In 1961, when I was fourteen, El Paso had a population of about 200,000. I was used to Des Moines, about the same size, but Des Moines was more a matter of our south side neighborhood, and was older and traditional, but not as modern. El Paso was new, with ranch style housing spread over the desert and with wide freeways, palm-lined avenues, and sleek shopping centers. It resembled southern California, wide open, and spread over the desert and up against mountains.

Our family would come to El Paso on holidays, driving in from Roswell in our station wagon, two hundred miles through the mountains and desert, passing through the pines of Ruidoso and past adobe small towns, Tularosa and Alamogordo, then on through White Sands Missile Range, turning left towards the chiseled mountains of El Paso. The sunlight was overpowering, causing the desert to glitter. New subdivisions were under construction everywhere, consisting of stuccoed, cinder block houses with attached car ports, each house surrounded by low walls of large, tan colored stones encased in concrete. High above was the sun, a tensor point in white, but you couldn’t look at it for more than a second. The light blue sky was always cloudless, streaked with a few contrails from Air Force jets maneuvering high above.

For me, El Paso offered the feeling of modernity and promise never to be equalled. El Paso was the next Phoenix. Frankie Avalon was singing on the car radio, or was it Paul Anka, Ricky Nelson, Dion, or Fabian, the honeyed voice saying “Venus if you can, …” “Just put a little, sunlight in my hand…” Cars are high finned and sleek and pastel colored, two toned, the burgundy and white Plymouths, Chevys, or the more compact Ford Pintos, Volkswagen Beetles, and motor scooters.

Overlaid on this beautiful, modern city of the American West was the wonderful Hispanic culture, with Mexican food being a major discovery to anyone living there. There were family shopping trips in Juarez, across the border. This was at a time when there was little middle class in Mexico and I saw abject poverty for the first time. it was hard to take. My first contact was walking along the market streets, with poorly clothed, unwashed children in torn shirts and shoeless, coming up to ask if they could have a handout or watch our car for a dime. These memories do not go away. Occasionally, we would go to bullfights, going afterward for mango and strawberry juice atop the Hotel San Martin across from Juarez’s central market. The southwestern evenings were bright and things cooled down. The mountains took on a purple hue.

Although the Dodds were spread all over El Paso, they were mostly concentrated initially around Montana Avenue, and they were a very close knit family, doing almost everything together. On Sundays, they would all go to the Christian Science Church at the Scottish Rite building downtown, then all go out to lunch at Luby’s cafeteria, where there would be fifteen adults and kids spread along the table.

There were the family’s favorite eating places. Ardovado’s Italian family restaurant, which had the best shrimp pizza imaginable, a fetish I have been chasing every since, with the jumbo shrimp fresh and only partially smothered in the cheese. Cappetto’s on Montana Avenue had great veal. And, there was Elmer’s, which had the best tacos ever, with lots of shredded lettuce and spicy, hot sauce over melted cheese and ground beef inside a crispy shell, each taco wrapped individually in wax paper and placed in a paper tray for carry-out.

My cousins and I spent the days riding their scooters, a Vespa and Moto Guzzi, with me on the back, around the circular “Oasis” drive-ins with car hops taking orders on roller skates. Or, we would ride downtown to the ornate Plaza movie theater, or cruise up and down Piedras and Paisano Avenues running north and south between our aunts’ houses, or down Dyer. It was the time of the early Air Force jets, and my cousin Mark lived near Biggs Air Force Base, where we used to crawl between the wires onto the airstrip and lay down on our stomachs just off the end of the runway in the sand dunes. The jets would come at us down the runway, at first dots on the purple asphalt, sometimes with an orange glow in the center where the jet engine was, then getting larger, and halfway down the runway, lifting off and swooping up and over us with a great roar of engines. The military police, in their jeeps, would chase us off.

My uncle Bob was the storyteller in the family, reliving a lot of colorful childhood stories, some of which I had heard before. There was a lot of family lore, stories about my aunt’s appendicitis in Osceola, Iowa, which led the family to Christian Science, about the banker who absconded with my grandfather’s savings, and my grandfather’s horse, Bill, who was purchased by William Jennings Bryan, and who my grandfather called over to him once when Bryan was riding down Pennsylvania Avenue. There were tales of Iowa tornadoes and caves, and trains crossing the farm in the night, and one tale about the hired hand who almost killed my grandfather with a claw hammer, and who was tracked down by one of my mother’s half brothers.

The Dodds were typical of the changing America, a Midwest farming family who migrated west after World War II, taking sales jobs, and eventually spreading out as society became more mobile with each new generation. Ties to Iowa were ultimately lost. One cousin ended up in Phoenix; others in Tucson, Idaho, North Carolina, and California. My family moved to New Mexico, leaving only a sole cousin in El Paso. But, for me, El Paso is always 1961, on the back of a Vespa, the sun ever present, on the way to grandma’s house.