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New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI)
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Touring New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI)
New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) often brags about its famous alumni such as Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain; Sam Donaldson, ABC newsman; Samuel Marmaduke, founder of Hastings; Peter Hurd, American artist; Tony Lama, Jr., founder of Tony Lama Boots; Roger Staubach, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback; Owen Wilson, popular young actor; and Paul Horgan, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author. It denies the rumor that Jessica Jaymes, Hustler magazine’s 2004 “Honey of the Year,” is an alumna.
Founded in 1891 as Goss Military Institute, this is the only
state-supported, co-educational, college-preparatory high school and
junior college in the United States. Its eight hundred male and female
cadets come from all over the United States and many foreign countries.
All learn to march (as did Conrad Hilton, Roger Staubach, Owen Wilson,
and possibly Jessica Jaymes. Will Rogers did not learn to march here,
but his son, Will Rogers, Jr. did, and the senior Will Rogers played the
occasional chukka of polo here while visiting his son). Junior college graduates
at NMMI have the opportunity to receive a commission in
the United States Army.
Isaac and William Rapp, brothers and architects from Trinidad, Colorado,
designed a master plan for the NMMI campus and its buildings in 1908 in
an architectural style that is a variation of Gothic Revival called
Modified Gothic, Military Gothic, or Scottish Castle. Crenellated
rooflines recall medieval castles manned by archers who hid behind the
higher areas while shooting at attackers through the lower notches. All
buildings are constructed of Kansas buff brick that became available—and
eventually put local brick kilns out of business—when Roswell’s railroad
finally connected with the transcontinental railway system in 1899. Many
of the buildings sport the Rapp brothers’ trademark octagonal turrets.
Even the modern Toles Learning Center has stylized ones. (Trivia
Question: Exactly how many octagonal turrets are there on campus?)
History
In 1890 Captain Joseph Lea—“The Father of Roswell”—enrolled his son Wildy in Fort Worth University, a premier military school
of the day. Captain Lea was so impressed with his son’s education there
that he convinced the superintendent, Robert S. Goss, to come to Roswell
and start a military school here.
Goss Military Institute opened in September 1891 with thirty-eight
students and six instructors on land provided by Captain Lea in the 400
block of North Main Street, today part of Pioneer Plaza. The school
provided the only high school education in Southeastern New Mexico,
focusing on military training as well as academic subjects. Of the
first thirty-eight cadets, twenty were female students who were not
subject to the same military discipline as the boys but did drill daily
with wands instead of rifles.
Financial difficulties soon led the citizens of Roswell to seek support
for the school from the Territorial government, which finally agreed to
take over the military school. In 1894 the newly renamed New Mexico
Military Institute moved a few blocks north to the corner of Main and
7th Streets, near the present-day McDonald’s.
In September 1898, after some additional serious financial difficulties
that required closing the school for several years, NMMI again
relocated, this time to its present-day site at the top of North Hill on
forty acres donated by Pecos Valley developer J.J. Hagerman. Legal considerations opened enrollment to females again in 1977.
Hispanics have long attended New Mexico Military Institute. The first African-American cadet was
admitted in 1966 with so little controversy that the cadet, Edward
Colbert, Jr., said, “I never even knew it wasn’t integrated until I read
it in the paper.”
Touring the Campus: Some of Our Locations
Around Saunders Plaza
Like all campus plazas and pedestrian walkways, construction of Saunders
Plaza began in 1983. A large statue of long-time Commandant H.P.
Saunders, Jr. sculpted by Roswell oilman and artist Rogers Aston in 1974
dominates this plaza, as Saunders long dominated cadet life. A 1912 NMMI
graduate, Saunders became Commandant in 1916, and held the position for
the next thirty-one years. He was described as small boned but heavily
muscled and athletic, a man of great moral strength and high standards,
fair in his discipline of cadets, but quite strict. When highly
perturbed Saunders would let loose with his strongest expletive:
“Fiddle-sticks!”
Thompson Memorial Plaza. This small plaza just northwest of
Saunders Plaza remembers R. Dan Thompson, Class of 1940, “a soldier,
polo player, coach, and friend” and is dedicated to NMMI’s two National
Intercollegiate Champion-ship polo teams. Although staff and students
had played polo almost from the beginning of the school it only became a
major sport at NMMI in 1924. On a visit to his cadet son (Will Rogers,
Jr., later a well known actor) in 1937, humorist Will Rogers, himself
quite a horseman, even played a chukka of polo here—actually, he played
on the polo field that once existed across Main Street between today’s
baseball field and the Wool Bowl. NMMI won their two national
championships by beating Princeton in 1952 and Yale in 1954. However,
just one month after winning their second championship, NMMI dropped
polo as a sport—because of its expense—in spite of strong objections
from students, staff, and alumni.
Marshall Infirmary. This hospital opened in 1918, just in time
for the deadly worldwide flu epidemic. Two-thirds of cadets were
affected by the illness, but only three died. Red Cross nurses and local
doctors helped, but fellow cadets cared for each other. Classes were
dismissed for six weeks of quarantine, with nightly movies—silent, of
course—relieving boredom. In 1965 the hospital was dedicated to Dr. I.J.
Marshall, a long-time NMMI physician. Campus police offices are also
located here.
Around Alumni Plaza
Alumni Memorial Plaza, whose outline is in the shape of the New Mexico
flag’s Zia sun sign, is dedicated to William D. DeSanders, a B-17 pilot
and member of the class of 1940. His larger-than-life statue sculpted by
Roswell oilman and art-ist Rogers Aston stands in the middle of the
plaza. Bronze statues also sculpted by Aston of soldiers from the First
and Second World Wars, Korean War, and Vietnam War at each of the four
corners of the plaza commemorate the alumni who served in those
conflicts. Aston’s close attention to detail reflects careful research.
For example, his World War I doughboy accurately carries a P-17 rifle
rather than the Springfield .03 that many assume they used.
Enrollment and Development Center (former Luna Natatorium, former
McBride Military Museum). From its earliest days in 1891 NMMI has
always had a swimming pool. Luna Natatorium, with its impressively
detailed Military Gothic features, was built over an outdoor pool on
this site in 1918 and named in honor of former cadet Antonio Luna who
died at Fort Bliss in 1916. During the 1930s, bathing suits were not
allowed in Luna Natatorium because they were considered unhygienic.
Female employees entered the area at their own risk—of embarrassment.
Until 1985 when the pool was filled in, some claimed to hear the
Splashing Ghosts of three cadets who drowned here under unusual
circumstances in 1954.
In 1985 NMMI converted this building to office and exhibit space,
renaming it the McBride Military Museum.. . .
In 2006 NMMI again renovated the building and renamed it the Enrollment
and Development Center. It now houses the offices of Admissions,
Financial Aid, the NMMI Foundation, and the Alumni Association. At
present the museum exhibits related to NMMI and U.S. military history
are in temporary storage, but will eventually be displayed on the second
floor, and will hopefully include one of Sergeant Barney Leonard’s
Harley-Davidson motorcycles with a machine gun mounted on the sidecar.
(“Sarge,” a weapons instructor at NMMI, put together an eight-cadet,
four-vehicle Armed Motorcycle Cavalry squad in 1915, but was
un-successful in convincing General Pershing to take the unit on his
pursuit of Pancho Villa into Mexico the next year.) Currently, football
memorabilia from Roger Staubach, an autographed picture of actor Owen
Wilson, and a photo of a polo player by famous New Mexican photographer
Laura Gilpin are among the items displayed.
Lea Hall. Today’s Lea Hall, built in 1937 on the site of the old
Headquarters Building, houses academic classrooms and offices for the
humanities. Designed to mirror Willson Hall across Bronco Plaza, it
honors Captain Joseph Lea, “The Father of Roswell,” who is also “The
Father of NMMI,” as he was responsible for its founding in 1891, donated
the land for its first campus, and provided much support over its early
years.
This is the third building on the New Mexico Military Institute campus given Lea’s name. The
first Lea Hall, a three-story red brick building, stood just northeast
of where the Commandant’s House (2 Campus Circle) stands today. A photo
of this building hangs in the Roswell Public Library lobby. This first
structure erected on the cur-rent campus contained classrooms,
dormitories, a laundry, a kitchen, a dining room, and even a basement
swimming pool. The first Lea Hall survived a twenty-four-inch hole
blasted through one wall when a Cadet Taliaferro set off a cannon late
one night, but it did not survive a fire in 1909.
The second Lea Hall, also three stories high but built of the standard
Kansas buff brick adopted by that time, was completed in 1910 in what is
now the north-east section of Hagerman Barracks. It contained
classrooms, science labs, the library, and a small collection of
military memorabilia, including the key to the blockhouse on San Juan
Hill, donated by “Captain Jack” Fletcher, long-time NMMI Band Director.
He had led the band that played patriotic music when U.S. troops raised
the Stars and Stripes over the Governor’s Palace in Havana at the
conclusion of the Spanish-American War.
Willson Hall. Willson Hall’s elaborate architecture made it the
most impressive building on campus at its completion in 1927.
Constructed on the old parade ground site where Cadet Conrad Hilton once
marched disciplinary tours for writing “vulgar and obscene” comments on
another’s paper, it currently houses natural sciences, math, social
sciences, and business administration classrooms and offices, but
originally also contained the library—which seems to have moved around
quite a bit over the years.
Mathematics instructor James W. Willson, Superintendent from 1901 until
his death in 1922, was one of the most influential early figures in
setting NMMI’s future course. A proud Virginian and a graduate of the
Virginia Military Institute, Willson set out to create the best military
school west of the Mississippi. He established the strong military
character of NMMI, based on the VMI model, focusing more on military
training and discipline than on academics. He placed such emphasis on
sports, which he greatly enjoyed, that he once refused to hire a prospective
faculty member because the applicant didn’t play baseball—until 1910
staff as well as students played on the athletic teams.
Toles Learning Center. The J. Penrod Toles Learning Resource Center,
com-pleted in 1985, contains the Paul Horgan Library, as well as an
auditorium, a TV production studio, a computer center, and counselor
offices.
. . .
Paul Horgan (1903-1995), a 1923 NMMI graduate, served as librarian from
1926 to 1944. He won two Pulitzer Prices: one for Great River: The Rio
Grande in North American History (1954) and one for Lamy of Santa
Fe (1975), a biography of the pioneer archbishop, whom Willa Cather
fictionalized in Death Comes for the Archbishop.
When Horgan first became librarian here he reorganized the library using
the Dewey Decimal System. The previous part-time librarian, Bandmaster
“Captain Jack” Fletcher, had also instituted a new organizational
scheme when he took over the library in 1909 from Modern Languages
Instructor Count Mancini-Martini. The Count had organized books by
size—tall books on one shelf, short books on another. “Captain Jack”
reorganized the books by color—red, green, blue . . .
Colt Field. NMMI’s original Polo Field covered this area as well as the
land where Godfrey Athletic Center now stands. A small section, about
where Honor Avenue runs today, also served as the football field,
although baseball, played on the eastern half of today’s Stapp Parade
Field, was a much more popular sport. Perhaps this was because NMMI’s
early Twentieth Century baseball teams won frequent championships and
beat every school and town team within 400 miles, while the football
team lost its first intercollegiate game in 1907 to the “Farmers” of the
Agricultural College in Las Cruces by a score of 28 to 0.
Cahoon Armory. This building houses the athletic department offices and
con-tains a gym used for basketball games, and in the past for dances.
Built in 1927, it was dedicated in 1929 to Roswell businessman and
banker E.A. Cahoon, who served for thirty-nine years on the Board of
Regents. It is called an Armory be-cause at one time the National Guard
used it as such. Older cadets try to scare RATS—new cadets—with ghost
stories about its Bloody Tower.
Ghost stories do abound on campus. One of the most popular concerns
“Missing Troop J”—this one has even made it to the Internet. It seems
there is no Troop J in the Corps of Cadets out of respect for members of
an early Troop J, all of whom died fighting to protect NMMI and Roswell
during the Indian Wars. It is even said that the faces of these young
men can sometimes be seen staring out of the clock tower on Lusk Hall.
One big problem with this story: the Apache Wars in New Mexico and
Arizona ended with the final capture of Geronimo in 1886. It wasn’t
until five years later that Colonel Goss founded Goss Military
Institute—that became NMMI—as a secondary school whose original students
were mainly girls but included boys as young as seven. Not until World
War I, by which time NMMI had expanded to include a junior college, did
volunteers from NMMI fight with the National Guard and U.S. Army. But
ghost stories are still fun, and quite a number of them, most equally
implausible, make the rounds here late at night (a do the rumors about
Jessica Jaymes).
Rock Garden. Superintendent “Deke” Pearson built this lovely rock
garden, topped with a huge chunk of petrified wood, during the 1930s. At
one time he kept two small alligators in the pool that filled the rocky
basin, but had to enclose it with a wire fence after neighbors across
College Avenue complained about finding alligators in their shrubbery.
Pearson Auditorium and Brown Music Center. Virginian D.C. “Deke”
Pearson, who served as Commandant for four years beginning in 1905 and
then became Superintendent in 1926, serving in that position for
twenty-one years, built this auditorium that seats over 1,000 people in
1940. Colonel Pearson was the first Superintendent to be seriously
interested in academics, as opposed to military discipline and sports.
In 1941 Superintendent Pearson purchased a Wurlitzer organ from the
Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque and installed it in the auditorium. The
organ was refurbished in 1983 and occasional organ concerts are
scheduled today.
Pearson Auditorium hosts five concerts a year of the Roswell Symphony
Or-chestra (founded in 1959, with all professional musicians since
1970), as well as presentations by various Armed Forces Bands, ballet
troupes, opera companies, and other entertainment for cadets and the
public. Some say Superintendent Pearson still keeps a watchful eye on
the goings on in his auditorium through his haunting, or haunted,
portrait in the auditorium lobby. Varying fees are charged for events.
The adjoining W.P. Brown Memorial Music Center, completed in 1983, is
used for band practice. Brown, a Phoenix businessman and alumnus,
provided the money to renovate the organ in Pearson Auditorium. The
Brown Music Cen-ter contains an interesting portrait of that wonderful
old NMMI character, Bandmaster “Captain Jack” Fletcher who led the NMMI
band for forty-one years. “Captain Jack” had been a Bandsman in the
British Army for ten years and a Bandmaster in the United States Army
during the Spanish-American War prior to coming to NMMI in 1902.
Retiring in 1943, he has the longest faculty tenure on record, and he
probably also holds the record for most luxuriant moustache.
Stables. WPA workers built NMMI’s stables in 1937. Once a
state-of-the-art equestrian facility able to accommodate 140 horses, the
stables have remained empty since the last horses left NMMI in 1997, a
sad time for the school whose recruiting motto was once “Every boy
rides.”
Daniels Leadership Center. This new facility with its adjacent ropes
course provides leadership training programs to cadets and the Roswell
community. Philanthropist R.W. “Bill” Daniels, Jr. (1920-2000) graduated
from the NMMI high school program in 1939 and the junior college in
1941. A Navy fighter pilot in World War II, he later became “The Father
of Cable TV” as a highly successful leader in that field. In addition to
funding this center, Daniels established NMMI’s television production
studio in Toles Learning Center. Varying fees are charged for programs.
Golf Course and Clubhouse. Superintendent Hugh Milton took over at NMMI
in 1947. An Army General during World War II, he had previously served
as President of New Mexico Agricultural and Mechanical College—today’s
New Mexico State University—so one of his first projects at NMMI was to
irrigate 140 acres on West 19th Street to raise alfalfa for NMMI’s
horses. He also set up a hog farm on the property, feeding the nearly
100 pigs from dining hall scraps. Needless to say, this was never a
popular enterprise, and he was never a popular Superintendent.
In 1956
a later Superintendent, Hobart Gay, who had been General George Patton’s
Chief of Staff during World War II, turned the hog farm into an
eighteen-hole golf course. This was a much more popular use for the
land, and General Gay was a much more appreciated
Superintendent—although NMMI no longer holds its annual “Gay Day”
celebration to honor him. When the golf course was built, special
permission was granted to design the clubhouse in a Modified California
Mission style, rather than the standard Military Gothic because it was
believed that a crenellated clubhouse would look silly. The par 72 golf
course and its driving range are open to public use, with a fee of
$25.00 for 18 holes, which includes a cart. 622-6033. Open nearly every
day 8-5 but closed Thanksgiving and Christmas.
For more complete information about touring NMMI . . .
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