50 Years Ago: Kids, UFOs and marriages made news in mid-sixties

Finally, kids on the reservation have something to do after school and on weekends.

Peter MacDonald, the executive director of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, announced 50 years ago that ONEO has received a $100,000 grant to create a neighborhood youth corps that would begin work on October 4 and continue through December 31.

Hundreds of Navajos between the ages of 16 and 21 are expected to be hired under the program to work in government programs throughout the reservation after school and on weekends.

The students will make $1.25 an hour. Part of the $100,000 will be used to pay teacher and government workers to oversee the projects and make sure that students don’t take away time from their class work to participate in the program.

Students are allowed to work a maximum of 12 hours a week which would net them, after taxes, about $13 a week which in 1965 was not something that could be scoffed at.

“Worthwhile and needful work will be performed,” said Doswell Jamison, director of the ONEO program. This work, he said, will “provide job experience along with the opportunity to earn money for school expenses.

He stressed that students will be monitored to make sure that their grades do not suffer.

By the time the program ended on December 31, more than 1,200 Navajo students would have participated in it the program at one time or another.

This was an outgrowth of another ONEO program that provided funds to hire students during the summer months. The summer program provided jobs to some 3,500 Navajo youth, most whom were assigned jobs in the chapters, helping make community improvements (helping the elderly in the community clean their homes or doing the same thing at the chapter house seems to have been a popular assignment, at least for the chapter officials.

Amazing enough, there was not enough enthusiasm for this program from a lot of Navajo parents but in 1965, there were no video games, or even televisions on the reservation to keep students occupied.

Instead, most parents on the reservation were farmers or ranchers and children were expected to do something called chores after they got out of school, which included watching over the sheep or doing various chores around the house.

It was still very common for older children to be kept at home on some school days watching over the younger children while their parents went shopping or did some other chore away from the home.

This wouldn’t happen for a couple of more years but by the late 1960s, the Navajo Times began publishing stories of complaints by superintendents of school all over the reservation that although school started in late August or early September, many students wouldn’t start attending school until sometime in October because they were needed at home to help with the harvest or take care of the livestock.

Principals and teachers would complain because when the students finally did start showing up, they would have to go through all of the material over again or have a situation where a good portion of the class would be so far behind that they would never be able to catch up, especially in the math classes.

Nineteen sixty-five saw the beginning of a trend in Navajo news – sightings by reservation residents of everything from a UFO or Bigfoot to a monster lurking in Ganado Lake.

It wouldn’t be until the early 70s when the paper realized that stories about these kinds of sighting sold newspapers so in the 60s, there would be brief mentions of these kinds of sightings in the Smoke Puffs sections or within other stories about life in a community.

Most of the UFO sightings in the 1960s seemed to come from people living in the Eastern Navajo Agency with a lot of these reports coming from Shiprock and surrounding chapters.

As far as checking up on whether there was any truth to these sightings, the paper never seemed to do that, probably because of the lack of reporters.

Leslie Goodluck, the managing editor throughout most of late 1965, would mention a sighting of a UFO or a strange creature on he roadside or print a letter from someone reporting a sighting and ask the Times readers if they saw it or had any information they wanted to add.

As far as can be determined by looking through the archives of the paper throughout the 1960s, the Times never did a major article on anything supernatural but by the time Chet MacRorie returned as editor of the paper in 1971, the paper would begin showing a real interest in the subject and would do major stories whenever something mysterious was sighted over the reservation.

Another thing that readers may have noted under Goodluck was a sharp increase in the number of stories about forthcoming marriage ceremonies. For awhile, a marriage announcement appeared in almost every issue of the paper and it usually consisted of a picture of bride and the groom looking straight at the camera.

The actual story itself would just be a long cutline giving all of the lineage and particulars about the ceremony.

For example, the Times reported in early October 1965 the marriage of Annie Nahaliih to David Gillwood in ceremonies held at the Mexican Water Baptist Mission.

The ceremony was performed by Duane Block, the pastor of the mission and apparently this was a real pleasure for him since he was mentoring Gillwood who was an evangelist who was working with Block at the mission.

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