The past 100 years

From The Santa Fe New Mexican: Nov. 6, 1917: There are good schools in San Miguel County; there are others that are passable, but a large majority of those he saw are in a deplorable condition, writes Assistant State School Superintendent John V. Conway, who has just [finished] an educational survey of San Miguel.

Mr. Conway found crowded rooms, poor attendance, uncomfortable antiquated school furniture and in a number of instances of absolute indifference on the part of school patrons.

Nov. 6, 1992: Editor’s Note: Mark Oswald is a native of Arkansas who reported on Bill Clinton for three years while Clinton was governor, including Clinton’s announcement that he was seeking the presidency.

A year ago in his home state of Arkansas, Bill Clinton could not have drawn 60 people to a rally outdoors in the middle of the night with a below-freezing wind chill.

But at 2 a.m. Tuesday in Albuquerque, about 900 miles from Little Rock, the chance to glimpse Clinton and hear him talk for a few minutes attracted at least 6,000 people to an open-air gathering. Many seemed happy even after standing in the cold for more than an hour to see Clinton when, by all standards of normal activity, they should have been sleeping. … For a native Arkansan, the scene was mind-blowing. Clinton used to jog alone past my house in the old, rebuilding inner city neighborhood that surrounds the Arkansas governor’s mansion. The man still owes me $1.28 for a frozen yogurt I bought him in 1988. And now, crowds of people in New Mexico — and at other last-minute campaign stops around the country — had come out in the wee hours of the morning to scream for this same person to become leader of what used to be known as the Free World.