Remembering Walt Queen: A Real-Life Santa Who Lived Christmas

Walter Queen WAS Santa Claus. Photos courtesy of Walter Queen

I only met Walter Queen in person one time. I befriended his daughter many years ago, and she told me early in our friendship, “My dad is Santa Claus.” Wait, what? But she was right, he was a pure gentleman, a person who oozed kindness — and he looked exactly like Santa. Sadly, Mr. Queen passed away this week. It got me thinking about this story, which I wrote back around 2013 for Insider Louisville. I post this now in honor of Walt “Santa” Queen and the joy he brought to every life he touched.

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Once upon a time, I believed in the spirit of Christmas. I sang the songs, carefully signed and mailed the Hallmark cards and drank the Christmas-flavored Kool-Aid.

But that changed over the years, in large part due to the growing commercialization of the holiday. Retailers began stocking shelves with their prefabricated Christmas bounty earlier and earlier with each passing season. The airwaves began to provide the soundtrack to increasing greed with songs about boughs of holly, even when kids were still jubilant over Halloween hauls. Retailers, armed with cash registers, gently placed fingers on triggers in anticipation for the big game that would soon wander through their doors.

Meanwhile, faux Santa Clauses suited up to take photos with kids in malls, at stores, at parties and at corporate events. Parents spent hours dressing their children in holiday clothes, fighting swollen parking lots and standing in line so their kids could join in the annual festival of avarice, culminated by the ritual of sitting on fake Santa’s lap.

To put it bluntly, I was disgusted with Christmas. I had become my own version of Dr. Seuss’s the Grinch. So, wearing a signature sneer, I decided to write a story about so-called “mall Santas” and the money they make during the holiday season. I wanted to know how much green these opportunistic elves could pull down while sporting the red. It was a simple story about economics and reality.

And then I met the real Santa Claus. Two of him.

When I called my first Santa on his cell phone and asked if he had time to chat with an Insider Louisville writer, he asked me to hold on for a moment.

“I was out in the shop making toys for girls and boys,” he said when he returned to the phone. He then let out a subtle, but undeniably jolly, chuckle.

What the heck?

“I was actually checking to make sure my generator still works,” he then admitted. “Storm coming later.”

But make no mistake: Walter Queen, 70, of Louisville is Santa Claus. A semi-retired Home Depot worker by day, Queen began donning the cap and coat about eight years ago once his hair and beard had finally gone fully gray. People told him he looked like Santa Claus, so he decided to play along. He’s now a busy Santa Claus who works daily shifts at Bass Pro Shop in Clarksville during the Christmas season, and also does a wide variety of special events. He says he makes anywhere between $30 and $150 per hour doing Santa gigs. Not bad jack.

But after he patiently answered my questions about how much money he might expect to make during the holiday season and what his goals were as a working Santa, the conversation took a left turn into uncharted territory. It was my own fault. I asked the question that would derail my jaded intentions: “Why do you play Santa?”

“I had this happen yesterday,” he said, telling of doing a volunteer Santa gig at a daycare for special needs children. “One little girl was dressed up in a princess costume, but she was unable to move. When [the girl’s mother] put her limp body into my arms, I couldn’t hold tears back.”

He then related doing a fundraiser the weekend before to help the Special Olympics Kentucky flag football team raise money to go to a national competition.

“I think making the children happy is why,” he said. “To work with those kids is just wonderful.”

I was momentarily speechless. I cleared my throat. I felt tears welling.

Ssssshh. Walter Queen believed Santa was truly real. And he was right.

‘DO YOU BELIEVE?’

Jerry Owens of New Albany, Ind., is another professional Santa with whom I spoke for this story. At 63, he’s been playing the jolly old elf for nearly a quarter century. He estimates he will make $5,000-$6,000 this holiday season doing primarily private events. His standard rate is $100 per hour, with the caveat that tips from his employers are kindly accepted. But, similar to Queen, his motivation is not money-driven – the money, he said, is more about covering the costs of costume upgrades, costume repairs and travel.

The emotional wage is where it’s at for him.

“The first child I saw as Santa, I will never forget her,” Owens said. “She came running straight up to me, jumped up in my lap, looked at me with two big blue eyes, and said, ‘Santa, I love you.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m hooked.’”

Being Santa, he said, puts him in a unique position to be able to make people of all ages happy, at any given time. A great example is a commercial he filmed for Coca-Cola a few years ago. Contrary to what you are probably thinking, it was not a terribly sweet-paying gig – Owens made a little less than $600 to film the spot. But his experience was unique.

The Coca-Cola marketing reps gathered letters that had been mailed to Santa Claus, Ind., decades earlier and had never been answered. It has been a tradition at the Santa Claus Post Office since 1914 to send back a customary response from “Santa,” but these letters arrived too late in the season to be answered – and they were never discarded.

Coca-Cola tracked down the adults who had written the letters as kids back in the 1950s and ’60s, bought many of the original vintage toys for which they’d asked Santa all those years ago, and let Owens do the rest. A crew filmed him knocking on doors, then either reading the letter to the person or having the person read their own childhood letter aloud to him. He then would present them with their gift, be it a Lionel Train set or a vintage doll that talked and wet itself.

And then, on camera, he would ask them one simple question: “Do you believe?”

“When they opened [the letters] up, they became a child again,” Owens said. “They remembered mom and dad making them write a letter to Santa. They remembered the loss of mom or dad, and the tears began to come.”

These stories make the business side of being Santa seem superfluous, even though that side is interesting as well. I was surprised to learn there are a number of Santa Claus colleges across the country, as well as an International Santa Claus Hall of Fame in, naturally, Santa Claus, Ind. Owens said he attends annual training sessions with several of the colleges, which also affords him a chance to sit down with his contemporaries and talk about, well, being Santa Claus.

The training involves everything from the history of Santa Claus – “Kids can get on Google, so you better have an answer,” he said – to how to answer difficult questions and how to hold or handle a child safely.

The questions children ask, he said, are sometimes the hardest part. While one would think that a child asking, “Are you the real Santa Claus?” would be innocuous, well, it bears further thinking. What if a Santa says “yes” to that question, and then the child goes to a Christmas party the next day only to sit on a different Santa’s lap?

Santa education teaches men like Owens and Queen how to handle those moments. So what is the correct answer?

“A wink, and say, ‘Only you can make that choice,” Owens says, in full character. “I can tell you I represent the spirit of Christmas.”

Some questions are tougher.

“Santa I just want my daddy back,” is one Owens has heard.

“Or, I just want my daddy to stop beating my mommy, or to stop beating me,” he said. He paused, and after a moment, then moved onto another topic.

YEAR-’ROUND SANTAS

For Queen, being able to bring children joy all year is one of his favorite aspects of the “job” of being Santa Claus. I met him for the first time several years ago when he was in street clothes – seeing him, even in pants and a plaid shirt, evokes feelings of childhood. He is Santa Claus. And that’s how he likes it.

“We were out at dinner Friday night at Cheddars,” he said. “There were kids coming over to get pictures with me. When we left, in the lobby, I was there 30 minutes talking to kids and letting their parents get pictures with me. It’s a blessing for the child, but for me it’s almost overwhelming. It’s a celebrity kind of experience, but very humbling.”

Queen even has a Mrs. Claus in his wife, Barbara. She not only makes him costumes, but she grooms him and, as he said, “keeps me looking good.”

“She curls his beard with a curling iron,” Joanna Erickson, Queen’s daughter, said.

Owens’ story is similar to Queen’s in that he stumbled into being Santa through his natural looks. But like Queen, with whom Owens is friends, it was a happy accident to say the least. Also like Queen, Owens plays Santa all year, wherever he goes, in street clothes.

Heck, when I called Owens’ cell phone, he answered by saying, “Hello, this is Santa Claus!” (He did not know I was a writer calling him for an interview.)

When he first began going gray, his co-workers told him he looked like country singer Kenny Rogers. The Santa references began coming soon thereafter, at his urging – during the Christmas season he would wear red sweaters to work, prompting his co-workers to see him differently. It stuck.

And being Santa out of costume should come naturally. It isn’t about the suit, he said. Not at all.

“When a young child looks at you, they look beyond the suit,” Owens said. “They look at your eyes, and how intent you are in making them as happy as can be.”

Making children happy in the moment – that’s what it’s about when you’re Santa. It’s especially about children who may not be happy at home, or who may be sick. And sometimes Santa understands all too well how important that happiness is.

In 1989, a semi hauling a flatbed truck barreled into Hospital Curve on Interstate 65 downtown, carrying stacks of crushed cars. The cars, somehow, broke loose, spilling into the opposite lanes and landing on several cars.

Two of Walt Queen’s daughters were in one of those cars. They were killed.

So what happens when Santa Claus is faced with tragedy?

John Boel, a news anchor for WAVE-3, was a young reporter who covered that crash. He was assigned with the duty of going to Queen’s house, knocking on the door and asking for an interview. Boel described it as a feeling of pure dread, a part of the job that no reporter ever really gets used to. But he had no choice.

“So, I go out and knock on the door,” Boel said, “and [Queen] is the kindest, gentlest person you’ve ever met. He invited us in, told us everything, showed us pictures.”

That’s how Santa Claus handles tragedy. But that’s not the end of this story. Months later, after the driver of that semi had been found responsible in a court of law for those deaths, Walt Queen attended the man’s sentencing hearing. Or, rather, Santa Claus did.

“At the sentencing hearing, [Queen] gets up there and says, ‘I forgive him,’” Boel recalled. “It’s what Jesus Christ would do. You don’t forget, but you forgive.’”

Queen implored the judge to spare the man, to give him another chance – the man shouldn’t go to prison for making a mistake, Queen said. The judge agreed. The man who accidentally killed Santa’s daughters went free that day, because Santa found forgiveness in his bag of gifts.

“It just floored everybody in the courtroom,” Boel, who dedicated a chapter to Queen in his memoir, said. “It was an amazing act of forgiveness. To this day, when I am having trouble forgiving somebody, I think of him.”

This loss in his life further fuels Queen’s kindness – the brand of kindness any good Santa Claus must have in order to be the best Santa he can be. Ironically, that personal tragedy had another effect on him, something else unexpected that helped lead him to a life as Santa.

“My beard quickly went from black to salt-and-pepper to gray,” Queen said. “That incident had an effect on my beard.”

As a result, someone would later ask him to do a single Santa appearance, delivering gifts to a nursing home. He said yes, got himself a costume, and he’s been Santa ever since. He does it because he enjoys making people happy – because he believes.

According to Owens, most Santas feel the same.

“I do it strictly because of the fact that I can have an effect on a life,” Owens said. “I don’t mean just a young life; I am a hospice-trained Santa also. I have seen the effect this figure has on older individuals in later stages of Alzheimer’s.”

He said he can simply walk into a patient’s room, even in street clothes, say hello, and see the difference.

“They will raise their heads and look in your eyes, and say, ‘Santa Claus,’” Owens said. “Then you see a 90-year-old with their eyes as big as a 5-year-old’s, and all I did was show up. They looked up and saw a time in their life that made an impact.”

The effect Santa has on elderly people is to take them back to a happier time. The effect Santa has on children is to make them happy in the now. Owens said the message he sees in a child’s eyes when he or she climbs into his lap is universal: “Santa just unconditionally loves me, because I’m me.”

Queen had that very effect recently on those special needs children of which he spoke. For those moments, he was Santa Claus. Or perhaps even something bigger.

“I told my wife that, for a moment there, god allowed me the privilege to be his hands,” Queen said, “and to hold and love those children.”

I believe Santa is real. And what would the real Santa do on Black Friday? He wouldn’t bristle over consumerist greed; he would be good, for goodness sake.