"When dawn spreads its paintbrush on the plain, spilling purple... ," Sons of the Pioneers theme for TV show "Wagon Train." Dawn on the mythic Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico, looking toward Raton from Cimarron. -- Clarkphoto. A curmudgeon artist's musings melding metaphors and journalism, for readers in more than 150 countries.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Old photos, article in a look at Albuqureque's past

We arrived in Albuquerque, N. M., in the summer of 1951, driven there from Fort Worth by our uncle Mike, since Dad had already taken a job as a technical artist at Sandia Corp. on Sandia Base.
While scrounging through a box of old photos and more, I can across this 1952 article and photos in the Sandia Bulletin, the base newspaper.
It tells the history of the base and includes some astounding photos of how remote the base was from Albuquerque just a two to three years before we arrived. Look at that bare mesa stretching to the Sandia Mountains. Now it's full of subdivisions, up to the mountain's very base.
20+ years ago, at the house on Sandia Base where we grew up, now gone
Sandia was at eastern the edge of the city when we came, but we never knew all this, and lived in base housing for several years. 
Reading the history, I found another interesting fact. The base was the after-WWII dumping ground of "war-weary" B-24 Liberator bombers and P-51 Mustang fighters, both planes that Dad had been a draftsman on when at North American  and Consolidated companies in Fort Worth during the war, when I and my brother Jerry was born.

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