Gone but not forgotten: Reunion planned for students of late, great Monroe Junior High

The short but happy life of Monroe Junior High School began in September 1953, temporary barracks strewn across the designated property on the southeast corner of Louisiana and Indian School Northeast. Bricks and mortar would come a year later.

It ended in the spring of 1974 with Monroe’s closure, the anguished cries of MJHS parents falling on the deaf ears of Albuquerque Public Schools administration.

In between, thousands of Albuquerque 12-to-14-year-olds went to class, walked the halls, ate lunch in the cafeteria, played in the band or orchestra, sang in the chorus, went to dances, began dating, shot baskets in the gym, ran on the track and played football — flag and/or tackle — on a goathead-infested dirt field.

Indelible memories were made.

“Gosh, it was junior high school, right?” State District Court Judge Stan Whitaker, Monroe Class of 1972, said in a phone interview. “… For me, it was just such a rich experience, just to have so much to be involved in when you’re so confused and chaotic and coming into those teenage years.

“Just nothing but positive stuff, when I think about it.”

On Friday and Saturday, an all-classes Monroe Junior High reunion — timed with the 50th anniversary of the school’s closing — is scheduled. Marita “Mert” Eckert, Monroe Class of ’73, is the organizer.

“It’s been 50 years since we closed, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while,” said Eckert, who has organized reunions for her graduating class at Monroe and for her class at Del Norte High School (’76). “So I waited until this year, so we could invite everyone that ever went there.”

Like Whitaker, Eckert, who lives in Albuquerque, remembers her days at Monroe with unrestrained fondness.

“It was a very innocent time in our lives,” she said. “Everyone was innocent, and it was a ‘Mayberry’ time. That’s how everyone I’ve talked to (about the reunion) talks about it.”

Poetry’s a notion

Gail Rosenblum, like Eckert a member of the Class of ’73 and a co-chair of the reunion’s organizing committee, won awards for original oratory and dramatic interpretation as a Monroe ninth grader.

But it was the written word, not the spoken, at which she would go on to make her living.

“In seventh or eighth grade, I wrote a poem,” Rosenblum, who lives in Minneapolis, said in a phone interview. “I still have it.

“It’s just a very corny poem, but I gave it to my teacher and she loved it. I wish I could remember her name … but I just remember she gave me such positive feedback, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a writer!’”

So she was. Rosenblum went on to write for the New Mexico Daily Lobo, the Albuquerque Tribune, the Albuquerque Journal, the San Antonio Light and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, primarily as a feature writer, before retiring in 2023.

Of her days at Monroe, she said, “We just grew up there. (Albuquerque) was a small town then, and we grew up like family.

“All the kids were very close, and I think that’s why we’re able to have a junior-high reunion where this many people actually want to come. I imagine that’s pretty unusual.”

Getting on track

Whitaker played the drum in the Monroe school band, played football and ran track with no thoughts at the time of pursuing a career in the law.

Yet, there indeed exists a link between his Monroe years and the judge’s chambers he now occupies.

The talents he honed on that dirt track east of the school building, competing in Mustangs green and gold, led to a sterling athletic career at Sandia High; he won a big-school state track title in the quarter-mile as a senior in 1975.

His achievements at Sandia earned him a full athletic scholarship to the University of Kansas. But the NCAA, upon learning that Whitaker and other college athletes had been awarded further financial aid in the form of federal grants, moved to either reduce accordingly the value of those athletes’ scholarships or to declare those athletes ineligible.

A group of athletes, led by Whitaker’s Kansas track-and-field teammate Cliff Wiley, filed suit.

“I wasn’t a named petitioner,” Whitaker said, “but Cliff was named on the lawsuit as representing all of us.

“Just through the entire process, it was so interesting to me. … It sort of piqued my interest, thinking, you know, that maybe someday I might want to become a lawyer.”

After graduating from Kansas in 1980, Whitaker continued to compete in track through 1986. He ran the 800 meters at the 1984 U.S. Olympic Trials, though he didn’t qualify for the Los Angeles Games.

Whitaker earned his degree at the UNM School of Law in 1989.

“I really believe,” he said, “that my experience and my participation in (track and field) really drove me into this area of practice, this profession.”

It’s a drive that, it could be said, began on that dirt track at Monroe Junior High.

Coach Williams

It all started with coach Ollie Pembroke and a cord of rope.

David Williams, Monroe Class of ’62, was a seventh-grader when Pembroke assigned him an important task.

“He’s going down the list of people, and he’s picking them out in P.E. class for flag football,” Williams recalled. “It’s ‘You do this, you do that.’”

To Williams, Pembroke said, “You’re a quarterback.” He then handed this 12-year-old, fresh off the playgrounds of Inez Elementary, a cord of rope and a roll of adhesive tape.

“He told me, ‘Over the weekend, I want you to cut this rope into 10-inch strips and tie a knot on each end and tape up the ends so they don’t frazzle, and we’re gonna have flag football starting next week.’”

Williams didn’t know why Pembroke singled him out. But, he said some 65 years later, he liked the feeling.

“That was sort of the first time I thought, ‘OK, I’m gonna be in charge,’” he said. “‘I’m gonna be the quarterback and the flag maker, and I’ve got coach Pembroke on my side.’”

In the junior-high years that followed, Williams said, he found himself paying close attention to how the Monroe coaches — Pembroke, Bill Wolffarth, Hugh Dickson, Frank Love — went about their business.

“I think I did just attach myself to their roles and their responsibilities,” he said. “I was one of those gym rats that wanted to play and wanted to be on the teams. Since they were in charge, I attached to those guys.”

Those attachments led to a career.

After playing football at Sandia, Williams spent 10 years at Eldorado High School as the head baseball coach and an assistant football coach. He was hired as Del Norte’s head football coach in 1981, came back to Eldorado in the same capacity in 1996, then retired in 2006 — all told, 36 years as an APS coach

Shining seasons

John Baker, Class of ’59, was a baseball player at Monroe — playing center field and hitting .348 for the Mustangs as a ninth-grader. But coach Pembroke — there he is again — would have his baseball players run a mile every day for conditioning. Baker would always finish first.

He didn’t run track for the Mustangs because junior-high track meets, for some odd reason, didn’t include a running event longer than 220 yards.

But when Baker got to Manzano High, Wolffarth — having left Monroe for the city’s brand-new high school — asked John Haaland, Baker’s friend and Monroe ’59 classmate, to go out for cross country.

“I thought I’d try, too,” Baker told the Journal in 1966.

He didn’t just try; he succeeded. Baker would go on become one of the finest middle-distance runners New Mexico has produced or will produce.

Beyond 1966, many New Mexicans know the story. Of how Baker and Haaland, both APS coaches, helped launch the powerful Duke City Dashers track club.

Of how Baker, stricken by testicular cancer, died in 1970 at age 26. Of how he became the subject of an award-winning book, “The Shining Season,” by author William Buchanan, and of a TV movie. And of Aspen Elementary, where Baker had taught and coached, being renamed in his honor.

Far more than a postscript were the contributions of Haaland, Baker’s friend and Monroe classmate, who continued to coach with the Dashers and at Del Norte High.

Haaland, for years the driving force behind the Great Southwest Classic high school track meet, died in 2019 at 74.

The faculty

No history of Monroe Junior High can be complete without a mention of general science teacher George Fischbeck.

Fischbeck was an original Mustang, having come to Monroe from Ernie Pyle Junior High in 1953. He earned a national following for his zany, wildly inventive approach to teaching, then at some point in the 1960s left Monroe to become an Albuquerque TV weatherman.

In 1972, “Dr. George” was hired to do the weather by Los Angeles TV station KABC.

Fischbeck died in California in 2015 at 93.

Tom Martin taught music and shop at Monroe from 1969-74 and is planning to attend the reunion.

Martin later taught band at Cleveland Middle School, where one of his pupils was Brandon Kauffman, Eckert’s son.

Brandon was struggling in school, Eckert said in an email, until Martin made improved grades a condition of his continuing in band.

“The magic potion,” Eckert wrote in an email, “was Mr. Martin making it a requirement that his students rise up to the level of his expectations.

“He was such a wonderful influence.”

Whitaker recalled Fred Quinn, a school counselor, as “just the funniest, energetic guy who was very supportive of the students.”

Coach’s cradle

Monroe served as a proving ground for some of Albuquerque’s more successful high school coaches. In addition to Williams, a Monroe student, there was:

HUGH DICKSON: Monroe’s head baseball and football coach from 1960-64, Dickson went on to coach baseball and basketball at Del Norte. He was the Knights’ head basketball coach for 13 years and was the Albuquerque Tribune Metro Coach of the Year in 1980.

Dickson died in 2021 at 86.

BILL GENTRY: Gentry was Monroe’s first football coach (1954-57) in preparation for a high-school coaching career at Highland and Eldorado that produced 305 victories, three state titles and membership in multiple halls of fame.

Gentry died in 2020 at 93.

FRANK LOVE: In his three years at Monroe (1962-64), Love took the Mustangs to a city track title and a Heights Division basketball title. Love coached boys basketball and cross-country at Del Norte before moving into administration.

BILL WOLFFARTH: Taking the same path as many of his Monroe students, Wolffarth coached at Mark Twain Elementary — a Monroe feeder school — before moving to Monroe in 1957 and in 1960 on to Manzano, where former Mustangs Baker, Fred Knight, Victor Moore, Stan Renfro, et al, competed for the Monarchs. Wolffarth coached football and track at Monroe.

The Doorman

The late Jim Morrison, lead singer of the iconic rock group The Doors, is reported to have lived in Albuquerque from approximately 1955-57. A 2015 Associated Press story reported that Morrison attended both Monroe and Wilson junior high schools during his short stay.

It went unreported as to whether his time at Monroe lit the fire that propelled him to a career in music. But let’s just say it did.

Albuquerque Journal writer Rick Wright is a Monroe Junior High alum — Class of 1962.