The other day a concerned Magdalenian sent the newspaper a note wondering what happened to Old Timers and how come it’s not happening anymore. For those with short memories, Old Timers weekend was customarily held around the second weekend of July, and I don’t know if it’s gone for good, but it saddens me that the event once thought to be impervious to time and the weather seems to have gone the way of other time-honored traditions.

Although the last one was held in the pre-COVID year of 2019, one of its main organizers,

Donna Dawson, told me last week she is bound and determined to bring it back next year.

Whether she can pull it off remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure; for 47 years, folks would look forward to those three days when the village played host to innumerable horse trailers and pickups, kids and cowboys, and upwards of a thousand visitors having a good time.

There was a parade and dancing and lots of food, from fry bread to real pit barbecue and, of course, rodeos. For a town with a history of cowboys and cattle, Magdalena has always loved its rodeos.

To hear old-timers tell it, the first rodeo in the United States was held in Magdalena. Although that’s up for debate, it’s said the most spectacular rodeo was in 1918, when Tex Austin brought his world-famous rodeo to town.

According to Cecil Owsley in the book Celebrating 100 Years of Frontier Living, there were no facilities so makeshift fences and chutes had to be constructed at the old baseball park across the street from where the post office is now.

Cecil recalled that some people had traveled for days to be there, and since the hotels were full, a few ended up camping out at the park. By the time the rodeo started, the ballpark was lined with folks sitting on fenders of their cars, “the radiators pressed against the fence,” he said.

Anyway, I thought Old Timers was an event unique in all the Southwest. First, it was created for one purpose; to visit and catch up with anybody and everybody who was born and raised in the area or who has lived around here long enough to get away with fibbing about it.

Second, it was organized and carried out by volunteers, the everyday people of Magdalena.

There had been random changes since the first Old Timers in 1972 when the above-mentioned Cecil Owsley, along with his wife Vera and others, decided to hold a big picnic and social at their place near Pueblo Springs to acknowledge those folks who had roots in Magdalena. Those who played a part in keeping the village going, as well as those who were still living to tell their stories. The old cattlemen, the cowboys, the miners.

One story that’s still floating around is the one about a flying saucer that crashed somewhere out on the San Agustin Plains. The Roswell UFO Festival last weekend notwithstanding, according to some folks over in Catron County, there’s more to that story.

A few years ago, the late Anne Sullivan of Swingle Canyon set out in search of specifics concerning one rumored incident; a purported second UFO crash site. She wrote that a Quemado resident recalled a visitor in 1946 (a year earlier than the Roswell incident) who said, “I just stopped in Magdalena and there was a thing from space. There’s people in it and they tell me one of ’ems still alive.”

Another Quemado resident knew a man in Mangus who saw a “shiny thing” on a mountainside one summer in the late forties.

A few Aragon residents recalled hearing about the incident. “Just that there was tracks,” said one. And from another, “There were strange people. They were moving. It looked like a plate.”

A Magdalena resident remembered one UFO allegedly crashed about 15 miles west of the village, possibly around Wolf Well or Tres Montaño. Yet a man from Socorro said an eyewitness told his father that the crash occurred somewhere between Datil and Horse Springs.

Anne wrote that they all admitted that this was hearsay, to which they did not necessarily subscribe, and on top of that, some remembered that the first time they heard about it was from UFO investigators who started showing up in Catron and Socorro counties in the 1980s.

But I digress. Weren’t we talking about Old Timers?

The question remains, will there be a return of the Reunion next year? Some say yes, and some say no. Can I insert, “It takes a ‘Village of Magdalena’ here?”

Me, I’d be happy just to be an “older” timer, like one old timer once told me a few years back, “I may be older than you, but I’m also wiser than you.”

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain