He was born at the original Holy Cross Hospital in Taos in 1967, and moved to Red River when he was two days old with his parents Ted and Beth Calhoun.
“Does that still count,” Michael Calhoun asks, “as being born in Red River?” It does.
The Calhoun name, as Michael likes to tell it, has been associated with the grocery business in Red River for over sixty years.
“My granddad, Glen Calhoun, actually started in the grocery business in Texas. He managed a Piggly Wiggly in Fort Worth.
“In 1959, he built a building on High Street which is today Erik’s Workshop, over there next to the Sundance Restaurant and Bitter Creek.
“He opened Glen’s Superette, as a grocery store in 1960. He moved his family up here from Fort Worth, including my dad and my grandma Bernice.”
Sitting at his desk in the office of the Red River Brewing Company & Distillery, Michael says the Calhoun grocery stores in town have been known by three different names.
“It started as Glen’s Superette. Then it moved to what is now Big Horn Sports – that was my dad’s store. They bought that in 1964 from Johnny and Rosemary Brandenburg. My dad was 20 years old at the time. He had recently married my mom, who was a tourist girl in town. They ran Red River Grocery at that location until 1969 when they built Der Markt which opened in 1970.
“It’s kind of funny to think of Der Markt as the new one. It’s more than 50 years old!
What are his earliest memories of Red River?
“I was thinking about my earliest memories. I remember growing up at the Red River Grocery, which is now the Big Horn Sports building. We lived in a little house right behind that building. I remember,” he chuckles, “opening the dining room door and and Aisle 3 was right there.
“I remember Der Markt when it was being built and all the construction that was going on inside that building. I would have been barely three.
“I also remember learning how to ski down at Powder Puff. I was about the same age.
“Michael recalls playing at an early age at the Grandview Camp, located at the corner of High Street and Jayhawk Trail, with Deke Willis.
“Of course I’ve known Deke since we were both teenie tiny and we grew up here together. Besides playing there, we also played shuffleboard at the Riverside.”
Formal education was an interesting deal.
“Back then, Red River was an odd hodgepodge of schools. I started off going to school in Questa and went to kindergarten in Cerro, in a little pink adobe building.
“Then, when I was in fourth grade, around 1975, Red River Academy opened up here in town. It was on Inferno Trail, right next to the river. That school operated for five years.
“It was great fun. We’d ride our snowmobiles to school sometimes. We went trout fishing right out the back door during recess.
“We even had ski team practice some mornings before school started. It was before the Red River Ski Area opened in the morning for regular business. We’d go up and have downhill practice.
“Drew (Judycki) would open it up for the ski team to practice for an hour, hour and a half. We’d rap up ski practice and go to school. It was fun. It was great.
Does he remember the names of any of his teachers at the Academy?
“It was Duane Manning’s dad.” Michael pauses for a moment. “What was his name? He ran that place for a while.
“Tom Veale might have been involved there: I don’t remember that, though. I know Annette Gill was school teacher for a while.Barbara Dry, too. Linda Calhoun taught there for a little while.
“It was a little four room school. There were probably 30-40 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. There were just two or three in each grade. I remember one year, we didn’t have anyone graduating.
“It was a small place. Before it operated in that school building, Red River Academy held classes in the Community House for about a year.
“Classes were held all year long while that building on Inferno Trail was being built.
“I went to 4th grade in the Community House. I can honestly say that I went to school in a log cabin!” Michael says that the Red River Academy closed down in 1980.
“It ran for five years. After that I went to Taos – two different schools. I wound up graduating from Taos High School in ‘85.”
Questa, Cerro, Taos: A “hodgepodge” of schools was how education was done for Red River kids in those days.
“It was okay. Back then I thought that was just normal. To do all that traveling… especially to Taos. It was an hour each way.
“At the end, I was car pooling myself in a sweet little 280Z car that I bought from Drew Judycki. That was my first car and I drove it back and forth to Taos with three other guys.
“That carpool was me and my little brother Brian, Rowland Betz Jr. and Steven Betz.
“When I attended Taos Christian Academy in 1982-84, there were more Red River kids. We actually had a little bus that members of the town went together and bought. There was probably 20 kids.”
His first job was, oddly enough, not at the grocery store.
“You would think so, wouldn’t you? No, I never really did work for my dad at the grocery store. I did work here and there, just to help out now and then. It was never a solid job.
“Like most kids in Red River back then, my first real job was when I was 12. I worked at the Fun Slide. It was where the park is now. About one-third of the east side of that land that is now the park was a little amusement park.
“It was a three-story tall slide. You would get in a gunnysack and slide down. It was fast. I don’t remember who owned that thing. There was also a bouncy house and bumper cars, pinball machines, and I made cotton candy, sold and took tickets, summer only.
“I made $1.25 an hour. What I didn’t spend on fishing gear at Williams Trading Post, I saved up and bought my first motorcycle.”
Like everyone else in town, he would work at Texas Reds “at the original location” washing dishes and cooking in summer.
“During winters when I was going to UNM, I would come back on holidays and work at TRs for Annette and Bill Gill. That was a great time.
“I’m sure that literally thousands of people worked there over the years. It was like a family.
“I really miss Bill. I didn’t realize until years later about all the things I learned from him. Not that he was teaching me, but I learned so much just being around him, just soaking up things. I really enjoyed that place. It was the best time ever.”
Upon graduation from Taos High School, Michael went straight to Albuquerque to study Computer Science and Business at the University of New Mexico.
“I had been into computers since my dad bought one of the first commercially available computers on the market in ‘79, to use at Der Markt. It was a Tandy.
“I pretty much confiscated that thing. I couldn’t get enough. Then I went to school and studied computers, went on to be a software programmer.”
He graduated with a BS from UNM in 1989, eventually moving to the Dallas area – “we had some family there” – with his new wife, Sharon. “It was a busy year, ‘89!”
He says Dallas was okay, with the convenience and all the things to do and see. Still, for a small town kid from Red River…
Returning to New Mexico, “just as fast as I could,” he got a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“I really enjoyed working and living in Los Alamos. I spent 25 years there doing software. It was great. That town is like no other in the world.
“Of course, Los Alamos was just two hours away, so we were up here in Red River almost all the time.
“Red River never stopped being home! What do they say: you can take the boy out of Red River, but you can’t take Red River out of the boy!”
Michael says that, after 25 years at Los Alamos, what he does not miss is the need for constant security clearance.
Upon retirement from the LA Labs, Michael and Sharon moved to Red River with the idea to start a brewery and distillery. Michael was a fan of craft brewing and Red River would be a great place for such a business. Red River Brewing Company, however, is another story for another time.
