A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

5: I Land in the Duke’s City

When I got to Albuquerque I had thirteen dollars and a quarter and this little kid not yet a year old. I looked around and finally went to a place up on Second Street that saidAPARTMENT FOR RENT.The place belonged to this Italian lady, Mrs. Bachechi. The Bachechis owned a lot of stuff aroundAlbuquerque,very rich people.Her family built the KiMo Theater.These moving picture palaces were springing up all over the country in the twenties, some made to look Chinese, some like mosques. But the KiMo was unique. It was fashioned after Southwestern Indian pueblos. After all the running around,Albuquerque looked better than any place else. I thought I had a chance of getting a job there. But I had no training,no education at all in the way of getting a job.Well,Mrs. Bachechi had seen me driving around town in the Model T. She was quite thrilled when I showed up at her door looking for a place to rent. She had a Packard sedan and she wanted to hire me for her chauffeur. She gave me the apartment free and hired a maid to take care of my kid. I ate with her, too, in her dining room, and I got off pretty 5 ❙ I LAND IN THE DUKE’S CITY ❙ 46 ❙ ❙ I LAND IN THE DUKE’S CITY ❙ easy. She gave me a little spending money, not very much. Soon I was herding her all over town in her Packard sedan. About this time I was having some female trouble after having the baby, and that’s how I happened to go to this lady doctor, Dr. Evelyn Frisbee.Dr.Frisbee gave me good advice.She told me if I didn’t want to have any more babies to keep my feet in a bucket. I told her there were lots of things I couldn’t do if I kept my feet in a bucket.For one, you couldn’t keep your feet in a bucket and ride a horse. I’d already set my mind on one day becoming a rancher. She said,“That’s all right.You can’t do anything else,either,when you’re straddling a horse.” Dr. Frisbee was a socially prominent person, but she befriended me, a nobody, when I was in a strange place among people I didn’t know. She told me in spite of the hard times I’d gone through in Colorado, my lungs were healing.Whenever I was in need of advice I knew I could drop in on her. She was my doctor. I needed to make more money, so when I wasn’t chauffeuring Mrs. Bachechi I went out and looked around to see what I could find. I saw people working in their yards, planting and trimming and putting fertilizer on their lawns. I found out there was a big stockyard down in the South Valley. So I put some boards across the bustedout floor of the Model T, and I got several wash tubs, and I went down to the stockyard and filled them up with sheep manure and sold it to people as fertilizer for their yards. I charged them two bits a tub. It was a good thing cars were open then. Sheep manure is smellier than a hog pen in the rain. Well, I was making a little change off that, and I also got a job at the Franciscan Hotel as a maid.I didn’t know anything about maid’s work. I didn’t even know how to make up a bed the way they made them up professionally. I was surprised to find all these liquor bottles in the rooms. I didn’t know about people partying that way, in hotel rooms, with liquor and all. 47 ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ People would leave their tips there on the dresser. I gave all the tips to the boss at the desk.I didn’t know you were supposed to keep them, and he never saw fit to enlighten me. I had to learn from my own experience, find out everything for myself. Well,I hauled tubs of sheep manure,and I lived at Mrs.Bachechi’s and drove her around in that Packard car, and I worked at the Franciscan hotel for a while,till Mrs.Bachechi told me to go ahead and quit.Life...