Bernie Hall: High class for country kids

I was out of town when Bernalillo Hall - the last remaining high rise on the campus of Eastern New Mexico University - was demolished last month.

Even though it had long outlived its useful life, it was bittersweet to see the photos as it came down and even more so to drive past the mountain of rubble last week.

Bernalillo opened in the fall of 1967, according to the ENMU yearbook, The Silver Pack, as well as stories in the Portales News-Tribune.

Built to house 450 female students, it took its place on the Portales skyline a year after its seven-story twin - Lincoln Hall - opened in the fall of 1966 for an identical number of men.

Affectionately dubbed Bernie, it was an active residence hall for about a half century, prior to becoming a catch-all building used for everything from storage to housing much of Golden Library for a few years during the multi-million dollar renovation that created the Golden Student Success Center.

But it's as a dorm that Bernalillo Hall will best be remembered.

When you do the math (450 students times 50 years) and adjust for variations like single rooms and women who lived there for multiple years, it's fair to guess that around 20,000 of us spent at least a semester there, making memories that will far outlast brick and mortar.

For me and my roomie - Diane Smith of Floyd - Bernie was our first home-away-from-home when we enrolled as freshmen at ENMU in the fall of 1979. From our room on the fourth floor, we had a birds-eye view of the community ... high class for a couple of country kids.

Eastern's residence halls were all single sex then, and each floor was outfitted with vast group bathrooms.

Males were allowed to visit but, if memory serves me, always had to be escorted and in sight. ("Let's keep those doors open, ladies.")

Whether we were bringing up a boyfriend, a brother, or a dad on the elevators, as soon as the doors opened, it was our responsibility to shout out, "Man on fourth!"

(To be clear, this was not a misunderstanding of baseball, but rather to alert our fellow fourth-floor residents who might be scampering down the hall to the showers that someone with XY chromosomes was on our floor.)

Because of their proximities (and because I can think of no plausible other reason for what I am about to tell you), Lincoln and Bernalillo Halls served as emergency gathering places for each other.

That means that if a guy from Lincoln Hall happened to sneak into Bernalillo at 2 a.m. and activate the fire alarm, all of us residents of Bernalillo Hall had to evacuate the building and assemble in the lobby of Lincoln.

The opposite was also true, but while my pajama-clad dorm mates and I made multiple late-night trips across the lawn to Lincoln after being jarred awake by alarms, I don't remember even one time that the guys ended up in our lobby.

Diane and I narrowly missed legitimately activating the fire alarm once when we frantically shoved our illegal toaster oven under a bed, seconds ahead of opening our door to our resident assistant who was conducting surprise room inspections.

While the RA never looked under the bed ... phew ... neither did Diane and I until a while later when we started smelling smoke.

In our haste, we had turned on the oven, which was trying its hardest to ignite the mattress. We whipped it out barely in the nick of time.

When I drove past the mounds of bricks and twisted beams last week, I was relieved all over again that another four decades of students got to make their own crazy memories in that building after us.

Bernie is gone, but the smell of a slightly toasted mattress? That will linger always.

Betty Williamson loved her year at Bernie. Reach her at:

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