Creating a Ludwig Day

It wasn’t unusual for Ludwig to sense when someone was having a bad day.  He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the social scene in town, befriending almost everyone. He had very specific inside jokes with most of them. People sometimes called him the mayor of New Paltz or its unofficial ambassador.

Someone once told Ludwig they didn’t believe him that he could possibly have that many friends in town. They demanded proof. Ludwig returned a few days later with a handwritten, eight-page list of everyone he considered his friend.

Rotzler started “The Ludwig Montesa Fan Club” on Facebook back in about 2010, after Ludwig had a seizure on stage at an open-mic night. She wanted to take his mind off any potential embarrassment by showing him the support he really did have. “I just felt really bad when it was in public, because everybody hears about it. I just felt like I wanted to see him the next day and tell him he had a fan page on Facebook,” she said. “Of course, with Ludwig you know that’s going to be massive.”

That page gained about 200 followers up until Facebook changed its settings, bringing the number back down to twelve. Since Ludwig’s death, the page has become a place for people to mourn his passing. The “Ludwig Montesa Fan Club” now has about 1,300 members.

Since Ludwig passed away, those mourning him have turned toward the spiritual. People from a Christian or Jewish background call him a ray of light or an example of God’s love on Earth. People from a Buddhist or Eastern influence see it in a different perspective. “People have been saying that he was our bodhisattva,” Sisenstein said.

There’s a reason he evoked such faith in people. Ludwig didn’t care if you were white or black, Asian or Latino. He didn’t care if you were rich or poor, if you were homeless or if you had a great job. He didn’t care if you were gay or straight. He didn’t care if you were a Muslim, a Jew, an atheist, a Buddhist, a New-Age spiritualist, a Christian or anything else. He didn’t care if you were an elected official. He didn’t care if you were shy and stuck to yourself. He looked at people without prejudice, bias or agenda. He tried to make everyone smile – no matter what kind of day they were having.

“He just loved everyone – without question, without judgment,” Sisenstein said. “If you were nice to him, he loved you. And he thought about people all the time. He was always giving people little gifts, if he knew you were sad. He was completely unselfish. He gave so much, and he never ever expected anything in return.”

Rotzler said she thinks people responded to Ludwig’s genuine affection for those he met. “He was innocence and love. There wasn’t a bad bone in his body.” She added: “He had a lasting impact on people.”

There’s been talk of putting up a statue of Ludwig or a mural in his honor somewhere in town. It’s unclear if that’ll happen. However, mayor Jason West said he’d be open to naming a park in Ludwig’s honor.

People who’d like to remember Ludwig should attend Ludwig Day or stop by the shrine on Main Street – while it’s still up.

Oscar Montesa, Ludwig’s father, said they’d been surprised by the outpouring of sympathy and the shrine that’d gone up for his son in the last week. “He was much too young to go,” Oscar said.

One of the stories that touched Ludwig’s parents the most came from a woman in her early thirties. Formerly homeless, she didn’t have many other friends in New Paltz besides Ludgwig. She used to sit on the stoops along Main Street.

“She said, I thought that people were avoiding me. But Ludwig would always come over to me and give me food,” his father reported she had said. “And that really touched me. With his meager allowance, he wants to share with some of his friends.”

Oscar added: “He touched a lot of lives.”

Ludwig was the youngest of three siblings in a family with a history of going into business or law. But he surprised his family early on, at age five or six, with his gravitation to classical music and piano. “Ludwig was the artist in the family,” Oscar said. “He was part of the artistic crowd – and the artistic community is especially hurting.”

When Oscar was interviewed by another local media outfit, he put it a different way. “Ludwig is an artist – that’s his life,” he said.

I think Oscar’s right, but in a broader sense. Ludwig was an artist, and his masterpiece was that he repainted the landscape of the people who knew him. He made us more patient, more tolerant, less judgmental, more joyous and more spontaneous. Ludwig made New Paltz a better place to be, and Main Street will never be the same without him.