Las Cruces - White Sands Missile Range

Oh man! Oh man! I was part of the Co-op Program. Yes, it had an official name but I don't remember it. I just remember how delighted and eager I was. I was free! No parents, no schools! How naive.

NMSU took in loco parentis seriously, more or less, and it was a school. It demanded a certain amount of propriety most of the time. It turned its back on some improprieties some of the time. It was a good introduction to the world of grownups.

It was a beautiful campus! It was a huge campus. It had very academic-looking halls (buildings) scattered here and there, close enough for easy walking, far enough apart for a stolen kiss.

This is probably not true but the way I remember it. I arrived in June. There were no girls, no young women, no coeds. Just two thousand or so young males. The place reeked of horniness. The girls, young women, coeds, arrived in September, about six hundred of them. They transformed the campus. It still reeked of horniness, but with perfume added. And some of the horniness was assuaged.

Adept young males found a high school girl, but they were in short supply and nowhere near. (The town was several miles from the campus then, except for the off-campus housing and some professors' homes.) Guys found them in churches, so the girls needed an attitude adjustment, but they were more or less willing, most of them.

But in June, I arrived, moved into my dorm room, and started work at White Sands Missile Range. I was in the Co-Op Program, which meant I was a government employee who worked and got paid for six months of the calendar year then took classes and presumably studied the rest of the year. NMSU accomodated us by splitting its summer offerings into two six-weeks sessions. Roughly we divided the year into January through June and July through December. Christmas Break and July the Fourth always messed with that, but NMSU made it work, six months on, six months off.

I worked and studied in that program for two and a half years. If I'd've continued to major in engineering, I might've stayed in it all five years of college. But I changed my major to physics and was no longer eligible.

It was a good program and did what it intended: It gave engineering students hands-on in-the-field experience of doing engineering as they studied academically, producing much better grounded new engineers.

So I no longer worked at WSMR, but I still studied at NMSU and lived in Las Cruces. That too was a good experience.

I was damned lucky. The NMSU Physical Sciences Laboratory snapped me up as an Engineer's apprentice and put me to work helping test the antennae designed by the real engineers. The antennae were designed for use on spacecraft so we needed to know the shape of their broadcast fields to be sure we could hear from the spacecraft as they traveled.

It gave me more grounding in engineering, but taught me electromagnetics like nothing I'd ever done had.

And suddenly I was done with college. I graduated and got a job as an engineer, of course. There were no jobs for people with a Bachelors degree in Physics. A BS Physics is like kindergarten in Physics.

So goodbye Las Cruces (for now) and hello Seattle!

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