Opinion: Pandemic good time to dig up memories

Stuck at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Phyllis Roeder has decided to write her life’s story.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for 25 years, since I retired,” she said.

So that’s what got her started thinking about her childhood in Portales. And that’s when she started remembering her school days, which reminded her of the big explosion at Central Grade School.

Problem was, Roeder had never known details of the explosion and she wanted some. So she emailed the newspaper to see what she could find out.

This is what we’ve learned together:

Snow was falling early on the morning of April 1, 1949, when first-grade teacher Alice Watson arrived at work. She was alone in the building, except for Joe Singleton, the school’s first-year janitor.

The Portales Daily News tells us Watson asked Singleton into her room because she thought she smelled gas. Moments later, the floor furnace exploded and they both were buried in debris and seriously injured.

It took 20 minutes for rescue workers to dig them out.

“The entire oak flooring of the 25 by 32 room was splintered, and the roof fell … on top of the two people,” the newspaper reported. “Every window in the four-room building was shattered by the explosion.”

An investigation later revealed “a high concentration of gas had accumulated beneath the floor furnace” and caused the big boom.

Both victims were conscious when rescued, but both had lengthy recovery periods.

Watson suffered a crushed vertebra and was paralyzed in her lower extremities for the rest of her life.

Singleton, the newspaper reported, suffered multiple broken ribs, a broken hip and a pierced lung.

Retired Portales newspaper publisher Marshall Stinnett, Watson’s nephew, remembered she went to Boston for rehabilitation after the explosion. He said her passion for overcoming adversity made her an inspiration for soldiers who had suffered similar injuries.

While she never returned to the public school classroom, she tutored students at her home and learned to drive a car with the gas and brake pedals near the steering wheel.

She also collected porcelain dolls and outfitted them to look like the nation’s first ladies.

“She remained independent,” for the rest of her life, Stinnett said.

Watson died in 1984 at age 76.

Multiple students remember Singleton returning to the grade school — where L. L. Brown Early Childhood Center sits today — after the accident. They described him as kid-friendly.

“I can still see him, clear as day, putting that dust down on the floor and pushing it with his broom,” said Judy Crume.

“I remember him well,” said Lena Hodges Goff in a Facebook post. “I was in the second grade. Miss Jewel Price sent me to find a janitor. I had no idea what that was, but fearing her wrath, went down that hall crying. He was there and asked if he could help. Janitor found and a friend made.”

Singleton died in 1983 at age 83.

And so now the story can be part of Phyllis Roeder’s story, which, by the way, is also pretty interesting.

She’s traced her American roots to 1881 when her great-grandfather immigrated from Germany with her grandfather, who was 3 at the time.

Her grandparents died during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. They were in Missouri then.

Her parents brought her to New Mexico in the middle of her first-grade year. She was Phyllis Smith at the time, and Alice Watson was her teacher.

“I came from a one-room school house with four kids in the first grade,” she said Monday. “There were at least 25 kids in my Portales class.

“I remember Mrs. Watson was a very nice lady and very pretty. I remember how scared I was, but she was very welcoming and I adjusted very quickly.”

Phyllis Smith was a freshman when her old grade school blew up. She graduated from Portales High in 1953, and went to work for a credit bureau in Portales, making 75 cents an hour. Soon after, she moved to Roswell and went to work for Gulf Oil, where she was paid the astonishing sum of $271 a month.

In Roswell, she married before moving to San Diego, where she’s lived the last 55 years.

If you remember her from those Portales days, she’d love to talk. “I’m cocooned in my home because of the virus, so you can call anytime,” she wrote in an email on Monday. “If I don’t answer, I’m on a walk or working in the yard …” Or working on her story.

David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]

More local history:

pagespast.net