50 Years Ago: Belly dancers create a stir among area residents

So what was the big controversy this week on the Navajo Reservation? Believe it or not, it was belly dancers.

It seems that students from Brigham Young University came down to Window Rock and decided to give the folks there some entertainment, which they called “Curtain Time, USA.”

The Times reported that it was really entertaining and the students did a good job of entertaining the almost packed house at the Window Rock Civic Center.

“There is a time and place for everything,” said the Times on its editorial page, but the time and place for belly dancers was certainly not right before that wonderful show put on by BYU students.”

“We have been hearing comments about this all week,” the paper added.

In another thing this week covered by the paper, another controversy could have arisen but apparently did not.

The Navajo Times did something 50 years ago it had never done before – it put details of a car accident on the front page. And it went into detail on it.

The paper had reported on accidents previously and even talked about fatalities but it had never done it on the front page before, apparently not to make traditional readers of the paper upset.

The paper had dealt with stories about death with kids in the past.

But in late July, two deaths occurred that apparently triggered some kind of response by the staff at the paper that a decision was made to put both on the front page in the same issue.

There didn’t seem to be any kind of reaction to it – no letters to the editor from people threatening not to read the paper anymore and the Times didn’t report anyone being so upset they cancelled their subscription.

Regardless of that, the paper carried no gruesome photographs of the accident (nor has it since then, and pictures of bodies in the paper is one tradition that the Navajo Times has never broken).

As for the story of the accident itself, the paper reported that Christine Tsosie, the 21-year-old daughter of Ida Tsosie Brown of Twin Lakes, died in a one-car accident on July 29.

She was one of three passengers in a car driven by Charlie Bowman, 32, of Red Lake.

The four were traveling from Gallup when their car hit the right side of the bridge at Twin Lakes. Christine Tsosie was declared dead at the Gallup Indian Hospital.

Pat Smith, a silversmith formerly from Lupton, was apparently the one who told the Times about the accident. He gave the Times an exclusive eyewitness account of the accident.

“My wife and I heard the crash when the car hit the bridge,” he said. “We ran down to where the car was. It had knocked out part of the cement on the bridge.”

“The people in the car were bloody, groaning. I tried to get the door open to helped get them out. Then a New Mexico Highway Patrol car came. I helped them to get the people out.

“They were all covered with blood. It was awful. The motor was smashed and it went through the front part of the car,” he said. “I don’t want to ever see anything like that again.”

The others in the car were Arlene Shack, 19, of Twin Lakes, who received a dislocated hip; Steven Begaye, 21, of Many Farms who received severe head and body lacerations and Charlie Bowman, 32, of Red Lakes. He was the driver of the vehicle and the Times reported that he was reported to be in critical condition at the Gallup hospital with internal injuries.

The second story on the front page also concerned an accident.

The victim here was identified as Wallace Segody, 14.

His body was found on July 30 by the Navajo police who enlisted the help of tribal rangers and prisoners from the Fort Defiance jail to help search for the boy who had been reported missing on May 9 when he was on a camping trip with other Boy Scouts from the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah.

He had apparently fell down a 65 to 70 foot canyon wall north of Assayi Dam between Crystal and Navajo.

He was survived by his parents and two brothers and four sisters.