Tom Taylor, Eccentric Veteran and Cloudcroft Icon, Dies at 77

Remembering “One-Arm Tom” with the help of his daughters, family, lovers, neighbors, and friends.

Tom Taylor, a fixture of Cloudcroft and the Lost Lodge community, known for his alternative lifestyle, quirky personality, generosity and unfiltered humor, has died. He was 77.

Tom died of cancer. His final moments were spent in his yurt in Lost Lodge, surrounded by his daughters.

Perhaps no other event impacted Tom’s life greater than the Vietnam War. A former athlete and already a father, he was drafted into the Army at the age of 21 and was shipped off to combat.

Tom walked point as a grunt, or infantry soldier, and was wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade. The event nearly killed him, and Tom would say that he died the day he was shot. Doctors amputated his left arm below the elbow. He later traded a prosthetic arm for a hotel stay while in Mexico.

The Army recognized Tom with a Purple Heart and multiple Bronze Star medals for “heroic and meritorious deeds during combat.” He described himself as a good soldier but always shied away from being labeled a hero.

The horrors of war followed the veteran for the rest of his life. While he struggled with PTSD and his amputation, the experience of combat put Tom on an unconventional path.

He became an accomplished artist, gardener, performed stunts in movies, worked undercover for law enforcement, grew cannabis, remodeled homes, and dabbled in the occult.

Backwaters are where Tom found peace, he would say. They were places off the beaten path where people lived close to the land and prioritized community over material possessions.

He later found such a place in Lost Lodge, outside of Cloudcroft, where locals joke that any HOA would require a junk car in every yard.

“He had a death wish,” says his daughter Meagan Taylor about her father’s life during the early years after the war. He traveled through Mexico and Latin America, and settled into an indigenous community in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Tom wore a hook on his stump, like a pirate, which often frightened the locals.

“Tom was in a very unique experience because he was supported because of his military injury, and it gave him the ability to really dig down deep into all sorts of things. I mean, that gentleman knew a lot about a lot of things and we’ve had conversations that were very deep, and he was very deep,” said Bill Niffenegger, Tom’s friend of fifty-plus years.

(Left) Tom Taylor during his stint in the Army before he was wounded in Vietnam. (Right) Tom installs one of his carvings in Washington State. Photos courtesy of Tom’s family.

Raised in Marion, Iowa, Tom briefly returned to the Hawkeye State and reunited with his first wife Thilieu and their two daughters Meagan and Rachel. He then bounced around the upper Midwest and hung out with the hippies.

He met Bill and his mentors Eli and Uncle Mac. He described Mac as a warlock who would sometimes place his glass eye on Tom’s dinner plate. The girls were scared of Mac and still don’t know his real name.

It was during this time that Tom met his second wife, Toni, and had his third daughter, Brooke.

The gang traveled west to the once sleepy fishing village of Port Townsend, Washington. Tom and Toni delivered Tom’s fourth daughter, Taya, inside a converted school bus there at the gates of Puget Sound.

Tom began acting in independent movies. He also carved wood sculptures. Great hunks of cedar were transformed into towering depictions of snakes, hawks, sailors, and local wildlife. Many were sold to wealthy patrons in the Pacific Northwest.

Tom played Hugh Kelso, a down-and-out dad and police detective, in the indie comedy-thriller Love and Dynamite (1992). He starred alongside Dan Haggerty who was famous for the Grizzly Adams series. The movie is available on YouTube and is one of a handful of small productions that bear his name.

Exasperated by the growing popularity of Port Townsend, Tom ventured to New Mexico and settled in Cloudcroft in 1995. He followed his friends Bill and Beverly Niffenegger, who later opened The Old Apple Barn emporium in High Rolls Mountain Park.

With Cloudcroft as a home base, Tom continued to travel. He ventured to Brazil with Bill, and later to Jamaica where Tom met his third wife Andrea. He and Andrea had Tom’s sixth daughter Tommilee and he embraced Andrea’s daughter, Stacy, as his own.

“It’s the air. It’s sweet,” he would say about Cloudcroft. Tom raised Tommilee here, and became a pillar of the village and the Burro Avenue Boardwalk.

”He loved Cloudcroft. He liked the Western Bar, and he started making friends and never stopped,” said Bill.

A woman approached him on the boardwalk and, thinking Tom was homeless, she tried to hand him some money. Tom smiled, looked at her, and pulled a wad of cash from his back pocket, over $2,000, which was part of his monthly disability payment from the Army.

By his own admission, Tom sometimes appeared a little destitute. “I smell like old meat,” he would say. His baggy Levi’s would be stained with cow manure that he used to fertilize the garden. He seldom left the house without his black felt hat with an Army Airborne pin stuck in it, and later wore a leather eye patch after losing sight in one eye.

He had T-shirts printed with his own humorous “Tom-isms,” sayings that often poked-fun at his amputation or the politics of the day. I don’t Clap, I’m Unarmed, I Love Clowncroft, and Too Many Subpoenises were some of the phrases he proudly wore.

“He had a chuckle and he had silly T-shirts, but let me tell you that was a very, very well-informed gentleman,” said Bill.

Tom Taylor in his yurt. (Photo and art by Drew Gaines)

Tom would talk to anyone regardless of politics, social status or age. Complete strangers were greeted with a joke and a smile.

He wanted for nothing and would hand out money, loan tools, give away building supplies and befriend hitchhikers. He’d measure a person by their willingness to share.

“Counter-culture people, people who have a hard time getting along in the establishment, I find more people within that group who will share their last potato with you,” Tom said.

He attempted to “reorganize” water using neodymium magnets, drank his own urine after studying urotherapy, practiced sungazing, and created ormus—a kind of trace mineral extracted with alchemy. Everything he put ormus on thrived, from his hollyhock flowers to his chihuahua Clyde, who lived for over twenty years.

Many of his experiments took place at his tire-wall compound in Lost Lodge where he erected his yurt, held cookouts, and let the children run wild.

He hired locals (including this writer) during the summers to shovel gravel into old tires that were stacked to create terraces and castle-like structures.

He enjoyed cooking over a fire, drying clothes outside, using an outhouse, raising chickens and operating his chainsaw.

“That guy had one arm and did more work than most guys did with them and their neighbor,” said Bill.

Friends recall when Tom attempted to render homemade biochar, a type of fertilizer that requires very high heat and low oxygen. He used a metal barrel, a hot fire and a butane torch. An explosion ensued when a rush of oxygen ignited unburned butane beneath the metal barrel and shot the container fifty feet into the sky with a ka-boom that shook the neighborhood.

“But when it hit the ground and he wasn’t decapitated, I just started dying laughing,” said Cassi Parvin, Tom’s friend and former girlfriend.

Despite his failed biochar experiment, Tom inspired a Cloudcroft High School student to pursue making biochar, leading them to receive a college scholarship for their work.

“I just met him one little time in the bar, and I thought a one-armed man was going to make me uncomfortable; but I think I just met my new best friend and that’s how it was for 25 years,” said Cassi. ”There’s so many beautiful moments, there’s too many to remember.”

Ex-wives, girlfriends, lovers, friends, neighbors would all stop to visit Tom during his final weeks. A dozen people at a time would sometimes shuffle through his tarp-wrapped, single-room home, a testament to all of the lives he touched.

Tom was born on February 8, 1948 in Ottumwa, Iowa to parents Iris and Merwen Taylor. He had a brother James and sister Jeanie. He is survived by his six daughters Rachel, Meagan, Brooke, Taya, Tommilee and Stacy, his eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He died during the morning of October 10, 2025.

He told his children “the circle is full” before he passed.

His daughters stood outside their father’s yurt before they all traveled home. They were asked what words described their dad. “Empathic, talented, incredible, patient, f***ing hilarious and scary sometimes.”

“He’s magic,” they said.

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