Western way of life

NARA VISA - The 26th annual Nara Visa Cowboy Gathering of poetry and music performances Friday through Sunday again became a reaffirmation and preservation of the western way of life.

The event also serves as a preservation effort for the venue itself - the nearly century-old Nara Visa Community Center, once known as Nara Visa School, and its adjacent Works Progress Administration gymnasium.

Teressa Bruhn, a board member, said the Cowboy Gathering generates about $1,000 each year for the community center. She was hoping to get that up to $2,000 this year by asking the performers to give back some of their fees.

Bruhn said it costs about $500 a month in utilities and insurance for the center. She said the property also needs repairs to fix a leaky roof and problematic plumbing.

"It would be a shame if it fell down," she said.

Nara Visa School, which included an auditorium still used for Cowboy Gatherings today, was built in 1921 for $3,500, according to the nominating petition for the school's 1983 listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The architect was J.C. Berry, who designed dozens of schools in Texas and Oklahoma.

The WPA finished the gymnasium in 1937. The National Register petition noted the crew built the gym with adobe bricks made with no straw. The bricks were so stout, they could be dropped from a second-story window without breaking.

Hallie Belle Bogart of Tucumcari, who took money for food orders in the gym's kitchen Saturday, was among eight members of Nara Visa's Class of 1956 as its final graduates. Her father, Elmer, was a Nara Visa alum who helped build the gym.

She said the memories come flooding back when she's back for the annual gathering. She recalled a long-gone duplex on the school grounds used by a principal and teacher and their families, including one girl who became a Miss Arizona.

"I'm really proud of the way they've taken care of this school," she said, noting other former school buildings in Forrest, McAlister and Wheatland in Quay County have fallen into disrepair or ruin.

Nara Visa School limped along as an elementary school until 1968. Residents persuaded the Logan school district to let the grounds become a community center, which it has been for a half-century.

Kay Irwin and Karen Bell, residents of the Nara Visa area and volunteers at the event, said the community center is used about 10 times a year for funerals, family reunions, two Logan school board meetings and for the occasional wedding, flu-shot immunizations and election-year pie auctions and enchilada suppers attended by local politicians. It charges a rental fee except for funerals, which are hosted for free.

The venue truly is a community center for Nara Visa, Irwin said.

"If it's gone, I don't know where we'd go," she said.

One event, however, is gone for good. Nara Visa Community Center once was used for elections, but the Quay County Clerk's Office stopped that this year after it determined having a secure internet connection there would be too costly.

One thing keeping Nara Visa Community Center afloat is the fact many residents request memorials be made to it after they die.

Bell said the community center would keep operating "as long as the help and money don't run out."

One of the Cowboy Gathering's regular performers, fiddler Katie Howell-Chapman, known as Rodeo Kate, doesn't need persuasion to give back her fee to the center. She once lived in the region near Rosebud, and she gives back almost all her performing fee to Nara Visa except for the fuel needed to get there.

"I love it," she said of the community center. "I'm glad they didn't come in and do repairs that were not the same as what the building was."

During the Saturday matinee, Rodeo Kate played the Bob Wills western-swing classic "San Antonio Rose" on her fiddle. The song's genesis began in neighboring Harding County, where a young Wills cut hair at a barber shop and played weekend gigs in Roy, New Mexico. He learned to play Spanish-language songs during his two years in Roy, and that experience morphed into "San Antonio Rose," his biggest hit.

Wills' time in Roy occurred during the late 1920s, just a few years after Nara Visa School was built.