By SHARON SNYDER and MAXINE JOPPA
Los Alamos Historical Society

In 1973, the alumni of the Los Alamos Ranch School arranged a huge reunion in Santa Fe. Many of the former students flew to Chicago just to take a special train to Lamy, a route many of them had taken as young boys.

John Shedd Reed, CEO of the Santa Fe Railroad and a member of the LARS Class of 1933,
made the cars on that special train available. Once in Santa Fe, the alumni stayed at Bishop’s Lodge, then owned by Jim Thorpe, LARS Class of 1942.

​In anticipation of the “boys” returning to Los Alamos for a day, the historical society sent old
photographs from the Ranch School era to the Los Alamos Monitor to publish in advance of the visit. Those same pictures, clipped from the newspapers, were displayed for the men to see during the reunion, and, naturally, they wanted copies of the photographs! The historical society explored the possibility of furnishing prints from the original photos, but that idea proved too expensive to recreate all of them in large numbers. So, another idea emerged.

All of the photos could be put together in a commemorative book that would sold to the men who had attended the reunion. With a little more thought, it seemed a good idea to add some history of the school and captions for the photographs, but all of those plans were to be carried out by a group of volunteers who knew little or nothing about publishing and had no money!

Ranch School master Fermor Church was ill (he would die within a few months), but he and his wife, Peggy Pond Church, agreed to write a short history of the school to go with the
photographs. 

To produce the book, the volunteers who put it all together went to the Los Alamos Credit Union and secured a no-interest loan on a “pay it back as you can” basis.  With the book finally ready to go to press, the inexperienced publishers contracted with a printer in Albuquerque, but they were given a bad press run. When the books arrived, there were mistakes and even some pages missing!