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Chapter 6: Welcome to the Boomtown
Right: U.S. government ration stamps
Below: Girl and soldier dancing, Albuquerque High Gymnasium
Courtesy: The Albuquerque Museum, PA 1986.019.009 photo by Clarence Redman
circa 1945
and squash. Almost everything was rationed. Tires, gasoline, sugar, butter, and meat were limited. Rationing was hard on sanatoriums, where treatment depended on nourishment. Mrs. Van said that it was difficult to “scramble menus to meet the shortage.” No one remained uninterested or uninvolved. A waterworks building at Broadway and Tijeras became the USO club, where soldiers from the growing base could eat donuts, drink coffee, write letters, visit, and sometimes go to dances at the high school gym. The military presence expanded. Clyde Tingley, ex-governor and once again mayor, huffed and puffed, “We can have a military base, but there will be no loose women.” Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms closed Sandia School for Girls, out on the southeast mesa near the base, and the elegant structures served convalescing wounded for a time. Mrs. Simms died in 1944. Her nephew, Albert Gallatin Simms II, earned his medical degree. He and his wife, Barbara Young, would be stalwarts of Presbyterian and Albuquerque in the years to come. Everyone went off to war—nurses, tray boys, doctors, dieticians, kitchen workers,
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