama just happened to be the Central American nation where a lot of tourists bought quality hats made in Ecuador – or cheaper knockoffs.

If Johnson’s hat story didn’t begin in childhood or his post-college days, perhaps it started in 1974 at an unfamiliar campground outside of Santa Fe.

He was traveling in an old pickup with his young wife, Katrina, and their 3-month-old daughter Echo. After a long day’s drive from Austin, with a vague plan to relocate to the Four Corners, they stopped at the campground to spend the night. But when they left the truck, just briefly, they returned to find their goods stolen. Frantic, they rushed into town to replenish and encountered a couple of shop owners who not only helped them stock up but also suggested a place to stay.

Johnson never left.

The now

Maybe it’s less important to know how or when Milton Johnson’s Montecristi hat saga began than to know what it has become.

Last December, a week before Christmas, Johnson was working with customers in the lobby at Montecristi Custom Hat Works. One customer, a Santa Fe resident who had known Johnson for a quarter-century, was shopping for his 15^th or 16^th Montecristi hat. He loves the hats, and his respect and fondness for Johnson is obvious.

“Milton’s one of the local characters of Santa Fe,” the customer said, only to be interrupted by another customer, this one a first-timer from out of town.

Duane Kent of Castle Rock, Colorado, helps lead weeklong mule rides. He’d heard of the Montecristi hat store  – and Johnson – and made the trip to Santa Fe to size up the goods. And to get sized up himself.

He tried on a sample hat.

“You make these hats look really good, Duane,” Johnson said, before swapping the sample for a black-and-silver, wood-and-metal contraption that resembles, well, nothing you’ve ever seen.

The device is around a century old, from France, works like an adjustable antique bicycle helmet and precisely sizes a person’s head. From the measurements, Johnson makes three marks on a blank 5-by-7 index card that becomes a sort-of cranial thumbprint for the customer.

Kent wanted to know if hats can be repaired if damaged by weather or other culprits.

“We can usually work the little things out,” Johnson said. “But if your mule sits on it or something, that’s different.”

Montecristi also offers felt hats, for a different feel or a winter cover. The best felt hats come from beaver, and that has complicated Johnson’s supply chain due to world events.

“We’ve seen a 65-percent increase in beaver prices,” Johnson said. “The best beaver comes from Ukraine and Russia. With the war going on, we’re now having to get it from Canada.”

The middle

One day in the late 1980s, Johnson was working in the shop when a pair of familiar customers walked in. Not familiar as in family or friends, but familiar as in anyone who watched television had probably seen them many times.

One was film critic Gene Siskel, famous for his verbal sparring with fellow critic Roger Ebert.

The other was Oprah Winfrey. No description needed.

“We were still on Galisteo Street, and in walked Oprah, with Gene Siskel, the movie review guy,” Johnson said. “We started with some non-custom hats, and Oprah decided she’d rather have a custom. So, I measured her head and it was 25 inches. I said, ‘My goodness, Oprah, your head is the biggest measurement I’ve ever done on a woman.’”

To which Siskel quipped, “Geez, Milton, what do you say when you WANT to sell somebody a hat?”

Oprah was good-natured enough to invite Johnson to a housewarming party for one of her talk show’s producers, the reason Chicago-based TV stars Siskel and Winfrey were in Santa Fe. Johnson responded by bringing a friend, singer-songwriter Roger Miller, to perform at the party. The Grammy-winning Country Music Hall of Famer lived near Tesuque at the time.

Johnson has created hats for actors, musicians, politicians and other celebrities, but doesn’t normally name-drop.

 “We don’t like to throw out the names, any more than they want us to throw their names out,” Johnson said.

He almost always uses the pronoun ‘we’ to describe his operation because, he said, the business would not work without the staff at both Montecristi and his other store, Santa Fe Hat Company, which sells non-custom hats off the shelf.

On the December day that mule-rider Duane Kent visited Montecristi, a crew consisting of Eddye Santos, Noé Lopez, Juan Morales and Synde Partin were keeping things humming at the hat works.

But it takes months for a worker to get the hang of things, Johnson said, and two years or more before a new employee can be called a craftsman.

And you won’t get your hat overnight.

“We still do it the way I learned 50-something years ago,” Johnson said. “We thought about getting mechanized. With a hydraulic press, you can do 30 hats an hour. But we’re not all about volume. We’re about making the best product with the best quality materials and service for the life of the hat. “We use some of the finest materials in the world. And we have some of the finest craftsmen in the world.”

The end?

On a visit to The Shed, a longtime Santa Fe institution known for its red enchiladas and chilled margaritas, Johnson’s arrival feels like a joyous reunion. He can barely make his way to a table as old friends and customers stop him to bid hello.

Montecristi customer Sam Priest is at The Shed celebrating his honeymoon. He bought a Johnson-made hat for his wedding because Johnson made a hat for Sam’s dad, Duncan Priest of New Zealand. Such are now common occurrences for Montecristi: customers from all over the world; customers bridging two, three and four generations of families who’ve bought Johnson’s hats.

In these moments, it seems as though Johnson could go on forever. Make great hats, take care of loyal customers, eat great enchiladas and enjoy his status as a community treasure.

And maybe he will.

“Some people work 30-40 years to retire, they get a gold-plated watch, and then they drop dead the next day,” Johnson said. “My fingers don’t work so good anymore and the hat steamer fogs up my glasses, but I can still teach these guys how to do the detail work.”

Richard L. Connor
El Rito Media

He always had an eye for opportunity, the boy with the bike and a nickel who wanted not one but two Cokes.

Milton Johnson, 10, lived in Handley, a Texas neighborhood that had been a town before it was swallowed by a bigger neighbor named Fort Worth.

“I used to ride through Handley on my bike, and I had me a nickel I’d take to the drugstore for a Coke,” Johnson said, recalling his childhood. “I wanted two.”

So, he’d sidle up next to a person at the counter, a person who seemed to want privacy.

“I’d get me that Coke and slurp it all the way to the bottom of the glass,” Johnson said.

The slurping would annoy his countermate, who would order the clerk to give Milton another Coke and order Milton to “stop that damn sound.”

“And soon I had me two Cokes for one nickel,” Johnson said.

And, as the song says, “the cowboy rode away.” It’s easy to imagine little Milton hopping on his bicycle and riding into the morning sun with a cat-caught-the-canary gleam in his eyes.

At 81 years old, Johnson still has the gleam, the spark, despite fighting the exigencies of life. Adventure. Fame. Ups and the downs. College flunk out. Eye-opening and ugly Vietnam war as a grunt. Learning hat-making and navigating the road to glittering success but falling prey to drugs and an interruption in life’s long march with involuntary confinement for 11 months.

Check out more videos of Milton Johnson’s process.

Through it all he has maintained his zest for life, seasoned with a sense of mirth that keeps the diamond-like glitter in his eye. It’s a personality trademark, indelible as the trademark on the hats he creates at his world-renowned Montecristi Custom Hat Works in Santa Fe.

A fellow Santa Fe retailer, asked if she knows Johnson, responds with a smile. “Know him? Everyone knows Milton Johnson. He was wild. I mean really wild.”

And, for good measure: “Popular and fun.”

Later in life, after the clever Coke trick, Johnson’s calculating eye drew him to seize an opportunity that eventually brought him fame for making and selling Panama hats.

Decades later, the opportunity is an institution: Johnson and the Panama hat.

Assorted versions of the Panama perch atop Johnson’s mop of unruly gray hair each day but he doesn’t just wear the brand. He is the brand.

Milton Johnson not wearing a Panama would be like Henry Ford cruising the streets of Detroit in a Cadillac.

Johnson is a rake and a rambling man, though his gait is now more ambling than rambling. Hands that have shaped thousands of hats are now bent with a crook here and there but still guided by the delicate touch of genius. At one time those hands were athletic, quick as lightning in a sport that puts a premium on quickness. Johnson was a star basketball player at Fort Worth’s Polytechnic High School, earning all-tournament honors in the 1962 Texas state tournament.

Those hands, outsized relative to his 5-foot-6-inch frame, are still nimble with felt and straw.

“I learned leadership when I was co-captain of that basketball team,” he says. “Then I developed it more when I was president of my University of Texas fraternity, a job I focused on so much I flunked out.”

His leadership skills have been invaluable in business, inspiring loyalty and enduring relationships with those who have joined him along the way.

Synde Parten met Milton in Texas, helped him learn to work with fur, and still works with him more than 30 years later. J. D. Noble runs Johnson’s non-custom retail store, Santa Fe Hat Company, and has logged 37 years with the hatmaker.

Noble is Johnson’s burly counterpart who in 1989 was on his way from Missouri to Taos with hopes of being a painter and detoured into Johnson’s store.

“Want a job?” Johnson asked.

Johnson told him to meet him later in the day at his hangout, The Pink Adobe. Someone made him a bowl of Green Chile Stew.

“Done,” says Noble. “I was hooked.”

Johnson’s life, a long and winding road of adventure, misadventure and rebellion, is also one of adherence to strict business rules. The contradiction is one of many that define an untamed man who can be so self-disciplined that he refused to pause for an hour of conversation on an especially busy March day at his store.

“We want to interview you more, and in depth,” said the editor.

“Not during the end of my sale month,” Johnson said.

The 10-year-old who devised a way to turn one nickel into two Cokes is still striving to succeed. And he’s still the charming rascal who hustled that second Coke.

Johnson’s life is a study in contrasts, ups and downs, pushes and pulls. How to make sense of it all?

“Magical realism,” he says matter-of-factly.

Along the bumpy dirt roads and even an LA freeway-kind of life, he has become legendary, and life’s often harsh realism has been spiced with magic.

Johnson became a devotee decades ago of magical realism, one of the hallmark themes of books by Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez, the famed Colombian journalist, author and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“It changed my life,” Johnson says.

After Johnson flunked out of the University of Texas in 1966, he joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. He later returned to UT, graduating in 1969 with a degree in political science.

He opened a restaurant in Buda, Texas, serving Indonesian food, but closed it and told his new wife they were moving.

“Well, sugar, let’s move to paradise,” he said.

“Where is that,” she asked?

“Medellin, Columbia.”

They moved and he began learning the rug and blanket trade in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He’d buy goods there and bring them back to Texas to sell on the street, mostly on “the drag” adjoining the University of Texas campus in Austin.

Along the way he discovered the village of Montecristi where they grew paja toquilla, the plant that provides the fiber, the straw, for the Panama hat.

The process of producing the straw is featured on the Montecristi website in a video, “Journey to the Source.”

Intrigued by Colombian culture, Milton read Marquez, and given the lifestyle of the era – hippie, freewheeling, often drug-drenched –Johnson was fascinated by the contrary notion of harsh realism, balancing experiences such as his service in the Vietnam War with hopes and dreams that might be achieved through a magical sense of the possible.

Defying his wilder instincts, Johnson learned a trade and mingled with famous, influential people such as Stanley Marcus of the Neiman Marcus retailing empire. It was Marcus who offered Johnson a chance to market his hats in the upscale chain’s department stores, particularly at store openings in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Folks loved Milton’s hats, especially the Panamas. The Neiman Marcus connection could have been Johnson’s launch pad to retailing glory.

“It should have been, but I was so messed up on drugs I didn’t capitalize,” he said.

Fame, or maybe infamy, sent Johnson back to his hometown of Fort Worth in 1985 – not to a hero’s welcome or parade. He was sentenced to federal prison there for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. While his hats and sometimes raucous anti-establishment behavior attracted fans and friends, his newfound fame also brought him “friends” he didn’t need, some of whom turned out to be working with the DEA and eventually sold him down the river after they secured a plea bargain.

“I was not guilty,” he says without a trace of bitterness. “But I was an easy target.”

A setback? A tragedy?

“No. It saved my life.”

During the 11 months he spent in a prison where his fellow inmates included future President Bill Clinton’s brother Roger and some Oklahoma county commissioners who had perpetrated an asphalt scam, Johnson became reflective. And he trained to become a runner.

“They let me out to run the Cowtown Half- Marathon,” he said. He ran nine-minute miles.

His sentence was called “indeterminate,” meaning he could be released in six months or remain locked up for 10 years.

He credits the late and former New Mexico Chief Justice Charles “Charlie” Daniels with getting him freed after representing him at a parole hearing. Daniels was a character himself, racing vintage cars and playing guitar in a band called The Incredible Woodpeckers.

Imprisonment produced a new Milton Johnson, a man with both body and mind on track, and he quickly turned his focus to the hat business.

He was soon on his way to resuming his status as a legendary hatmaker – only this time on more subtle terms.

Legendary. It’s a word more often abused than used correctly.

Johnson, though, is legendary, the real deal. He is the nation’s – maybe the world’s – most famous and accomplished creator of Panama hats.

If you want the best Panama hat made by the best Panama hatmaker, you find your way to Montecristi Custom Hat Works, where Johnson does business in a small Santa Fe adobe at 322 McKenzie Street. His second store, Santa Fe Hat Company, is at 118 Galisteo St.

Johnson recently sold a hat for $25,000 but his custom shop also has hats for $1,000. Less expensive offerings are available at Santa Fe Hat Company, some for under $400. Johnson also sells premium fur felt hats from Stetson and other manufacturers.

These days the band on a hat can make it special. He has those, too, and recently someone paid $36,000 for a hatband.

Johnson opened his first Santa Fe hat store in 1974 but it was only open during June, July and August. He bought Lone Star Hatter in Austin a few years later.

He learned some initial hat-making techniques from Ralph Anderson, an Austin hatmaker. Johnson had been selling materials to various Texas hat companies. His craftsmanship with Panamas is mostly self-taught and refined through years of experience.

It was in Austin that he met Parten, who had expertise in fur and still works in the Santa Fe custom shop.

If you want to learn many of life’s lessons, you listen to Milton Johnson and marvel. His hard-won wisdom shines in his bright blue eyes, full of mirth but with a serious mien, a soulful depth.

The life reflected in those eyes has been colored with what writers like to call “universal irony.” You flunk out of the University of Texas, get drafted into a Southeast Asia war you find dishonest and ugly, come home matured by life’s hard realities, are befriended in college by a professor of Latin who tells you to just show up for class and he will pass you in order to help you graduate and then, riding high on early success and fame, you blow it all.

You go to prison.

Ironically, all these experiences motivate you to redirect your talent and energy to achieve new heights of success through hard work and paying attention.

J.D Noble says the success comes from Johnson’s constant search for perfection.

“He and the rest of us who learned from him to make hats are driven to strive for perfection,” says Noble.” That is his gift – always striving for perfection and never quite getting it. Never giving up.”

Success is paved with failure.

“My first hat was for a small-time actor,” Johnson recalls. “I wanted it to be perfect., stayed up all night shaping it. When I started placing the hat it just kept sliding down and quickly it covered the actor’s eyes, stopped only by his nose.”

Dejected, Johnson started over.

Now, when Milton places a hat on someone’s head it’s as if he is handling delicate crystal or porcelain. Both hands steadily lower it.

The hats don’t drop anymore. They fit and the cash register rings.

Looking for a hard, definitive answer, you ask, “How does he do it?” How did he learn and master this remarkable skill?

In the late 1960s the fastest downhill ski racer in the world was Jean-Claude Killy.

Cornered by a reporter who had pursued him for months and finally latched onto an adjoining seat on a nonstop plane trip, Jean-Claude was asked how he learned to raced so fast.

“I don’t know,” Killy said.

And how did Johnson master the art of making Panama hats?

“No idea,” he deadpanned, “except I’ve built a lot of hats.”

After everything, the highs and lows, the stumbling failure and the soaring success, Johnson is still at his shop every day, personally measuring and fitting those extraordinary hats. Yet he’s weary and haunted by uncertainty about the future, by not knowing who will preserve his legacy.

Johnson is a master of a craft and to those who blaze careers in crafts, there is no blueprint for ensuring the future of the craft or identifying those who possess the magical “touch” that makes the product special and unique.

Told that many believe him to be the world’s best Panama hatmaker, Johnson says, “Well, my modesty escapes me. They are telling the truth.”

But who will carry on his work?

He needn’t worry. The founder and guardian of Montecristi Custom Hat Works believes in the power of magical realism to guide the hand of fate. His legacy is secure.

A struggling lizard species in the Permian Basin could lose federal protections as a result of a court motion filed last week by the federal government.

The dunes sagebrush lizard was listed as endangered in May 2024, meaning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was required to devise a recovery plan for the species native to the sand dunes of southeast New Mexico and West Texas.

Key threats to the habitat and species were the oil and gas industry and other industrial development in the area, which impacted a shrub known as the shinnery oak and the sand dunes the lizard needs to survive, according to the listing decision.

On June 3, under the administration of Republican President Donald Trump, the agency changed course.

A proposed joint settlement agreement was filed by the state of Texas and the U.S. Department of the Interior with the agency agreeing to vacate the listing and admitting it erred in determining the shinnery oak could not be restored without federal intervention.

Endangered status, under the Endangered Species Act, also requires the agency set aside lands as “critical habitat” where a species is known to survive and its population could be restored.

The lower “threatened” status under the law means the agency believes extinction could become imminent in the future, requiring additional reporting and monitoring.

Four months after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the lizard endangered, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit calling on U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to vacate the listing and order the interior department, the service’s parent agency, to remove the species from the endangered list.

The September 2024 suit argued the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to prove the shinnery oak could not be restored.

Court filings show the federal administration opposed Paxton’s case, denying the state of Texas’ allegations in a November 2024 response to the initial complaint and contending the agency had the authority to list the species as endangered.

That was in the final months of the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden and his Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, now a candidate for governor or New Mexico.

About a year and a half after Trump succeeded Biden in January 2025, the recent filing said the service “reevaluated” its conclusion that the lizard was unsalvageable without federal land restrictions afforded by the endangered listing.

“The assumption discounted experimental efforts that showed promise for habitat restoration, resulting in the potentially inaccurate assessment of conservation efforts that may have impacted the Service’s conclusions as to whether the dunes sagebrush lizard meets the statutory definition of an endangered species,” read the joint motion. “Remand would allow the Service to correct the potentially inaccurate assessment of conservation efforts without further litigation.”

The move drew cheers from supporters of the oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christiansen, one of three who lead regulation of the oil and gas industry for the state of Texas, said delisting the lizard was a “significant victory” against “regulatory overreach.”

“The goal was never about protecting wildlife,” Christiansen said. “It was about using federal bureaucracy as a tool to restrict oil and gas production and undermine American energy independence.”

Christiansen pointed to voluntary conservation agreements signed by landowners with approval from the federal government throughout southeast New Mexico and West Texas, actions intended to prevent further loss of lizard populations in exchange for being insulated from further regulatory restrictions.

The agreements, known as candidate conservation agreements with assurances, are facilitated in New Mexico by Carlsbad-based nonprofit the Center for Excellence.

In total, about 33,000 acres were enrolled in the programs for lizard conservation.

But Jason Rylander at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the programs were not working. He said about 95% of shinnery oak habitat in the region was destroyed by increased oil and gas operations and other developmental practices such as agricultural grazing, despite the purported agreements.

The remaining habitat for the species, Rylander said, was “fragmented,” meaning lizards struggle to breed with other populations.

He pointed to the Feb. 25 decision by the agency to remove endangered species act protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a grouse that also uses shinnery oak through the region, accusing the agency of a “pattern” in curbing environmental regulations.

The biological diversity center filed a request on June 5, calling for the court to reject the joint motion to delist the dunes sagebrush lizard.

“There appears to be a disturbing pattern of the Fish and Wildlife Service ignoring its mission to save struggling wildlife like dunes sagebrush lizards and lesser prairie chickens for the convenience of Texas politicians and big oil and gas polluters,” Rylander said. “We’ll keep fighting to protect rare and imperiled species wherever they live.”

Managing Editor Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, or @AdrianHedden on the social media platform X.