As they gathered Thursday at Fort Lewis College, members of the Class of 1964 celebrated their 50th anniversary by remembering their firsts:
First to earn bachelor’s degrees from the newly minted four-year college.
First to graduate from Fort Lewis College instead of Fort Lewis Agricultural & Mechanical College.
First year for the Center of Southwest Studies.
First to compete athletically as the Raiders instead of the Aggies.
“And now it’s not the Raiders anymore,” said Steve Clark with a laugh. “When they dropped the A&M, the guys who were studying industrial arts to teach shop all had to move to Alamosa to get their degrees (at Adams State College).”
Clark, one of the 32 alumni in attendance, is the one who came up with the reunion idea with fellow graduate Hughie Easterday about three years ago, but it took Alumni Director Dave Kerns and his staff to pull it off.
The Fort Lewis this class attended was far different than the one they toured Thursday. The school had been in Durango only since 1956, when it moved in from the Old Hesperus Campus, so there were only a few buildings, including Berndt Hall, John Reed Library and the first dorm, Cooper Hall.
“I lived at the Brookside Motel for $30 a month, $1 a night, along with a couple of other students, and they were glad to have us because Durango was dead in the winter,” Clark said.
A peek at the Katzima Yearbook for 1964 reflects a dress style reminiscent of the Eisenhower era. Prominent at the front of the yearbook is an acknowledgement of the seminal event of their senior year, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the fall. Everyone scanning the book stopped for a quiet moment when they came to that page.
“There was only one television on campus, in the Student Union,” Helen Valdez Bennett said. “It’s a wonder the floor held, with everybody there.”
The big issue on campus was student protests against tuition hikes with marches on Main Avenue.
“One of my favorite memories is hanging Gov. John Love in effigy at the Homecoming Parade,” said Jack Burk, who spent 32 years teaching biology at the University of California, Fullerton, before retiring in Mancos. “And the greased-pig races were great fun. They’d take 6- or 8-month-old pigs and grease them up with Crisco. The Westerners Club and Phi Tau (Sigma, an International Mechanical Engineering Honor Society) guys would compete.”
The Biology Department only had two professors, Herb Owen and Don Johnson, and both were fresh out of grad school. Did FLC prepare Burk well for his future career?
“I was able to skip the master’s degree and go straight for my Ph.D,” he said, “so I’d say, definitely.”
Fundraising Hootenannies, sock hops, and the G.I. Club’s Foreign Film Festival including “Yojimbo,” which screened at the Kiva Theater, were among the many entertainment options students enjoyed.
Geology major Bill Vogel relied on Frank Bowman as a teacher because Bowman was a Geology Department of one.
“I had six classes with him,” he said. “He was great, except he didn’t believe in plate tectonics.”
The Young Republicans outnumbered the Young Democrats by about 3 to 1, and the men outnumbered the women by about the same margin in 1964.
“I don’t remember being asked out a lot,” Bennett said, “but I went straight through in nine trimesters, and I was working around campus. Boy, is it hard to put 50 years in one tiny day.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect last name for Herb Owen.
