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USS New Mexico’s Bell Finds a Permanent Home

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By the time the USS New Mexico battleship was decommissioned in 1946, her bells had rung out alarms of attacks and tolled the grief felt by those who survived as they buried at sea the shipmates who had given their lives. The “Queen of the Fleet,” commissioned in 1918 and christened with both champagne and the waters of the Rio Grande, had served as the finest battleship of the Pacific fleet and endured attacks by kamikazes and bombers. For her World War II service, the ship received six battle stars and is still recalled with awe — even though she was sold for scrap in 1947.

The story might have ended there but for those bells — one of which arrived on Friday, Nov. 16, at the New Mexico History Museum after a circuitous post-war life. That part of the story goes back to New Mexico Gov. Thomas Mabry, who began working in 1947 on obtaining one of the ship’s two bells.

His correspondence with Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan reflects the state’s desire to spare the bell from the scrapyard. Sullivan shared the goal, but it was a weighty one — 1,100 pounds, according to a Dec. 22, 1947, letter from the Navy chief.

“It was the practice of the Navy to outfit some of the older battleships with two bells, and the U.S.S. NEW MEXICO was so equipped,” he wrote. “It would give me much pleasure to donate the bell of the U.S.S. NEW MEXICO to you on behalf of the State of New Mexico, but before doing so, there are two conditions which must be fulfilled. The first is that Congress must approve all donations. … The second condition is that the State of New Mexico must agree to defray all expenses incidental to packing and shipping.”

Our correspondence file includes Mabry’s request to obtain the portion of the ship’s bulkhead that held a painted record of how many Japanese planes and shore installations were destroyed by the ship’s guns. If the letters are correct, the bulkhead made it to New Mexico, but we’ve been unable to trace where it went. We do, however, know what happened to the bell.

In 1948, Gov. Mabry and Mayor Frank Ortiz officiated at a dedication ceremony as the bell was placed on the Santa Fe Plaza. (The photo above was taken at the event by Robert H. Martin. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives 41320.) It stood on the Plaza for nearly 30 years. An early 1970s Plaza renovation forced its removal, but the Manuel Lujan Sr. building in the state’s South Capitol Complex gladly took possession of it. It hung below a stairway near the building’s vending-machine area until a recent renovation there forced yet another move.

This time, we were ready. We have the storage space, we have a small exhibition dedicated to the battleship and its nuclear-submarine namesake, and we have staffers who feel an emotional tie to the ship and its mates.

“It represents to much,” said Tom Leech, director of the Palace Press and curator of our lobby-area exhibit, A Noble Legacy: The USS New Mexico. “When I think about what that bell has been through — it’s rung general alarms when the ship was under attack. It rang when those guys were buried at sea.”

(To learn more about the ship’s ordeals and heroism, check out this mini-documentary, USS New Mexico BB40: The Drinan Diary, produced by the museum and Michael Kamins of KNME-TV in Albuquerque.)

Getting the bell delivered to our loading dock was one thing. Figuring out how to get it to our lower-level almost-hermetically-sealed collections vault was another.

First, staff members eyeballed it. Warily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, four of our burliest guys tried to move it …

 

 

 

 

 

… but couldn’t even budge it.

 

 

Finally, we resorted to good old hydraulics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for what happened to the second bell, we know that the University of New Mexico acquired it, possibly with the help of the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity, but we aren’t certain where it is. Outside the Student Union Building? At the football stadium? Inside the ROTC building? If you know, drop us a line. (And if you know what happened to its clapper, which our records showed “disappeared, mysteriously, during the early 1970s,” we’d be interested in that as well.)

Our hope is to put our bell on display as soon as we polish off some other priorities. One popular suggestion is to place it in the Palace Courtyard. We’ll let you know when that happens. In the meantime, we’re pleased and proud that an important part of New Mexico’s heritage is sharing quarters with so many other artifacts that tell the stories of who we are.

 

Picture This: Photo Archives Intern Lauren Gray

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Ask most of us why we work here and “I love history” is sure to be one of the top three reasons. That goes double for Lauren Gray, an intern in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, former intern in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, and recent graduate of the University of New Mexico’s master’s program in U.S. history (with an emphasis in Colonial History and a secondary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe).

Since January, Gray has been working as part of a three-year grant to digitize and preserve the photo collections. She has fastidiously and meticulously scanned and archived thousands of photographs, bringing an acute attention to detail, careful handling of fragile photographs and the ability to organize large amounts of data to the job. Her efforts play a very important role in bringing the Photo Archives into the digital age and allowing the public to view photos wherever they happen to be on planet Earth.

Her biggest challenge? Learning how to use new software and restoring old photographs that have been badly damaged by time.  “It’s extremely frustrating to see history deteriorating right in front of you,” she said while scanning a pinhole photograph. “But it’s also really rewarding to be able to preserve these artifacts and even restore them.”

Gray’s appreciation for the museum extends beyond the northeast corner of our campus. Her favorite exhibit was Fashioning New Mexico, the inaugural changing exhibition in the Herzstein Gallery when the museum opened in 2009. “I love tactile things and anything that brings history alive in an interactive and intriguing way.” (See the interactive web version of the exhibit here.)

Her favorite event is the Santa Fe Mountain Man Trade Fair because “mountain men are unique to American history, and it’s fascinating to see people keeping the tradition alive.”

Just how deep is her love for the History Museum? In September, Gray and her fiancée, Christian, were married in the Palace Courtyard. The couple shares a love of history and wanted to make a lifelong commitment there, Gray said, because of its long and diverse history and its beauty – a perfect fit for a happy marriage.

Theatrical Secrets Spill from a Long-Closed Trunk

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Almost everyone’s had a daydream about finding an old trunk in the attic, brushing off decades of dust, and opening it up to unknown treasures within. Minda Stockdale and Pennie McBride have gotten to indulge of bit of that fantasy with their work on an early 20th-century steamer trunk in the collections vault.

Originally acquired by the Museum of International Folk Art in 1964 from the estate of Felipe Perea, it was recently accepted into the History Museum’s collections. “It had been accessioned, but the items weren’t catalogued,” McBride said.

“It was kind of a mystery project,” Stockdale said.

The trunk itself is a beauty, with a roller top and adorned with mother-of-pearl and metal accents. But opening it and dealing with its many contents was a job McBride wasn’t sure she had time for. Then along came Stockdale.

Stockdale (that’s her at left, holding the costume for the Boy Angel), a 2010 art-history graduate of Colorado College, had worked in a Park City art gallery, but missed the history part of her degree. The museum brought her on as an intern, one who wanted a project she could experience from start to finish.

“The trunk was sort of sitting off to the side under a piece of plastic,” Stockdale said. “Pennie said, `This’d be a perfect project.’”

“It gives her experience cataloguing, inventorying, photographing, and rehousing, and she’s been doing a lot of research,” McBride said.

As for herself, she said, “I was totally excited about seeing the devil’s costume and the horns.”

The devil? Oh, that was just the start.

Since early July, Stockdale (who, yes, is the granddaughter of onetime vice-presidential candidate Admiral James Stockdale) has been coming to the museum three to five days a week to work with the trunk’s contents.

Perea, the former owner, was an actor, and the costumes appear to have been used in a local production of Las Pastorelas (Shepherds’ Tales), a traditional Mexican play typically performed around the Christmas holiday. A 1915 photograph inside the trunk (see it at below) shows the actors dressed up, with Perea as the devil, Felipe Boen as the boy angel, and Frank Montoya as the hermit. A note written on the photo didn’t say who played the reclining shepherd.

This was no ordinary devil’s costume. It’s festooned, folk art-style, with vintage Monopoly game pieces, silver medallions, an 1894 dog-tax tag and, for reasons Stockdale has yet to decipher, President Taft campaign buttons. The accompanying hat has goat horns, and the pants have metal bells sown down the sides of the legs.

Props used by the actors included a comically large rosary and silver sheriff’s star, and a knife that turned out to be a real bayonet made for a 1903 Springfield rifle.

“I’ve been e-mailing with Dr. Enrique Lamadrid at UNM because he’s been researching Las Pastorelas,” Stockdale said. While he’s been able to provide a lot of helpful information, she said, even he’s stumped by the connection to Taft, the president who signed New Mexico’s statehood bill in 1912.

Also in the trunk were items for a ragtag circus, including a hand-painted banner and velvet shorts possibly worn by the strong-man actor. “I don’t know much about those items yet,” Stockdale said, but added that the task of finding out keeps her going.

“I just get excited to come in every day and learn,” she said.

 

By George: A Letter from Our First President

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The Fray Angélico Chávez History Library recently acquired something you’d more likely expect at an East Coast institution. The Aug. 25, 1784, letter written by George Washington was donated by two Albuquerque men who said it had been in their family since 1937.

While it doesn’t reveal any state secrets or military stratagems, it is written in the hand of the man who presumably slept in no shortage of hotels and inns. Five years shy of becoming the nation’s first president, he was fresh off his American Revolution victories. He had been touring his considerable land holdings, some of which came his way courtesy of Robert Dinwiddie, who is referenced in the letter and served as governor of colonial Virginia from 1751-1758.

Librarian Tomas Jaehn said the Chavez Library has letters from other presidents, including Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, plus a letter that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Fray Angélico.

Materials in the library are available to researchers and other members of the public, Tuesday-Friday, 1-5 pm. (Enter through the New Mexico History Museum’s east doors.)

Here’s a transcript of the letter, sent to James Mercer and written at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. (Mercer was a member of the Continental Congress and later a jurist; his brother, George, was Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war.)

Dear Sir,
My Sister handed me your favor of the 18th. I thank you for the advice respecting the mode of conveying a title for the Lands I purchased at your Brother’s Sale, & will pursue it; but necessity will oblige me to postpone the matter until I return from my Western jaunt; as, from Company & other circumstances, no leizure is left me to rummage for papers before.

My letter to your Brother John Mercer, would have informed you, that I apprehended there were omissions in the account I transmitted, to my prejudice, as I had not been able to make any statemt of my Books, or to assort my Papers (wch by frequent removals to get them out of the enemy’s way, were in sad disorder) since my return. I am much obliged to you for the Memm taken from your journal, especially as I am in a way to be a considerable sufferer from my advances to obtain, & Survey the Grant of 20,000 Acres of Land under Dinwiddies proclamation. Many of the Grantees never having paid me a Shilling.

The enclosed letter will give you every information in my power respecting Vanbraam–when you have read it please return it to me, as it has received no acknowledgement yet. With very great esteem & regard I am–Dr Sir Yr most obt Servt
Go Washington

Our Lady Takes a Trip to the Doctor

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We told you recently about the Conservation Lab’s investigation into the probable painting-behind-a-painting of Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos (Our Lady of Saint John of the Lakes). Today, the painting took a trip to Albuquerque, where a friendly radiologist and his staff put her under their high-tech equipment for a look more intense than Museums of New Mexico equipment allows.

Dr. Jim Lowry (at left, with radiographer Cassie Barth) at El Camino Imaging Center invited Museum Resoures Division Conservator Mina Thompson and History Museum curator Josef Diaz to bring the painting in after another physician relayed our suspicions and limitations to him. He volunteered the use of his center’s equipment and staff, intrigued as we were at this unusual juncture of art, history and science.

Here’s the painting’s story, in a nutshell: Contract conservator Steven Prins had uncovered some evidence of an earlier painting beneath the ca. 1820 image painted by José Aragón while cleaning the waxy, sooty, flaked and cracked canvas. Thompson, the lead conservator in the investigation, aimed the Conservation Lab’s best equipment at it and found some evidence that indicated there were indeed two layers of paint containing different minerals — one sign that the paintings were done in different eras.

The painting comes from the New Mexico History Museum’s Larry Frank Collection, which includes numerous examples of Aragón’s bultos and retablos. Paintings on canvas were rare in his 1820-1850 creative arc, because the medium was difficult to obtain in northern New Mexico’s frontier conditions.

One theory holds that the initial painting came up El Camino Real and hung in a church or home where it suffered some kind of damage. At that point, Aragón may have been hired to re-create the image or develop a new one — an option he likely would have jumped at just for the chance to try something new.

At the imaging center, Lowry, Barth and lab manager Beth Rocco put the painting through a series of X-ray workouts of various intensities, each time crowding around computer screens to see what might be revealed. Early on, a ghostly image raised a flutter of intrigue: What appeared to be three lines of a signature or inscription glowed on the screen, tantalizingly. A different intensity of image, though, showed the lines to be part of the crown that Our Lady wears in the visible part of the painting, with the X-ray machine picking up on the lead or mercury contained in the red paint.

As further images failed to produce anything more conclusive than some curious dots, the technician who runs the center’s CT scan offered to put the painting into its tube during a rare 10-minute break in his patient schedule. With that test, we could photograph thin-as-skin layers of the painting, which we hoped would give us a better idea of what lies beneath.

Alas, there was no clear-cut answer, at least immediately. Thompson is taking a series of images back to the Conservation Lab, where she’ll piece them together and see whether she can make some better conclusions about the hands that have worked this canvas. “It’s going to take some interpreting,” she said. (Just so you know, and we’re not kidding here: Should any scientists at the Los Alamos or Sandia labs be willing to offer up even more high-tech equipment, we’ll be there.)

The effort became something of a group exercise at El Camino Imaging, with various physicians and technicians weighing in with their suggestions. Lowry admitted that he had spent some time on Google looking for other examples of X-ray paintings.

“This is fun,” Rocco said. “We had a little bit of experience a few years back when we did a CT on a mummy for a museum. Radiology gets to do some interesting things–not that our patients aren’t interesting, but this is out of the usual realm. We don’t have to ask this `patient’ to hold their breath.”

We extend our deepest gratitude to Dr. Jim Lowry, Cassie Barth, Beth Rocco, and all the other staff members who helped make today possible. In addition, we’d like to thank Dr. Margaret Chaffey and Dr. Malcolm Purdy. She doesn’t speak very often, so we can’t ssay for certain, but we’re pretty sure Our Lady had a good time, too.

Unlocking the Secrets of a 19th-Century Painting

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Conservator Steven Prins (left) inspects "Our Lady of the Lakes" with curator Josef Diaz.

Could another painting be lurking beneath the cracked surface of Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos (Our Lady of Saint John of the Lakes)? Conservator Steven Prins carried that question to the Conservation Laboratory of the Museums of New Mexico this week, hoping that some high-tech equipment and the help of the museums’ conservators might lead to answers.

The painting comes from the New Mexico History Museum’s Larry Frank Collection and was likely created around 1840 by José Aragón, a master santero whose bultos and retablos are on display in the museum’s Tesoros de Devoción exhibition. Josef Diaz, curator of Southwest and Mexican Colonial Collections, hopes to include it in a 2014 exhibition, Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World. First, though, he needed to see what it would take to clean it and preserve it, so brought in Prins to have a look.

The painting’s surface, waxy and coated with soot, has cracked and flaked to the point its underskin peeks out — something that tantalized Prins, who thought he spied the hand of another artist beneath Aragón’s. He did a bit of spot-cleaning with a cotton swab and mineral spirits, and a faint hint of black lines and red spaces appeared.

On Monday, Aug. 6, Prins and the painting came to the Conservation Lab, where Associate Conservator Mina Thompson aimed some high-tech devices at its surface in hopes of uncovering more information.

From inspecting the canvas and the stretcher’s construction, Prins can already make a few assumptions. “It suggests possibly Peru, but I don’t want to go out on a limb and say it’s that,” he said. “The construction is characteristic of a Spanish Colonial painting. … It looks like an old painting that was already damaged when it was re-primed and re-painted.”

Diaz suspects that an underlying painting — if it exists — was created in Mexico and brought to Santa Fe where it suffered some type of damage, most likely drips from one of our notoriously leaky flat roofs. Aragón may have been eager to try his hand at the canvas medium or may have simply accommodated the owners’ request that he repaint the original image or create a new one.

Thompson brought out two pieces of equipment: MuSIS, a multi-spectral imaging tool that interprets artifacts in different wavelength bands, from ultraviolet to infrared, in effect “seeing” it in layers; and the lab’s trusty pXRF, an X-ray fluorescence machine that can detect elements heavier than silicon in the periodic table. By comparing the machines’ results with those obtained from other artifacts, conservators can make reasonably solid assumptions about how things were made, with what materials and, sometimes, in what time period.

They took a series of images, double-checking them on a laptop screen as they went, trying to determine whether a shadow here meant X and a brightness there meant Y. Their best immediate results came when the pXRF was used to test the color red in different parts of the painting — the suspected “old” painting and Aragón’s. The patch of older paint proved to contain lead while the newer part showed mercury. That supports a hypothesis that the two were painted by different people, possibly in different eras, and maybe as many as 100 years apart.

But, Thompson said, “We have a lot more work to do.” They need to analyze more areas and compare the machines’ results with tests from other objects for further confirmation and they hope to take a leap into even more precise testing tools.

Technological advances tend to roll faster than most museum systems’ abilities to keep up, so equipment more wiz-bang than the Conservation Lab’s capabilities are needed to firm up our knowledge of Our Lady.

Now that they know the painting’s likely holding onto a secret, Thompson, Diaz, and Prins are hoping to take it to a medical facility’s imaging technology as a next step.

The goal is to know more of the painting’s story; no one expects to find a masterpiece so fine that it’s worth removing the Aragón painting to reveal it. Diaz is particularly impressed with the fine details and gracefully simple expression that Aragón achieved on Mary’s face. Prins is impressed with Aragón himself.

“He was not at all influenced by formal Spanish painting,” Prins said. “He didn’t give a hoot about what was going on in the academies. These were folk artists with no pretense to academic style. They were their own counter-culture, and that’s one of the great things about them.”

 

Contested Homelands and the Broken Legacy of Pecos Pueblo

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Long before the Spanish colonists and, later, the Santa Fe Trail riders, the Pecos people made a home in a valley of buttes ringed by mountains about 17 miles east of present-day Santa Fe. What happened to them over centuries of encounters with other people, combined with cycles of drought, periods of epidemics, and changes in economies typifies two of the most important points learned by teachers participating in a program at the New Mexico History Museum this month.

The first is that the disruptions experienced by people across this desert land created wounds that still bear visible scars.

The second is that the resilience of those people’s desire to connect their hearts to a physical, geographical place cannot be broken.

“Contested Homelands,” a week-long program led by University of New Mexico Professor Rebecca Sanchez and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, held two sessions at the museum, reaching a total of 80 teachers. Besides helping teachers from throughout the nation learn how to reorient their notion of how North America was settled, the sessions aimed to put a definition on querencia, a Spanish term that means “home,” but so much more. A place of identity, of heart, and of memory. A place where our stories are told, understood, and embraced.

They heard lecturers and panelists, they tried their hands at traditional crafts, they took walking tours of downtown Santa Fe. And to wind up their week, they took Friday evening tours of Pecos National Historical Park, guided by History Museum Director Frances Levine, who has conducted extensive research on the pueblo’s ethnohistory and who wrote Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries (University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

Originally called Cicuye Pueblo and renamed “Pecos” by the Spanish, the pueblo was a gateway to the great plains, serving as an important trade post for Native peoples, then Spanish colonists, eventually seeing the Santa Fe Trail come within hand-waving distance of its boundaries. At its height, 2,000 people lived in a sprawl of multi-storied buildings, marked in the Spanish colonial era by one of the largest mission churches in the region. (Some interesting architectural renderings of what the pueblo might have looked like at its height are here.)

The mission was destroyed in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, then rebuilt various times over the coming centuries, sometimes with cobblestones, sometimes with adobe bricks. The pueblo’s population fell victim to a variety of stresses — raids by other tribes, smallpox and cholera, drought and starvation. By 1838, fewer than 20 Pecos people lived and were forced to make a difficult choice: Stay in a fragile and lonely land or join forces with the only other pueblo that still spoke their Towa language. They chose the latter and that year walked the 80 miles west to Jemez Pueblo.

Bloodlines have long since mixed, but even today at Jemez, Levine told the teachers, you can find puebloans who nurture a dream of returning to this querencia. Ceremonies are still held at the site, including an annual event with Saint Anthony, patron saint of the mission. In 1999, the skeletal remains of thousands of their ancestors, disinterred by archaeologists and stored for decades at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, were returned to the valley in a ceremony fraught with emotions.

After a picnic dinner in a shady grove near the ruins of the mission, the teachers gathered under a ramada to hear Ranger Eric Valencia talk about the resistance, accommodation, and inevitable change that happens whenever people of different cultures encounter one another. What they also heard, though, was Valencia’s version of querencia.

He grew up in the Pecos Valley, he told the teachers, and first descended into one of the park’s reconstructed ceremonial kivas as a four-year-old Head Start student. Besides falling into the thrall of the kiva’s mysticism, he said, he was taken by the flat-brimmed hat of the park ranger and knew, even then, that one day he would work there, too.

“As you leave here from here today or tomorrow,” he said, “I hope you return to your homes changed. I hope you return with an appreciation of what it is to live in such a harsh land as New Mexico. And I hope you encourage your students to visit their national parks. Tell them that when they see one of these arrowheads (the logo of the National Park Service), they are in one of the most special places not only in that area but in the whole wide world.”

 

A Centennial Letter: The BLM Boosts NM Communities, Shovel by Shovel

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For his part in the New Mexico History Museum’s Centennial Letters Project, John E. Gumert, a retired BLM worker now living in Ingram, Texas, sent us the most delightful remembrance of communities that were changed by an early 1960s idea from a president who didn’t live to see the outcome. We like it so much that we’re sharing it in full, illustrated by images from the Bureau of Land Management’s website. (There’s still time to send us your remembrances for the project–describe your life in this, the 100th year of New Mexico statehood, or something about your life or your family’s that fills in the gaps for future historians. Send the letters to Centennial Letters Project, New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe, NM, 87501.)

A Shovel-Ready Project

By John E. Gumert

When I hear the term “shovel-ready projects” or references to employment with funding by the 2009 stimulus bill, I flash back in time to a real “shovel-ready project,” when I worked for a federal agency in New Mexico, in 1962.

It was Thursday, November 1, 1962, Albuquerque. Six of us U.S. Bureau of Land Management employees, about half the staff, were eating lunch, when we had a telephone call from state headquarters, Santa Fe. We learned that President John F. Kennedy had just authorized $400 million, for a nationwide accelerated public works program (AWP). We had our own wish list, had talked and planned, but with little funding, we had not been able to get this work done.

Our state office did not know how much funding we’d get, just that President Kennedy wanted projects started immediately, with photographs of workers on his desk in Washington, D.C., on Monday, November 5, when he would officially announce the program’s beginning.

Our orders were, “Don’t worry about purchasing or hiring rules. This is immediate.”

In the BLM office, I was range manager.

Wild Rivers Area of the Rio Grande Gorge

Our responsibilities were for one-and-a-quarter million acres of public lands, north of Albuquerque to the Colorado border. The late Claude Martin was district manager.

I’m left to tell the story. That afternoon, with enthusiasm, we discussed possible projects for northern New Mexico: range improvements, especially in the arid Rio Puerco watershed; forest work, thinning and reseeding fire breaks; recreation development, not even a program in 1962.

We contacted the New Mexico State Park Division, which had a plan on its shelf to develop recreation facilities along the Rio Grande, where the river ran swiftly through a deep canyon. Yes! We were definitely shovel-ready. This became our priority project for the BLM in New Mexico, with NM Parks providing its plan and a staff member.

By 4 pm that day, I was driving a BLM pickup to Taos, with orders to buy wheelbarrows, shovels, picks, hand tools for 100 people. Occasionally, I heard the bulky mobile radio in the pickup crackle, with voices coming through static to tell me that the state employment office was announcing hiring processes. They would open a hiring hall in Taos Plaza at 8 am, Friday, just hours away.

From Taos’s two hardware stores, I bought with government purchase orders the stores’ entire stocks of wheelbarrows, shovels, picks, canteens, first-aid kits, heavy gloves. I stayed in Taos, to watch and take photos, with a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera, of the hiring. A BLM team arrived. The late Walt Stone was named project director. We decided to set up a second project, forest improvement, near Peñasco, NM, with Jack Dossett in charge. He’d been pushing for needed work there.

On Saturday, November 3, I guided a school bus filled with our first workers to the Rio Grande site. I knew of an old sheep trail down from the mesa to the river. This made sense as a route for a hiking trail. It’s called The Chiflo Trail, and it is about 2,560 feet in length, with an elevation drop of 320 feet.

The late Les Lawrence, a BLM employee who had worked with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the late 1930s, came out to help survey and run levels to meet trail standards.

On my mind was the order, “Photos! President Kennedy wants photos by Monday!” This was pre-computer days. I knew telephone, telegraph, teletype as modern communication. I loaded film packs into that Speed Graphic. I tried to become camera-ready. The BLM public affairs officer, Doyle Kline, came to the site. He took more photos showing shovel-ready, shovels working, magnificent scenery.

Late Saturday evening, I drove from the site, nearly 200 miles south to the Albuquerque airport, carrying a bag of undeveloped film. I hurried through the airport building (no security) to get the bag onto a 9:30 pm flight. In Washington, D.C., a BLM employee met that plane, had the film developed. Photos of the workers at our Rio Grande project were on President Kennedy’s desk, Monday morning, on time.

La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site

At the height of this accelerated works program, about 300 workers were employed in the Albuquerque district, plus several contractors with heavy equipment. Besides the Rio Grande and Peñasco projects, we had funding for range improvement in the Rio Puerco and other sites. For recreation areas, this was the beginning—openings to the public and later designation of the Rio Grande as a Wild and Scenic River.

We discovered projects that we had considered, had hoped for, that were finally possible, because we were shovel-ready. We cooperated with other agencies, and found people who were motivated to work. One of my most interesting times was going north to Fort Carson, Colorado, with BLM friend Jerry Kendrick, to pick up eight surplus three-quarter-ton GI trucks, World War II vintage, loaded with hand tools. We put those to good use in northern New Mexico.

On April 16, 1963, President Kennedy recognized our programs’ success. He asked Congress for an additional $500 million. Congress denied more funding. The work had to end.

On November 22, 1963, Jack Dossett and I were in Peñasco, passing out final checks to about 30 workers. We could see how the income had made many changes, not just in our projects, but also in the lives of hundreds of people who had been employed. Throughout the area, we saw sparkling new tin roofs on adobe houses, new pickup trucks, heard good news about local economies.

The small black-and-white TV in the café where we sat with workers sputtered out a bulletin, bleak news from Dallas, Texas. As we drove back toward Albuquerque, our BLM radio crackled to confirm our nation’s loss of President Kennedy.

White Mesa Bike Trails

Today, I can stand on the rim of the Rio Grande and look out at what was once a sheep trail, and now is a small part of a well-used recreation area. I can see visitors aim digital cameras to send photos around the world, immediately. I can hear them describe, on cell phones, what they see, what their plans are. I can watch them explore this place, their own, their public lands.

I want to remind them. “First comes the dream.”

And to each, I want to shout, “Are you shovel ready?”

 

Today, 50 New Mexicans Became the Nation’s Newest Citizens

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The New Mexico History Museum proudly hosted a naturalization service this morning for 50 people from 15 countries who packed the 200-seat auditorium with even prouder family and friends. We’ve wanted to hold such an event here since opening in 2009 and we got to the finish line on two important occasions: Flag Day in the Centennial of the year New Mexico became a state.

“New Mexico became a state only after a long struggle,” said Frances Levine, the museum’s director, who acknowledged before beginning her remarks that “You are making me cry.”

“American statesmen were not sure that our citizens could find a place in the nation. After all, many people then living in New Mexico did not speak English, and others did not hold religious beliefs that were common in other parts of the United States. When we did become part of these United States, we brought a different perspective on American History. No longer were the pilgrims our only forefathers, so too were explorers who came from the south, bringing Spanish traditions to this far northern frontier. We added many Native American peoples and their rich traditions to the American nation. Today, this ceremony is yet another way in which we celebrate the rich blending of cultures that happens when people of many nations join together to form a more perfect union.”

Those being sworn in under the authority of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service were young and not-so-young and represented the nations of Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

“America means freedom,” Chief U.S. District Judge Bruce L. Black told them. “The freedom to pursue your dreams. … We are all immigrants, with a few exceptions of Native Americans. Our country is constantly enriched by new immigrants.”

Among those being sworn in were two men who have already protected our nation as members of the U.S. military. Carlos Jose Vergara Alegre, from the Philippines, served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps from October 2002 until October 2006. And  Mario Alberto Vazquez Andrade, from Mexico, served honorably in the U.S. Army from September 2006 until June 2010.

In honor of Flag Day, the new citizens were given miniature flags as they signed in. But as a special treat in honor of the Centennial, the History Museum gave them a second miniature flag with just 47 stars–a remembrance of taking the oath on the anniversary of New Mexico becoming the 47th state.

“Our flag tells our nation’s story. It is a story of struggle and perseverance, of idealism and opportunity,” said Veronica Gonzales, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. “Those are themes that we Americans embrace. And those are themes that many of you share, as indicated by the hard work and dedicated that have led you here today.”

We all celebrated afterward with lemonade and cookies in the lobby (thank you, Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico), while the nation’s newest citizens got a head start on their voter registration, Social Security sign-ups, and new passports. Having the building filled with so many happy people, their parents, their children, their sisters and brothers, lifted our spirits into the stratosphere.

If all goes well, the History Museum will become an annual host of Citizenship Day. We wish all of the participants the best as they enter this new phase of their lives.

100 books, 56 cameras and 6,000 pinhole photographs

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Mysterious, artistic, and as low-tech as an oatmeal box, pinhole photography has captivated everyone from schoolchildren to professional photographers for more than a century. The Pinhole Resource Archives, the world’s largest collection of images, books and cameras, just joined New Mexico’s largest archive of photography, the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.

The collection was a donation from Pinhole Resource Inc., which is based in New Mexico and led by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer. (The image at left is “Brooklyn Bridge, New York City,” by Ilan Wolff, 1987. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives HP.2012.15.369.)

“In looking at other possible repositories for the Pinhole Resource Collection, we felt the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives had a tremendous web presence, which would make the collection accessible to people worldwide,” Renner and Spencer said in a prepared statement. “In addition, with the staff’s enthusiasm and interest in pinhole images we felt the collection would have a good home here in New Mexico.”

The Photo Archives has already digitized hundreds of the images, which can be searched here (click on “Browse Pinhole Resource Collection” or type the word “Pinhole” into the search box).

“The Photo Archives and the state of New Mexico is fortunate to be the repository for this world-class collection of pinhole photography. There is no other collection like it and is a tremendous addition to the resources made available to the public through the Photo Archives,” said archivist Daniel Kosharek.

Even in this digital age, pinhole photography remains an intriguing medium. Its continued popularity has been celebrated every April since 2001 with Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. The 2010 event drew 3,387 images from 67 countries.

An exhibition of images from this unparalleled collection of pinhole photographs, representing images from New Mexico and around the world, is scheduled for April 2014 Poetics of Light will coincide with Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

(The image at left is “Anne S. in front of Jack B.’s Pool,” 1984, by Willie Anne Wright. She was the first pinhole photographer to place Cibachrome positive photographic paper directly into her 11”x14” pinhole camera. Wright’s photograph, a five-minute exposure, graced the cover of the first issue of “Pinhole Journal” in 1985. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives HP.2012.15.763.)

In the 5th century BC, a Chinese philosopher noted the inverted image produced through a pinhole—an effect that led to development of the camera obscura and serves as the fundamental quality of pinhole photography. Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Leon Battista Alberti advanced the knowledge of pinhole camera obscura imagery, creating a basis and understand of one-point perspective. In 1850, Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, took the first photograph with a pinhole camera.  By the mid-1980s, a variety of pinhole cameras could be purchased by anyone who wanted to create images without creating the camera.

In its most simple description, a pinhole camera is a lens-less camera with a small aperture. The interior of the “camera” (which can be, yes, an oatmeal box…or a traffic cone…or the human mouth…) contains a piece of film that records the projected image over periods of time that can range from a second to a year.

When the atomic bomb test was conducted at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, Julian Mack, working for the Los Alamos National Laboratories, documented the explosion with a pinhole camera (image at left; Palace of the Governors Photo Archives HP.2012.15.775).

Pinhole Resource Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to pinhole photography across the globe, was formed in New Mexico in 1984 by Eric Renner. He began working in pinhole photography in 1968, while teaching three-dimensional design for the State University of New York at Alfred. Images from his 6 pinhole panoramic camera were shown in the first exhibition of the Visual Studies Workshop Gallery in Rochester, New York. Consequently, one of Renner’s images was included in the Time-Life Series The Art of Photography, 1971. Through exhibitions and workshops, he met pinhole artists throughout the world and worried that their work might become as lost as the thousands of images taken during the Pictorial Movement from the late 1880s to early 1900s.

After forming the nonprofit, he created the Pinhole Journal, and in 1989 was joined by Nancy Spencer, co-director of Pinhole Resource and co-editor of the journal, which ceased publication in 2006. Their collections included images from Europe, the Mideast, Asia and the Americas, books about pinhole photography, and dozens of pinhole cameras, one of which dates back to the 1880s.

The Palace of the Governors Photo Archives contains more than 800,000 prints, cased photographs, glass plate negatives, stereographs, photo postcards, lantern slides and more. Almost 20,000 images can be keyword searched on its website. The materials date from approximately 1850 to the present and cover the history and people of New Mexico from some of the most important 19th– and 20th-century photographers of the West—Adolph Bandelier, George C. Bennett, John Candelario, W.H. Cobb, Edward S. Curtis, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Nusbaum, T. Harmon Parkhurst, Ben Wittick, and many others.

The Archives actively seeks material from contemporary photographers as well in order to document the past 50 years of visual history in New Mexico. Recent acquisitions include works by Jack Parsons, Herbert A. Lotz, Tony O’Brien, Steve Fitch, David Michael Kennedy, John Willis, Ann Bromberg, and Cary Herz.