High school reunion provides a fond look back

My family moved from Farmington, Utah to Las Cruces, N.M., when I was a teenager. Even taking religion out of the equation, living in New Mexico was really different from living in Utah. I moved from a crowd that wore trendy Joyce shoes and Jantzen sweaters to a town where squaw dresses and cowboy boots were the norm. I was 16 (enough said) and I felt I had gone to the end of the Earth.

My parents bought a house in the first-ever subdivision in Las Cruces. It was a home not unlike the one my husband's parents moved into in Provo, Utah, those typical houses built all over the United States for returning servicemen and the growing population after World War II. Our home was on the last row of houses with the back yard a desert that went unbroken all the way to the Organ Mountains.

By the time I left high school I had acclimated very well and I lobbied to stay at New Mexico State, but instead I came back to Utah for college. My parents moved from Las Cruces two years later, so I never returned, until now — 48 years later.

Last month my husband, Grit, and I traveled to the 50th reunion of the Class of 1957. I was curious to visit again and glad Grit was willing to accompany me so that he could share in a part of my life he had only heard about.

Las Cruces has gone from a sleepy Rio Grande River town of about 12,500 to a city with a population of 80,000. When we went looking for my house, we found it buried in a rather run-down neighborhood. I didn't even take a picture as it was not at all the house I remembered, and the desert was filled with homes that stretched almost to the base of the mountains.

Just as I needed a street number to recognize my old home, it was good to have name tags with a yearbook picture on them at the reunion parties. Over the years I have kept in touch with three good friends, Cecelia, Casper and Bunkie, but had the circumstances been different, I would have walked right by most of the others, except for Pat Russell and Alice Valentine, who amazingly looked the same.

There were 248 in our graduating class. Sadly, 48 of them are gone — a whopping 20 percent. We called our friend Dede Aguirre, who couldn't attend because of health problems. She told us of another friend who had died; Billie had lived a difficult life, so different from the effervescent teenager we knew. She dated Dick Bright, probably the best athlete in our class, when I dated his friend Johnny Castle, who was also on the list of the deceased.