The aerial of “downtown” Corrales in my last column got several comments, so I’m using another aerial for this column. This one is of the area around Meadowlark Lane.  It’s also from 1959 and was taken by Corrales professional photographer Dick Kent and lent to the Historical Society by his son, Guy.  

Dick’s wife and Guy’s mother, Edie Kent, died recently, so I want to add here a note of condolence for the family as well as good memories of Edie Kent.  I first met her several years ago when I was looking for a photo (by Dick Kent) of the Princess Jeanne neighborhood in Albuquerque.  

She was wonderfully generous and warmly gentle. We discovered that we both had been to the same college and that was cause for shared memories.  When I next saw her she was in a special bed at her home in Corrales —the house they built back in 1950. Even though she was clearly incapacitated, her interest in looking over Dick’s photos that might be used in the Arcadia Press Corrales book was genuine and her desire to make sure I saw everything was wonderful.  Such a great lady —Corrales will miss her.

Back to the aerial photograph.  North is to the right, west is up and east is down; Meadowlark Lane is the very noticeable white road running east to west from near the bottom of the photo where it appears to end at a large house shaped like a fat “T” with a very short stem.  Just above the house, i.e. west of it, is the Corrales Interior Drain, aka the mucky ditch. Following the road west, toward the top of the photo, Meadowlark intersects Corrales Road; the slight offset of the two parts of the road, still there today, is plainly visible.   

Along the top of the photo is the curving Main Canal  —it will be many years before Loma Larga runs alongside it.

Coronado Road parallels Meadowlark on the north; it’s a narrow white road that begins at Corrales Road and to the west it curves as it crosses the old ditch just as it does today. On the southwest corner of the curve is a white house; the Dunlap house built in the early 1950s and recently demolished.  The amazingly huge globe willow (looks like a splendid green cloud in the summer) that stands in the field (the house was just south of it) doesn’t appear to have been planted, but perhaps it’s simply not visible in the photo.  

If you follow the old ditch north you see a thin white road running east west which is probably La Entrada. There a solitary house on the north side of La Entrada (toward the right edge of the photo) and I think this is the house that Eric Palladini built for his family on land that he bought from Abenecio Perea who was his uncle by marriage. At the far top right of the photograph is a house reached by a narrow road winding through sage brush.  This has got to be John and Anna Green’s house that they built starting in 1952.

Unfortunately this photograph isn’t as clear as the one of central Corrales, but I hope someone out there can help identify the house at the east end of Meadowlark and some of the houses set back along the south side of Meadowlark east of Corrales Road.  And, of course, anything else that someone recognizes.  My phone number is 898-5017 and the email address is mpdavis69@gmail. com.

The buildings north of the school in the central Corrales photograph were identified by three callers. The small building on the north edge was the first restrooms for the school: two rooms back to back —long narrow spaces that had in the girls’ part a row of toilet seats, There were no stalls so you sat right next to the girls on either side.   Nora Manierre Scherzinger, who went to school there in the 1950s, remembered that there were two sinks with mirrors above, but they were placed so high that she could never use them. The other building was a wooden portable building used for the kitchen and dining room.  She added a great story about the  toilets:

“One of my “terror” memories from grade school was asking to be excused, running out to the restrooms, barreling around the wooden exterior shield and seeing a teacher, Miss Evangeline Baca,  sitting on the toilet.  I was horrified, said excuse me and ran out as fast as I had run in.  Don’t remember if I waited outside or whether the chance meeting scared me so much I just didn’t have to go any longer.  She was a fourth grade teacher and a very strict one at that!