The Enchantment of New Mexico: Tales of Resilience and History

Episode 107– You can also listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts, and Amazon Music

About the Episode

In this episode of the “I Love New Mexico” podcast, host Bunny Terry reflects on her personal journey, emphasizing the profound impact of New Mexico on her life. She shares her educational experiences at the University of New Mexico, highlighting the influence of Dr. Ferenc Szasz, a history instructor who inspired her love for storytelling and history. Bunny discusses her decision to leave school to raise her son and her eventual return to complete her degree. The episode underscores themes of personal growth, the importance of preserving stories, and the rich history of New Mexico, with a brief musical interlude celebrating the state.

Johanna graduating from UNM – since I couldn’t find the one of me graduating!

Episode Transcript

Bunny 00:00:03 Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry and I’m the host of the I Love New Mexico podcast. We talk about everything here. There are no boundaries. We talk to people who are from all corners of the state, people who are chefs, who are tourists, who are artists, who are Chamber of Commerce executives, and who are from ranch families that have been here for hundreds of years. New Mexico is enchanting, and it’s interesting. And I can’t believe I get to do this job. New Mexico is so amazing, and I invite you to come along for the ride on the I Love of New Mexico podcast. Thanks for being here. I recently did a podcast where I talked about the why and the wherefore and how this podcast got started, and I talked about how in 2009, I was following Gary Vaynerchuk, who said you should write about things that you love. And so, in my ultimate wisdom, I chose to write about New Mexico. And one of the fun things that happened is that as a result of doing that research and going back to my original blog post from 2009, I read a few of those posts that were, I got to tell you, not terrible writing and really pretty good stories.

Bunny 00:01:32 And this was the the one that I’m going to share with you today, was all about an instructor that I had at UNM. it I, I also recently did a podcast about my favorite elementary school teacher, and I thought, you know, we’re in that time of year when all of our kids have gone back to college, and it feels important to give a shout out to somebody who gave me. He didn’t give me a great love for New Mexico history, but really deepened it and taught me about primary documents and oral history. And I will be forever grateful to doctor Frank Sasse, who was a history instructor at the University of New Mexico. So I just want to share that old original blog post with you. I think those of you who went to the to UNM and who may have gotten a history degree, or just those of you who are interested in New Mexico history, might find this heartwarming. It it. I’m telling you, when I read it again, it made me cry. But let me begin with a blog post that I wrote in December of 2010, just a year after I had begun writing the I Love New Mexico blog.

Bunny 00:02:57 A lot of my readers know my personal story in Las Cruces in 1981. I was a first semester junior. Give or take a credit, or to at New Mexico State University. And I really loved college. Every minute of it. I was I had a work study job at the Rio Grande Historical Society, which those of you who are listening now to the podcast know led to, my finding photos of black Jack, black Jack Ketchum s hanging where he was decapitated in Clayton. I loved Las Cruces. I loved my view of the Oregon mountains on the eastern horizon. I loved going down to Capiz in La mesa and El Patio in Mesilla, and I lived in a little efficiency on the outskirts of Mesa. It used to be it was previously a bunkhouse, and it had been turned into three efficiency apartments. I loved living on the edge of a field of green chilies in the massive valley not far from settlements. Pecan farms. I love my friends. I love meeting for breakfast on Saturday mornings for green chili at dicks.

Bunny 00:04:15 And mostly surprisingly, I loved going to class. I was one of those crazy nerds who ate it all up, especially the history and English classes with their organized syllabi and their list of books that I had to finish before the end of each semester. Does that take you back? I loved the reading list that we got. I was having a great time and then inter life, I discovered that I was pregnant early in the second semester of my junior year, and in my characteristic variety is the spice of life. Let’s see where this road takes me. Fashion. I opted to quit school. I have my son Zachary, and start a new life elsewhere, which at the moment was in West Texas, which was its own sort of adventure. And when my lost Las Cruces in New Mexico State, friends who are shocked at my decision to quit school and have my baby said, but what about school? I’d reply, perhaps a little flippantly. It’s okay. I promised myself I’d finish college before this baby finishes high school.

Bunny 00:05:22 And then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, it was 1995. 14 years had passed. Zachary was in the eighth grade at the Albuquerque Academy, and by then we also had Johanna. She was four, I was single. We lived in a great sandstone Adobe house on Mountain Road in Albuquerque, and by day I was a paralegal for a lot of demanding but kind lawyers. By night I was mostly the queen of macaroni and cheese, Johanna’s baths, and Zachary’s homework, and my weekly dose of E.R., to which we were all addicted. It was a really nice life. We didn’t have any discretionary cash, but we had really good friends and a picnic table in the backyard under a honeysuckle arbor and two cats named Philip and Puff, and breakfast at the frontier restaurant at least twice a month. Four times a month? Who knows? But I thought about my degree a lot. I thought about how I miss those book lists and all those papers I’d been forced to write. I thought about how I always was a little sheepish when people would say, do you have your degree? I would say no.

Bunny 00:06:33 But mostly I remembered the promise that I had made half in jest, that I would finish college before Zachary finished high school, and very slowly, one class at a time, I decided to start chiseling away at my remaining credits. That’s when I discovered the history department at UNM. And eventually Frank Saz. he spelled his name f e r e n c. capital s z a s z. I had a couple of classes with professors like Paul Hutton and Virginia Scharff and Linda Hall, and in my last three semesters before graduation, I had classes with Doctor Sass. There are professors who love their subject, who feel passionate about the cause behind the stories and theories they’re sharing, and who feel that history is more a social endeavor than a linear chronology of fact. That was Virginia Scharff and Linda Hall. And then there are the professors who love the students, who probably, without thinking about it in concrete terms, believe that the most important thing they can do is impart something of true worth and true humanity to their students.

Bunny 00:07:49 That was Frank says, I hadn’t thought about Doctor Says for a while. Sometimes when I’m reading a particularly good piece of history, he’ll come to mind because he was all about how we could be the best historians possible. And then and of course, this is in 2010 when I was writing this. I read his obituary in my daily Lobo online. It was one of those moments that made me stop breathing for a second. It created a longing for that square table in that classroom at the back of Mesa Vista Hall. All those funny and enthusiastic history grad students learning, while SAR’s discoveries discussed reciprocity and fairness in the American West. The last class I took with him was a graduate level class on biography in the spring of 2000. It was a crazy semester. Zachary was going to graduate from the Academy on May 26th, and if all went as planned, I was going to graduate on May 12th, two weeks before Zachary. I should have been able to take the class since I was an undergraduate, but I saw it on the schedule and I went straight to doctor, says his office, begging him for the chance.

Bunny 00:09:07 He smiled at me and said that this one is going to require a lot of work, Miss Terry, but I think you’re up to it, which is one of the nicest things anybody ever said to me. And then he signed the pink slip that would convince the registrar to allow me into the class. I was working full time. I was taking 12 hours of classes, and Doctor Saz had assigned a 25 page biography of a significant historical figure of our choosing, complete with source documents, period accuracy, and interviews if possible. As much as I loved reading and writing. This was the semester, and that biography was the assignment that felt like the proverbial straw that might break the camel’s back. Zachary’s senior year activities, combined with Johanna’s third grade homework, combined with my crazy workload for all these lawyers, really for the first time, felt like too much. For my biography, I chose Chike Waltman, a K County survivor of the Bataan Death March. Doctor says applauded my choice and we dug in for the long haul together.

Bunny 00:10:17 He helped me put together my interview questions and directed me to yet another list of books about the Philippines in World War Two the Japanese philosophy of war, prisoner of war camps, and videos on the death march. I’m telling you, I really didn’t know what I was getting into every day that I came into class, he had an encouragement. Another fact that I could check another idea for my oral history list, and he made sure that I didn’t give up on my assignment. Even after the first interview when I came to the classroom nearly in tears. This is really hard, I told him. These prisoner of war camp stories are grueling. He told me what I was doing was important work, and that I needed to tell a story and that I needed to hear it. The reason I was allowed access to Mr. Waltman was because he was a friend of my parents. He lived in Logan, and when I was talking about having to do this biography with my parents, you know, I never dreamed that they would come up with my subject.

Bunny 00:11:19 But my dad said, looked at my mom and said, you know, she ought to talk to Kike. And I said, first of all, where did he get that name? And they said, you know, it was his. It was his nickname from when he was an infant. And his parents were, they raised Quarter Horses in San Jose, New Mexico. So there’s a whole nother story that we could tell about the Bataan Death March and how New Mexicans figured very prominently in that. But doctor Says was so encouraging. And I wrote the biography. we’re going to put a link to a bit of it that’s posted online. I got an A in the class, and somehow I graduated with all my friends in town to cheer me on. And then Zachary graduated and we survived that may to go on with the rest of our lives, which have been amazing. But what Frank says gave me that semester was a hunger for those other stories and a respect for my own. He made me.

Bunny 00:12:28 He helped make me brave enough to tell stories. And that’s one of the reasons I do this blog, because there are stories in New Mexico that need to be told, places that need to be explored, events that need to be recognized. I don’t think that I’m amazingly qualified to tell them all, but I’m willing. Which in the end was all that doctor says asks that we be willing to explore and be excited about the possibilities of stories in our history. I found a book by Doctor Says in the bookmobile in 2010. Thank God for the bookmobile. That’s a whole nother story. His book is larger than Life New Mexico in the 20th century. In the foreword, he tells the story about how he came to UNM in 1967, hired by Gerald Nash to teach American school American social and intellectual history. He was a newcomer to the southwest, and he and his wife Margaret Margaret, who was a widowed PhD candidate when they met and who became a professor in the UNM history department, made New Mexico their true home, exploring and writing down the stories of hundreds of New Mexico locations and the people in all those places.

Bunny 00:13:42 Doctor says inspired me to open my eyes and hear the stories of the place where I live and the people who live there, and he made me passionate about preserving memory. It’s important stuff, whether you do it well, like doctor says, or you just do it like me, and it’s what makes me who I am. Thanks for listening. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to the I Love New Mexico podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share it with your friends on social media, or by texting or messaging or emailing them a copy of the podcast. If you have a New Mexico story that you’d like to share with us, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our email address is I Love New Mexico blog at gmail.com and we are always, always looking for interesting stories about New Mexico. Subscribe, share and write a review so that we can continue to bring you these stories about the Land of Enchantment. Thank you so much.

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