As we age, remembrances get bigger, smaller, grander or just plain forgotten over time.

So it was with my recollection of my first trip to Whitewater Creek in the Gila Wilderness in the mid 1990s. I walked down a trail called “Gold Dust” to a section of water above the touristy Catwalk trail. I remember the hike as being rather long and hot, but the reward for the effort was great. I remember saying something in my fishing journal to the effect that i had “caught more fish in about two hours than I have ever caught.” All of them were tiny 6-inch rainbow/Gila hybrids who would instantly attack any fly you put on the water. I returned every one of them to the creek.

Fast forward to May 1, 2023. Margo, Chester our dog and I decided to try the same trail to the middle section of Whitewater Creek that had provided so many great memories before the Whitewater-Baldy fire 11 years ago virtually destroyed the watershed. Native Gila trout have now been planted all along the creek, but I have yet to catch one. So this was the day I was going to do it.

We got started on the Gold Dust trail about 9:45 and it was already hot. I quickly realized how much longer the trail was than I had remembered it 11 years ago. I also thought we had not brought enough water. When we turned a corner to view what looked like another two miles of trail, I became convinced we should turn back. Chester, who was thrilled to running around outdoors and covered three times as much territory as we did, was panting like an old steam locomotive and starting to limp — but still eager to go.

When we were almost back to our truck, two young athletic women who were stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, overtook us and said that while the creek was beautiful when they finally reached it, we were smart to give up the trek before the trail got incredibly steep during the last half mile. So we turned back, defeated.

Along the trail, I was amazed at the spectacular variety of wild flowers growing in dry rocky soil along the trail. Some of the flowers I spotted are shown in photos below.

And when we finally got back to the truck, Chester was limping even more. It turns out that he had run so much that he formed blisters on the middle pad of his two front legs and the skin was peeling off. We took him to the vet Monday and the doctor diagnosed the injury as “too much fun” and handed us a $135 bill for the visit. Below is a picture of Chester with his two wrapped front legs. He’s pretty much recovered by the time you will read this.

So in the end, no fish were terrorized because we never cast a fly on the water, no flowers were picked and only Chester seems to have been temporarily inconvenienced. Hope you enjoy the video and some pictures:

As the United Press International political editor and state capitol bureau chief for seven years during the 1970s, I covered three governors during that time.

The first was David F. “Lonesome Dave” Cargo, a Republican who was often seen as a loner in his own party and in the state in general. I was only on the job for about six months while he was the governor.

The next governor I reported on for four years was Bruce King, a master politician who was liked by just about everyone. His folksy attitude and unique twang when he spoke made many people believe he was not as sharp as smoother talking political figures. Not so. He had a gift for bringing people together and negotiating things that were right for the long term benefit of the state. And he could remember just about anyone’s name after meeting them just once. He assembled a talented support team and named some impressive people to various leadership positions in his administration. He was also teamed up with the best First Lady I’ve ever known in New Mexico, Alice. In her obituary, the Albuquerque Journal described her as a “sturdy ranch woman” who knew how to connect with people as well as her husband did and made countless friends in all corners of the state.

Jerry Apodaca was the last governor I covered. Sadly, his death was announced last week. He had apparently been suffering from cancer and died at his home in Santa Fe.

Apodaca was one of the youngest governors elected in the state at the time and the first Hispanic governor in the modern history of New Mexico. He was charismatic, approachable, visionary and surrounded himself with a great team of advisors and department heads who were part of new cabinet system to help him govern the state.

I first met him when he was elected to the New Mexico Senate from Las Cruces during Bruce King’s first term as governor. I was covering the Senate at the time and we quickly became friends. He would often approach me to talk as I ventured on the floor of the Senate during breaks in the action. He one of several younger outgoing members of the Senate on both sides of the isle who came to be known as the “young turks” and who filled many more leadership roles in state government in coming years.

He was a strong advocate for educational and minority issues. The last time I saw him in person was when he was guest speaker at the annual Martin Luther King breakfast at New Mexico State University in the 1990s. He gave a powerful speech that I recall prompted a standing ovation.

I had two adventures with him during his time as governor. On one, he was promoting tourism in the state and we went on a whitewater rafting trip down the Rio Grande Gorge. It was a spring day when the runoff was high in the river, and the water was really, really cold. I recall him shivering when he took off his soaked shirt, then realized cameras were on him and quickly sucked his mid-40s gut back in.

Another time, I snuck off work mid-week to go skiing and also found him playing hooky on the slopes of Santa Fe Ski Basin. For some reason, one of his ski boots had broken a hinge and I helped him patch it up for the rest of the day with some duct tape we found in the Ski Patrol shed. We rode up the lift several times that day, talking about many different topics.

When the time came for me to accept a transfer to Cheyenne, Wyo., to become state editor for United Press International, Apodaca issued a governor’s proclamation declaring Nov. 26, 1976 as “Pat Lamb Day in New Mexico.” After several years, the ink on his signature had faded away, but a colleague at work in Las Cruces was his cousin and arranged for him to sign it again. It’s still on my wall in my “office” here at home. A photo of it, which is somewhat difficult to read, is attached below:

I believe I’ve mentioned that our neighborhood has become quite a menagerie in recent years. We’ve spotted racoons, foxes, skunks, coyotes, various species of lizards, frogs, an occasional harmless snake, a flock of Guinea hens and even a pack of javelinas.

Last week, we added a new critter to the list of nature sightings in the neighborhood. A turkey was trotting through our front yard during an early morning jaunt on its way from somewhere to somewhere else. Luckily our dog, Chester, didn’t see it or he might have tried to bust through our front window to chase it.

Two neighbors who saw the bird — both of whom said they had hunted turkeys — weighed in on whether it was wild or domestic. I got two differing opinions. A woman whose yard the bird had invaded said it was definitely domestic, while a guy across the street from me said it was definitely wild.

I’ve seen lots of wild turkeys in both the Gila and Lincoln National Forests, but never in the Organ Mountains east of here. If it was wild, it had to travel a very long way to get here.

There’s also a small farm about a half mile from our house near Mesilla which has been keeping several domestic turkeys in a pen next to a ditch road that we frequent on our walks. The birds there looked nothing like this skinny critter.

The bird eventually disappeared, but it was having difficulty deciding what direction to go. When I first spotted it, the turkey was pacing back and forth along the fence shown in the picture above. I drove home to get my camera and returned five minutes later, it was still pacing along the same fence, looking as confused as ever.

These are not smart birds, I concluded. I’m glad Benjamin Franklin didn’t succeed in having a turkey as our national bird.

My good friend David and I went fly fishing last week on private water in the Sacramento Mountains. It was the first time he had been fishing since he had heart surgery last fall and he managed to catch a nice fat rainbow to make his trip extra special. I caught only a couple of chubs, although the week before on that same stretch of water, I managed to catch three nice trout.

The place we fish is not that spectacular for its scenery, but it’s a good place to goclose to home that usually awards good results. However, it has one unusual feature that takes some adjustment.

The person who owns the property runs a ranch that has been in his family for years. During that time, I don’t think they’ve every thrown anything major away. There are at least 30 broken down and abandoned vehicles — at least 11 of them 1980s vintage Ford F-150s. There are several tractors and other bits of farm equipment rusting away in a field near his barn. Old refrigerators, washing machines, water heaters and other domestic appliance carcasses litter an area near his house. There’s also an abandoned 53-foot trailer from some former trucking company which appears to have had a large heavy tree or telephone pole smash down on about midway on its roof.

However, there’s probably some valuable stuff out there. I noticed several late 1940s-early 50s Chevy trucks whose bodies were in relatively good condition. These old trucks with what I always thought were classic lines have become popular with collectors who restore them. There’s even a five-window cab on one of them, something that’s especially collectable.

There’s an abandoned Jeep Station Wagon from the late 50s-early 60s, similar to two that my father owned. I can write an entire blog about the adventures I had with that type of vehicle, which maybe I’ll do some day.

There’s also this 59 Chevy two-door sedan, complete with the “cat eye” trail lights. If you look closely, you can see where a tree or shrub once grew up between the rear bumper and the body of the vehicle.

I don’t want to call out the person who owns the ranch. He’s a good guy and we’re lucky to have access to his section of the river. His ranch is miles away from any reasonably sized town, and I’m sure he doesn’t have affordable access to a service which could pick up and haul off much of this stuff. However, I think that several of the older vehicles on the property could provide some trim pieces or body panels that would be useful for restoration projects.

Some car restoration expert might find a visit to the ranch interesting and profitable for the owner.

Last week’s spectacular explosion of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket was described by company officials as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

Wow, what a creative way to explain a disaster.

But Musk apparently saw the failure as a way to learn more about how to prevent a future multi-million dollar fireworks display. It was Thomas Edison, who said after thousands of failed attemps to create a light bulb:“I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.” It also helps to have a good wordsmith at hand when things go wrong.

It made me think of some euphemistic and creative ways we might describe things in New Mexico — for example:

“Rapid horizontal displacement of dirt and sand” — a New Mexico spring windstorm

“Intentional obfuscation of vector change intention in a vehicular mode” — failure to use a turn signal in your New Mexico car or truck.

“Exponential production of hot air” — no, not the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, but the New Mexico Legislature in session.

“Intense downward vertical dissemination of water accompanied by high voltage electrical discharges” — a New Mexico monsoon season thunderstorm.

“Invasion of non-native species with distinctive dialect and lack of taste” — Texas tourists visiting Santa Fe, Taos, Ruidoso, etc.

“Hand crafted accoutrements made from native sand, brown paper and religious candles to celebrate festive occasion” — Christmas luminarias.

“Ubiquitous mood alteration centers” — cannabis dispensaries around New Mexico.

“Capsicum infused edible pod with genetic color transition over time. Also know for triggering whimsical state legislation” — red and green chile.

“Rolling seed disbursement plant mechanism” — tumbleweed.

“Foreign nation celebration observed in New Mexico involving mass consumption of tequila but having nothing to do with mayonnaise” — Cinco de Mayo.

If you think of others, I’ll include them in a future post.

Yesterday at our church, St. James’ Episcopal, a group of ten persons showed up unexpectedly. They were sitting on a rock wall while we were preparing for our monthly Vestry (church board) meeting. The group, consisting of six children and four adults, were migrants/refugees from Venezuela. Their only possessions were carried in paper Wal-Mart shopping totes.

Luckily, we have a member of our church board who speaks fluent Spanish and we were able to find out where they came from and what they needed.

They simply needed a place to stay while they awaited what they hoped would be a more permanent home somewhere, possibly in the United States.

They told us they had been in a “military camp” on the border where they had been treated badly. It was not clear if the “camp” was in the United States or Mexico. They said they had been told that there might be temporary room for them at the Holy Cross Retreat south of Las Cruces, but they had no transportation to get there.

Two of our church members and I helped load them up in two SUVs and drove them the relatively short distance to Holy Cross.

When we got there, we were told by officials at the facility that there was no room for the families and that they could not stay there. I made a call to the Las Cruces Community of Hope and was told that they had no accommodations for the ten, but that they could provide them someplace to be for the day and get two full meals.

We loaded them up in the SUVs again and drove to the Community of Hope. After some discussions with officials at that facility, there was glimmer of hope that some other agency in Las Cruces might be able to give them shelter temporarily. We left them there and they all thanked us for our efforts. I had forgotten my money clip that morning, so I regrettably had no cash to give them.

I’m not sure what happened to them. I hope they found a safe place to shelter for the night.

This is the second time I’ve dealt with immigrants/refugees from Venezuela who came to our church for help.

Venezuela is in a terrible place now, with a corrupt government, decimated economy and mass exodus of its citizens looking for a better life, not just to the United States but throughout South and Central America and the Carribean. I read that more than 90 percent of the country’s citizens are in poverty.

It occurred to me what tremendous courage and love of family these people had to travel thousands of miles to somewhere where their future was uncertain, while holding hope that a better future awaited them than if they had stayed in their own country. It also makes me angry that someone likely took money from them to “ship” them to America and sold them a “bill of goods” about what they could expect.

I won’t get into the politics of what is happening at our border except to say what my good friend Jim said the other night regarding the furious national debate surrounding gun control.

“We need to have a conversation about it, not just yell at each other,” he said.

The same is true immigration policies, I think. We need to do something other than have the President, Governor of Texas, Vice President, and various members of Congress on both sides of the aisle travel to El Paso to stage photo ops and then return to their offices and start yelling at the other side. And it’s not, as one of my cynical friends once suggested, just a matter of “who’s going to pay for it.”

I woke up this morning when our dog Chester hopped onto my side of the bed as he often does to demand a round of tummy rubs and ear scratches. It occurred to me as I was petting him that his life is so much better than the 10 people we tried to help yesterday — especially the six children. He has indoor warm shelter, a safe place to be, a constant supply of food and water, many places to lounge, a big yard to play in and lots of personal attention.

We need to pray for these people and others like them who showed up at our church yesterday. And we also need to pray for our political leaders to come together to find a way to address this issue — not just by yelling at each other.

I was once asked where I would eat my last three meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner — if I had one day left on the planet. My choice for breakfast was Andre’s in Aspen, where my wife and I used to go each fall when we were newlyweds. It was a prototype of the “fern bar” look with great breakfast food, including my favorite — vein clogging eggs benedict. My choice for dinner was some restaurant in Durango, Colorado, which I suspect is no longer open. I remember it for interesting architecture and a great steak, which was high on my then unsophisticated epicurian preferences at the time.

And for lunch? A Lota Burger with green chile and cheese, preferably from one of the older outlets with a well-seasoned griddle. Yeah, I know — pretty lame.

But the last time I went to Lota Burger, I was severely disappointed. The Lota Burger had been shrunk to the size of the smaller Itsa Burger. The Itsa Burger was still the same size as it has been for years but maybe now with a miniscule sized beef patty. (And to top off the disappointing experience, the green chile was just plain hot — not flavorful.)

We’ve noticed lots of things recently that have been “shrinksized.” A certain candy bar I like that now costs close to a dollar has been shrunk to what is euphemistically called a “fun size.” I think the only person who thinks it’s fun is the bean counter at the candy factory who can squeeze more profit out of less and less. Toilet paper rolls which might last only one pass through the bathroom. A “family picnic” size of corn chips about the size of a napkin that might feed a family of ants.

So when my wife opened a package of flour tortillas last week, we discovered this:

Here it is in comparison to a regular “burrito size” tortilla:

We’re fairly hopeful that this was just a manufacturing error. Or maybe it was just a bonus gift from the Albuquerque Tortilla Factory.

At any rate, it made me wonder about the famous “Holy Tortilla of Artesia” from 1977. If you’ll recall, a woman in her kitchen found what she said looked like the image of Jesus on a tortilla she had made for her husband:

I was a reporter for United Press International in Albuquerque at the time and remember writing stories about the tortilla. When I saw pictures of it, I thought the image looked a little more like John Lennon, who of course at one time said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. (I did not express that opinion in any of my news stories, however.)

My concern is whether the canvas upon which holy (and other) images can appear has been shrunk so much, will we be able to recognize what we’re supposed to be seeing?

I know that’s a lot to ponder on a windy Tuesday afternoon in New Mexico, but I await your comments.

The Albuquerque Journal last week reported that city officials admitted that a section of Third Street in the city’s downtown area had been transmogrified with errant lane stripes. The city said a routine paint job to delineate lanes on the road had been botched and ended up creating angle parking spaces on the road.

The city’s Municipal Development Director Pat Montoya noticed the errant stripes when driving in the area.

“You’re driving southbound and, all of a sudden, there’s no place to go,” he said.

The city immediately blamed the striping contractor and said proper striping would be painted late last week.

But oops, it turns out there wasn’t an error after all. A few days after the initial report of the error, the city retracted its original story and said that angle parking spaces were planned all along. Apparently, not everyone got the memo.

It reminded me of a story when I was growing up in my small town of Ruidoso. A short section of Sudderth Drive (the city’s main drag) had been repaved, but the contract apparently did not include a striping job.

City officials took pity on a guy who everyone knew as the town drunk and offered him a simple job of paining a white stripe down the center of the short section of paving. Thrilled at having been thrown a bone to make a few bucks to keep his liquor cabinet full, the guy hatched a plan to attach a spray can of white paint to the front of his old Jeep and trigger it remotely as he drove down the center of the road.

The probability of him being intoxicatged when he did the paint job, along with a very loose front suspension his Jeep resulted in a white line that looked like the route a skier might take through a giant slalom course on the slopes. The result looked something like the picture below. (Actually, as I recall, it was worse.)

Our rambunctious goldendoodle, Chester, discovered another way to amuse us last week. I had just mowed our back yard and because I had let my tall fescue grow too high. When I mowed, there was a lot of bright green mulch scattered about in certain areas.

Chester has rolled in some awful stuff in the past — the carcass of some dead animal at a school playground, stinky cat poop along our walks and other underdetermined obnoxiously odiferous things.

So when Chester spotted the large clumps of green mulch left behind when I did my overdue mowing job, he dived right in and started rolling around in it before I could stop him. He relished in the task. The result is below:

Yes, his face was a subtle, but still obvious shade of green. He also got it on his back when he rolled over the clumps of grass.

Now I have no problems with people dying their hair. Our good friend Gloria in Santa Fe often surprises us with interesting shades of purple hair. And I once helped my middle-school-aged daughter and a friend dye their youthful locks with a sticky red Kool-Aid mixture in our bathroom sink. It washed out pretty quickly, but I’m not sure the parents of our daughter’s friend appreciated my efforts to emulate hairstylist “Mr. Gigi.”

(I do, however, object to suggestions that I dye my hair to keep it dark. I’ve never dyed it. I attribute my hair color to good hair genes. I do have an increasing number of gray hairs working in, and I’m fine with that. End of rant.)

By the time you read this, Chester’s green tint will be largely gone. However, he still smells like a freshly mowed lawn — which is not bad and WAAAAY better than other things he has rolled around on.

You’ve probably been reading or hearing a lot lately about the New Mexico Legislature’s designation of roasting green and red chile as the official aroma of our state. The legislation drew criticism from some who said our lawmakers needed to focus on more important issues than the odiferous offering that seems to be unique in our state every fall.

At any rate, the legislation has been signed into law by our governor, joining such things as the bolo tie as the official state neckware, the tarantula wasp as the official state insect and “red or green” as the official state question.

I had suggested other states adopt an official state aroma. For Texas, it could be the smell of West Texas sweet crude wafting across the Permian Basin. For Nebraska, the earthy notes of feedlots. For New York, the unmistakable odor of a subway. I was disappointed that I had no takers.

Undaunted, I have decided to offer our lawmakers another list of suggested “official” state items or experiences to be considered at the next session of the legislature. Here goes:

The official state dog: A cross between a Chihuahua and a Pit Bull.

The official building material: Adobe bricks.

The official noxious weed: Tumbleweed.

The official weather phenomina: Howling spring winds.

The official car repair kit: Bailing wire, duct tape, WD-40 Vice Grips and a hammer.

The official home repair kit: Bailing wire, duct tape, WD-40, Vice Grips and a hammer

The official dwelling: Mobile home with old tires on the roof.

The official traffic sign: Orange barrel

Official car: Lowrider

Official truck: Old Ford F-150 with multiple dents, fading paint and mismatched aftermarket wheels.

The official medical malady: Springtime allergies.

The official state hamburger: It used to be Lota Burger until they started making the Lota Burger and the Itsa Burger the same size.

The official front yard decoration: Gravel, weeds and rusting ’82 Camaro on blocks.

The official state Christmas decoration: A paper lunch sack filled with sand and a candle.

And the official small business: Either a Mexican food restaurant or a marijuana dispensary. Wait — I’ve just come up with something brilliant. A combination of the two!!! I think I’ll start a chain:

No, not our wedding anniversary. That was 51 years ago on Feb. 13, 1971.

This anniversary was March 30, 1982, when the Space Shuttle Columbia landed at what was then called Northrup Strip on White Sands Missile Range, virtually in our back yard here in southern New Mexico.

Columbia, which began its mission on March 22, 1982, was forced to change landing locations because of poor weather conditions in southern California at Edwards Air Force Base. As happens so often, the weather conditions from southern California moved to New Mexico and caused high winds for the next several days.

I remember watching the landing on live on television. What I remembered was that the shuttle’s landing gear did not extend until the last minute — it looked to me like it was only about 20 feet off the ground when the gear came down. I was afraid it was going to do a belly landing on the hardpack gypsum landing strip. After the gear game down, the aircraft, which had no brakes, rolled for what seemed forever before coming to a stop. At one point as it rolled along the ground, the nose pitched up as if it was planning to do a touch-and-go landing maneuver.

Below is a video link provided by KOAT-TV in Albuquerque of the landing. It was posted on Twitter this week.

In 1982, New Mexico hosted its first and only landing of a Space Shuttle. Space Shuttle Columbia landed at White Sands Missile Range after bad weather caused runways at Edwards Air Force Base to become unfavorable for landing. pic.twitter.com/IBTHSdZErS

— KOAT.com (@koat7news) March 30, 2023

A few days later, the public was invited to view the Columbia as it waited on the ground to be attached to its Boeing 747 mothership and flown back to Florida.

As it turned out, I was on a road trip somewhere to coach the New Mexico State University rugby team and could not go. My wife, Margo, however, was determined for our kids to see it. She drove herself and our children — Tyler was three and Lindsay had just turned one — on a circuitous route to Northrup Strip. Attached is a faded photograph of Tyler holding (it looks like a choke-hold) Lindsay, who was not at all happy to be there.

I read with sadness last week that Chevrolet was planning to end production of the Camaro, introduced in 1966 to combat Ford’s wildly successful Mustang. That car, as well as the Mustang and many other followers, fueled the desire of young men to look cool in a sporty but relatively inexpensive set of wheels.

I have to admit that I was one of those testosterone-driven young men who sacrificed a lot of his paycheck to buy a Camaro when it first came out. I remember distinctly that my car payment was $67.50 per month for three years. I had a full-time job while I was a full-time student at the University of New Mexico — burning the candle at both ends — for a $75 per week paycheck that I was glad to devote to the car purchase.

My 1966 version was spectacular. It was yellow, with a yellow interior, black vinyl top, red striped tires, the Rally Sport package (a black stripe across the nose and hidden headlights) and the SS package, which included the legendary 350 cubic inch small block Chevy engine and a four-speed transmission. It also had factory fake mag wheels, which I was certain would be stolen every night I parked it. (They never got stolen, but my four-track stereo did one night when it was parked across the street from the Albuquerque Police headquarters.)

My brother teased me that the name “Camaro” was French for “loose bowels.” A friend’s mother could never remember the name and dubbed it a “Canaedra.” A work associate called it the “Yellowjacket.”

The car was based on the platform of the Chevy II, a loser in the car wars against the Ford Falcon. The chassis was pretty uninspiring and the live rear axle hopped like mad and made the entire car shudder when you tried to do a burnout.

It wasn’t my first car. My first was a 1943-45 Ford-built surplus World War II Jeep, which had been brush-painted blue, with a yellow T-stripe of duct tape which I had applied to make it look cool. I wrote in an earlier blog about the many misadventures I had in that Jeep. I wish I still had it.

My next car was a real dog — a 1960 black Chevrolet Corvair made infamous by Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” expose. I broke my leg in a skiing accident at Taos and could no longer drive a standard transmission car, so my parents loaned me their bland white 1963 Chevrolet station wagon with an automatic transmission for the next six months. When it came time for my cast to be removed and return to manual transmission driving, they offered the wagon to me as a trade in on the new Camaro. I’m not sure why they did that, but I’m eternally grateful.

Had I kept the Camaro and refreshed it over the years, I’m sure it would be worth more than $100,000 today.

It’s a passing of something especially memorable in my life. It was a time when anything was possible if you had a cool car, a rewarding job, an exciting future ahead and no worries except for whether you’d remember to wake up in time for the final exam in your Political Science 352 class.

But first things first, my good friend Don in Montana spotted another error in my writing. And to make it worse, it was in an article about how careful we need to be with writing style. I apparently inserted a semi-colon in place of an apostrophe in the word “it’s.” I blame my fat fingers and deteriorating fine motor skills for the error. Or maybe it was spell check. Anyway, thanks Don, for the catch. At least someone is reading my drivel.

And now to the real story, which is about Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, the notorious train robber outlaw hanged on April 26, 1901, in the only public hanging ever held in the northeastern New Mexico town of Clayton.

I occasionally dig through newspaper clippings available to me through Newspapers.com about interesting and oddball events happening in our state. I was looking up “bungled robberies” when several stories about Black Jack Ketchum popped up. I decided to pursue the story about this man.

Ketchum was born in San Saba, Texas, in 1863. He moved to New Mexico in 1890 as a cowboy working on ranches in the Pecos Valley. By 1892, he and his older brother Sam apparently became bored with the cowboy life and poor pay and turned to more lucrative but dangerous train robberies. His first job was the heist of a train near Nutt, NM, carrying a fat payroll to nearby Deming.

He associated himself with such nefarious figures as “Bronco Bill” and “Kid Curry” and ended up being a member of the “Hole in the Wall Gang,” made famous in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He continued his lawless ways and participated in many train robberies and other acts of general badness. His last attempt at a train robbery occurred on Aug. 16, 1899, when he was shot off his horse when attempting to rob a train in northeastern New Mexico between Folsom and Des Moines, where his brother had been killed in an attempted robbery about a month earlier. Ketchum was found badly wounded the next day lying next to the railroad tracks and was taken to a hospital Trinidad, CO, where his arm was amputated.

When he recovered, he was taken to Clayton, NM, where he was convicted “for felonious assault on a railroad train” and sentenced to hang. That law, apparently pushed through the New Mexico Legislature by the all powerful railroad industry, was later found to be unconstitutional.

While in prison, Ketchum apparently porked up as a result of not having much excercise. He tipped the scales at 215 pounds on the day of his hanging.

Clayton had never conducted a public hanging before, so the gallows were something new. The person in charge of the hanging only had a spindly rope for the noose that likely had seen better days and was rotten. He apparently didn’t think through the implications of a puny rope and a rotund soon-to-be victim.

As he was led to the gallows, Ketchum’s last words were “Bury me deep, boys, so the coyotes don’t get me.”

When the trap door was opened, Ketchum’s body was so heavy that his head snapped off. The headless body plummeted to the ground and stood straight up for a few ghoulish moments, then toppled to the ground. Ketchum’s head rolled out of the noose that also had also given way because of the body’s weight. It fell on the ground, drawing gasps from a horrified crowd of observers. Thankfully, by the time he was buried, the undertaker had sewn Ketchum’s head back on his body.

A story written by a New York newspaper reporter who had traveled to witness the hanging described Ketchum as being extremely handsome and impeccably dressed.

“Black Jack Ketchum was a handsome man, they say, the best looking outlaw ever to terrorize New Mexico,” wrote Edfrid A. Bingham of the New York Express.

Bingham said Ketchum, at six feet, two inches tall, had penetrating dark eyes and always insisted on being photographed in the finest of clothing. Even after his arm was amputated, he insisted on having his final photo taken before his hanging with his hair perfectly coiffed and his suit being fashionably impeccable.

“He was dressed in the most picturesque clothes his keepers could find,” noted Bingham.

“Nature is fond of choosing the saddest occasions for her most gracious beneficiaries,” wrote Bingman about the day of the hanging. “The breeze across the green-brown levels was Sebean (reference to areas of the Middle East), the sky was a benediction in blue, the sun was a gentle as a baby’s smile.”

“A great stillness fell upon the town and rough men talked in whispers,” said Bingham of the moments before the hanging. “…they gazed at the thing that in two minutes more would be blotted off the map of life…”

We just don’t write ’em like that any more.

As a former journalist, I pride myself on proper spelling, being grammatically correct and being consistent in my writing style. In my more than 50 years as a journalist, the United Press International Stylebook was THE proper way of writing. It;s my writing Bible, so to speak.

For example, it says to always spell out numbers one through nine (then use digits thereafter), don’t over-capitalize, use punctuation sparingly (take that, you supporters of the Oxford comma!) and don’t use the word “over” when you mean “more than.”

So I was embarrassed last week when my nine-year-old grandson spotted an error in one of my blogs. I used the words You Tube instead of the proper YouTube (no space between the words). Sorry Max, you were right and thanks for the catch.

On another subject, it was interesting to read about the report by the Rodey law firm of Albuquerque concerning recommendations to correct problems which led to a fatal shooting at the University of New Mexico by a New Mexico State University basketball player. The NMSU administration asked the law firm for a complete and independent review of the incident, with recommendations to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m sure most of you have read about the matter many times, so I won’t repeat the details, but I will list what the recommendations were:

• Establish a more detailed policy about weapons on campus.
• Have a procedure for how coaches should cooperate/communicate with law enforcement officials involving possible crimes involving players.
• Make sure that student athletes adhere to integrity and values of the school.
• Create more detailed policies for team and individual player curfews.
• Revise student athlete handbook.
• Better administrative oversight of student athletes.

Well duh. I may not be the brightest guy around, but I suspect that almost anyone who followed the story could have come up with that list. I’m not sure how much NMSU paid for the review by the Albuquerque law firm, but I’m sure it was in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m just wondering what would have been a better use for that taxpayer money.

When I see things like this, I always go back to the cornerstone of being a good person: “Remember what your mother told you.” Maybe we need a “house mother” in the athletic department.