Leroy by JR Hightower

 Plaza Café - Excerpt from "Leroy"

JR Hightower grew up in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 

He is a restauratuer , entrepreneur, and raconteur.  "Leroy"

(not yet published) will be JR's second book. His first book, 

"Alone on Pasture Ridge" is available on Amazon.

In 1946, Judge Howard Beacham who owned the Plaza Café, decided to retire from the restaurant business and work at just one job - being Magistrate Judge. 

Leroy took possession of the Plaza Café on Christmas Day, 1946. He had convinced his brother Harold to come to Alamogordo to help with painting and cleaning up the café during the week between Christmas and New Years; closing and cleaning the restaurant that week became a tradition for many years. The inside of the Plaza Café was presented with a new coat of paint every Christmas. 

The whole family scrubbed, cleaned and removed the mounted deer and antelope heads, Mexican sombreros and serapes from the walls.  Harold refinished the counter and the twenty-four swivel seats. The wooden counter was beautiful; the back bar behind the counter was a lighted pie case with sliding glass doors on the front and storage cabinets underneath. Small individual breakfast cereal boxes were stacked on top and a big mirror ran the length of the counter. 

Leroy Hightower re-opened the Plaza Café under new ownership on January 2, 1947. The dining room seated 86 people and another 75 would fit in the banquet room in the back- not big by today’s standards, but after World War II in Alamogordo, New Mexico in a town with a population of less than 7,000, it was impressive. The Plaza Bar, the only bar with a liquor license in the city limits, used the banquet room as a dance hall on weekend nights.  

The cafe’s lunch counter ran almost the length of the dining room. It turned and went to the east wall, leaving just enough room for a row of chairs by the front wall for guests waiting for a table. 

On the east wall, in the center of the mirror over the pie case that served as the back bar of the counter, there was always a big bouquet of fresh flowers, a nice touch in the desert. The counter and chair backs were crafted from durable oak. The same sturdy woodwork was still beautiful and in use when Leroy sold the Plaza Café twenty-five years later. 

A filling station was on the corner of the property at 10th and Pennsylvania Avenue (later named White Sands Boulevard).  The bar on the north side and the cafe on the east side formed an L  around the back side of the parking lot. 

The adobe buildings were covered in stucco in traditional Mexican style with vigas (large pine logs) serving as rafters for the roof. Vigas are often topped with latillas (sticks laid in patterns over the logs) to finish the ceiling, but the Plaza ceiling was more appropriate for a restaurant. (Latilla sticks can attract bugs, little critters, spider webs, and dust bunnies). The area between the vigas was stuccoed into a half-moon concave arch halfway up each side of the log to create a bright, clean look.  

The traditional New Mexico adobe building - made from mud and logs and sticks, served as the main architecture in southwest towns and villages. Filled with oak furniture and counters, the cafe looked especially inviting during the dark, desert evenings. The vigas outside the bar were encircled in neon; the roofline of the cafe and the filling station were outlined in the bright white light which cut through the dark. 

Noble neon gas ran through long tubes which had been twisted into shapes with a torch by a skilled glass bender. Internal electrodes were inset into the cylinders filled with neon and then hermetically sealed by clamping and melting the glass ends together.    

Each letter had its own transformer and when a bombardment of electric volts were applied to the electrodes, the gas ionized in the tubes causing it to emit brilliant liquid fire. The internal electrodes in the luminous tubes prevented degradation of the neon by sputtering and crackling. 

 The first sight travelers saw as they approached Alamogordo at night were two competing signs over the gas station edged in neon cutting through the darkness: one, a metal Mobil Oil sign with its Pegasus logo, and one a polished aluminum rocket about 20 feet long, outlined in blue and green neon with an exhaust tail of orange flashing neon. The rocket had Plaza Café written on both sides in red neon directing hungry customers to their future meal. 

                                    Plaza Cafe at Night    

V-2 rockets had recently been captured from Germany, and along with former Nazi scientists and engineers, who had rather come to work at the White Sands Proving Grounds instead of face punishment for their collusion with the former German government, had secretly arrived in the desert to help the Army begin experimenting with rockets.  

The military's effort to emulate Germany's rocketry had thus far proved disastrous.  The first rocket tumbled end over end and bounced off the mountain above Alamogordo.  The second ended up in Juarez, Mexico's graveyard - an appropriate ending.  "Operation Paperclip," was put in place by the federal government and deals were made to sneak the formerly fascist scientists and their families out of Germany and into the United States. 

When the program became successful, Alamogordo became known as “The Rocket City,” and Leroy joined the city's booster promotion with his highly identifiable, silver rocket gleaming in the sky above the Plaza parking lot. The German families slowly integrated into Otero County's acceptance. Their children enrolled in local schools, they joined local Catholic or Lutheran churches, moved into existing neighborhoods, and eventually the pain of the war quelled between former local soldiers and foreign "Hun" scientists until the former hatreds are practically unknown by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren today. 

Former Plaza owner Judge Howard Beacham agreed to stay on for a while to help Leroy in the kitchen. Leroy’s wife, Cecilia, who had flirted with a career in movies in Hollywood as a singer and dancer, got the contact information of her friend, Foster Exline, an executive chef at a supper club in California. Leroy talked him into moving to Alamogordo so the Plaza Café could have a bona fide chef.  

                                Cecilia O'Hagin Hightower

Foster settled right in and went to work about 3 a.m.  He began each day with a 5-gallon pot of Farmers Brothers brand coffee using city water that was plumbed into the coffee maker so he and early customers and staff could help themselves. 

The natural gas fired Bunn coffee maker had two 5 gallon coffee pots with site glass tubes to view the level of the coffee. Each side had a spigot at the bottom and was heated to 210 degrees; hot water was available on demand through a third spigot in the center between the two rectangular coffee containers. This water was used for hot tea and Sanka (the modern powdered decaf of the 1940’s and 50’s).  

A clean towel was tied over the spigot of the freshest coffee in order for the staff to know to use the other pot first. If there was no towel on either of them, they knew to watch the level of the only pot they had and brew a new pot before they ran out. The wait staff would fill their glass bubble-shaped pots from the 5-gallon dispenser, then set the coffee carafes on single burner hot plates in the wait stations. 

The combination of Alamogordo water and the Farmer Brothers brand created a robust coffee. A pungent, carmelly fragrance filled the cafe when the hot “rocket fuel” was brewed in the morning.

The coffee maker was enclosed so oxygen did not get to the coffee. This enabled it to stay fresh longer because the oil in coffee oxidizes quickly when it is exposed to air. Oxidation makes the oil in coffee beans rancid and causes the coffee to taste bitter and old. 

Ground coffee oxidizes when exposed to air, too, so it needs to be sealed in an airtight container after it is opened. Coffee companies vacuum the air out of coffee cans to remove oxygen - which is why a new can of coffee goes “swoosh” - sucking in air when the seal is broken.  

Foster would put twenty to thirty pounds of bacon to blanch in the oven and about as much link sausage and par cook it. All of Foster's delicacies were made from scratch. Sausage drippings were the secret ingredient in the waffle batter, giving a subtle hint of flavor to the puffy, crispy gridded cakes.  Bacon drippings were added into the pancake batter and to season the beans and vegetables. The par cooked bacon and sausage would later be browned to order on the 36-inch flat grill, along with individual orders of eggs, hash browns, toast, and pancakes.  

Two huge old waffle irons were set up every morning on the line that was converted into a steam table for lunch and dinner. Three 4-slice toastmasters were on the shelf where the bread was stored, over the table where finished orders were picked up by the wait staff.

The waitresses called out their orders to the cook, there was no ticket hung. When you were feeding 150 to 300 people breakfast, it would get intense and the cooks were incredible in organizing plates and other clues to remember all those orders. 

Leroy’s nephew, Tommie Carl Herrell, started washing dishes at the Plaza and worked his way up to cook. Tommie and his friend, Jimmie Randall, both cooked at the Plaza in their teen years; Jimmie also cooked at Holloman Air Base in one of the military club’s kitchens.

Foster put big pots of stock, one beef and one chicken, on to boil all day for soup and other ingredients. He started the lunch specials with “Boiled Beef” on Tuesdays. It was just cubed beef but the long stringy muscles of the shoulders were skillfully cut short so when they were boiled in the beef stock from the day before, the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender.  

Boiled beef, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken potpie, and beef stew daily specials ran Monday through Friday. Meat specials were served in 8 ounce, oval green china ramekins in the entrée section of the plate so the juice would not run off. Other lunch specials were served on sectioned luncheon plates without the ramekins to eliminate washing more dishes. The special included an entrée, two sides, and endless hot, fresh, yeast rolls.  

Foster made rolls every day from scratch. The daily special cost around 65 cents. On Sunday, it might be turkey and dressing with all the trimmings, roast beef, or roast pork for 95 cents. The favorite after-church entree was turkey dinner. Five or six thirty-pound turkeys were cooked. If there was any meat left, it was used for open-faced hot turkey sandwiches or in the club sandwiches. 

Newspaper Flyer

Foster made 12 to 24 pies three times a week and kept the big pie case full - or tried to; he just could not seem to bake enough pies. He bragged that he could whip up a baker’s dozen (13) egg whites and sugar into enough meringue to top 10 pies. 

The chef called the newspaper weekly, and told them the lunch and dinner specials so they could have the menu inserts printed and delivered in time to be placed in the lunch menus. Foster never seemed to be in a hurry or flustered because he was so organized and efficient. He cooked and baked the best food imaginable.  

The slight, balding chef wore a long sleeve, white dress shirt (instead of a chef jacket) with his checkered chef pants and a long white apron. He rolled the shirtsleeves up and somehow managed to stay clean. Foster stayed with Leroy until he sold the restaurant 25 years later and then stayed at the Plaza Bar with Amelia and Mike Musgrove after that.

The café was a success from the first day partly because of the location, an increasing military population stationed into the area, Leroy’s skill running a restaurant and his ability to put the right person in the right place at the right time, and moving out of the way to let his staff do their jobs.  

After the first year, Leroy paid his loan back early from Felix Loggains, bought his father, Pop, a ’47 Mercury, and bought himself another ’47 Packard. He became a part of the community even though he was a “come-to-town soldier” and not one of the “old guard” families of ranchers, farmers, or businessmen who had been there since the end of the last century.

The late 40’s and early 50’s were great economic times in Alamogordo; the town doubled its population in the 1940’s and doubled again in the 1950’s. Leroy’s sister, Mary, and brother-in-law, Gordon Herrell, arrived after their Oklahoma farm “blew out,” and they had a big auction sale and moved to Alamogordo in the Fall of 1950.  

Mary had severe arthritis and the dry climate of Alamogordo was said to be good for her and she did seem to get around much better than she did in the humid Oklahoma air. With all the building and construction going on in Alamogordo, Leroy’s brother, Harold, had shown up and done well with his paint contracting business; he welcomed his brother-in-law, Gordon, to help him. 

In 1954, Leroy allowed his son, Junior, to work in the restaurant operation of the Plaza Café and he began to report to Foster after school. Twice a week the Peyton Packing Company in El Paso brought swinging beef carcasses in a truck to Alamogordo and occasionally sent in special shipments because the cafe's walk-in refrigerator was not very big. 

Leroy thought it would be helpful for Junior’s football weight training to help with hoisting the carcasses. Foster would not allow Peyton Packing Company to unload any side of beef that weighed less than 400 pounds. That would insure that it came off a minimum 1,200-pound steer. The young bovines’ weight before butchering was one-third head, horns, hooves, hide and innards, one-third right side, and one third left side.  

When the Peyton truck came in, Foster would climb up into  the back, inspect and select his sides of beef from the swinging beef hanging on big hooks suspended from the rails on the ceiling of the truck. After Foster chose his beeves, the drivers could unload the meat and hang the beef quarters on hooks close to the cutting table in the back room of the kitchen. 

Even then there wasn’t much market for “prime” grade beef, a grade higher than choice. Prime beef is marbled (fattier), better tasting and from bigger beef cattle, making the meat to bone ratio better (i.e., a 300 pound side has almost as much bone in it as a 500 pound side), so it is more expensive per pound of meat. 

But sometimes Peyton had “prime” beef they would sell to the cafe at the “choice” price because they knew Leroy and Foster liked the best grade available and because the Plaza was such a steady customer. 

Leroy’s son, Junior, was a big ol’ kid and his new job was to help the chef “work up” the beef. With a couple of knives and a handsaw, Foster would cut up the beef quarters - he was a slight man but strong as a bull. Junior received an invaluable education, learning which cuts came from which parts of the steer.  

He learned how grocery stores sell beef “round,” a section of beef from the cow's hindquarters, as sirloin tips. The round is connected to the sirloin, but it has two big tendons (gristle) running the full width and length of it. It does not have enough fat to roast, will dry out before the gristle breaks down, and is too tough to cook quickly like steak. The best thing to do with it is to grind it up. 

Junior and Foster carried the large beef quarters to the walk-in and hung them up on the meat hooks. The chef would not let the boy unhook a whole quarter and carry it to the table alone because he said the youngster didn’t know how to lift that much weight yet. 

But the tough, slight man must have been strung with tendons and gristle running through him because he deftly handled 150 pound beef quarters on his back yelling for everyone to get out of the way as he wrangled the seven cubic feet of meat onto the cutting table. 

 Quality cuts of the side of beef needed a good deal of fat trimmed off; the fat would be thrown in a big stew pot and saved in the walk-in. A bull hindquarter would come in about once a week. Bulls do not have the fat steers do; they are almost all red meat which cooks up with great flavor but tastes tough and dry. The bull meat would be ground up with the fat in the walk-in to create a good grade of ground beef. (Bull meat can no longer be bought for human consumption because of added hormones and gene alteration. It is sold for pet food, though). 

The Plaza sold lots of hamburger during the lunch specials: stuffed bell peppers, spaghetti and meatballs, ground sirloin steak, and hundreds of hamburgers and cheeseburgers every week at lunch and dinner. There were also mock filets on the menu (a 12 or 14 ounce ground beef patty wrapped in bacon). 

Foster took the rounds, deboned them, and then used the eye (part of the round) and top rounds for chicken fried steak and the bottom rounds were used for roast beef. The trimmings went in the ground beef and the bones into the stockpot. New York steak and filet mignon were customer favorites and #109 bone-in ribs were used for prime rib on weekends.  

Occasionally, when they did not need all the #109s for prime rib, the rib bones were cut off and put in the rib pot and Delmonico steaks were cut from the lip of the rib eye. The beef ribs and short ribs would be used for evening specials. The chuck was used for boiled beef and roast beef, and the remaining forequarters were ground. Every part of the cow was used except the moo. 

One of the biggest sellers was the Plaza Club Steak. It was a 9-10 ounce top sirloin. The short loin was cut up for porterhouse and T-bone steaks. In addition, the loin strips became New York steaks and the tenders were cut into filet mignons. 

The porterhouse steaks were huge, about 35 to 40 ounces, with part of the tail left on that hung over the edge of the platter. The remaining bones and blubbery parts were put in Foster’s stockpots with onions, celery, carrots and whatever other fresh vegetable trimmings were around. 

    Vegetable beef soup was on the menu every day to help use up the beef stock the chef constantly boiled. The broth was made into gravy for hot beef open-faced sandwiches, and used in roast beef dinners. 

    Occasionally Foster would make French onion soup with toasty bread and cheese melted like lava on top of the comforting concoction. Chicken necks, giblets, tails, and other trimmings went into the chicken stockpot and ended up as cream of chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, chicken and rice soup or chicken and turkey gravy for hot turkey sandwiches, turkey and dressing and chicken potpie. 

    After the beef was cut, put away and the table cleaned, Foster went home and Junior became the pot washer. The bakery table was scrubbed with Clorox water and the top layer scrubbed off with a Chore Girl copper mesh pad, until it almost made a paste of water and wood. A dough cutter was used to scrape off the paste and water into a trash bucket so the table would not be contaminated; it was air dried and not wiped down with a possibly tainted cloth.  

    At closing time, the butcher-block table had to be done the same way. The cut marks from the knives were scraped off so the bacteria would not have a place to grow and the chlorine in the Clorox killed any bacteria on the table and sanitized the scraper. 

    On the weekdays when there were no meat deliveries, they baked pies. Junior rolled out pie crusts as quickly as possible, but Foster would get disgusted and roll out a crust or two himself in quick time just to show his rookie how it was done. On Sundays, Foster went home right after lunch. He worked a short day on Monday, too.  

    Leroy would not allow Junior to operate the big dishwasher; it was an automatic conveyor fed dish-washing machine which used 210-degree water to rinse. Leroy warned Junior that he might get his shirt tail caught in it and be pulled in, but he did wash glasses on the double sided glass washer with the center turned one way and the outside turned the other. An unfortunate lesson was learned about what happens if a finger nail gets caught by the whirling brushes, ripping the nail right off.  

    Added to the staff was a rotund, wizened cook that would sit on a 50-pound lard can next to the butcher block and smoke. If Junior had all the pots washed, the cook would let him make food orders. The growing boy had to be careful over the grill so he wouldn’t burn his belly because he was not yet quite tall enough to reach all the way across it. 

    The kitchen equipment included a large automatic potato peeler that held about 20 pounds of potatoes. It spun around and grated the skin off with friction, then the “eyes” needed to be cut out of the potatoes. Carrots and turnips could be peeled in it, too, but Foster did not like that new fangled contraption and preferred it be done the old-fashioned way. 

    

    The prep staff tended to leave the potatoes in the peeler for an extra amount of time so they did not have to “eye” them. The potatoes would come out almost perfectly round with about half their original weight when they were left in the peeler too long.  

    Junior would work up five or six, 5-gallon buckets of raw French fries every afternoon. The peeled and cut fresh French fries were soaked in water with a little “Tater White” (a chemical additive to keep potatoes from turning brown - now banned). Then, the five gallon buckets were put in the walk-in for the cooks to use on the night shift.  A bucket sat on the floor by the fryer that had a big strainer on top to drain the potatoes. If they were not drained before they were put in the fryer, the water would cause a fuss making the hot oil foam and pop.

  
    At first, Junior had a little trouble remembering all the orders without tickets and the cook would sometimes have to bail him out. He was ribbed about potentially burning his belly and when he did not dry the potatoes enough before letting them down into the grease, the grease would fly into his face like fireworks on the Fourth of July. 

    The cooks prepared and put the entrées and garnish on the plate, and then the waitress would get her own sides from the steam table. Fresh yeast rolls waited on a rack over the hotline to proof. Junior learned to estimate from the number of previous orders when another pan needed to go up to proof and to put the proofed ones in to cook, and to take them out and not burn them. A waitress would sometimes remind the cook when the rolls were getting low; everyone fussed if the endless, yeasty rolls ran out. 

    The Plaza’s competition was the Coronado Café across 10th Street on the Southeast corner of the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th. It was owned and operated by a Mediterranean man who everyone called “the Greek.”  

 

 

    One-half block south of the Coronado was the Wagon Wheel Café. The Wagon Wheel was a lot smaller than the Plaza and the Coronado. It was run at that time by an energetic, saucy woman who looked a bit like country singer Patsy Cline. Lola Mae always wore a white starched hat held on with bobby pins and she was quick with a hearty greeting when a customer entered the door situated between two wagon  wheel windows.  

    The Alamogordo Hotel at 9th Street and New York Avenue also had a coffee shop.  In addition, there were three drug store soda fountains: Felix F. Loggains’ Corner Drug, on the southwest corner of 10th Street and New York Avenue; Walter Lafferty’s Alamo Drug, on the northwest corner of 10th and New York; and Johnny Rolland’s Rexall Drug a few doors south of the Corner Drug on New York Avenue. 
    All three had good soda fountains, sold sandwiches, and light faire in addition to sodas and ice cream items. However, nobody else had an executive chef like Foster Exline.

             

    Eber McKinley opened the Desert Aire in 1957 and leased the restaurant to Ramona and Bill Duncan. Ramona was one of Leroy’s former waitresses. Denny O’Hara opened the new Rocket dining room about the same time. A small café at Seventh and Pennsylvania later became Margo’s. There was the Mountain View Cafe just north of Indian Wells on the west side of Pennsylvania. (It stayed open all night and had a good pinball machine).

    Leroy said that when a new restaurant opens it won’t take all your business, it will take some of everybody's business. He said when new cafes opened, you had to do a better job than they do to compete. That’s why competition makes everybody better, or you don’t stay in business.

    In the 50’s came the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In on south Pennsylvania Avenue and the Red Rooster at 1500 North Pennsylvania, right across the street from the north end of the Alamo Courts that Leroy would eventually own.

jrhightower50@yahoo.com

Emma Hamsher, Thoroughly Modern Twentieth Century Teacher - Part IV

    

New Mexico Institute for the Blind Campus

 The 1919 school year at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind began without a hitch.  Emma met her students and their parents at their designated train stations and they easily transferred trains in El Paso to Alamogordo with the help of the Pullman Red Caps who were friends of Emma’s by now.  For the first few weeks, it seemed they were all settling down to a wonderfully productive year. Then suddenly children started becoming ill; everyone feared another flu epidemic.  It wasn’t flu, it was worse -- smallpox! 

    The school was put in quarantine. Fortunately,  a new health center had been built on campus during the summer and a nurse from El Paso had been hired. She was well-versed in nursing smallpox - there was little to do but comfort the children who were sick, try to keep their fevers down, and clean up the bodily messes from diarrhea and throwing up.  

    Small children and Natives were especially vulnerable to this virus.  Thirty percent of its victims would die, be blinded, or have short term syndromes, horrible facial and bodily scarring, or lifelong illnesses from the disease.  In the Native population, the mortality rate was much higher; the European disease had killed 90% of the first Americans within the first hundred years Anglo settlers set foot on Eastern shores.

    Few of the children had been vaccinated; the nurse lined students and unvaccinated staff up to be given the vaccine. If the injection site didn’t form a blister within the first two weeks, they would be re-vaccinated.  The dime size scar on a person’s arms was their proof of vaccination.  Meanwhile, the strange little nurse scrambled around the medical center mumbling to herself, tilting her head and answering herself.  She was always busy, but never seemed to mind. 

    Emma went to the health center to talk to the children through the windows. They were greased down with oil from their heads to the bottom of their feet to keep them from developing scars.  This was probably the best treatment to apply because when it was all over, the children suffered little scarring. 

    Small Pox Victim

During all this time, everyone was in complete quarantine, even the dog. No one could leave campus, and the fence was the limit, even though the school was surrounded by desert. They were all becoming tired of each other and then finally, three days before Christmas, when everyone had been successfully vaccinated and the health center was child-free, the quarantine was lifted.

    Arrangements were hurriedly executed and the activity of getting home for Christmas was exhilarating.  If home was too far away, teachers and staff found places to go where they had a change of scenery and could relax. 

    Emma delivered her charges north and decided to spend her holiday in Santa Fe.  She loved the farolito lights, colorful decorations, the red pork tamales, religious processions like the La Posada, posole, biscochitos, and piñon bonfires. She thought everyone should spend at least one Christmas in Santa Fe during their lifetime. 

    But Emma was not one to rest on her laurels.  She had heard of a child with eye problems at a mining camp near Gallup. She arrived around noon the day after Christmas and was directed to a rough building that held a large dining room. Because of the holiday, the miners were not working, and many of them were having lunch there. There was a little 11-year-old girl who was serving bowls of food to the tables. She was being paid 50 cents per week for a seven day work week that began at dawn and ended in the dark.    

    The child’s eyes were extremely red and oozing. Emma located the girl’s father, a large, rough Polish miner who told her he did not know the whereabouts of the mother and the girl had never been to a doctor.  Emma convinced him that she had State authority to take her to get treatment and go to school. 

    The father got his daughter’s coat and the few other pieces of clothing she owned. They got in Emma’s waiting car and the driver took them to Gallup. At the hotel, she bathed her and with some washcloths and warm water, greatly improved the appearance of her eyes, although they were still inflamed.

    After breakfast the next morning, they wandered over to the station to await their train. Suddenly, two men appeared - - one who  came up only to Emma’s shoulder with a face twisted into perpetual anger- the other was a big man wearing a Stetson, a badge and a gun at his belt. The cruel looking man ran the restaurant at the mine and according to him, Emma had no right to take the child. She asked him if he had the 11-year-old under a contract. He said he didn’t need a contract and was taking her back where she belonged. 

    “Over my dead body,” Emma said. Words flew between the two.  Finally a big, hearty laugh came from the sheriff. He said, “Come on man; I'm taking you back to camp - - you're not getting anywhere here." He steered the mean, diminutive man back to the mine, and Emma and the girl boarded the train to El Paso for an ophthalmological appointment. 

    At Mr Pratt's request, but much against Emma’s resolve, she was told to carry a revolver in her satchel. She was often offered advice that the place she was headed was dangerous; she said she could predict what words the warning would begin with,”I have a daughter of my own…” 

    She said she had  never needed her revolver, and never used it except for target practice, but fantasized this time of bopping the child’s raging employer on his noggin with the grip of her gun. Fortunately, she did not act upon it.

    In El Paso, two doctors examined the child and came up with the diagnosis: trachoma. The doctors turned her eyelids inside out and scrubbed them with a medicated brush. Each week she was to go to the nurse at the school clinic where she would receive the same treatment. It took four months before her eyes were infection free. Some of her vision was saved, but her eyes were badly scarred.

    Around this time, a former teacher at the school visited the Institute. She was Elizabeth Garrett. Her mother was Spanish from Northern New Mexico, and her father was the famous sheriff, Pat Garrett. Pat was renowned for having captured the notorious Billy the Kid. In fact, he captured him twice! The first time, Billy was jailed and sentenced to be hanged, but managed to escape. Patrick followed Billy to Fort Sumner and there, shot him. Pat was known as a tough man when necessary, but always very gentle and kind to Elizabeth.

    Emma was enchanted with Miss Garrett who then lived in Long Island, New York and earned her living by singing. She told wonderful tales of growing up in New Mexico Territory and of her parents, particularly her father. In the evenings, the students and staff would sit around Garrett on the lawn and listen to her tales, some exciting, some sad, but most of them a living history lesson of New Mexico.

Pat Garrett and Elizabeth's Youngest Sister

    The evenings during the few weeks Elizabeth visited were glorious. Her entourage would sit on the lawn while the sunset crept behind the San Andres Mountains. Then the moon rose followed by millions of stars. Under the expansive sky, Elizabeth told stories and sang song after song, all in Spanish. Emma’s favorites were “La Paloma” and “La Golondrina.”

    In 1915, three years after New Mexico was admitted to the U.S. as the 47th state, Garrett wrote ”O Fair New Mexico.” Written in the form of a tango, it was officially adopted as New Mexico's state song in 1917. John Philip Sousa, famous military march composer, made an arrangement of the song in 1928. 

    Garrett was in the process of moving to Roswell, where she would teach piano, continue writing songs, devote her time to serving as a Board of Regent’s member for the Institute for the Blind, and perform around the country. 

    Elizabeth was friends with the blind/deaf author and political activist Helen Keller and her former teacher and lifelong companion, Anne Sullivan. The two would visit the “Songbird of the Southwest" at her home in Roswell and in Santa Fe to help Elizabeth lobby for the Institute in Alamogordo, and for the blind in the State of New Mexico. 

    Their lobbying activity to convince legislators to give state taxpayer money to her causes often began with a joke from Elizabeth Garret.  She said she was there to fight for the blind and deaf in New Mexico.  She quipped, “Quite frequently, my father had to bring harmony with a gun. I always have tried to do so by carrying a tune.”

    Around the time Garrett’s visit ended, Emma began to receive letters from her fiance, Harold Minturn, with a return address of a post office box in New York City.  Since German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s grandson, abdicated and the war ended at 11 o’clock, on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, Emma had received no correspondence from Harry.  She assumed he was in Europe and was cleaning up the mess the “Huns” made with their destructive war.  “Huns” was a derogatory term used by the Allied forces to define the barbarism of the German forces.

    Harry explained that he had not been sent to Europe but had served as a mechanic in upstate New York. Now he was in the city trying to make his fortune as a salesman. Minturn had grown up with his parents and brother in boarding houses in Kansas, Missouri, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and several places in between, so he knew that a post office box was the best place to receive his mail while he was “transient.” 

    Emma’s tall, slender, dark haired, blue eyed soldier had been mustered out of the Army with no missing limbs or eyes, no mustard gas respiratory problems or chemical burns that disfigured his face or caused blindness. Unlike many soldiers who returned from Europe, he had not suffered from the loss of fingers or feet from trench foot, frostbite, or gangrene infections. 

    He was not one of the disfigured  “gueules cassées,” - “broken faced men,” missing noses, jaws, cheekbones, ears or eyes. These men often went to a Tin Nose Shop to have custom, thin copper masks made. The prosthetic masks, crafted by sculptors on painted copper, were designed to resemble the soldier's pre-injury appearance as closely as possible with eyes, eyebrows, cheek definition, mouths, and ears painted over a base coat matched to the soldier's skin tone. 

    The copper coverings were held on by a tin wire or a ribbon and kept civilians from recoiling at the sight of the veterans’ disfigurements of missing cheekbones, jaws, noses, or eyes,  but did not always cover the psychological trauma the wounded had  suffered from the Great (horrible) War.

  Tin Nose Masks to Cover Missing Face Features

 Emma was far away from the consequences of World War I.  Her brother had been drafted, but like her fiance, stayed state side and was now safe and sound back in Chambersburg.  The nearest Emma had come to the war was when an  incident occurred during the Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa and his Villistas had raided Columbus, and General Pershing from El Paso’s Fort Bliss was ordered to keep Pancho Villa out of New Mexico and back where he belonged. 

    After General Pershing's unsuccessful invasion of Mexico, his 6000 troops headed back to the borderland.  Several squads of his soldiers were making a summer foray into the Sacramento Mountains to train in the fresh mountain air. Pershing’s entourage of gallant cavalrymen  passed through Alamogordo to get to their destination and camped in the park under the trees which Alamogordo was named after. They were staying under the fat cottonwoods over the weekend and would head up the mountain on Monday.

    A  dance soiree was held for the troops in town on Saturday evening; the orchestra from The Institute for the Blind furnished the music and one of the students whose home was in Alamogordo attended the dance. Several months later, the teenage girl told Miss Hamsher she didn’t feel well enough to attend class. 

    Emma sent her student to the health clinic where they discovered that she was pregnant. The girl  didn’t know the soldier’s last name; she only knew that he was a homesick, terribly unhappy boy from the South who had told her that she was a wonderful dancer, how lovely she was, how he had never met a girl as understanding and kind as she was, and had asked her if he could see her again as soon as he received a leave of duty. By the time the girl discovered her predicament, Pershing and his troops had been sent overseas to France. 

    The pregnant girl’s mother had been dead for several years and her older sister had taken over raising the children.  The big sister did not allow her littler sister back in the house.  The school nurse suggested the girl go to El Paso where there was a home for unwed mothers; she remained until the baby was born and adopted. She then came back to live on the campus until she graduated.

    Emma shook her head at the girl’s naivete and the opportunism of the young man. The school was quite strict with boy/girl activity on the campus and during field trips.  The students and staff were warned of hereditary blindness and discouraged relationships between students.  Emma vowed to keep a more diligent watch on her female charges and spoke to them about piety and purity. Society placed a high value on a woman's virtue, and warnings were given against activities that were considered detrimental to a girl's moral standing.

    Meanwhile, Emma was contemplating the end of her five year teaching stint in New Mexico with mixed feelings.  She was anxious to begin a family of her own, but leaving the children with whom she lived and worked was going to be gut wrenching. This had been the most interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience she had ever encountered. Her blind children had been her teachers; she said she had learned more from them than they had from her.

    As the school year ended in 1921, it would also grieve her to leave  the land of enchantment; she would miss the grandeur of the mountains, the desert, the indescribable sunsets, the homey little adobe houses which grew out of the brown land, and the friendly population of Anglo, Spanish, and Native people.

    Emma had made close friends in Alamogordo; one was a priest who corresponded with other churches to help Emma locate blind children. The Father came from Germany for the “cure.” He had tuberculosis and the dry, desert air helped him heal and he fell in love with the area and remained.

    Emma became friends with an English couple - the husband was also a “lunger” with tuberculosis.  The gentleman was a billiard buff and they had one room built onto their adobe house which was known as the Billiard Room. They taught the young school teacher to play billiards and frequently invited her to spend an evening with them doing nothing but playing billiards after dinner. 

    Superintendent Pratt and Mrs. Pratt also doted on Emma.  The school doctor who brought his children and his  tubercular wife from New York to Alamogordo were also quite close with Miss Emsher.  Everyone wished she would stay, but understood she had extended her engagement for a long time and was at the upper end of the age for marriage. It was time to be taken care of by a loving husband.

    Before she left, she had taken a group of children for a picnic at a mountain park on top of a small canyon several miles from school. After lunch, Emma told the students she was going to hike down to the stream close by to fill a  bucket with drinking and washing-up water.  She made them promise to stay just where they were until she returned. Several of the children had partial vision and she knew they could be trusted to make sure this happened.

    As she hiked down the hill, the bucket fell out of her hand and dropped noisily, clang, clang, clanging down the rocky mountain to the stream. She retrieved it, filled it, and hiked back to the children where she found everyone where they had been, but now on their knees, some crying, with hands folded, praying for her. They thought she had fallen with the bucket. 

    She wondered how she could leave them and never see them again. It was a difficult decision to make, but she wanted to finally marry the man she had kept waiting for so long. When they returned to school, she began packing for the trip back east. Mr. and Mrs. Pratt put her on the train the next day. She found her seat and waved to them where they stood  on the platform; she had  tears in her eyes and a pain in her heart while she watched little Alamogordo, sitting at the foot of the Sacramento Mountains, and her dearest friends roll out of sight.

  Alamogordo Train Depot Grounds

  Emma was married in Chicago in August of 1921 in a civil ceremony in a courtroom, no family nor friends attended.  Her husband, Harold Disney Minturn, was reported as being a stockbroker in the Windy City. Emma’s achievements were listed extensively in the Chambersburg newspaper wedding announcement - graduate of Temple Baptist College, teacher, field officer, accomplished public speaker.  Her father was the late artist, T.O. Hamsher.  He had died of tuberculosis when Emma was five years old.  

    Unbeknownst to his bride, Harry had been married before in 1917 in Kansas City to a young, local woman. Harry worked as an advertising man while living at the Densmore Hotel when he married Roby Singleton, daughter of the recently deceased Dr. J.M. Singleton; she had inherited a healthy fortune.  They were married for less than a year during which time, the man of the house (Harry) typically controlled the household purse strings.

    The tumultuous alliance ended in a lawsuit which was eventually settled with his first wife’s family. Harold Minturn had accused his spouse’s household of alienation of affection and sued them for $50,000, over $1,250,000 in today’s money.  They reached a settlement just to quell the town gossip and he was paid a secret sum and given a motor car to leave town. 

    Toward the end of the divorce settlement, Harry was drafted at age 29 (just missing the 30 year old cut-off) and preparing to leave for Pennsylvania where he would soon be introduced to Emma Hamsher.  

    When the judge overseeing the divorce trial told Mr. Minturn he had to leave Kansas City, Harry replied that the U.S. Government had superceded that command and that he was a former Cavalry soldier and was glad to be going back to the military. As he was catching his train bound for boot camp in Pennsylvania, he lied to a newspaper reporter that he was leaving to attend Officer Training School in Illinois.

    There are no military records of Minturn serving in the U.S. Cavalry.  Census records showed him working as a messenger and a stenographer in Kansas while living with his parents and brother in a boarding house.  His father worked in a department store and his brother Raymond went to business school and was drafted the same time as Harry; Raymond would later become a successful engineer.

    Near the end of 1919, Harry’s address changed from a New York to a Chicago post office box.  Harry wrote that the job prospects there were much better and that he was working as a stockbroker.  He said he would live cheaply in a boarding house until they married and he would be looking for an apartment for them in a nice area - near the Loop.

    Apparently, when Harry mustered out of the military, he moved to Manhattan where he married a woman six years younger than he was, Beatrice Bovee, who had a peddler’s licence at a pier in Brooklyn.  The couple moved to Chicago in 1920 for financial reasons; they lived with his wife's mother, Belle Bovee, a dry goods saleswoman who also took in boarders to make ends meet.

    Harry Disney Minturn married Emma Hamsher in August of 1921. He had found them an apartment on the fashionable North side of Chicago, walkable to Lake Michigan and not too far from the elevated train known as the “Loop.” Chicago fascinated Emma; it was beautiful, exciting, interesting, and enjoyable. A year and a half later, a son was born, Raymond Hamsher Minturn.  He lived for nineteen days. A year after that, a daughter arrived stillborn.  

    Emma took a job with the Chicago Public Schools as a teacher after the painful experience of losing two babies. The rules had relaxed and married women could teach in Chicago as long as they did not become pregnant or have children. 

    Emma had come into the marriage with a savings account from her five years of teaching and summer field work duties. Harry began to work on a project as a contractor, becoming a founding member building a private country club with a 26 acre lake.

    In 1928, Emma resigned from her job when she discovered she was pregnant.  She had a healthy baby girl, Anne Leigh Minturn, who required every bit of Emma’s attention.  Six months after she was born, her parents took her with them on a celebratory cruise from Florida to Cuba. 

    The year 1929 was a banner year for Cuba until the Wall Street Crash in October.  Gerardo Machado, President of Cuba, was willing to pocket any bribe from any foreigner who wanted permits to own and operate hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, and brothels. Tourism increased markedly in Cuba and tax revenues allowed for a  central highway to be built; money for public education spending increased, and investment in industrialization began - until it all crashed along with the Stock Market.

    The Great Depression ended the bubble of the Roaring 20’s. Emma was not working and slowly became a “grass widow.”  A “sod widow’s” husband is six feet under; a grass widow’s husband stops coming home.  But Emma announced to all that she had in fact become a “widow,” to avoid the shame of whatever there was to be ashamed of with a husband who had disappeared.  

    Emma eventually became the manager of an apartment/hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. She and Anne lived there until Anne matriculated from Chicago Girls’ Latin School and then attended Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1949. 

    Meanwhile, Harry married Helene Smith in Panama City, Florida in 1937 and five years later, a Florida newspaper's legal posting ran for four weeks announcing that Helene Minturn of Panama City, Florida was divorcing Harold Disney Minturn of Biloxi, Mississippi who had vanished.  

    After World War I, divorces increased notably during the Roaring Twenties.  Hasty marriages were common during war time. A husband sometimes returned a stranger after the trauma of battle but divorce was still stigmatized, especially for women.  Divorcee was synonymous with “loose woman.” 

    Divorce was fault-based and difficult to prove and obtain. Some churches did not recognize divorce; it was easier in a time before computer databases, social media, facial recognition and tracking devices to simply disappear a few states or a coastline far away.

    Three years later, Harry died in Los Angeles, California, less than ten miles from his second wife, Beatrice Bovee Johnsan, now a Hollywood socialite whose soirees made the newspaper thanks to the wealth of her new husband.  

    An application was submitted by an anonymous person to the Veterans Administration requesting a headstone for Harry at Los Angeles National Cemetery; he had died two months after the end of World War II, twenty-five short years after his military service ended following World War I. 

    Emma and Harry’s daughter, Anne Minturn, had been given a research assistantship at Harvard and Emma decided to apply for a job in nearby Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind. She called Perkins to set up an appointment for an interview, but since Emma’s teaching credentials had lapsed, the only job available was an office secretarial position for the bursar. 

    The bursar was extremely helpful and asked Emma what type of job she was really looking for. He suggested she go to The Statler Hotel in Boston the following week to attend a meeting of administrators from various schools for the blind; he arranged for Emma to meet some of the superintendents. She met with Dr. Francis M. Andrews from the Maryland School for the Blind. 

    Emma told Dr. Andrews that she had presented a speech twenty-seven years ago at a conference on his campus. She remembered how beautiful the grounds were - lawns filled with magnificent elms and oaks, an orchard, woods filled with birds, wild flowers, and a brook running through the forest. At 19 years old, she had sat by the brook to practice her progressive presentation that she later gave to hundreds of educators dedicated to working with the blind.

    The  vacancy at the Maryland School for the Blind was for a dietitian. She was not a dietician, but she no longer had a teaching license and the Superintendent convinced her she could do the job until something became available that she preferred. She asked about budgeting and he replied that as long as she fed the children, the teachers and staff well, there would be no problem.   She accepted and stayed at the school until she retired in 1972.

    But, Emma would not rest on her laurels. She began lobbying her Superintendent to create a new position called  “Home Visitor.”  The Home Visitor would travel the State of Maryland to advise and counsel mothers of babies born prematurely who developed blindness. Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) beat out venereal disease after the advent of penicillin as the leading cause of childhood blindness.  

    The Home Visitor would teach the mothers how to teach their children until they were old enough to attend school. The Home Visitor would provide resources and referrals for the families of children with vision problems and would go from town to town to seek out new babies who qualified for the services.  

    After the position of Home Visitor was established, Emma nominated herself for the job.  The Superintendent hired her and she spent the next twenty years as the Maryland School for the Blind Home Visitor. She traipsed the state from north to south, east to west in her automobile, no longer needing to take a train nor a horse.  She hand typed a memoir after she retired; her last chapter oddly mimicking her first chapter.

      Maryland School for the Blind

  In 1974, Emma went to live with her daughter, Dr. Anne Leigh Minturn, professor of social psychology at University of Colorado at Boulder.  Dr. Minturn’s publications included women’s and children’s issues, cross-cultural perspectives and extensive research she gathered in India.  “Mothers of Six Cultures,” “Sita’s Daughters,” and “Rajputs of Khalapur” were a few of her publications.

    Emma’s obituary in 1985 was titled, “Emma Minturn, She Taught the Blind.” Her story of teaching in Alamogordo, New Mexico was premier, along with the “fact” that she had been a widow for many years.  Her adventures of riding trains, travelling horseback, riding in wagons, and in rented automobiles through the desert to make sure she found every blind student in the state defined her life. 

    Emma’s daughter,  Anne,  named after Anne Sullivan, teacher of Helen Kellar, died in an Egypt Air plane crash off Nantucket in 1999. She was seventy years old.  In her will, she bequeathed a collection of New Mexican artifacts, (gifts from parents of blind children to Emma), to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.  The Pueblo storyteller clay dolls, figurines, bowls, Navajo and Apache baskets, and other artifacts were each small enough to fit into Anne’s mother’s leather shoulder bag she'd carried onto trains, horse’s backs, and in rented cars.  Even the santo of Joseph, caretaker of children, now displayed in the Harvard museum, once fit perfectly into Emma’s well-traveled satchel.

 

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