Measuring the impact White Sands Missile Range has had on Las Cruces is difficult at best. Prior to 1980, White Sands would occasionally publish statistics. For instance, in 1951, there were 1,862 people working there. By 1957, the population was up to 9,000 and at its peak in the late 1960s the number was north of 11,000.
In the 1980s and 90s, the range’s Public Affairs Office published an annual statistics fact sheet which nailed down some of the numbers, like total number of personnel, annual salaries, annual contract dollar amounts in the local communities and where people generally lived.
By the way, at first workers lived almost equally in Las Cruces and El Paso with the rest living on post or scattered everywhere from Cloudcroft to Socorro. During the last publication of the fact sheet the Las Cruces portion of the population was closer to 50% with El Paso’s portion shrinking.
Putting those numbers together was not easy for the staff because of all the entities calling WSMR home. One thing was definitely missing in all of those reports - the people impact on communities like Las Cruces. It was and still is impossible to nail down. We know just by talking to others in town that the families of WSMR employees have done all kinds of things for Las Cruces…..taught in the schools, run their own businesses, managed other’s businesses, joined and helped run many of the volunteer and charitable organizations, participated in many civic events, and on and on.
A few White Sands employees have chosen local politics and have served as mayors and mayors pro temp. The first was Ed Noble, who accidently came to Las Cruces from Texas via White Sands. Noble chanced into the White Sands personnel office after giving his friend a ride to the range. It turned that with his degrees in chemistry and physics, Noble was hired on the spot and started work in 1952. He quickly rose from a basic employee to one of the top managers in 1961. Essentially, he was one of those early pioneers at White Sands who helped invent what a “missile range” needed to be. In 1992, he was elected to the missile range’s hall of fame.
Noble’s first house in Las Cruces was in the Bellamah subdivision. He felt the subdivision was poorly planned and executed and the city didn’t provide enough control over how subdivisions were built within city limits. He advocated for a civic league to get the streets and sidewalks improved. This quickly led to his election to the Las Cruces city commission in 1958. In in1962 his fellow commissioners chose him as mayor.
Noble was also a good tennis player who gave lessons. In 1970, the NMSU tennis program was in disarray and the athletic director, Lou Henson, asked Noble to help out. Noble stepped in and recruited some quality players to come to NMSU and he found Van Hill to come and coach. Both of Noble’s sons, Jim and John, were pretty good tennis players themselves. Both went to the New Mexico high school state championships and received scholarships to play at NMSU.
Albert M. Johnson also came to Las Cruces to work at White Sands. He’d graduated from Tennessee State University in 1958 with a degree in civil engineering. He started work in the facilities engineering organization and then, as the flood of environmental laws and regulations poured out of Washington, D.C. in the 1960s, Johnson was put in charge of the new “environmental improvement” office.
One of his notable accomplishments was his leadership of the renovation of Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was tested in July 1945. This included getting the Schmidt/McDonald ranch house restored to its 1945 condition after it sat moldering for more than 30 years. The ranch house is now part of the open houses held regularly at the national historic landmark.
Immediately upon arrival in Las Cruces, Johnson got involved with the community. He became president of the Dona Ana County chapter of the NAACP and would later serve as the state’s president of the organization. In 1968, Johnson was elected to the Las Cruces city commission and was re-elected several times. In 1976, he was elected mayor by his fellow commissioners. He was the city’s first African American commissioner and mayor. As mayor, he was noted for getting money for recreation and senior facilities and a new library for the city.
Johnson’s presence was felt beyond Las Cruces. In 1970 he was named chairman of the New Mexico Commission on Human Rights and in 1975 he was selected as chairman of the South Rio Grande Council of Governments. He also served as chairman of the governor’s Council of Criminal Justice Planning.
Johnson died in 1986 at the age of 49. A statue of Johnson stands in tribute in the park named for him in front of Branigan Library.
Unlike the men listed here, Dolores Archuleta is a native of Las Cruces and often tells compelling stories of growing up in a small town with dirt streets and no running water in her neighborhood until German POWs dug the trenches for the pipes in WWII. Her first job at White Sands was in 1957 as a typist. Over the decades she advanced and retired from the missile range as a program analyst in the range operations organization.
In 2001, Archuleta was elected to the Las Cruces city council and served through 2009. In that time, she was selected by the other councilors to serve as mayor pro-temp and became the third White Sands employee with a “mayor” title.
Coming from a family with many veterans, Archuleta always leaned toward honoring vets in many of her activities as a volunteer and working with the city. She was instrumental in getting the Veterans Memorial Wall at the Veterans Memorial Park established.
She helped coordinate the city’s annual Veteran’s Day parade, using her connections to White Sands to get military participation in the parade. She has worked tirelessly to organize honor flights for New Mexico veterans to visit Washington to visit monuments and memorials as a tribute to their service. She is known locally as the “veteran’s advocate.”
These are some of the people who have had a local impact.
