Las Cruces -- Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago this week, I started my three-year stint as the El Paso Times Las Cruces Bureau Chief. February 19, 1974,

“Bureau Chief” was a glorified name for a stringer. The “Bureau” was the green schoolbus I lived in with my dog. To connect a telephone, the phone company required a telephone pole, so I used a length of 4x4 wood. One very perplexed accountant asked editor Fritz Wirt why the Times was buying a telephone poll.

I was no newspaperman. My “writing sample” was poems. As a pro-civil-rights and antiwar radical, I was rather an exile, or self-exile, within my own country. I called the new gig “my crash course in middle America.” With hair down to my belt, I was quite a strange figure to the city commissioners when I plunked my motorcycle helmet down on the reporters’ table just below the dais. Mayor Tommy Graham immediately dubbed me “Captain Zoom.”

My first stories were about the airport (for which, then as now, the city administration had big plans) and the March 5 city election.

City Hall was that building on the southeast corner of Main and Church. Our beautiful County Courthouse was where the three County Commissioners met, in a tiny room you could fit maybe two-dozen onlookers into. The Courthouse also housed district court judges (just two then, not nine), magistrate court, and all county offices. The little jail was attached. The modest public hospital was across Lohman.

Travelers on Interstate 10 had to use Valley Drive and Picacho, to rejoin the interstate up by the airport. Our population was about 40,000, maybe 30,000 without counting NMSU students. Everything from near Telshor Drive to the Organs was desert. The Cox Ranch was the next dwelling East of town. Highway 70 to Organ was pretty barren. Beyond Main stood Tegmeyer’s Steakhouse a mile up the hill, and later a turnoff to NASA’s Apollo Site. A friend named A.J. once offered me a lot on Highway 70 for $50. I should have bought.

Tommy Graham, who ran Graham’s Mortuary with his brother, was our Mayor. Bob Munson was a City Councilor who became Mayor within months. An early story I covered was local hero Jerry Apodaca upsetting several others to win the Democratic nomination for Governor.

Soon, the Watergate Hearings were in full swing, and at least once the city council brought in a TV so we could all watch for awhile before the meeting.

The biggest motel in town was the Palms, owned by City Councilor Tommy Tomson. The Greyhound station was the modest building still on the northeast corner of Lohman and Campo. We had two drive-in theaters and two movie theaters on Main Street, but the Allen Theaters were a ways off yet.

When I bought a house on Ethel Street in 1975, it cost $17,000.

NMSU played football in an ancient little field right on University Avenue. Journalism was so casual that when the County Commission’s Friday meeting yielded approval of a county bond issue to help finance a new NMSU football stadium, subject to a referendum that would be the year’s biggest local political issue, the commissioners asked the reporters present to hold the story ‘til the official announcement Monday. Two of us refused.

It was a far smaller town. More of a community. A higher proportion of the population speaking Spanish. A town deeper contact with made me love.

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[The above column appeared Sunday, 18 February, 2024, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website ("When Las Cruces Was a Smaller Town"), as well as on KRWG’s website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM, streaming at www.lccommunityradio.org/).]

[I went from holding a series of part-time jobs to working very full-time, covering every aspect of the town. Never having been a reporter, I made up how to do it as I went along. Talked to everyone, took copious notes. In stories, quoted all sides liberally, expressing no opinions. Being objective was part of the job. It was easier than it might have been because the issues I cared about – getting us out of Viet Nam, integration, minimizing poverty and racism, and such – were rarely implicated all that directly in the local issues I covered. I’d not followed local politics, so I had no favorites. Quoting everyone worked wonderfully: readers smiled over the wisdom they or their allies had spoken, and shook their heads at how clearly I’d summarized the other side’s bullshit.]

[As in every small town, there were wrong things going on that some folks wished they could speak of, while more powerful folks wanted no such thing. I was helped along by not being allied with anyone. Many folks thought the mayor controlled the Sun-News. But the El Paso Times was out-of-state; and my crazy appearance – motorcycle bum with long hair and casual dress – convinced people that I was unlikely to succumb to pressure. So people told me things; and as people who told me things never got named or retaliated against, other people told me things. I had a lot of controversial and interesting moments.]

Some will wonder how it all happened, in a more technical sense. For the first year, I had no office. The schoolbus was it. The “bureau” was Nick the Dog and me. The telephone pole facilitated not only a telephone (which I hadn’t bothered with ‘til then) and a telecopier. That, far short of our modern gadgets but miraculous back then, meant that unless I was late with an urgent story, I could type it up, inserted in the machine, and the machine would produce a facsimile in El Paso. This was a precursor to the fax machine that soon became standard. That, dictation, and sending film down to El Paso by bus sufficed. I probably visited the El Paso office about once each month, for one reason or another.

And it was fun. Many stories were obviously required; but a lot of features were what I happened to came up. If I was curious, I asked. If I wrote about it, it was news. ]