Over the 4th of July holiday in 1964 we went to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. It was an interesting trip, somewhat memorialized in the Caribou County Sun newspaper.

We had been in San Angelo, Texas, stationed at Goodfellow Air Force base for less than a month after finishing Chinese Language School and getting married. I was in a training program to teach me how to use the language skills I had learned in Connecticut. A bit of information about the training program is documented on the Goodfellow AFB web page. See www.goodfellow.af.mil/~ho17/ho/basehist.htm
for more information. A black-and-white picture in the middle of the page shows the equipment we were being trained on.

July 4th was the first holiday after starting school. Because the 4th was on a Saturday that year, we had Monday as a holiday and decided to take a short trip to Carlsbad and tour the caverns.

Our good friends Jim and Winnie Coursey had a Volkswagen beatle and we planned to drive that to New Mexico and back. We left early Saturday morning thinking it was only a few hours of driving (we’ve since become much better at map reading!). We arrived late in the afternoon in enough time to catch the last tour of the day.

The tour was very interesting and we thoroughly enjoyed the time in the caverns. We came out of the caverns just about the time that the bats made their exodus for their nightly search for food. The sight was quite amazing!

There wasn’t much around the caverns in 1964. I understand the area is quite commercialized now, but back then motels and other accomodations were quite limited. We had literally no money, so our plan was to camp in the National Park Campground and do some more sightseeing the next day. Texas had been beyond hot. Consequently, we didn’t bring much sleeping gear with us. Southeastern New Mexico, on the other hand, was not hot. In fact, it got uncomfortably cold that night. We were sleeping on a blanket on the ground with a blanket over us and were freezing. Then then ants came out — red ants with a vicious bite. After being stung several times, we got up to inspect the area and found we were sleeping on top of an anthill. They were coming out by the hundreds. The blankets were full of ants. We weren’t alone in this plight, either. Jim and Winnie were also up and had moved into the VW because of the ants. We had no trouble deciding we’d had enough and pointed the car back towards San Angelo.

The ride was pretty uneventful for the first hundred miles or so, and then the engine started running very rough. Inspection proved that a spark plug wire was broken. The carbon filament was broken right at the connection to the spark plug and we had no tools to fix the problem. Our attempts only made the problem worse — the wire became completely unrepairable. It was early Sunday morning so open gas stations were few and far between and none had a mechanic unless we were willing to pay an emergency fee. We continued driving but with the car running on three cylinders, we couldn’t drive very fast and the car was guzzling gasoline with wild abandon. We couldn’t afford to continue and we couldn’t afford to pay the emergency charges to get the spark plug wire fixed.

The car had belonged to Winnie before she and Jim were married (I was the best man at their wedding). Winnie had an automobile club membership so we finally called to see how that would work. We would still have to pay the charges, but they would send Winnie a bill rather than us having to pay on the spot. We were ecstatic! The repairman arrived around 4 a.m., fixed the spark plug wire, and we drove uneventfully back to San Angelo, Texas.

While we were at Carlsbad, we registered our name and address in the guest book. Wonder of wonders, a couple of weeks later, the Soda Springs newspaper published a short article about us visiting the caverns. Anything like this makes news in Soda Springs, Idaho! Of course, the proofreading was also par for the newspaper. The grammar mistake is quite noticable.

At the end of our initial training program, I was selected to go to airborne training. Jim Coursey was assigned to a intercept station on Taiwan. He elected to do an unaccompanied tour so that he would only be gone for fifteen months. Winnie went back home to Connecticut to wait for Jim to come back home. At that point we lost contact. A few months ago I got a short e-mail from Jim, but he hasn’t responded to my e-mail back to him.

Colorado has a license plates for honorably discharged veterans. Since we’ve bought the RV and need to put plates on it, I dug out my discharge paperwork so that I could prove that I qualified for these plates. In the folder was the 3×5 card with the short newspaper blurb and my comments. Sometime in the past I had put this card together! The card brought back the memories and they’re now recorded for posterity.