Music camp co-founder Wanda Higgins dies at age 97
Wanda Higgins woke up Monday morning in her bedroom at the Hummingbird Music Camp in Jemez Springs and danced her way to the breakfast table. After her meal, she danced back to bed, complained of breathing problems and peacefully went to sleep for the last time.
Higgins, 97, died of natural causes, said her daughter, Sally Chapman. She would have turned 98 in July.
“We really thought she was going to make it to 100,” Chapman said.
Higgins had spent the previous night greeting visitors, students and staff for the opening of the camp’s 60th season. She died just three months before the New Mexico Music Commission was scheduled to give her the Lee Burk Award for her contribution to music in the state.
Higgins was born Wanda Wagner on July 26, 1920, in Dolores, Colo. Her family was from New Mexico but had moved to Colorado amid a lengthy drought. In 1937, the family returned to
Albuquerque, where Higgins graduated from Albuquerque High School.
She met her husband, Kenneth Higgins, a horn player and music teacher, and they married in 1939. He taught for decades in the Albuquerque public school system.
“He wanted to start a music camp,” Chapman said of her father. “She cooked and she cleaned and she served as his support, and the two of them built this camp.”
The camp, opened in 1959, was named after the hundreds of hummingbirds that inhabited the area, where the Higginses provided summer activities and music lessons for students ages 8 to 14. In its first year, the Hummingbird Music Camp had a class size of nine, Chapman said. Today it serves close to 1,000 kids.
Campers learn to play a variety of musical instruments and perform various genres of music while taking part in field trips and confidence-boosting activities. Wandering about the campus, one is just as likely to hear the gentle strains of a student orchestra performing Bach as a teen guitarist playing the Southern rock anthtem “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Wanda Higgins was known for cooking pancakes and using a big fork to toss them to the young campers for breakfast.
“She was famous for that,” Chapman said with a laugh. “Every Sunday morning, she would throw them to the kids like Frisbees, and they would catch ’em and eat ’em.
“We were wondering, who’s gonna do that now?”
Former students and camp counselors who knew Higgins paint a portrait of a woman whose constant presence set a tone of warmth, acceptance and love for those who visited the site.
“Her love for kids has fostered this incredible place,” counselor and former student Claire Johnson said. “This is its own little oasis that would not have been possible without the spirit that she was.”
Chapman said her mother embraced and accepted many students and staff members, regardless of their backgrounds or personal challenges. “People would normally say of someone like her, ‘I loved her,’ but what we keep
hearing from them is, ‘She loved me.’ ”
Kenneth Higgins died in 1996, but Wanda — whom everyone called “Mimi” because that’s the way she wanted it — continued to run the camp with the help of her children and staff members.
She appeared to be in good health until just days ago, still driving her car from her home in Albuquerque to Jemez Springs and elsewhere, and shooing a trio of bears out of the camp’s kitchen with a dish towel — a trick her grandmother had taught her, Higgins told her daughters.
“She ate a banana a day and said that was her secret to a long and happy life,” said Molly Ranger, a camp counselor and former Hummingbird student.
Higgins is survived by her three daughters — Leslie Higgins, Teena King and Chapman — as well as 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren. Chapman said family and friends will hold a public memorial service July 4 at the camp.
In lieu of flowers, the family is asking for donations to the camp’s scholarship fund for children.