Judy Jones UNM Vice President for Advancement
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Diane Klinge Becker, ’61 BADA, ’68 BAFA, and I met in 1958, in a Mitchell Hall Spanish class. She was an Alpha Chi and I was a town girl who mostly crawled onto the 6 a.m. bus from Sandia Base, laden with Edith Buchanan’s everlasting English compositions, her relentless corrections, and my deathless rewrites. There was no duck pond. Instead, the black-topped parking space was lined with sawed off telephone poles to mark its boundaries. Diane and Stephanie Kimbrough Spinks suffered through frequent whiplash while I learned to drive, because I backed into every one of the poles, using my parents’ Flowmaster black-and-red Buick like a battering ram. Then, tuition was a big $50 a semester, and if you spent $25 on books, it was something to talk about. There were about 4,500 students. Diane and I met daily at the old SUB, now a museum, for good coffee and fresh cake doughnuts served on thick restaurant white china. Often we sat with N. Scott Mommaday, Neil Frumkin, and some guy who was positive that the radical organization for students called the SDS was the future of the world. Diane and I joined for two bucks because he was pretty cute, and we wanted to date him. In subsequent years, we wondered if the FBI would hunt us down and rip the paper cards to bits in front of a tribunal dealing with heretics. Now a team referred to as “Mutt and Jeff,” Diane, a tall and blond Chicagoan, and I, short and dark, became fast friends throughout all the rest of our years at UNM. We studied together, hit the beer busts, soulful poetry sessions, and shoulder-to-shoulder parties over on Pine Street, where the word “Beatnik” was gaining approval, along with Joan Baez’s voice. I took up playing and singing with a five-dollar hockshop guitar and managed a two-chord “Michael Row
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3 ways New Mexicans View UNM (from the university’s 2003 statewide survey) • More than 70 percent rank their overall impression of UNM as either extremely good or good. • Asked why they feel positive about UNM, the highest response (43 percent) is the quality education UNM offers. • One-quarter of the respondents say we have enough parking and shuttle buses— who are these people?
Karen Abraham Executive Director, UNM Alumni Association
3 things I’d Like You to Do
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• Send us your e-mail address—register at unmalumni.com.
• Interact with us—send us your opinions, reconnect with your friends through our online community, respond to our surveys. • Take pride in your alma mater—it’s a world-class university!
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