THE PAST 100 YEARS

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Aug. 2, 1922: 200 people in De Vargas Pageant; 150 Indians, 50 soldiers — tell your friends about the Greatest Fiesta.

Aug. 2, 1947: Two Santa Fe fliers found today what is believed the wreckage of a plane in which two Clovis fishermen disappeared last Saturday while on a trip to Eagle Nest. Jimmy Richards, pilot, and Bert Baca, GI student observer, both of Santa Fe, reported this noon upon landing at the Watson airfield in Las Vegas they discovered a Luscomb plane about five miles south of Agua Fria and seven miles south of Eagle Nest, but found no sign of life.

Aug. 2, 1972: Members of the Mayor’s Utility Task Force today criticized a Public Service Company of New Mexico easement agreement which would allow property owner Robert Weil 3,000 water meters off the Buckman water line for “the expected area of growth” outside the Santa Fe City Limits.

Felipe Gonzales, member of the task force, said the general opinion of task force members is that the Buckman Well Project was ordered for the purpose of delivering water to the City of Santa Fe and not any person outside the city.

Aug. 2, 1997: As the Rio Grande near Socorro dried up in April 1996 and thousands of federally protected minnows were perishing, an adjacent canal and several irrigation ditches were “brim-full” of water, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report says.

The report also says that for several crucial days the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District — which earlier this month had diverted the entire flow of the river for irrigators — reneged on a pledge to release back into the river channel a portion of the water it had seized.