Page 72 - Anthology

I was born on Thursday, December 23, 1920, in Espanola, New Mexico, about 25 miles NW of Los
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Alamos National Laboratory where the Atom Bomb was created.

The Española train depot, 1920

Española was founded in 1880 as a railroad village and incorporated as a small country town in 1925.

The city is situated in an area Juan de Oñate declared a capital for Spain in 1598.
Española has been called the first capital city in America. At the 2010 census, the total population was
10,495.

A Glimpse at Our Formative Years

My family called me Lupe. My sister, Maria del Carmen Eriberta Rodriguez Martinez was born July 9,
1922, at Corral de Piedra near Espanola, New Mexico, at the home of her maternal grandparents
Candido G. and Rafelita V. Salazar. She was baptized on July 16, 1922, with her grandparents as
godparents. When she was about seven years old, she was stricken with spinal meningitis and I being
almost nine at the time was sent to live with our Rodriguez grandparents in the house that they had built
next door to ours. The house was close to the Espanola School and our aunts Mary and Gloria could
walk to school during the winter months and attend school even in inclement weather.

The disease, spinal meningitis, was apparently difficult to diagnose. I recall our father, Manuel D.
Rodriguez, telling us that he had visited Bertha’s attending physician, Dr. Lee who was researching his
physician textbooks endeavoring to diagnose her condition correctly. (Two years later, when I had scarlet
fever, Bertha was sent away from home to the same grandparents to protect her.) At about age fourteen
both Bertha and I had tonsillectomies performed one Sunday morning by Dr. Nesbitt, in his small hospital,
with ether as the anesthetic. I still recall the suffocating feeling of being forced to breathe through gauze
saturated with ether.

At this particular stage in our growing up, Bertha had an early growth spurt, as girls sometimes do, and
Bertha was taller and heavier than I was. And this was our general stage of development when I got
a bicycle for Christmas, with the stipulation that I was to let Bertha have use of the bicycle. One summer
day, we got parental OK for us to bike over to Corral de Piedra to visit Grandmother Rafelita Salazar and
Aunt Anita.

Of course, I was the designated driver, and the route was the only gravel road used before the Chama
blacktop had been constructed. Halfway there one had to traverse the small Sandoval arroyo at the
bottom of the hill. I had gathered quite a bit of momentum going down the incline when we hit the arroyo
bed. I couldn't stay in the traveled rut and you guessed it, we took a nasty spill on the sand and gravel.