Passel of photos lost years ago returned to family
Apparently the girl he vowed he’d never forget forgot. Forget that for a moment, for I bring you glad tidings, sad tidings and a surprising little twist of fame as a followup to my column about a pouch packed with a passel of photos in a park found 15 years ago. Try saying that fast. To recap, Albuquerque resident Jennifer Gardner had found the pale pink pouch containing a treasure trove of family photos while walking her dog in Tiguex Park near Old Town.
But whose family was the mystery.
After a futile search, she packed the photos away and only recently unearthed them again. Some of those photos appeared in this column Friday, along with our musings over how the photos had ended up in the park, the identities of the people in the photos and their connections to one another.
The only clue we had was the name George Ramirez, who on the back of a photo presumably of himself dressed in Army khakis, had professed his eternal fondness for an unnamed sweetie.
“To the girl I’ll never forget,” read the photo, taken in 1968 at Fort Bragg. “Yours truly George Ramirez.”
The calls, emails and Facebook posts came early that morning as different members of the same family recognized some of the faces in the photos as their own.
“When I saw them, I was excited,” Yvette Martinez-Baggerly wrote. “And the first picture was of my mom and her friend.”
Her mom is Rose Martinez, who in one of the photos is a young woman in a pink shirt that appears to have been taken in the late 1960s.
Martinez and niece Isabel Tijerina identified others in the photos — here’s Patsy in this one, David in that one. Joanie. Susie. Julian. This cousin. That uncle.
“Some of the younger members of the family have asked how come we don’t have many photos of the family,” Martinez said. “But we did. We just didn’t know what happened to them.”
Among the photos we were most curious about was one in which a handsome man in suit and tie is seated at a desk, a globe on the desktop, the image of President Kennedy on the wall. One of Gardner’s friends had called him “Historical hot stuff.”
She was more right than she knew.
The man turns out to be Tijerina’s father, Reies Lopez Tijerina, a famous, fiery civil rights leader of the Chicano movement. His followers’ 1967 armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in the name of restoring Spanish and Mexican land grants remains one of the most iconic moments in New Mexico history.
The photo is a rare find, one not believed to be included in historical archives.
Among the other photos are several of the same man, one of them in which he wears an Army uniform and kneels next to a woman in a chair. Because of the Army connection, we assumed he was George Ramirez and the woman was the girl he vowed never to forget. Well, forget that. The man’s name was Robert Abeyta and the woman in the chair was his mother, Martinez said.
“I don’t recall a George Ramirez,” she said.
But after a few moments, it came to her — the girl George Ramirez promised not to forget was her.
“He was just a guy,” she said. “We went to the movies once, and my cousin would tell me he would ask about me, even after I got married. But I never liked him much.” Ouch, our broken hearts. Martinez and Tijerina can’t say for sure how the photos — 97 of them, more than the 60 Gardner had initially estimated — ended up in the park.
They believe the photos were handed down from one relative to another. That relative, who lives within walking distance of Tiguex Park, has had her home broken into in the past, they said. It’s likely the photos were among the items pilfered then discarded in the park.
The photos were delivered to Martinez’s home Friday. Among them was one Martinez had hoped for — a portrait of her mother, dressed in a bonnet, two strands of beads dripping from her neck, a youthful smile on her face.
Her mother was 29 when she died. She was the girl Martinez could never forget.
The family members say they are grateful to Gardner for being the guardian of the photos all these years. Others might have tossed them out or left them in the park to blow away like leaves.
Gardner said she could have never done that.
“I’ve actually been weepy about it,” she said. “Family is super important. It’s part of the good news cycle.”
Let’s hope this good news is soon preserved in a photo album shared widely from relative to relative, generation to generation.
And let’s hope George Ramirez found another unforgettable girl for whom he was just as memorable.
UpFront is a front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.