Page 81 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Deming and More - Chapter 19
When Imogene and I moved to Luna County, she taught at Waterloo School, south of Deming and west of the Columbus road, near the Mexican border and the Tres Hermanas Mountains. She lived in a small apartment in the yard of Thelma Inmon’s family on their ranch. Mrs. Inmon was later a member for many years of the New Mexico State Board of Education.
I lived in Deming, sharing a house with some other teachers, and taught in the Sunshine School. In our household were Dona Townsend and Ora Matthews, teachers, and Ora’s two younger sisters still in school. Ora later married Roy Perkins who working in the Deming Post Office and was nicknamed “Si”. Dona married a man in Luna, New Mexico, in Catron County, and moved there to live.
While I was in Deming, I met the Fletcher Tigner family, living on a ranch between Deming and Silver City, near the City of Rocks. The family consisted of Fletcher, his wife Cleo, and their three children - Patsy, George (Buddy), and James. Years afterward they bought the old Woofter Ranch in the San Mateo Mountains just off State Highway 107 between Magdalena and I-25.
When I first met Cleo, she was awaiting the arrival of Buddy, who many years later taught agriculture in the Socorro High School and now owns the Paul Woofter Ranch.
After teaching in Luna County for a couple of years, I went to the University of Southern California to earn a master’s degree in psychology. I returned to New Mexico in the spring. Since I had no hope of obtaining a teaching job at that time of year, I went out to the C-Bar-N Ranch a few miles south of Datil, where Bill Benton, foreman, his wife Alvera, and their two sons, Billy and Johnny, lived. For a few months I taught the older boy, Billy, who was in the first grade.
Getting my Master’s Degree in Psychology.
The C-Bar-N had once been owned by Dub Evans, but at that time it was owned by a banker from Kansas City named Johnson.