Tag: biography

Book Review: Heroes and Villains of New Mexico by Bud Russo

The short chapters in this historical collection cover times dating back to the Pueblo Revolt all the way up to the early days of space program research. Each character is thoroughly researched and portrayed with color and flair. I can’t possibly summarize all of the stories, but there were several that particularly struck me. Two had to do with a flood of the Dry Cimarron River, so called because it seldom flowed fully.

In the early 20th century, a tremendous monsoon filled the river to overflowing. One of the heroes in this book was a telephone operator named Sally Rook. By staying on the job despite the raging flood, she saved the lives of almost everyone in town as she called them while the storm and the waters closed in. Her courage truly moved me.

The aftermath of that flood allowed a cowboy named George McJunkin to discover what became known as the Folsom Site, with the famous Folsom points. It changed the understanding of prehistory in North America. McJunkin had been enslaved in Texas until age fourteen. After the Civil War, the free young man moved to New Mexico, became a cowboy, and worked in exchange for reading lessons as well as  money. He became a self-educated naturalist. He was riding fence when he found what he was sure were not modern buffalo bones exposed by the recent flood. And he noticed indications of human activity in the area. He tried to get scientists to study what he had found, but they ignored his letters and even the bones he sent. After all, he was just a cowboy. Many years after he died, the site was finally investigated.

The heroes range from people who made great discoveries to people who risked their lives or lost their lives to save others. Chester Nez, author of the outstanding autobiography, Code Talker, is one of those portrayed. I highly recommend his entire book, as well as the chapter about him in this book, I took my time reading it, getting absorbed in each vignette. The writing is a little over the top, but it definitely keeps you engaged. And I haven’t even mentioned the villains!

Working Together, Washington, Wisdom and Walnuts

This week my college’s entire faculty and the president and the provost got together and discussed a major change in the academic calendar, a change which some support and some oppose, and we worked toward a compromise. Though we didn’t solve the problem yet, we agreed to keep talking. If we didn’t keep cooperating and communicating constructively, the institution would cease to function and it would fail the needs of those we serve, the students.

A few days ago, I finished reading an eight hundred page biography of George Washington, which I reviewed at length on my Booklikes blog. Washington was flawed, as all of us are, leaders and unknowns alike. He was successful because he listened and took time to think.

Here are two of my favorite quotations from his letters (also quoted in my review):

In this one, he was writing to his adopted grandson: “Where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”
 

The following is an excerpt from a letter Washington wrote to a Jewish congregation in Philadelphia. Note that the word “demean” back then related to one’s demeanor and didn’t have its modern meaning of debasing. It meant comport or behave. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship. It is now no more that tolerance is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives bigotry no sanction, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” He found religious tolerance to be too weak a concept, too condescending toward religious minorities.

Between two classes today, I took an outdoor yoga break. My route out the side of my building passes under a walnut tree and then across a lawn beside the tennis courts. Earlier in the fall, it was hard to tell a walnut in the grass from a tennis ball. A closer look at the bright yellow-green spheres revealed either the smooth texture of a walnut pod or the fuzzy skin of a tennis ball. Now the walnuts are yellow, resembling golden delicious apples, and some have softened open or been punctured by squirrels for the nut inside. The tennis balls, of course, are still firm and green. I place them on the wall of the court or toss them inside, in case they can be used again. Once they’ve been hit past the fence and left there, though, I wonder if they can serve any purpose in the game, or if these wild shots can’t be reclaimed by either the tennis players or the earth.