The past 100 years

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Dec. 31, 1917: Your Best New Year Resolution Is To Be A Food Patriot In 1918.

Dec. 31, 1967: Two of America’s most prominent young couples, Capt. and Mrs. Charles Robb and Mr. and Mrs. Pat Nugent, are spending the New Year’s weekend in the Red River area.

Mr. and Mrs. Nugent arrived in Santa Fe from the LBJ Ranch Friday afternoon. Capt. and Mrs. Robb arrived in Santa Fe yesterday afternoon. As soon as they deplaned the couples were driven to Red River in waiting cars.

Mrs. Nugent and Mrs. Robb are daughters of President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson.

Dec. 31, 1992: Five years ago on New Year’s Eve, Marion Fleming’s teen-age daughter was driving home from a dance when she was killed by a drunken driver. Jennifer Fleming was nearly 17.

“It’s something our family lives with constantly,” Fleming said Wednesday from her Los Alamos home. “You never get over it.”

“And something like what happened on Christmas Eve brings it all back,” she added.

Fleming was referring to a more recent holiday tragedy. That was a Dec. 24 accident in Albuquerque in which a suspected drunken driver — traveling the wrong way on Interstate 40 — smashed his pickup truck into a car. A 31-yearold woman and her three daughters were killed and the woman’s husband was badly injured.

That tragedy has set off an unprecedented explosion of outrage over New Mexico’s chronic problem with intoxicated drivers, long one of the nation’s worst. It also produced renewed calls for legislative action to toughen the state’s DWI laws.

On Tuesday, the Albuquerque funeral for Melanie Cravens and her daughters became, in part, an antiDWI rally. The Rev. Rob Carmen demanded the legislators in attendance: “What are you going to do?”