Part 1 - Emma Hamsher, Thoroughly Modern Twentieth Century Teacher

New Mexico Institute of the Blind - 1917

 The hero an individual admires says a lot about a person’s character.  But, educators have not often been high on the list of superstars.  Teachers have historically had marketing problems - Miss Frizzle on Disney’s Magic School Bus may be the most definable teacher youngsters know. Her catchphrase embraces a learning style:  Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy! Miss Frizzle's colorful dresses match the day's lesson with pictures, and her thematic earrings glow when she's about to start a new field trip.  

Mr. Rogers, of children's TV fame, is quite the opposite in his conservative cardigan, white shirt, and tie.  His big smile, soft spoken voice, and calmness are near saintly.  He once said, "... anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me".  Many former student have teachers who have been heroes to them, helped them find their purpose, helped them stay on course.  They often are the one adult who cares about them and motivates them to succeed.

Miss Emma Hamsher from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania was so inspired by the hero tale of Anne Sullivan, a teacher for the blind and deaf, that in 1917, at age 17, Emma took a train to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to become a teacher at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind.  Miss Sullivan became the inspiration for Emma and thousands of other young idealists to become educators. Emma admired Anne so much that she would name her daughter after her.

Anne Sullivan's history was told by her student in a book published in 1903 called, The Story of my Life by Helen Keller.  Anne was a legally blind woman whose parents were Irish Potato Famine immigrants. In 1866, when she was five years old, she contracted a painful bacterial eye disease, trachoma, which caused a series of infections and made her nearly blind. Her mother died from tuberculosis three years later and her father abandoned her and her younger brother two years after that. Her younger sister was left with an aunt. 

                      
(left to right) Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan                            Helen Keller's autobiography, 1903

Anne and her brother, Jimmie, were sent to an almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. Jimmie died from tuberculosis four months into their stay. In 1875, following reports of cruelty to inmates at Tewksbury, including sexual abuse and cannibalism, the Massachusetts Board of State Charities launched an investigation. The investigation committee included Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston.

Sullivan was sent to the Soeurs de la Charité hospital in Lowell where she endured several unsuccessful eye operations. The trachoma she suffered from causes the eyelashes to turn under the eyelid and scratch and irritate the corneas; pus drains from the red, swollen eyes and lymph nodes are swollen in front of the ears. It is a chlamydia based bacteria and is transmitted by flies in poverty stricken places - unwashed bedding, clothing, and hands help spread the most common cause of blindness worldwide.

 

When she was transferred back to Tewksbury, she begged not to be sent back to the ward with ill and insane patients; instead, she was housed with single mothers and unmarried pregnant girls. During a subsequent inspection of the almshouse,  Sullivan implored the chairman of the committee to allow her to go to the Perkins School for the Blind, considered the best school for the blind in the United States.  Within a matter of months, her wish was granted.

Anne Sullivan began her education at Perkins without reading or writing skills. She graduated at age 20,  in June 1886, as the valedictorian of her class. She was a feisty Irish girl who knew she had to speak up to be taken seriously.  She made friends with Laura Bridgman, the first blind and deaf person to graduate from Perkins and she learned the manual alphabet from Laura - a sign language transmitted by creating letters into the palm of a deaf-blind person’s hand.

The summer after Sullivan graduated, the director of Perkins School for the Blind was contacted by Arthur Keller, Helen Keller's father.  He wanted to hire a teacher for his seven-year-old blind and deaf daughter.  Sullivan was recommended for the position and she began her work in 1887 at the Keller's home in Alabama. Upon arrival, Anne argued with Helen's parents about the Civil War and over the fact that they had owned slaves.  But, she quickly connected with Helen and for the next 49 years, Sullivan went from teacher to governess to companion and friend.

Sullivan's curriculum was strict; she constantly introduced new vocabulary based on Helen’s interests by spelling each word out into Keller's palm.  Within six months her student learned 575 words, some multiplication tables and the Braille system. 

Sullivan encouraged Helen's parents to send her to the Perkins School in Boston in 1888 and stayed there with her. Sullivan’s  protégé became famous for her remarkable progress. Keller became the public face of the school, helping to increase its funding and donations and making it the most famous and sought-after school for the blind in the country.  

            Alexander Graham Bell, telephone and phonograph inventor, met Sullivan and Keller and was greatly impressed by their success.  Bell’s mother and wife were both legally deaf and he spent a lifetime trying to create inventions to make their lives easier.  He famously put his pocket watch against Helen’s cheek to feel its chimes to tell time. Bell donated funds to  send Helen to Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard University;  Anne accompanied her. Sullivan and Keller went on lecture tours under the auspices of the Y.W.C.A and both became global celebrities at the beginning of the 20th Century. 

        

            Emma followed the two women’s fame in newspapers and books. She decided to become a teacher for the blind. To be fair, Emma’s role models and career choices were limited during the “Progressive Era” she grew up in. Women had very few vocational options at the turn of the century. Domestic servants made up the largest sector of the female workforce; factory workers, store clerks, dress makers, nurses, and teachers were other income-producing possibilities for “the weaker sex” needing or wanting to work.  

       

             There was a “marriage bar” in the United States that persisted until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing hiring discrimination based on sex. The “bars” were based on the idea that married women should not be distracted from their home lives by a job and should not take a job from a man who needed to support his family. Female teachers at this time could not be married and were expected to resign before their nuptials because they would no longer be able to focus on their teaching with a man in the house!

        

            In 1916, Emma was completing her year of teacher training at Temple Baptist College in Pennsylvania. At the same time, Elizabeth Garrett, the blind daughter of Pat Garrett who shot Billy the Kid,  was finishing an eight year teaching stint teaching music at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind.  She would move to New York to begin a musical career and would become known as “The Songbird of the Southwest.” Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller began a speaking tour across the United States in 1916.  Meanwhile, Emma’s future husband, Harry Disney Minturn, was in Kansas City, having just married a young heiress whose father had been a successful pioneer physician in the city that straddles two state lines.

                                                                                             Elizabeth Garrett

             The Kansas City newspaper's story about Roby Singleton Minturn did not shock the local residents because they knew she had a reputation for being an unbridled filly. Roby had filed for divorce and petitioned to change back to her maiden name from her married name. She had married an advertising man who lived at the Densmore Hotel, Mr. Harold Disney Minturn. Her husband had a counter-lawsuit against his mother-in-law, and six other inlaws for $50,000 for causing alienation of affection from his wife. They also had a custody suit over a motor car - each claiming the other drove too fast and would crash the brand new automobile. 

        

            The couple had been married for less than a year when Roby filed divorce papers. The wealthy daughter of the late Dr. J.M. Singleton of Kansas City, admitted that she supported Harry financially. The couple tried to make reconciliation with a trip to New Orleans, but this failed. Harold dismissed his lawsuit in order to reach an undisclosed settlement from the Singleton family.  He promised to “get out of Dodge,” (Kansas City) and he said he planned to go to Pennsylvania to join the military with the U.S. 's looming inclusion in the world war.

 

In 1917, Emma and Harry met at the military base near her home several months before her departure for the West and his potential deployment. The whirlwind romance ended that summer with an engagement ring (slightly used), and promises to write. 

Minturn was training in Pennsylvania with the 334th Tank Corps as a mechanic when Miss Emma departed from Pennsylvania. She promised her fiancé, Harry, a man of medium height and medium build, dark brown hair and light blue eyes -according to his draft card, that she would marry him in five years. The war should be over by then and Harry could establish himself in a career while Emma worked at her dream job teaching high school at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind. She promised Harry that she would return to begin a life as a wife and mother. 

            High schools barely existed in the nineteenth century; then suddenly, because of new compulsory education and child labor laws, a quarter of all 15 to 18-year-olds were going to school.  Educators were suggesting that at least an eighth grade education was necessary in the new fangled world.  New inventions included the toaster, the tommy gun, tanks, movie cameras, the passenger plane, the bra, the zipper, the assembly line, and a summer candy that wouldn’t melt - the Life Saver!  Children needed more education for an increasingly complex mechanical and scientific world, and compulsory schooling became de rigueur. 

             Emma boarded her train for a three day trip to Alamogordo, New Mexico. The last night on board, there was a young mother with a very young child.  Several friends the mother had made en route stopped by and invited her to the observation car.   She left her child in the seat and went to the observation car with the other young people. The baby became restless and began crying.  Men in the car near the baby tsk-tsked.  Emma picked up the child and signaled the porter over to her. She said if he would make up a berth, she would put the child to bed.  He did, and in a short while the train car was once again quiet. 

            She was reading when a man sat down beside her saying, “That was a nice thing for you to do.”  She did not respond. He finally asked, “Are you afraid of me?”  She assured him that she was not and warmed up a bit; they had an interesting conversation until stopping in Tucumcari.  From there, he was taking another train crossing the mountains to the Mescalero Indian Reservation. 

    

            Meanwhile, the train taking her to Alamogordo was being filled with hundreds of gallons of water and heaps of coal.  The passengers went outside to stretch their legs by walking back and forth on the station platform.  She noticed a man in a large Stetson hat swinging his legs as he sat on the baggage truck, its long tongue stretching out to trip passers-by. When the engine on her train was filled with thousands of gallons of water and holding as much coal as it could bear, the passengers climbed into their assigned cars and were set to arrive the next morning in Alamogordo.

 

Emma arrived three days before the opening of school.  She was in awe of the grandeur of the desert and the mountains, the pure air and the exhilarating light.  She had arrived from a low altitude and was around 4,000 feet higher in altitude and was not used to the dry desert air.  A house parent invited her to play tennis but the game did not last long.  Blood streamed from her nose at the 30-30 score when she became a gory mess.  It looked like “murder on the tennis courts.”  

The following day the students were returning - all three New Mexico cultures were represented: Native, Spanish and Anglo. Superintendent Pratt gathered everyone and the students were turned over to the house parents. He called the teachers to the office. 

When the Superintendent was introduced to Emma, he joked that they were together in Tucumcari on Tuesday. She decided not to let him get away with the cheeky remark.      " Sorry,” she said.  “I didn't recognize you without your hat.”  The other teachers looked puzzled about the relationship of these two who had never really spoken before -  Mr. Pratt had just nodded while sitting on the baggage truck, swinging his feet in Tucumcari. He took her joke well and they would have a good working relationship for the next five years.

Transportation was not always reliable in the Tularosa Basin surrounding Alamogordo. There was a narrow gauge into the Sacramento Mountains, and during summers it was possible to rent a car or horse, but Emma wanted to explore the area and felt she needed a horse. She saw a sorrell listed for sale in the newspaper and she set off for the livery stable for a test ride.

 The horse had all of his teeth and seemed to have the appearance of being strong and healthy. She found he handled easily, so she let him out. They were going at a fast clip when, without slowing, the horse turned sharply to the right and slid on all four hooves to a hitching post in front of a saloon. The sorrel had put his head down on his way to the saloon and Emma lost her reins.  She grabbed the hair on his mane and  left the saddle head over heels, cartwheeling over the hitching post boots hitting the wall next to the swinging saloon doors.  

Two cowboys were heading out of the saloon at the same time.  They picked her up, dusted her off and asked her if they could buy her a beer.  She declined and  informed them that it was the horse's idea to stop, not hers. 

 One cowboy had been looking over the beast and announced that this was Jake's horse.  After they stopped laughing, they explained to her that Jake had left the community but had sold his horse before leaving. They explained that, rain or shine, day or night, going or coming, Jake and his horse would never pass the saloon without stopping for a drink. She climbed back into the saddle and took the horse back. She wondered where else that horse was conditioned to stop - places probably not fit for a school teacher! 

Several days later, Mr Pratt sent a message that Emma needed to come to his office. He laughingly told her that she had created quite a sensation and a great deal of gossip in the town about how she was dressed in her Tweed English riding habit (an long apron over pants) and her acrobatics at the saloon. The story had probably improved with the telling.

He suggested that until the ladies in town got to know her, she should probably ride in a full split skirt, so they wouldn’t know she was riding astride. She eventually found a horse that didn’t stop at saloons, ordered a split skirt from the 

Sears and Roebuck Catalog, lowered her stirrups, and rode around the countryside without creating the hullabaloo she had first ridden into town with. 

        English Riding Habit                            Students in front of New Mexico Institute for the Blind

                                                    View of Institute for the Blind from Alameda Park

To be continued…

The Bomb: Sending Arecibo’s Message of Breathing Caesar’s Last Breath - a New Mexican’s Musings and Family History Lesson

 Sending Arecibo’s Message of Breathing Caesar’s Last Breath -

 a New Mexican’s Musings and Family History Lesson

Fermi’s Theory devised on July 16, 1945  Trinity Site, NM 

Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American physicist,  simplified the problem of the order of magnitude estimation in physics at the 1945 Trinity test site, less than a hundred miles from my family’s farms in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico.  Before and following the Gadget’s test, Fermi correctly predicted and calculated the power of the first atom bomb using shredded paper. 

While observers at the test site beheld the searing golden, violet, gray and blue explosion of light - ten times brighter than the midday sun - Fermi scrutinized strips of paper he had placed at the periphery of the blast and then measured the distance they traveled when the air pressure from the explosion reached them.  His estimation corresponded exactly to the measurements produced by precise instrumentation - greatly surprising his fellow scientists. 

During Fermi’s scrap paper chase, the scientist missed the beauty and clarity that exposed each crevasse and ridge of the surrounding San Andres mountains and the Capitan and Sierra Blanca peaks; he ignored the 1,200 ft. diameter fireball, the same temperature of the sun, that rose over 10,000 feet into the high desert sky. 

At exactly the same time, less than a hundred miles to the southeast, my grandfather was starting a pre-daylight breakfast of biscuits and gravy peppered so intensely it looked like a black constellation on a white sky.  He said the morning became so bright that it couldn’t be described with words - the dark sky splitting open into light so bright it felt electrical - and then the glare suddenly fell back onto itself into darkness.  

The Las Alamos assemblage at the Trinity Site were spellbound by the test’s success. After the emergence of light and the disappearance of sound, there were cheers and the participants congratulated each other and shook hands. The nearby farmers, ranchers, Mexican villagers, and Apaches were told an ammunition dump exploded at the nearby White Sands Proving Ground - just the beginning of many lies, thievery and collateral damages inflicted on them in their fateful proximity to the military base.

In a later casual conversation with fellow scientists back at Los Alamos Labs, Fermi analogized about the distribution of his scattered paper scraps, the equal distribution of atoms in our atmosphere, and then simply clarified his proposition by postulating on how we all breathe Caesar’s last breath. 

The physicist explained that every atom on the planet has been here forever and when we take a single breath, we intake a single molecule from Caesar’s last exhalation. He wrote his equation on the blackboard, and then he left to meet his wife, Laura, for dinner.

Enrico and Laura Fermi both had salmon and sour cream sauce for dinner. They washed it down with a crisp, lemony, Vermentino bottle of wine.

2049 years earlier - Ides of March,  44 B.C. - Caesar’s Last Breath

On a perfect 63 degree day in the Roman Forum, Julius Caesar was circled by Senators hiding their knives in the folds of their togas; Caesar blocked Cassius’ first stab toward his shoulder and prepared to battle the twenty-three assassins around him. "Why this violence?" Caesar stammered.  Upon seeing his dear friend, Brutus, colluding with the murderers, Caesar covered his face with his toga and cried with unbearable grief at his friend’s betrayal.  

Two dozen knives blindly slashed around Caesar, some slicing and puncturing fellow conspirators’ faces, arms, chests, thighs; rivulets of blood streamed into Senators’ bodily crevices, clumped on their old scars and hair, and dripped stickily into their sandals. Caesar gasped in fresh air and spat out a gory, stale final gasp -  expelling atoms which began to evenly displace into Earth’s atmosphere.  His death rattle shook atoms from Caesar’s breath into Brutus’s heaving lungs. "Peace, freedom, and liberty!" Brutus roared as his friend fell and the rattling of knives ceased.

As successive battles augured badly for Rome, a civil war brewed in Marcus Junius Brutus’ chest.  He plotted a delusory attempt to save the Roman Republic but haunting consequences accompanied murdering his beloved companion; he did not comprehend that every atom on the planet had been here forever, that with each single breath until his own self-demise, he would intake a single molecule diffused from Caesar's last exhalation.  

In due course, weighted with the recognition of his naivete, burdened with the brutal tonnage of his shame, and seized by the impossibility of saving Rome from itself, Brutus surrendered onto the sharp point of his own sword and gasped in molecules of his beloved companion’s breath, which mingled with his own, which commingled back out into the atmosphere. 

Side Bar

Jesus and Judas would inhale atoms of Caesar’s breath in their day, as would Africans and Vikings, royalty and slaves, infidels and true believers, dogs and cats. Every atom that has ever been here does not practice discrimination; they evenly displace without ration, allocation, commission or dividend.  Incessantly, atoms respire into water and sugar and release to grow a talon on a raptor or fuel the fabrication of tusks on an elephant. Every atom that our ancestors breathed in and out, every atom that we are built of, is still held tight here by Earth's gravitational pull - so, please take your due.

Ovid wrote, “The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases.  From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes.” From the atoms we bequeath - salmon leap, hawks uplift, bears sleep, fawns slip onto earth, ink dots paper, dust stirs, musical notes form, floods cross plains.

Fourth Wall 

I’m going to break the fourth wall here to tell you that this rambling was initially written as a first draft of an eulogy and sat unfinished and undelivered due to the plague.  It resurfaced after watching Oppenheimer with my mother.  We ate popcorn during the movie and she had water and I succumbed to a rare, crispy diet Coke (which Mother repeatedly says will destroy my bones). There is no profound moral in this undelivered encomium which was merely an attempt to say, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust; a fancy pants contrivance in hopes of significance.

Post Script

4.4 billion years ago, carbon arrived on Earth - probably due to a car-crash-like event between earth and a small, embryonic planet.  Stony-iron meteorites fell hard onto and into Earth and it was the beginning of something big - relatively - as Einstein (as played by Tom Conti in Oppenheimer) would say. 

4.4 billion years later - mas o menos - in 1954,  Ann Hodges was taking a nap on a sunny afternoon in Alabama when a meteorite traveling 30,000 mph crashed through her roof and bounced off her hip, creating a bruise which was uncannily the size and shape of a pineapple.  

During that same year, 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was being probed about his loyalty to the U.S. due to his flirtation with commies fifteen years prior.  

During the same year, 1954, my parents, living a mere 75 miles from Trinity Site, where Oppenheimer’s Gadget was first tested, were expecting the first of their Baby Booming brood - me - a fact that my father said was made possible because at the time of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his Naval ship, the New Jersey, was headed to Japan and he swore that the bombs saved his life by ending the war.  

In 1945, under the unforgiving rule of the Emperor and Imperial Japanese Army, around 250,000 Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Indonesians were dying each month. Nearly a  million Japanese men and thousands of kamikazes (plane, torpedo, boat, frogmen) were positioned in anticipation of the U.S. invasion of Kyushu scheduled for November 1.  It was estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed or wounded at the upcoming confrontation. According to accepted military doctrine, an amphibious force must enjoy a three-to-one manpower advantage over dug-in defenders onshore. In fact, the Navy would have faced a one-to-one disadvantage if they had landed on the shores of Kyushu.

In August 1945, most Japanese were living off meager diets. By Christmas, blockaded Japanese would have been starving to death by the millions. The army, with their stockpiled food, would starve last.  

One bomb was not enough to disintegrate the Japanese military’s fanatical resolve nor the emperor’s commitment to his own self-regarding, self-preservation. The second bomb and the threat of more bombs offered a face-saving excuse to surrender—a glimpse into a sky splitting open a light so bright and electrifying the heavens so unimaginably, would make the Japanese surrender and allow my father to survive and return to New Mexico to participate in the next behemoth boom - the Baby Boom.  

Side Bar

New Mexico provided more military volunteers and suffered more casualties than any other state per capita. Patriotism ran high even in marginalized Hispanic and Native communities. The Navajo code talkers secreted military communications to commanders. 1,800 New Mexican troops fought the Japanese invasion of the Philippines just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor; New Mexicans died in droves during the subsequent Bataan Death March - 900 died, 900 returned to the Land of Enchantment.  And my father, at 17,  ran away from his Sacramento Mountain home, less than a hundred miles away from where the bombs had been tested,  and hired a woman to pose as his mother to sign the papers that allowed him to join the Navy immediately instead of waiting a year until he turned 18.

Lastly, the Arecibo Message

The Arecibo Message is an interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth that was sent to the globular cluster Messier 13 (M13) about 25,000 light years from Earth.  The message was sent in 1974 from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.  It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement rather than an attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials. When correctly translated into graphics, characters, and spaces, the 1,679 bits of data contained within the message describes our DNA, our understandings of science, and includes Fermi’s order of magnitude estimation - aka Caesar’s last breath.

In conclusion,  there are atoms that conspire, ones that inspire.

Ann Hodges might have been inspired to use her time more productively than taking a nap if she’d known that space debris has a difficult time hitting a moving object; one never knows when a star-dust laden meteorite is going to car-crash through your roof. It might be 4.4 billion more years before another woman lying on a couch receives a pineapple shaped bruise from a space rock.

My father was inspired to believe the atom bombs saved his life from a self-regarding emperor who conspired with an imperial army’s fanatical resolve to maintain an authoritarian military empire.  My future dad was grateful to not have to face the odds on the beaches of Kyushu. I’m inspired to believe we need to be constantly on the look-out for the Probability of a Series of Independent Imperialists, Fascists, and Fanatical Racist Supremacist Events.  Watch Out!

Robert Oppenheimer might have been inspired to tell Senators who conspired against him about Brutus’ misplaced, delusory attempts to save the Roman Empire.  As U.S. Senators brandied their career slashing knives against him, their name-calling schemes slicing and puncturing scientists’ reputations, their democracy destroying, self-serving machinations spewing rivulets of spittle into their aged crevices, clumping on old scars and thinning hair, and dripping stickily from their jutted chins, they were in fact unknowingly spewing out gory atoms of Caesar’s and Brutus’s final breaths.

“Peace, freedom, and liberty,” Oppenheimer might have howled at them during his character assassination. But relatively speaking, scientists and Senators are not always aiming at the same target…conspiring to inspire…splitting atoms…must be something in the stardust.

The Town Turkey by Clif McDonald

I was born in 1927 and the Stock Market crashed in 1929, so I grew up during the Great Depression in the Sacramento Mountains east of Alamogordo, NM. The mountain people, as we referred to ourselves, supplemented our food supply with meat from deer and wild turkey. Mountain people paid little attention to hunting season or hunting licenses. The Forest Service had the responsibility to protect the game but these laws were pretty lax for the local citizenry.

As a young boy, part of my duties was to keep meat on the table and not to use too much ammunition in doing it.   Out of necessity I became a very good shot at a very young age.  Each year just before Thanksgiving I had a flock of turkeys located and I would kill a couple for my family's festive dinner.  In those days everyone had a large cast iron pot in the yard to wash clothes. You would fill the pot with water, chop some wood and build a fire around the pot and boil the clothes. I needed hot water to dunk the turkeys in so I could remove the feathers and these clothes washing pots were perfect for this.  I would get the turkeys dunked, plucked and gutted - all out in the cold, fresh mountain air - and take them inside ready for my mother to cook.

After I grew up, I married the most beautiful, charming girl in the mountains and we moved down the mountain to town. In Alamogordo we lived at the Tinsley Trailer Park on Millionaire's Row - so named because our "modern" trailer could hook up to indoor plumbing and we did not require the bathhouse as the majority of the other residents did.

Despite our luck, our first Thanksgiving in town was traumatic.  Since we no longer lived in the mountains, we lost our unwritten right to hunt out of season and buying a turkey seemed to be a huge amount of money. My dilemma was solved when I learned of a civic club hosting a turkey shoot. In this contest, groups of ten people could each buy a ticket for one dollar and shoot at a target; the one with the best score would win a turkey.  I was the winner with a one-shot bull’s eye so I got my turkey for one dollar. I had the choice of a frozen turkey or a live turkey; since I had no experience with frozen turkeys, I chose the biggest, fattest, white-feathered live turkey available. It would just take a second to circumvent the "live" part of the turkey and get the gobbler in the truck.

When I got home my wife asked “How are you going to get the feathers off?”  I said, “No problem. I will use the hot water in the bathroom.”  Those of you who know what dressing a turkey and scalded turkey feathers smell like know that this was a very bad idea.  

Soon, a blood-poop-feather-mud-sour-metal odor began roiling out of the fogged-up bathroom in our little trailer house. I cut off the turkey’s feet and began scalding and plucking the creature in the shower.  The hot water from the water-heater under-scalded the bird and the feathers didn’t come out easily.  In addition to blood, turkeys have dirt and sometimes manure in their feathers,. A horrendous brown soup of hot water, blood, feathers, and manure stunk up the little trailer house bathroom; feathers and “parts” dammed up the shower drain, and I kept clearing out the sludgy, smelly drain to keep water from backing up. 

There was water everywhere and a giant mound of soaking wet feathers several feet high. I took the bird outside, clipped off the head and then began gutting.  At least I could breathe fresh air outside, but by the end of my endeavor, I was covered in mud, water, and blood.  Between me and the turkey, the smell was so strong I could feel my lunch thinking about making a return trip.

Our entire house smelled so sickeningly pungent that we had to eat Thanksgiving dinner out on the patio. The turkey skin was full of pinfeather pokes that couldn't be pulled out under water-heater temperatures. We opened all the windows and let our little trailer air out for hours and counted our blessings there on Millionaire's Row.  We have been married almost 70 years and ever since that first fiasco, we’ve had almost 70 Thanksgivings with almost 70 store-bought, frozen turkeys.

Thanksgiving in the Sacramentos

 Dear Dad,

This morning the air smelled like autumn and I noticed a few leaves beginning to change colors.  The fall season always reminds me of hunting turkeys with you.  You would grab the shotgun off of the back porch and invite me to go along.  Sorry I wasn’t the son that you probably wanted for a hunting partner, but you were wonderful to let me be your buddy.   I really didn’t enjoy hunting but the individual attention I got from you was worth the effort it took to search for those elusive birds.

You always seemed to know where they would be and always said that hunting turkeys was a skill few people had. Most hunters would accidently run across a flock but to set out to find a turkey was something else altogether.  Remember how you would caution me to be quiet and not walk in the dry leaves and to tread softly. I remember you stopping to listen and telling me not to breathe so loudly.  You would take that old cheap watch out of your pocket and turn the hands backward so it would stop ticking while you cocked your head at a funny angle to listen.  You taught me how to make a turkey caller from a sleepy grass straw. Turkeys would come to you but I never quite got the hang of it. Yes, I know you are supposed to suck on the straw to make the call
but it seemed I always ended up with a lot of spit and noises that were loud enough to scare a bear.  I remember a time you shot into a flock and turkeys scattered in every direction; you grabbed the caller and one old stupid Tom turned around and came back to you. He was on our dinner table that night.  

Usually after our long climbs up the mountain we would find a place to rest; this is when we had our best talks. I loved your stories about your childhood adventures in the Sacramento Mountains; you taught me the name of trees, plants and birds and how to survive in the wild. We talked about the boys I was dating and you gave me advice. Of course, I thought I knew more about boys than you did, after all, this was a new time and things had changed a lot since you were young.  It will soon be Thanksgiving and the juicy Butterball store bought turkey on our table will be delicious, but It will never replace the memories I have of a young girl and her dad hunting those scrawny, tough wild gobblers we put on our Thanksgiving table.

Your Loving Daughter,   Barbara  

Junction, TX by Clif McDonald

Junction, Texas

Emma Evans and Clifford McDonald

I was born in 1927 at San Angelo, Texas. My father was Clifford McDonald and my mother was Emma Evans McDonald. Milton McDonald, my older brother was known as Mack. My father was born at Roswell, New Mexico and my mother was born at Junction, Texas. My father died before I was a year old so I have no memory of him. Mother then married Alvy Smith; he had a son called Sonny who was much older than me and I very much admired my new big brother.

        In Junction I also had my Grandma McDonald and my Grandpa and Grandma Evans, my mother, Emma; Uncle Delmer, Aunt Margarete and Lola Mae. Aunt Lola was a great favorite of mine, she was only five years older than me and she had a very sweet personality that everyone loved. Everyone especially treasured Mother and Aunt Lola.

        On the McDonald side, I had Aunt Allie and Uncle Aubrey Sanders who had lots of kids. These cousins were Herbert Lee, Emma Dell, Odell, Henry, and Barbara Ann. My stepdad’s mother was Grandma Lettie Smith.

        I can remember Grandma McDonald telling me about living west of Roswell, New Mexico when there were trouble with the Apaches  and Grandpa moved the family back to Texas and he went back to New Mexico to get the cows and was never heard of again. I can remember living west of Junction near the North Llano River. There was a South Llano River also and these two rivers came together at Junction.

Evans' home near  Junction

        Pecan trees grew all along these river bottoms and along the small streams on our place but there was not much demand for pecans locally and most people let their hogs harvest them.

        During the early 1930’s during the Great Depression there was no money to be had so Daddy and Uncle Delmer, Mama’s brother,  got this idea to spend the winter gathering pecans and hauling them all the way to New Mexico and sell them house to house. He was intrigued with Grandma McDonald’s stories about New Mexico and wanted to visit the Sacramento Mountains in those parts. At my very young age of four, New Mexico sounded like a different world. It was about 400 miles away and everyone called it Mexico. Grandma Mack was the only person I knew that had ever been that far away.

Bodarc Store near North Llano River

Finally Daddy and Delmar  loaded up the pecans and made the rounds telling everyone goodbye. They expected to be gone for a couple of months and to me they were gone forever before they came back. I worried that they had gotten lost and would never find their way home again.

I was so excited when they returned. I said, “Daddy did you find those mountains?” He said, “Yes I did and you won’t believe how big they are and how tall the trees are. They have a train that comes into the mountains and gets logs and saws them up into lumber. We are going to move to New Mexico. I rented a place where we can graze some livestock and farm some land and has a house on it.” Mother wanted to know all about the house. We had a new brother prior to Dad leaving. His name was Alvie Junior, later known as Curley.
Our place is near Avis School and it is between Weed and Piñon. There is a store and post office at both Weed and Piñon. To the northwest is a small town called Cloudcroft and our nearest real town is about 50 miles away; it is Alamogordo and is the county seat of Otero. There were a few paved roads around Alamo but no paved roads that went all the way through Otero County. And all the roads in the mountains are unpaved. Well, we were used to that. Nearly all road in Junction, Texas weren’t paved either!

I had mixed emotions about moving. I didn’t want to leave my grandparents and cousins and especially Aunt Lola. I knew it was so far away it would be a long time before we could come back for a visit. And sure enough it was seven years before we returned to visit.

Well, we got rid of all our belongings on the North Llano River, loaded our truck and went into Junction and made the rounds to tell all of our friends and relatives goodbye. Everyone shook hands, hugged, and cried. Then we headed west.

Just before sundown we pulled off the road, built a fire, unloaded the chuck box, and cooked supper. Then we rolled our bedrolls and spent the night. In the morning we cooked breakfast and headed out again. Our truck broke down several times and Dad and Sonny had to work on it a lot and sometimes had to catch a ride to the next town to buy parts. We slept in our bedrolls every night and cooked every meal on a campfire, which was the normal way to travel in the early 1930’s. It took us nine days to make the 400 miles because the truck broke down so much. Finally Dad pulled up in front of our house at Avis and said, “Well, this is it. What do you think?” We all jumped out, looked around, ran through the house and cried and hugged each other. We were finally at our new home in the Sacramento Mountains.

A Most Memoriable Otero County Christmas - 1932

A Memorable Otero County Christmas - 1932 
(Told to me by my father, Clif McDonald, Nov. 2018)

My family moved to the Sacramento Mountains in Southern New Mexico during the Great Depression. We left our grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins in Junction, Texas - a town where the North Llano and the South Llano rivers join up to become the just plain old Llano River.  Daddy rented a farm in Avis, New Mexico, which was far away from our  home on the river's south fork. We loaded up our truck and we four boys, Mama and Daddy lined up to say our goodbyes. It was like a funeral when we left; everybody was crying and hugging and telling us to be safe in "Mexico." We set out on the Texas Pecos Trail, a couple of ruts set in dust, that would shake and rattle our teeth for the next 450 miles of our westward journey.

We stopped each night before dark to set up camp; unrolled our bedrolls, found kindling, made a fire, and cooked out in the west Texas desert. We'd have our supper and the next morning we'd eat the cold leftovers. Mama and Daddy would drink some cowboy coffee boiled in the coffee pot and we'd set off down the rutty road until our car broke down or until dusk, then start all over again the next day.  We made the trip in a little over three weeks but it felt like a year of waiting and stopping and fixing. When we finally got to our place at Avis, it was beautiful!  We had a house and a school nearby and we could farm and raise animals.  It was pretty close to Heaven. 

In 1932, there was a persistent drought in the Sacramento mountains; our potatos only grew to the size of shooter marbles which Mama would boil, then clap into patties and fry up into "bread" because we couldn't afford flour for real hot cakes or rolls. Beans and corn were also our staples, and chickens provided eggs and sometimes a Sunday dinner. Our farm was best at raising children; the number of kids in our family eventually doubled, despite losing two sweet boys who left to become angels in Heaven.  

In 1932 there wasn't any money for Christmas.  Daddy decided to cut a  wagon load of nice wood specially sized for cook stoves. His plan was to peddle the handy, time saving fuel to housewives  in the treeless, flatland towns nearby. My dad worked for  days sawing, chopping and splitting hardwood down to the perfect size to fit in the firebox of 500 pound cast iron, heat producing, water boiling, bacon frying, chicken and biscuit cooking contraptions. We helped load the wagon with the perfectly sized kindling and split logs. Daddy told us all goodbye then hauled his freight down the trail through the settlements of Pinon, Duncan, Hope, and on to the barren plains of Artesia - stopping at every house to try to sell his cookstove wood. 

 
After several days we began to expect him to return and we would look down the road to try to see his horses and wagon coming.  At night we would sit outside to listen for him.  We were about to give up one evening when we heard the rumble of wagon wheels and the clinking of trace chains.  We all ran down the road to meet him.  He stopped and we all climbed on the wagon asking, "Did you sell the wood, Daddy?"

"Nobody has any money," he said.  "But

I traded the wood for a load of apples."  We looked under the tarp and saw the most beautiful red apples we could imagine and we all got one and started eating.  They were sweet and crispy and juicy and we were so excited and so proud of our dad for making such a good trade.

    On Christmas Eve we hung our stockings by the fireplace and finally went to sleep.  We woke in the morning to the sound of a crackling fire in the fireplace.  We excitedly ran in and found some candy and peanuts in our stockings.  I also got a pair of shiny new shoes.  I put them on, laced them up and waited for daylight to see how fast I could run in those new shoes.  I thought to myself, "It just doesn't get any better than this!"


Every Christmas now I think of how hard Daddy worked to make a Christmas for us, how good a new pair of shoes feels and how much faster they can make a young boy run.  And, when I eat an apple during the holidays, I recall how the perfume of a thousand cold, sweet apples smells when a tarp is lifted from where once a load of chopped wood lay.