NMNew Mexico Famous People

Born in Albuquerque, famous somewhere else

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque in January 1964, when his mother was still a teenager, and the family had left for Texas before he started school. That pattern repeats. Demi Moore was born in Roswell in 1962. John Denver was born in the same town in 1943 as Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., son of an Air Force pilot posted there. Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque in 1973 and grew up in Ruidoso, where a school drama teacher pushed him toward the workshop that led to his casting in Doogie Howser. Conrad Hilton was born in 1887 in San Antonio, a village in Socorro County, and rented rooms in his father's adobe store years before he bought a hotel in Texas in 1919. William Hanna, the Hanna of Hanna-Barbera, was born in Melrose in 1910. Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz, was born in Kansas but grew up in Albuquerque and began acting at the Albuquerque Little Theatre.

No president, but a geologist who walked on the moon

No US president has been born in New Mexico and none was raised there. The closest the state has come is Bill Richardson, born in Pasadena and brought up largely in Mexico City, who represented northern New Mexico in Congress, served as UN ambassador and energy secretary under Bill Clinton, won two terms as governor beginning in 2003, and ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

The New Mexican who traveled farthest is Harrison Schmitt, born in 1935 in Santa Rita, a copper town later eaten by the open pit beside it. Schmitt was a geologist rather than a test pilot, and on Apollo 17 in December 1972 he became the only scientist ever to walk on the moon. He came home and won a US Senate seat in 1976. The other New Mexican that Washington remembers is Dennis Chavez, born in Los Chaves in 1888, who left school after the eighth grade, drove a grocery wagon, taught himself enough to pass the bar, and sat in the Senate from 1935 until his death in 1962. His statue stands in the National Statuary Hall collection next to Po'pay, the Ohkay Owingeh religious leader who organized the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and drove Spanish rule out of the region for twelve years.

Pueblo potters and the writers who put the state on the page

Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo, working with her husband Julian, revived a black on black firing technique around 1919 after archaeologists digging on the Pajarito Plateau showed her ancient shards. The pots she signed turned a village craft into a collected art form, and potters from the same family are still working.

Rudolfo Anaya was born in Pastura in 1937 and raised in Santa Rosa. Bless Me, Ultima, published in 1972 by a small Berkeley press because no New York house would take it, has been assigned in American classrooms ever since. N. Scott Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, but grew up at Jemez Pueblo where his parents taught at the day school, and his novel House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. Tony Hillerman, an Oklahoman who spent his working life in Albuquerque teaching journalism at the University of New Mexico, began the Navajo police novels with The Blessing Way in 1970.

The outsiders who arrived and stayed

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin, first came out in 1929, bought a house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and an adobe compound in Abiquiu in 1945, and moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a New Yorker who had spent summers riding in the Pecos and personally suggested the Los Alamos Ranch School site when the army needed a place to build a bomb in 1942. Robert Goddard moved to Roswell in 1930 and launched liquid fuel rockets from a ranch outside town until 1941, years before anyone in Washington cared.

Two of the most recognizable figures associated with the state came the other way round. Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in New York City and was shot at Fort Sumner in July 1881 by Pat Garrett, an Alabaman. Smokey Bear was a real cub, badly burned in the Capitan Gap fire in the Lincoln National Forest in 1950, flown to the National Zoo, and returned to Capitan for burial in 1976.

Four Indianapolis wins and one head kick in Melbourne

The Unser family ran a service station on Route 66 in Albuquerque and produced the deepest racing dynasty in the country. Al Unser, born in Albuquerque in 1939, won the Indianapolis 500 four times, in 1970, 1971, 1978 and 1987. His brother Bobby, born in Colorado Springs but raised in Albuquerque, won it in 1968, 1975 and 1981. Al Unser Jr., born in Albuquerque in 1962, won in 1992 and 1994.

Holly Holm grew up in Bosque Farms, held world titles in boxing across several weight classes, and knocked out Ronda Rousey with a head kick in Melbourne in November 2015. Nancy Lopez was born in California and raised in Roswell, where she won the New Mexico Women's Amateur at twelve, and in her 1978 rookie season on the LPGA tour she won five tournaments in a row. Brian Urlacher was born in Washington state, grew up in Lovington, played at the University of New Mexico, and was the ninth pick of the 2000 NFL draft.

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