Hot Time in Fort McMurray

This Throwback Thursday Report has some current news attached to it.

In the northern part of the Canadian Province is a place called Fort McMurray.

Wildfire has taken over the town and upwards of 100,000 people are getting the hell out of town in advance of a gigantic fire that has overtaken the town, the forest, and most likely a lot of the industry there.

I’ve been there.  

Fort McMurray is an important place.  It is where oil filled sand is mined from the earth.  The oil is separated from the sand and sent along its way to our gas tanks and heating oil furnaces.

Here’s a picture of a momento that I brought back.  

You can see the tar sand, and the sand – the empty column once contained oil – but over the many years it seeped away in to the wooden trophy case.

My visit was during a trip of The New Mexico Amigos, sometime in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s.   Fort McMurray at that time had nowhere near 100,000 people...but I do recall a number of bars, a few hotels, and lots of portable housing.  And, giant holes in the ground as big oil was just developing the tar sands project.

The Amigos are New Mexico’s Official Goodwill Ambassadors, and each year the privately funded group takes off for a week, usually in May, to spread the word about the Land of Enchantment.

The first trip was in 1962 – as the group went to New York City and Washington,DC – I think – to tell the world that New Mexico had been a state for 50 years.

In 1973, and again in 1988 we visited the White House.  President Reagan dropped by on his way from the Oval Office to the residential quarters to say hi to our uniformed Amigos who patiently assembled in the rose garden on that hot and humid summer day.

Here’s that picture with Governor Carruthers and Senator Domenici. (I'm way over to the right - the only guy with a beard I think.)

I went on 10 or 12 Amigo trips – including Hawaii and to the Arctic Circle to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay – the top side of the Trans-Alaska pipeline.

The New Mexico Amigos still take a trip every year, but I don’t think they’re as public about their trips as it was when I went along.   We always met with local officials, Governors, Mayors, hosted them for a social function, breakfast, dinner or lunch – and they had to sit through a presentation about New Mexico.  The Governor of our state would give the welcome – and more often than not the governor of the visiting state would be in attendance.

  I was told during one of the trips there was a server union strike and New Mexico native Conrad Hilton was helping tend bar at a New York City function.  

Two really famous luminaries we met along the way,  Ronald Reagan when he was California Governor, and Spencer Kimball, the head of the Mormon church.  Kimball asked if I knew United States Judge H. Vearle Payne of Silver City.  I said, "yes".

Governor Reagan didn’t attend our function in California, but he did receive a delegation headed by Governor Bruce King at the office in the Sacramento statehouse.  When Bruce walked in Reagan had a New Mexico Roadrunner on his lapel.   

That's good advance work!