I attended Valley View Elementary from the years 1979 to 1985. It was a K-6 Grade School. Starting in the First Grade and ending just shy of completing the Sixth Grade, I was a proud Viking. Valley View Vikings. I did not attend Kindergarten there as my mother had sent me to a private school called Child Garden(?). (the only memory of that school was witnessing my first solar eclipse while playing on the playground.)
The school was a L-shaped building with the grades 1-3 in the lower part of the L and 4-6 grade in the upper part of the L. Made from red brick and having the features of large windows in every room, the school smelled like the 1960s. The bricks gave it a sturdy construction and security to the hallways, when in the 2nd and 3rd grade, we ran and ducked in part of our Nuclear Disaster Drills. Those were the years when the USA had boycotted the Olympics in the USSR. And the Russians would do the same in 1984. Tensions were high. Soviets were great bad guys. Second only to Nazis. (back on track) The fire alarm were sound more like a klaxon and we'd run to the halls and squat in the fetal position. Not sure if we'd have survived a nuclear attack but I was only 8 or so.
I once told someone that story and they thought it odd we had Nuclear War Emergency procedures in such a small cowboy town like Roswell New Mexico. The theory and ideology was Roswell, although Walker Air Force Base had closed in the late 60s, was still a target on Russian, uh I mean Soviet, missile charts. The reason was Roswell's I A C or Industrial Air Center, had one of the longest commercial runways in the world at the time. It had been built decades earlier to compliment the B-29 Bombers that were part of the 509th Strategic Bombing Wing. During the 1970s and 1980s the runways were still being used to test commercial and military aircraft. In the end, it made a bunch of kids from a forgotten town feel like they were important, I guess.
Sometime in the early 1980s, 3rd or 4th grade, construction on a gymnasium was completed. I remember everyone being really excited as we could have PE indoors during cold spells and we could move away from the very small cafeteria. I remember it was so vast and huge. (not so much when I would return in my High School years) The north wall had the folded bench tables and wall painted in a Rainbow scheme. (I wonder now what the PC decor would be as rainbows aren't just known for Unicorn riding little girls) Even had our 5th Grade Class Photo shot inside it, moving it from the Library where we had the pictures taken in the past. Ropes hung from the rafter beams; Dodge ball wars were fought; lunch was served on segmented trays there everyday; it was the site of the 1982 staged musical with CB as E.T.;and, it housed after-school Break Dance challenges, where spinning on your back and crawling like a centipede on cardboard gave boys cool reputations.
