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LAS CRUCES - Las Cruces native Alfonso Guzmán assures that he was receiving a well-rounded, solid education in 1941, as a seventh-grader at Holy Cross Catholic school.
Even so, the 84-year-old said, Pearl Harbor wasn't a place that had come to his - or anyone else's - attention in a southern New Mexican community of less than 7,000 people.
"Pearl Harbor was insignificant," said Guzmán, an amateur, local historian. "Like everyone else, we didn't know what it was."
That was until the now-infamous Japanese attack on a U.S. naval fleet on Dec. 7 of that year.
Guzmán, a paper delivery boy for the Sun-News at the time, had already made his rounds that Sunday morning. He lived on the 900 block of Lohman Avenue, which was "in the boonies" in the early '40s, he said. But he was visiting family friends, the Carbonierres, when his older brother phoned to relay a message: The newspaper's circulation manager had called all delivery boys for a second, unexpected shift.
Guzmán and the others made their way to the shop that housed the printing press to find out their assignment. They were to hawk a rare, special edition, he said.
"They told us we didn't need a bike; we had to walk the streets saying, 'Extra, extra!'" he said.
Guzmán said it was his first "extra." He said he walked the Mesquite neighborhood, but didn't sell
He has since come to understand the significance of the event, which propelled the United States into World War II. Troops from southern New Mexico, some of whom were former Civilian Conservation Corps workers, were among those who died in 1942 in the March of Bataan in the Philippines after being taken as prisoners of war.
Guzmán, a retired auto salesman and bookkeeper, said he was nearing the end of high school around the close of the war, and wasn't drafted into the service. An older brother served stateside training Army personnel, and an uncle of his served in Italy, he said.
Guzmán, who now lives near Sierra Middle School with his wife, recalled that he was helping out a sign painter at a mobile home park off Avenida de Mesilla in 1945, when he heard a car drive by, its speakers blaring the national anthem. Another sound soon followed, this time from a historic Catholic Church in downtown Las Cruces.
"I heard the bells of St. Genevieve's ringing, and sure enough, the war was over in Europe," he said.
Diana M. Alba can be reached at (575) 541-5443
