Category: People

Bill Rehm of Albuquerque was appointed to the House just last week. Now, in the first days of the session, he’s scurrying to learn the basics.

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

SANTA FE – The crash happened in the late 1980s, along a 25-mph stretch of Isleta Boulevard in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

High on heroin, the driver plowed straight through a turn in the road, killing a man changing a tire in a parking lot.

Bill Rehm wasn’t there the moment it happened but can recite details of the case because he studied and recreated it as a Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputy.

Of the hundreds of crashes he has studied, that one sticks out, in part because the driver told authorities he had shot up just 15 minutes earlier.

State law didn’t allow the Sheriff’s Department to charge the driver with drug possession, something Rehm, in his first week as a Republican state representative from Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights, is determined to change.

“That was a real injustice,” he said. “That family lost their father.”

The Bernalillo County Commission appointed Rehm to the post last week to fill the vacancy left by Greg Payne, who resigned earlier this month to become Albuquerque’s transit director.

The House has freshmen every other year, but Rehm is in a class by himself this year because of the timing of Payne’s resignation.

Rehm has spent the session’s first days getting acquainted with legislator-speak, trying to make sense of floor debates and committee schedules, and finding his way around the Roundhouse. And around.

His first and only measure so far would allow the state to charge drivers who have drugs in their system, but not physically on them or in their car, with possession.

“If we test you after any kind of accident and you come up positive, we’d charge you with possession,” he said.

On Wednesday, the first full day of the session, Rehm spent much of the morning listening to a presentation on the planned spaceport while drafting his bill.

To get from the basement level, where the spaceport was being debated, Rehm took the public elevator, not the private one expressly for lawmakers like him.

And after walking past her office the first time, Rehm enlisted the help of Jennie Lusk, one of several professionals on staff in the Roundhouse to help lawmakers draft bills.

Rehm worked with Lusk for about 20 minutes, fine-tuning the wording and mulling whether the bill should say “a drug that has been metabolized” or “a metabolized drug.”

Lusk told Rehm that after she was done he’d find a copy of the bill in his drawer.

“OK.”

Laugh, a big smile. “Where’s my drawer?”

Rehm has an idea for another bill but set it aside for this 30-day session, limited largely to budget matters. He hopes to be back for the 2007 session but faces election this fall, along with the other 69 House members.

“If I could get one bill through, that would be monumental,” he said.

On Rehm’s way back down to the House floor, Rep. Keith Gardner, a Republican from Roswell, shouted to him: “We’re having that press conference in the rotunda at 2 p.m. You should go.”

Sure, Rehm said, he’ll go.

“Now show me which way is the rotunda?” Rehm whispered to a reporter at his side.

Rehm, 55 and grandfatherly, partly bald and with a made-for-a-detective-TV-show mustache, is a longtime law enforcer retired from the Sheriff’s Department. He’s now a private investigator and teaches police how to recreate crashes. He’s married with two kids, and coaches soccer.

He put parts of his personal life on hold to become a lawmaker in a hurry. But this is what he signed up for.

Rep. Sandra Townsend, a Republican from Aztec who sits next to Rehm on the House floor, said learning intricacies of the Roundhouse can take a decade. Or three.

For 28 years before she was elected, Townsend attended meetings at the Capitol for her job as San Juan County clerk.

“I thought I knew it all. But there’s a lot to learn,” she said.

So Townsend, elected in 1995, said she’ll lend Rehm a hand when he needs it.

He might need assistance with tasks like figuring out what each of the four buttons on his desk on the House floor do.

(Green is to vote yes, red for no, black is to get in line to speak, white to call his page if he needs anything.)

Rehm said he’s catching on.

The hardest part so far?

“Getting totally up to speed in a week. I have been getting here early every day.”

Published Jan. 20, 2006.

Hotshots are accustomed to being the first responders to large blazes

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST – Standing in front of a two-foot-high pile of piñon and ponderosa, James Champ reaches forward and unleashes a wall of orange.

Within 10 seconds, the pile is popping and the flames are licking a dozen feet into the air. The stack of logs and branches reaches 600 degrees, then 800, and sucks air like an industrial fan.Champ, a wildland firefighter, has started a prescribed burn in the far northern corner of Santa Fe National Forest.

As a member of the Santa Fe Interagency Hotshot Crew, Champ works for the U.S. Forest Service to fight fires.

But burning brush and trees is also part of his job, especially in a year like this, when underbrush and weeds are thick from a good growing season last year. By lighting a fire now, he is eliminating fuel from a future conflagration.

And where some might see the flames as a dangerous enemy, Champ sees beauty.

“It’s really a fun thing to manipulate,” he said. “It’s really an art form.”

Before 7 a.m. on a recent day, Champ drives a mint-green Forest Service crew carrier north of Espanola on U.S. 84/285. His destination is a patch of forest in a remote corner of Rio Arriba County.

The top-heavy machine resembles a locker room on wheels. Inside, the firefighters — guys in their 20s and 30s, some wearing Oakley sunglasses and listening to iPods — sit like athletes going to a game.

Tucked in their seats and surrounded by enough gear to keep them going for weeks, the Santa Fe crew members are ready for a day of what they do best: line work.

To battle wildland fires in places that often have no water, hotshots work in row, averaging 20 at a time, digging a two-foot-wide trench ahead of fire’s advance. It’s a way to box in the flames and eliminate the fuel source, Champ says.

The Santa Fe team is one of 20 hotshot crews in New Mexico and Arizona. They are often the first responders in big fires far off the beaten path, and they are often seen as the elite among firefighters.

A four-year veteran of the crew, Champ, 31, said the physical work is not the hardest part about the job, for which hotshots can earn $25,000 to $30,000 in a six-month season.

“It’s mentally tough more than anything,” he said. “It’s 16-hour days for 14 days sometimes. You’re tired.”

Those days often involve sleeping in tents or on the ground, being away from families and the familiar feel of sheets and showers.

The work takes them to remote places like today’s destination, in a woody but dry corner of Rio Arriba County, where PowerBars replace Starbucks runs, sandwiches stand in for restaurant food and cell phone reception is out of the question.

Champ’s “office” is often nothing but forest, thick and scratchy in some parts but thinner in the areas the hotshots have already cleared.

Today, the crew will stand in the mud from a recent snow and burn piles of wood and brush.

But on another day, Champ and other firefighters could find themselves driving or flying out of state to work. The crew members are assigned nationally and pitch in wherever they’re assigned, regardless of which federal agency manages the land.

Members of the Santa Fe group have been all over, from Minnesota to Mexico.

“We’re like a city fire department, but we cover the United States,” said crew superintendent Rich Tingle.

As the truck rolls up into the forest on N.M. 96, the firefighters hop out, dressed in fire-resistant yellow and green clothing, hard hats and 30-to 40-pound packs.

Everyone has rolls of white tape for marking exit routes from a fire. They carry hot-pink paper to signal to helicopters that might hover. Everyone has six quarts of drinking water.

On a cool spring morning, they break into pairs and descend into the woods to light piles.

As they tend each blaze, which will take several hours to burn out, they talk about what they like – and don’t like – about fighting fires for a living.

“You give up your summer,” said Dave Simpson, a Pennsylvania native who joined the crew in 2003. “When you’re in town, you see people going to a movie and you remember what the public does.”

Friends might be going on a bike ride, but the hotshots can’t, Simpson said.

“You’d do that, but you’d have to go in the winter.”

Tingle views the work from a different angle.

“It’s nice out here,” he said, taking in the morning light on a stand of magnificent ponderosa pines and a yellow field below.

“You don’t have the red lights or traffic or people.”

But in the same breath, Tingle said, he misses those people – or at least a relationship. That’s a common refrain from the men on the crew.

“I can’t even have a dog,” Champ says. “I’m never home.”

Like Tingle, Champ lists the good things as quickly as the down sides to spending most of his time away from his own home, and protecting those of strangers.

“It’s not bad. You just adjust your lifestyle. It ceases to be a job. It’s a living.”

Published April 20, 2006.

In ’37 House, pretty Ortiz y Pino de Kleven refused to sit

By Kate Nash
Tribune Columnist

SANTA FE – She was born before New Mexico was a state.

Elected majority whip before any other woman in the country.

And among the first women to run a ranch by herself.

Now 96, Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven can barely get the words out to describe those days.

Her voice is less than a whisper, an echo from decades past.

But the memories of serving in the earliest days of the Legislature are there, although they come in waves.

“I think that the attitude was that women sit in the corner and be pretty,” Ortiz y Pino de Kleven said of the years after her election to the state House in 1937.

“I said, ‘I’m not pretty. I’m not going to sit in the corner.’ “

She is pretty. But sit she didn’t. And still won’t.

If you lean in close, she’ll tell you she fought for bilingual education, for women’s rights. That not all the men were nice back then. That women today are too worried about styles. That she thinks her nose is too big.

“I thought that women should get elected,” she said. “I said to them, `We women come first.’ “

The bilingual Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, who has been honored probably a hundred times for her community service, her teaching and her work on behalf of the state, visited the Capitol last week. She was hugged and kissed and thanked by everyone, everywhere she went.

She travels inch by inch and with a blue walker. Yellowed oxygen tubes feed her air. But her mind is as sharp as ever.

Ortiz y Pino de Kleven was the third woman elected to the Legislature and served until 1941. At the time, only 532,000 people lived in New Mexico. John E. Miles was governor. Some 40 percent of homes had running water. It was a year before Los Alamos would become the site of the Manhattan Project.

In the 1950s, she commandeered the huge cattle and sheep ranch called Agua Verde in San Miguel County. She later went on to be a dean at St. Joseph’s College in Albuquerque.

She’s also the star of “!Concha! Concha Ortiz Y Pino, Matriarch of a 300-Year-Old New Mexico Legacy,” a biography written by author Kathryn M. Cordova.

It’s a cliche to say, but in her checked black-and-white wool outfit, with her hair pinned in a bun with clips that could be 40 years old, Ortiz y Pino de Kleven is a living legend.

Even her jewelry – giant pearl clip-on earrings and necklace – emanate the fashion, the flavor of another time.

That’s part of what makes her a role model for modern-day legislators.

Senate Majority Whip Mary Jane Garcia, a Democrat from Dona Ana, first met Ortiz y Pino de Kleven at church. It was so many years ago, she can’t remember when.

But Garcia says she does remember that she was so awe-struck by all the things Ortiz y Pino de Kleven had done that she was a bit intimidated to approach her.

“She has been a real role model for so many of us,” Garcia said.

And not just for the 34 women who serve now in the 112-member Legislature.

“She was an exception for her time,” said her second cousin, Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, an Albuquerque Democrat.

“She thought she was just as good as any man.”

As she talks from her seat in the Senate lounge, Sen. Pete Campos comes in and kneels down in front of Concha.

“What’s your name?” she asks in Spanish. He answers.

“He looks like an old-timer,” she says, taking Campos’ baby face between her hands.

“Gracias,” Campos, a Las Vegas Democrat, says laughing.

“You’re doing so good,” he tells her, twice.

“I have a new boyfriend,” she says of Campos.

She smiles but can barely get the words out.

Still, the memories come.

“It was such a pleasure. It was such a pleasure,” she said of those days.

“People were so friendly,” she whispers. “People wanted to be good.

“I’m so proud to be a New Mexican,” says the woman who for many is the ultimate symbol of everything our state is.

After a 15-minute interview, Ortiz y Pino de Kleven is too tired to speak much more.

So she’s taken home for the day. She lives just down the street.

She’ll be back.

Published Jan. 30, 2006.

Mexican Consul Solana is a link between two nations

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

Growing up on the edge of one of the planet’s biggest cities, Juan Manuel Solana lived with a foot in two worlds: His family had an expansive garden in the mountains above Mexico City, while the giant municipality offered all its charms below.

He figured he was one of the luckiest kids around, able to live in the nearly empty countryside that’s since been developed.

“I had the best of both worlds, of having the largest garden in the world for me,” he said.

As the Mexican consul in Albuquerque, Solana still lives in two worlds – two countries that are inextricably linked.

Solana, 47, alternately works as a mediator, negotiator and cultural ambassador between a pair of nations that despite their proximity can seem galaxies apart.

In the past year, he’s helped the state Taxation and Revenue Department get access to a Mexican government database to check the veracity of documents used by Mexicans to get New Mexico driver’s licenses.

He helped Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies bring accused murderer Michael Astorga back to the United States from Juarez.

And he helped the families of Mexican immigrants killed in a car wreck near Santa Fe earlier this year get the bodies of their loved ones back.

“He really exemplifies what a consul needs to do for their community,” said Pablo Martinez, the state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“He has opened up his office to the community and really has had an open door,” Martinez said.

Solana took the post in 2001, with the approval of then-president Vicente Fox.

With the recent election of Felipe Calderon, Solana could be replaced.

But Solana, with salt-and-pepper hair and an almost grandfatherly smile, doesn’t worry about that. The Christmas season is a crazy time for the consulate, which helps thousands of Mexican and U.S. citizens each year at its office on Fourth Street just north of Downtown.

For Solana, who once worked for big-name companies in Mexico like Pemex, the national petroleum corporation, recalling his accomplishments over the years comes easily and brings smiles to his otherwise serious face.

The memories also come without a hint of bragging, without letting on that he’s arguably the most important advocate for immigrants in Albuquerque.

He helped Mexicans in jail get an education before being deported. Helped bring numerous Mexican cultural events and exhibitions to the state. Helped workers who weren’t being treated fairly. Helped Gov. Bill Richardson arrange meetings with two Mexican presidents in Mexico City.

His office has 13 employees, with divisions dedicated to a range of services from immigrant protection to health care and education.

The immigrant protection division is among his favorites, he said, although he’s quick to offers a positive assessment of each.

“It’s the department that gives you the greatest satisfaction, where you really can do something for so many,” he said.

When asked to choose a best moment in his nearly six years on duty, he can’t. There are too many, he says.

Solana, a former professor who is single, collects Mexican coins for fun, including the 2 peso gold coin he pulls out of a plastic case in his pocket on a recent day.

The price of gold is going up, he says. Good thing for his collection, he laughs.

Solana has filled his sunny, south-facing office with Mexican art – pottery from the village of Mata Ortiz, shelves of sculptures, prints and paintings.

The collection is a testament to the culture he loves and promotes, as well as a symbol of the immigrants he works to help.

Immigrants’ presence in the United States is something Congress needs to address, he said.

“We are not solving the problem, and that problem is a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to come here and work. There is a lot of need in Mexico,” he said.

“I hope the Americans and the American Congress find the way.”

While Solana is an ambassador of sorts between two counties, he also has to work with the variety of state and federal government agencies in the United States.

He has contacts at OSHA, the Department of Labor, the Governor’s Office, you name it.

Those who have worked with him say he doesn’t like to take credit for his work, much as he deserves it.

“I will be forever indebted to Juan for what he did for us after Astorga was captured in Juarez,” said Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White. “I think people should know he was very much involved, and I consider him a friend and always will.”

Solana said he was just one of a group of people who worked the case, in which sheriff’s deputies were able to get Astorga out of Mexico after he was arrested in the border town across from El Paso. Deputies had been searching for Astorga for 12 days.

White said he works with Solana often, including when Mexican nationals are crime victims.

“Victims of crime sometimes are reluctant to come forward, and feel more comfortable going through the consulate,” White said.

At the Taxation and Revenue Department, Solana helped form the first partnership in the nation in which a U.S. state agency could access information from a Mexican government database.

The department can use the database to verify documents presented by immigrants who have New Mexico driver’s licenses.

Richardson earlier this year ordered an audit of the 30,000 licenses held by immigrants – a daunting task that could have been harder without Solana as a link between the two governments, said Ken Ortiz, director of the state Motor Vehicle Division.

“Consul Solana went above and beyond and worked with the Mexican government to provide us Web access to do the inquiries,” Ortiz said.

Other agencies like the state’s Homeland Security Office also depend on Solana, not on a daily basis, but as a connection to have just in case.

Homeland Security Adviser Tim Manning said that should any kind of serious international incident occur at the border, he’d know whose number to dial.

“If we ever were to get into a situation where we needed to work with the Mexican government on something, he’d be our first call,” Manning said.

But Solana doesn’t worry about the worst that could happen at the border or anywhere else.

He tries to look for the good in the bad, like an accident in Santa Fe in February that left four Mexican nationals dead and eight injured after the sport utility vehicle they were riding in flipped.

“I remember the case; I remember the people that died. It was sad at the time, but it was something good that we helped the (dead) people from the accident to go back to Mexico,” he said.

Along with the grim moments, Solana’s job also includes work on subjects including international trade promotion.

When Solana started six years ago, New Mexico did $120 million in trade with Mexico, he said.

Now, the figure is more like $600 million.

Still, Solana says, work looms.

“I’m sure more can be done. I’m sure we’re going to be able to do more.”

Published Dec. 16, 2006.

To the people Albuquerque’s Brother Thomas helps, he’s a hero

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

The Christmas cards taped onto Brother Thomas Reis’ living room television tell it all.

There are Thank You’s, and God Bless You’s and Peace Be With You’s. There are so many that it’s hard to see what’s actually on the screen.

In all, 71 are visible, from Maine and Florida and Alaska and Hawaii, with surely more tucked away in other parts of Reis’ spare one-bedroom home. Others are no doubt on their way.

“This one is from the nicest person, a real angel,” Reis says.

His first sentence on a recent afternoon is the type of phrase he repeats over the hours.

“Why don’t you write about Ida instead of me?” he asks.

“Why don’t you call up Cheryl? She’s helped a lot of people. I’ll give you her phone number.”

Brother Thomas makes these inquiries even though a reporter is sitting in his Downtown apartment specifically to talk about him and his work. He has to be steered back on topic several times.

That’s because pointing to others is what he does.

But those he’s pointing at – the people in Albuquerque who know him and his charity and his influence – say Brother Thomas is a man an entire city should be following.

“He has the patience that only a modern-day saint could have,” says longtime friend Richard Treynor.

“Here’s a guy who cooks 20 or 30 meals and then hands them out. But he won’t take any credit,” Treynor added.

Though Brother Thomas demurs, constantly deflecting attention to others, he is a hero, the real thing, in Albuquerque’s low-income, elderly and religious communities.

He is, they say, a man who has dedicated his life and belongings to helping those who otherwise might not have a chance – or a champion.

They credit him with helping get the Barrett House up and running.

And keeping residents at St. Mary Rest Home, where he once worked, comfortable.

And making the other 31 elderly and low-income citizens feel welcome at the Hibernian House, where he lives.

And getting food to – and cooking for – thousands at the Good Shepherd Center and other centers around the city.

“He doesn’t like a lot of fanfare,” says Good Shepherd Brother Charles Schreiner. “He’ll pull in with a whole station wagon full of food. He doesn’t expect receipts or publicity or anything.”

With climbing food costs this year, places like the Good Shepherd are struggling to keep the hungry full, Schreiner says.

“Because of people like him, we can continue to help people. Otherwise, we’d really have to struggle,” Schreiner added.

The sight of Brother Thomas and his sun-battered, subcompact station wagon full of food is a common one in places where hunger is a constant shadow and help a rare beam of sunlight.

Acquaintances and friends repeat tales of Brother Thomas pulling up to a homeless shelter, a rest home, wherever, with just the things people need.

The other thing they say is this:

You can’t say no to Brother Thomas.

“If somebody needs something, he can get on the phone and talk anybody into anything,” says Patrick Newell, the outgoing director of St. Mary Rest Home.

Newell recalls the time a resident at the home couldn’t afford some badly needed dental care. Within days, a dentist was volunteering his time, Newell says.

When working the phones doesn’t do the trick, Brother Thomas goes in person to grocery stores to pick up food that he redistributes to shelters.

Larry Vehar, an Albertsons store manager, says Brother Thomas doesn’t have to work much to get others to give.

“He doesn’t have to try very hard,” Vehar says. “His work is a good cause and we don’t mind helping.”

Vehar says he’s seen others inspired by Brother Thomas during his trips to the store.

“I’ve seen people pull money out of their pockets,” he says.

Just as no one seems to be able to say no to Brother Thomas or his Irish eyes and hopeful smile, he, in turn, wouldn’t dream of turning anyone down.

Isabel Quillin, who has known and worked with Brother Thomas for 30 years, says she’s only gotten angry with him once.

“He took back a guy who was stealing from him,” she says. “I was mad for two weeks.”

Unfortunately, Brother Thomas is slowing down. At age 72, he does his work with the help of 14 medicines for his ailing lungs, a fragile kidney, shot bronchial tubes, plus a tumor that has crunched his spine.

But slowing down is far from stopping.

Brother Thomas still starts his days with the early Mass at Immaculate Conception Church. The service is tantamount to his breakfast – a chance to replenish his soul before a day of hard work, harder stories and little relief.

“I’m there before 7. I make my holy hour, my rosary, my stations of the cross, my spiritual account,” Brother Thomas says of his devotional at Immaculate Conception. “That’s my bank. God, I need that so I can make it through the day.”

If that doesn’t do it, Brother Thomas knows he’s got one last stash of peace – and peace of mind.

In his bedroom closet, next to the clothes that Quillin buys for him at second-hand stores, are pallets of beans, soup, canned chili.

It’s not for him. It’s for someone else – just in case he runs into someone who needs help.

That kind of preparation is something he’s been doing in Albuquerque since the mid-1950s, when he first arrived – seven years before Thomas Reis actually became Brother Thomas.

He rode the train into town, armed with a love of cooking, opera, classical music. His previous stops were varied – rural Oregon and Houston and Philadelphia and New Orleans. He says he was born in 1935 on a boat between Ireland and the United States, before his family’s name was changed from Rice to Reis.

“Don’t put those silly little details in the paper,” he pleads.

He came here to work with someone he had been writing to: Brother Mathias Barrett, a man he credits as a major inspiration in his life.

Barrett was an Irish priest who founded the Congregation of the Little Brothers of the Good Shepherd in Albuquerque in the 1950s. The center is known as one of the first to concentrate on helping the city’s homeless.

Brother Thomas could relate to the homeless, in part because he left home when he was 14. He’d wanted to see a Benedictine monastery, he says.

“You’re not going to put that in there, are you?”

He smiles.

He says he was one of six brothers and sisters, though Brother Thomas’ family is now in the Midwest. He has no children.

As he worked, the years flew by. One success story begat another, which begat a connection, which helped someone else.

He is flipping through a book of photos inside the community room at the Hibernian House – Thanksgiving dinners and St. Patrick’s Days, Christmases past.

He smiles again, and tries a sigh, which turns into a cough, fueled by pneumonia and bronchitis.

“She’s a gem, that doctor I’ve got,” he says.

Though he has a vast network of friends who are virtually family, Brother Thomas has a true love.

She’s 5 inches tall, with whiskery tan-and-white hair, four legs and a love for Brother Thomas that won’t quit.

She’s Baby, his dog, another of his “angels.” The one who sleeps right next to him, follows at his heels as he pulls his oxygen tank.

Vehar, who says Brother Thomas has given away the gifts he’s given him over the years, has only seen Brother Thomas keep one: a chew toy and a sweater for Baby.

“Everything else, flowers, I don’t care what we’ve given over the years . . . he always finds somebody that’s more needy,” Vehar says.

Brother Thomas says he has never thought of doing anything else with his life.

“You have to give in order to receive,” he says by way of explanation. “If you put money into the bank, you get interest.

“You put no money in, you get nothing. So what you put into the almighty God, when those days come when it’s so hard, (and you’re wondering) ‘Where’s my next meal coming from?’ . . . there’s where the almighty God gives you that interest, there’s that faith you have to have.”

Apart from God, Brother Thomas’ inspiration comes from those who served before him – those other people he keeps pointing at, giving the credit to.

“Everyone I know, who I’ve read the lives of, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Therese of the Little Flower, St. Catherine, Mother Teresa, Brother Mathias, all them people suffered,” Brother Thomas says. “But He never gives you no more than you can take.”

Published Dec. 25, 2007.

Woman watches New Mexico grow from window of small-town store

Kate Nash | The New Mexican

PEÑASCO — When she first moved to this mountain enclave in 1946, Patty Sahd would look out the front window of her family’s store and see women in black shawls walking to church on dirt roads.

In later years, she saw families in wagons and then, gradually, the first motorized cars. Men in pickups came over gravel roads, and then women drove up in sedans.

Later still, after the roads were paved, Sahd saw the convoys of hippies and the occasional mobile home being pulled slowly all the way up to this high-altitude town.

Now 97, Sahd is among the New Mexicans who have lived almost as long as New Mexico has been a state. On Sunday, New Mexico begins its centennial year, marking in particular Jan. 6, 1912, as the day the 47th state joined the union.

Recently, Sahd and three other New Mexicans whose lives span most of the statehood period talked to The New Mexican and reflected on their small but significant slices of state history.

Born before women won the right to vote, Sahd has lived to see New Mexico elect Susana Martinez as its first female governor. Statehood-era families saw few cars on the narrow dirt roads of the time, but by now, people such as Sahd have witnessed the construction of four-lane freeways and public transit systems designed to reduce the ever-growing traffic on the those roads.

When Sahd was growing up in rural Santa Fe County south of Santa Fe, it was hard for children to get to school, and today it is easy to go to college. On any given day, less than half of New Mexico’s school-age youngsters would be in school. Today, in urban-oriented New Mexico, even higher education is all around — 17 public colleges and universities serve 80,000 students.

Sahd, a kindly grandma to five and mother to two boys, had the opportunity to watch from a small-town perspective as the state developed. Her town, Peñasco, which grew and changed after World War II, has settled into its place as a quiet Taos County community of about 2,000 people clustered in the rural area northeast of Española.

Girl from Santa Fe

Patty and Pete Sahd arrived in Peñasco in 1946, married and ready to buy a little store and earn a living.

For both, it was close to where they grew up; she south of Santa Fe and he in Cerrillos, after his family emigrated from Lebanon when he was a small boy.

The couple’s paths would cross ways in the teaching field; he worked in Golden and then Stanley, she in Cerrillos and then Stanley, where they fell in love.

Pete Sahd graduated from St. Michael’s High School in 1929. He went on to The University of New Mexico, where he played football and basketball and ran track.

While Patty taught grade school, Pete taught English and coached athletics. Among Pete Sahd’s students was Bruce King, who the couple would later see as he campaigned for governor in the north.

Later, the pair moved to Florida, where Pete Sahd served in the Navy.

After World War II ended, Sahd, who worked in radar, was ready for something else, something less secretive. Buying the Peñasco store seemed perfect.

After leaving Florida, they temporarily lived in Taos before the move to Peñasco. After 44 active years in the village, Pete Sahd died in 1990 at age 78.

During their travels, the Sahds drove an early ’40s Chevrolet coup, considered a luxury at the time.

But even with a nice vehicle, the trip was tough.

“The roads were terrible,” Patty Sahd said. “Not a little terrible — terrible terrible.”

With time, though, the main road through town started to get better. Slowly.

Before Sahd’s eyes, it went from a muddy strip to a paved state road, part of the roughly 4,000 miles in New Mexico that were asphalt at the time.

The paths to nearby Española and Taos also would improve, as the years went on and as the town grew.

Raising sons, keeping shop

The Sahds’ sons, Randy and Ted, were part of that growth.

Randy was born in nearby Taos; his brother had been born in Albuquerque.

Both went to the local public school, which was run by nuns.

Once the boys were juniors in high school, the Sahds sent them to the New Mexico Military Institute.

Later, Ted went on to the Air Force Academy, and Randy went to UNM, where he studied business. After graduation, he moved back to Peñasco.

After a long career in the military, including as a pilot and trainer, Ted retired and lives in Albuquerque. But he never stopped longing for the tiny town where he grew up.

In a recent interview, he readily recounted his times roaming miles from home without parental supervision.

“It was a safe place. It was a place where my parents and all my friends’ parents allowed us to roam at will. We’d go two and three or four miles away,” he said.

Now 70, Ted Sahd recalled being interested early on in the horses tied to the hitching post in front of his family’s store.

His contact with horses blossomed into a love for the big animals and for the family’s ranch, in part because the bike and roller skates with which he tried to travel around Peñasco didn’t do so well on dirt roads.

Participatory road paving

Ted Sahd, a pilot who has master’s degrees in engineering and political science, also recalled being fascinated with the men who came to pave the road in the early 1950s.

The roadwork was a blend of ingenuity and politics: It took both the manual labor and some lobbying by the locals before the project would be completed.

“If you wanted a road, you had to put up a bond, and to put up a bond, you needed permission from the [local] legislator and the governor. You had to go down and lobby,” he said in a recent interview.

While he, like many who grew up in this town, left Peñasco for other places, Patty Sahd never wanted to go once she had settled in.

As those wheels of the new times brought novelties her way, Sahd saw just enough of the outside world to know that she was where she wanted to be.

“Anybody that grows up in these two-bit towns like Peñasco really likes the town, and you want to go back to it,” she said.

War times

As the country entered the early ’50s and the Korean War, many families in the area played a role in the war effort, particularly by sending their men abroad.

The Sahds played a role during war times, too, helping relay the sad news of those who had died, as the phone in their store was one of the few in town.

“[The military] was sending [the dead] people back,” Sahd said. “We had to tell people who had the misfortune of waiting for people to be brought back.”

The Sahds had also felt the sting of world war; Patty’s brother Myron died in Japan after the Bataan Death March from an infection that wasn’t properly treated, about a month before he was due home.

Later, as the country moved to combat in Vietnam, Patty Sahd lived the life many mothers of sons in war did: one of waiting anxiously for news of her baby every day he was gone.

Ted flew frequently in and out of Vietnam, and he made it home safe, unlike more than 400 New Mexicans who didn’t return from that war.

As she worked for the family business, Patty Sahd worried.

It was all she could do.

“We just went day by day and hoped everything was going to be all right. There was really nothing you could do about it.”

People in town weren’t part of nationwide anti-war protests. They didn’t gather around to reject the country’s involvement, she said in November.

“They were just kind of swallowing what was happening to them,” she said.

With Ted back on U.S. soil, Patty Sahd felt good about the times. It was calm in her quiet town.

The civil rights movement was beginning, but it seemed a world away from the store, the gardens, the things that needed tending to in this modest village where people generally got along.

Second-generation shopkeeper

Soon, Randy Sahd would return from UNM and take over the store, where he works today.

He’s also the Peñasco volunteer fire chief.

The scene at the store is a real-life drama played in real time. On a recent day, Randy Sahd gets a call about a chimney fire and dashes out the door, leaving his mother to look over the few customers who wander in.

The customers buy a few things, but not big ones. The purchases pale in comparison to the big orders the Sahds used to handle.

One buyer needs an electrical box that costs less than $3, another a copy of the Rio Grande Sun.

From her perch at the entrance of the store, Patty Sahd minds the cash register when it’s busy and looks out the window when it’s not.

The store around her is almost a shrine to the past, with a beauty section that has a dated, dusty Health and Beauty sign.

There’s candy for less than a dollar and hair products in dated boxes, seemingly from the ’80s or before.

It’s quiet, except for the whoosh of wheels from the occasional car driving by the Sahds’ front windows.

The heaters hanging from the ceiling no longer work, victims of a broken part that’s no longer made. Sahd huddles into several layers of fleece, as she is by now used to the cold at these altitudes.

In between customers, she has time to recall how the business used to be.

Back then, people ordered sacks of flour and sugar in 25- and 50-pound bags.

Back then, Sahd and her husband would let people into the store after hours, for they had traveled mightily to get there.

Back then, a small business could afford to sell groceries and not worry about the competition undercutting their prices.

Back then, overalls and socks and underwear sold well, keeping the Sahds in business.

Back then.

As Sahd thinks about yesteryears, her early time in Peñasco seems like another age, she said.

“It just seems like two eras,” she said.

“It’s just like those were old times and these are new times and whatever happened in between … I was so busy I didn’t notice.”

Published Jan. 1, 2012.