I went to a private church school there. I remember getting of the train (The El Capitan) and then the lady who ran the residence (Dorms) for the school who had been in a concentration camp in World War II in either Luxemburg or Belgium where she met her doctor husband there in the camp. So, she was no lightweight after surviving all this.
So, she sort of confronted me to "Weed me out if I was too spoiled a boy from Los Angeles immediately" so she said something to me (because I was dressed like a southern California boy different than people who you might see in Santa Fe then. She said: "What's a spoiled California boy doing here in Santa Fe."
However, I knew her game to ship me back home to California and I didn't want to go back because they I would have to work because I had already dropped out of high school there and my parents sent me to this school specifically because I was done with public school anywhere then.
Part of the problem is one month after I bought my 1956 Ford Station wagon that I called my "Surf Wagon" I started dating a girl from church who was 21 years old. Thinking back now I might think it strange that my parents would let me date a girl 21 years old at 16 but then again things were much different then than now and I think they just wanted me to marry a girl from our church more than anything else so I didn't leave the church like most people tended to do then when they got 18 or older especially.
But, after dating this girl for a year I moved to another girl who had just graduated from this same private private church school in Santa Fe in 1965 so she was one year older than me. I started dating her when I was 17 and she was 18. So, it was sort of natural for me to go to the Church private school that she had gone to and her older brother a good friend of mine from church (who passed away in 2006) both had already graduated from.
When I said goodbye to her at the train I think she knew it would mess up our relationship when I went to Santa Fe which it did eventually because she was crying and I knew she wanted to eventually marry me at that point at least. Well. I would say she was right about this now.
I arrived in Santa Fe on the El Capitan Train then likely in September or October of 1965. This was a different world for me completely because this place is 1000 feet in elevation above Lake Tahoe and Tahoe is at 6000 feet so Santa Fe is at 7000 feet sort of like Colorado Springs, Colorado. I think Flagstaff, Arizona is at about 7000 feet elevation too.
One of the previous graduates came back for a visit and played Volleyball with us and passed out while doing this while he was there because he was no longer adapted to 7000 feet elevation because he lived at a much lower elevation after he graduated. I think he graduated in 1965 when my then girlfriend from Los Angeles also Graduated.
Then one day my best friend at the school who was still alive then Victor, said, "Hey! You should go down because it's snowing and you can watch all the cars crash into a boulder in the park down town. So, I put on a wool hat and wool gloves and warm clothes and walked through the snow to the park to watch the cars crash into a boulder in the park. the boulder was huge (too huge) to have any of the cars hit me while sitting on a park bench crashing into the boulder one by one.
This is something I guess that happened every year day on the first real day of snow (usually in September or October then). My friend was right about every 10th car or so would come over the rise in the hill there too fast and then coming sliding into the boulder one by one and partly wreck their cars (either smash the front bumper or smash one of the fenders of the car. Cars all actually had fenders then by the way so they weren't just all one piece more like now here in 2025.
For a 17 year old boy it doesn't get any better than this to see something like this (unless you had your girlfriend or other male friends to share all this with). But I was alone then and figuring out what it was actually like to live in a place that snowed because I hadn't lived anywhere it snowed since I was 4 in Seattle Washington because I had lived in San Diego and Los Angeles Areas since 1952 when we came down from Seattle to San Diego on the Train (my mother and her mother and me) because Dad had already driven our car to San Diego. I'm not sure how many days it took to drive then from Seattle to San Diego but I do know it took 3 to 5 days to drive to Mt. Shasta from San Diego then too because there were no freeways except in Los Angeles County then and maybe inside of San Diego County then too.
So, when you have to drive through every city with all the traffic lights like then it really can slow you down a lot. In fact it took about 5 or 6 hours I think just to drive up from Redding to Mt. Shasta on a really windy curvy road then too even in 1953 when I first made this trip to Shasta north in a car with my father and another lady from the church who gave us a ride north then to Shasta Springs which my religion then owned in between Dunsmuir and the little City of Mt. Shasta then.
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