by Erin Griffith

“Oh, my goodness alive! It is a miracle,” Migdon Cox said with a chuckle. “You just can’t realize, you can’t imagine how—it was just those two buildings.”

Migdon Cox, 90, graduated from Eastern New Mexico Junior College in 1938, when there was nothing more than the current Administration Building and a girl’s dormitory, and to see Eastern today, is truly miraculous.

Ms. Cox, who was then Migdon Pepper, came to Portales from Ralls, Texas, where her father was a Baptist preacher. Future ENMU president Floyd Golden, at that time the College Dean, was a friend of the family, who often visited his sister in Ralls.

“Mr. Golden thought it would be good for me to come over here for school. I had an aunt and an uncle who lived here, and they had the biggest café in Portales and I worked in that café to go to school and I lived with them.”

It cost Ms. Cox $50 as an out-of-state student, which, she reminded, was a lot of money back then. Ms. Cox studied typing and shorthand and was awarded an associate in arts diploma upon graduation. She recalls that the “shorthanded teacher could write both right-handed and left- handed, it didn’t matter.”

She has vivid memories of her first classrooms at Eastern. “The building wasn’t all made when I first started. When I took typing, we went in at the main door and then we went to the left upstairs and that was a typing class and the other part wasn’t finished,” Ms. Cox said about the Administration Building. “It wasn’t until second semester that the other part was finished and you could go in the little door on the west to get to class.”

With a laughing disdain, Ms. Cox remembers having to wear the traditional freshman beanie. “Oh, we had an old green cap we had to wear. I don’t know, they just told us we had to wear them and we wore them.”

Ms. Cox said she did not have time to be involved with clubs on campus; she was too busy cleaning house, doing the washing and ironing for three boys and working eight hours a day at Liberty’s Café. However, she said the professors and football players came into the café to eat a lot, because the dining area at the campus was very small.

“I didn’t get any money during the semester because I was paying for school, but in the summer I stayed and I worked and I got a dollar a day, plus tips—and if you got a quarter tip, you were on cloud nine; you never got a quarter tip, you got 10 cents,” she said. Ms. Cox met and married her husband, Karl Cox, in that café.

“He came in the café; he brought a boy with him; they were both going to go to college and they sat on the end of the café (counter) and I hardly ever waited on the café counter, I waited on the big tables, and he told the boy ‘You see that girl right there,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna marry her.’ The boy said something like, ‘But you don’t even know her,’ and he said, ‘You just wait and see.’”

She recalls having to march down to the basement of the Methodist Church every Wednesday morning for Eastern’s assembly program. “They told us the announcements. Told us what we should be doing, told us to study in our classes and all that kind of junk, but that’s what we did.”

Until he injured his knee, Ms. Cox’s husband played football. Then he stayed around to “help any other boy who was injured.” They played on the high school field because Eastern did not have one.

“The football team picture is not in the 1938 annual because the coach got mad at my husband. My husband looked more like the coach than the coach so he wouldn’t let them put it in,” she said.

The boys didn’t have a dormitory, they just kind of lived around I guess. Karl lived with a nice married couple.

“It was pretty hard during that time, getting money to go to college and so he had to quit and go down and help his daddy with the farm, but he worked in a little bit of everything while he was going to school to make money,” said Ms. Cox. “He helped in the potato shed, and in the green beans, and he worked in the filling station and he worked in every little thing that came along.”

Ms. Cox does have sad memories of some of the boys she knew at Eastern New Mexico Junior College. “Most of the boys that graduated from out here, the years I was here, went into the services and most of them did not get to come back.”