Page 50 - Winter 2020

to college to earn a degree in zoology when Mary Kay was in grade school, who had always run a “tight ship” at home and demanded much of herself and her children.
“She said, ‘Your father is gone and these are things we need to do. You need to be strong.’ I don’t remember her going into any kind of deep mourning or depression,” says the senator.
Mary Kay’s dad was a partner in the restaurant and hotel supplies business in El Paso. He owned 49 percent of the business and after his death the remaining partners bought out Mary Kay’s mother.
“They forced my mother out,” says Mary Kay. “It was devastating, but she didn’t make us feel insecure. She said this happened and we need to move on. Your lives will change some but they won’t change a lot. We sold the big house and moved to a smaller one. It wasn’t a huge thing. She always made sure we felt loved and very secure.”
Her mother, says Mary Kay, was a woman who looked out for those less fortunate and the senator’s childhood memories are ripe with her mother’s kindness to total strangers.
“I remember her having beans and oatmeal on the stove always,” she says. “We lived on the outskirts of El Paso and they would come to our door and they needed to be fed. She always said, ‘When you have, you must share.’”
Mary Kay graduated from El Paso High School in 1950 where she was a cheerleader. Prior to that she attended two all-girls schools--Radford and Loretto Academy. Mary Kay says it was her brother who helped convince their mother to let Mary Kay transfer to El Paso High.
Mary Kay and her brother enjoyed a close, loving relationship. It was Paul who got her to push the envelope time and time again. It
was he who got her the bowling alley job, who taught her to ride a motorcycle and who made her a teammate on his touch football team with his friends.
Paul died of a heart attack at age 50. He managed the telephone company in Des Moines, N.M. and was stricken while on his way to a town council meeting. “It was devastating,” she says. “He was married and had four children.”
Mary Kay met George Kuper through mutual friends and the couple married
after a two-year courtship. Their daughter Susan was born and some 15 years later they adopted Allison.
Together they owned a car dealership.
“We were poor married people,” says
Mary Kay. “We took whatever vehicles we could.” They gradually grew the business with dealerships in Las Cruces and El Paso. Their fleet of cars eventually featured cars ranging from Volkswagons to Volvos, Porches and Audis. They opened a furniture factory across the border in Ciudad Juarez and a hunting lodge in Mexico.
Early on in their marriage, Mary Kay
came up with a marketing idea to promote their dealership. She became a race car driver. Driving a Jaguar, she competed against men in races where speeds often reached 100 miles an hour. They raced in open areas and in one case an abandoned airport.
And she was good at it.
“I don’t remember many races that I lost,” says Mary Kay.
She says her racing venture was intended to show women they could drive high end sporty vehicles and didn’t have to settle for sedans.
On Nov. 5, 1971, tragedy again touched Mary Kay’s life.
George, who had shared the Helen Keller quote with Mary Kay soon after they were
married, was killed in a plane crash while
on his way to set up their hunting lodge in Mexico. Three others in the small plane with George also died in the crash that occurred while the plane was crossing a mountain range and encountered severe wind sheer.
As sometimes happens, fate can be either the hunter or the savior. And if not for a children’s show, Mary Kay would likely have been on that fatal flight. Mary Kay said she had planned to join George on the flight but stayed behind so she could take Allison to the children’s show.
“George said, ‘You can’t disappoint Allison.’ So I did not go with him.”
Twenty years after George’s death, Senator Papen married Frank Papen, a widowed prominent Las Cruces banker, civic leader and state legislator who served in the House and Senate for 19 years.
The couple had been married just five years when Papen died from several health issues. Ms. Papen was elected in 2000 to the same Senate seat Frank Papen had held and in 2013 became only the second woman in the history of New Mexico state government to be elected President Pro-Tem of that chamber.
“He was a great, generous, loving man,” Senator Papen says of her late husband. “What he did for Dona Ana County was amazing.”
Before winning election to the State Senate, Ms. Papen was a citizen lobbyist advocating for bills that dealt with mental health. She often felt frustrated at the process and decided to try to transition from lobbyist to legislator.
“I would be in committee meetings and they would vote something down,” she said in a prior interview with this magazine.
“I began to think, if I could sit over there instead of over here begging, I could be over there voting. That is what drove me in deciding (to run).”
“I’ve ridden horses all my life and I love the racetrack”
-Mary Kay Papen
48 New Mexico Horse Breeder