Columns

Whether Dennis Chavez would win his first bid for the U.S. Senate in 1934, would be determined in Las Vegas. Election results indicated he had lost to incumbent Republican Bronson Cutting by a mere 1,261 votes statewide, and Chavez contested the election only in San Miguel County.    

It was 1992. Months earlier, my first daughter had been born, and life was good. I had a reporter’s job at a weekly newspaper and, after a scare in the first days of Amy’s life, we were raising a healthy baby.

Looking back at that time, we had so much more than we realized.

What we didn’t have, however, was money.

An icon in our state’s history, he remains among our foremost citizens. His bold achievements continue to affect the lives of every New Mexican, and his story is as relevant in Las Vegas as it is in Albuquerque’s south valley, or any other place in the Land of Enchantment.

He was the great Dennis Chavez, whose life-size bronze represents New Mexico in Statuary Hall in our nation’s Capitol, where he stands alongside  George Washington, Daniel Webster and Dwight Eisenhower.

Ah! We’re going to have some tofurkey in a few days. We’d better cleanse  our palates in preparation for gormandizing.

Tofurkey? It sounds almost like an obscenity, and in a family newspaper! Tofurkey, as you may have conjectured, is a  vegetarian alternative to turkey.

I got the word from the vocabulary website “Wordnik.” But that’s as close as I intend to get to it. Learning a new word is not the same as eating what it represents.