This is the first of what I hope will be weekly reports
during my stay in El Paso, TX. I am living here for about 10 weeks as an
experiment to see if the climate agrees with me and provides relief from my
chronic allergy and asthma problems. Also, it’s a good opportunity to get away
from the cold and snow of Ohio.
Why El Paso? Many fellow Ohioans seek winter relief in either
Florida or Arizona, mostly in the Phoenix area. But, I have been to Florida
many times and I am kind of bored with it. My parents lived there for nearly 20
years in retirement on the west coast in the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area and
I visited them almost every year during March.
I spent about 5 days in the Phoenix area in February, 2000
covering a couple of tire company meetings as a reporter for Tire Business. The
weather was delightful, but Phoenix was a sprawling city nearly 20 years ago
and I’m sure it’s even worse now.
So, I checked various web sites on climate for several
cities in the southwest and I picked El Paso. It has a dry climate with less than
10 inches of precipitation and about 300 sunny days a year. The average high
temperature in January is upper-50s moving up to the 70s by the beginning of
April.
El Paso’s metropolitan area has a population of about
800,000 and it is directly across the Rio Grande river from Juarez, Mexico. So,
the Latino influence on the city is very strong and I’m looking forward to more
exposure to that.
I also enrolled in a couple of short non-credit courses at
UTEP that I will write more about in weeks to come. One that I am especially looking
forward to is “Borderlands: History and Culture” Taught by a retired professor
from the University of Arizona. The El Paso region and spreading west to New
Mexico and Arizona is called the Borderland by locals.
To find a long-term rental, I checked both AirBnb and VRBO
for properties in several cities. Once I decided on El Paso, I found a very
small house called a casita on the west side of the city. As a bonus, this
house is very close to the University of Texas El Paso campus. I am hoping to
attend many activities there. Also, the cost for rentals here is less than coastal
areas of Florida and Phoenix.
I’ve ready attended a basketball game at Don Haskins Center
where the UTEP Miners lost to Old Dominion University by 2 points. Multiple
times during the game, the pep band played the school’s fight song, an upbeat
version of the 1959-hit song “El Paso” by Marty
Robbins. Also, the UTEP dance team is called “The Gold Diggers” and before the
game, several soldiers from Fort Bliss rappelled down ropes from the rafters at
the top of the area tossing t-shirts to the fans below.
Now this next part is difficult for an alumni of The
University of Kentucky (M.A., 1974). In the 1966 NCAA Basketball Tournament
Final, heavily favored Kentucky played Texas Western University (now called
UTEP). I watched that game on TV as a high school senior and the Miners beat
Kentucky to win the national championship—the first team with an all-black
starting lineup to do so.
It was one of the biggest upsets in college basketball
history and changed the game forever.
High above one end of the UTEP arena are several banners
with the names and numbers of key players from that team. The Haskins Center is
located on Glory
Road, which is also the title of a successful feature film about that
team released in 2006.
In my first week, I’ve had several good meals of Mexican
food and I have been writing quite a bit. I’ve taken a couple of walks in a
very nice park across the street from my house and have begun to explore the
outlying areas. Yesterday, I drove about 45 minutes to Las Cruces, NM, to look
around and have lunch. I considered that town for my winter sabbatical. Based
on what I saw there; El Paso was a better choice.
So, stay tuned for more in a week or so.
