Glenn's Girls
New Mexico
New Mexico is a place where one can come to lose himself from all that came before. It is the Land of enchantment by name. And by sight a land without end. It is the fulcrum balancing past and future, certainty and doubt. From this land there is no judgment and no truth to be sought. The landmarks and any of the better footholds of experience are relegated to memory and the not-here, not-now mañana land we otherwise call desert. New Mexico is at once good and bad. Perhaps this alone is paramount of its appeal to story-tellers, artists, charlatans, outlaws and historians alike.
Glenn Dennis could not have happened in any other place.
When we make a whole of the pieces that came before it is, after all, not an effort best made under the tired polemic of righteousness and truth. Instead, it is at best a pursuit of grey-making from the landscape of former blacks and whites. The ashen hills at the southern tip of the Rockies are polka-dotted playfully with thorny Piñons and snowy Palo Verdes rooted in sand, stone and sky. Indeed one hardly mentions the Rockies in the presence of these hills. The canons are meager. The rivers and snow caps seldom full of drama. Whereas the Rockies hint toward an undercurrent of stark beauty amidst danger and awe, these Rockies lean on the sky with the careless slouch of sleeping drunks. The beauty of New Mexico is not in the realization of it’s immediate awesomeness, but the vision and imagination that spring forth from the barren tide pools of generations. New Mexico is one vast impression and wilderness of thoughts.
New Mexico is proud of the military. On 70 from Las Cruces through Alamogordo and on to Roswell, one passes the White Sands monument and the missile range On either side of the road one can see the boomtown testaments to New Mexico’s era of prosperity. In the better years, during the space race, New Mexico must have been a destination for much more. A culture developing from the Indian foothills of the Rockies to the razor edged ridge lines of the blank mountains in the southernmost end of the state.
Las Cruces is a college town. The Aggies of New Mexico State seem to be the main attraction there. But New Mexico is not a place best described by the places people live. Or if it is, then certainly not the cites. New Mexico is as vast and barren as the states come. The portion between Las Cruces in the South, to Roswell in the East, the place where many of the events in Glenn Dennis’ story take place, offer very few attractions but for Billy the Kid, nuclear bombs, ghostly sands, and the spirit of mañana.
Glen Dennis stands two feet taller than the average height of new Mexico brush. These piñon trees amount to bushes about 4 feet tall, twice as wide, and the source of the signature green spotting of an otherwise gray-brown New Mexico countryside. New Mexico is not Arizona; there are no cacti. The desert here is low and flat and, in the valleys where the rivers run, grassy enough for cattle, corn, and commerce. Roswell today features a thriving cheese dairy, a factory which, according to the locals, makes 90 percent of the country pizza cheese. The cheese doesn’t explain what a town which lost its air force base decades ago is doing building new hotels, planning new water projects for a growing population. No, Roswell is famous now not for its cheese but for its infamy. At the center of that infamy is a humble six foot Irish Texan, the living half of fraternal twins, Glenn Dennis.
1947.
Two years after the war had ended. America stuck in the middle of Marshall era surplus. Plenty had happened in the years prior. Glenn got married in 1946 to Dorrie Neese, the eleventh of eleven children, the daughter of a preacher in Wyoming. They had met in New Mexico, where the two of them traveled to San Francisco where Glenn would learn the trade of undertaking. During the war Glenn had volunteered for enlistment but was kept out due to deafness in his left of two great big ears. He went deaf in that ear as a child when he dove headfirst into shallow water and knocked his head on the rocky bottom. That coupled with the death of his Twin Sister at the age of sixteen had created an opportunity for Glenn to take interest in and respect for death. After finishing high school in West Texas, he moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in the mortician’s business.
The baby was on the way. Glenn and Dorrie were three months pregnant in August of 1947. Pamela Jo was on the way. August X, 1947, at 6 AM in the morning, there was a knock on the door. Glenn got robed and went to the front door. Being the country mortician it was customary to call when there was an emergency. Glenn had ambulances and was on call most of the time in the event there was an accident at the base or on a highway from Roswell to anywhere. Glenn had embalmed and buried hundreds of airman and locals, and due to his dedication and congeniality, held a certain respectable stature. People liked Glenn Dennis. With him you were in good hands.
The knock at the door was Captain X from the Roswell Air Force Base. Before Glenn could say good morning or ask what the matter was, he was asked to step outside, which he obligingly did being envious and supportive of the military as such. The Captain told Glenn that he’d heard the rumors and he understood that Glenn was at the center of those rumors.
“If you say anything about what you saw,” Captain X said, “They’ll be picking your bones out of the sand.”
When Papa started talking about it, I was myself a teenager, the second son of Pamela Jo Dennis, now Pam Abbott, or to me, simply mom. Glenn Dennis is my Grandfather and to date the only member of the family who has been interviewed on Larry King or Unsolved Mysteries. In the eighties, before he became the Founder of the Roswell UFO Museum, before he has spoken publicly about his involvement in the sighting of a downed UFO in the New Mexico desert, Papa told the story with a sense that it was about time someone knew what happened—which is to say, without much bull.
2004
Glenn hadn’t seen the damn thing at all. Or at least not so far as he knew. What he saw was this. A hospital frantic with activity, otherwise friendly MP’s treating him badly, a nurse he knew more scared than confused, and phone calls from the base wanting more than the usual. All of this you can read in his self-published “Roswell UFO Story.”
The book is a few sheets of tan eight-by-eleven folded halfway and stapled into a chapbook. It numbers all of six pages and costs $4.95, which Papa would gladly give a visitor to the Museum he finds your company interesting.
For the past nine or ten years, I’ve been visiting my family in New Mexico and have had several occasions to visit with Papa in the humble settings. Thanksgiving dinner. The week of Christmas break. Whole Summer months a mile down highway 70 which zips through the Hondo valley between Roswell and Ruidoso. In those years, I’ve watched him deteriorate from a vivacious septuagenarian who seemed to have figured out a way to beat diabetes. He slathers his pancakes in molasses and peanut butter. He mows his acre-large yard with a riding mower ever week. A few years ago I witnessed him pull barbed wire out of his blades. He had turned over the mower and was going at it with a pair of pliers before I could enlist my own young hands to the job. He would never ask for help but on occasion would suffer to appease a grandson in his pleas. Papa, the Papa whose form seemed to stay steady throughout childhood and into my twenties, has always been a healthy man. His hands may have always been pocked and wrinkly, but his posture was upright and his voice clear. Most certainly his mind was a marvel of shortened hyperbole, tongue-in-cheek swears, and compliments. To some he is flirty. To others fatherly. But to all, liked. To see his swift demise last year, is a lesson in heartbreak.
The Truth of the Matter Is
Whether or not Papa can be trusted is complicated. Papa has never been anything but loving. A bit of a grifter, perhaps. If there’s anything to take from his life, it’s the notion that good springs from many facets. Papa was full of goodness and expressing that goodness was never difficult. While it’s true his heart may have always been in the right place his brain often got him into trouble.
Papa is always quick to hug and damn near quicker to compliment. I’ve seen him make ladies blush and men tip their hats. To the ladies in the Museum he’s called “Our Glenn Dennis” which indicates the kind of treasure those in casual but regular contact with Papa think he is. Having dealt with death and disappointment of an entire community through the years, once can begin to understand the degree of respect in witch many in Roswell regard him.
To many who’ve lived their lives and will die in Roswell, Glenn was their undertaker. Trust in him is a given, To those of us know him better, the truth of the matter is more complicated. Among us are his ex-wife, second wife, two daughters, step-daughter, two sons-in-law, three grandchildren. I do not know his banker. And I do not know his lawyer. But I am certain they too know the faults of the man.
The Faults
Papa has been in trouble with the law. He has hated his Ex. He has evaded taxation. He has amassed and lost a fortune. He has been ashamed enough to deny all of those faults. Among his lesser faults, he readily admits them. He’s deaf in one ear. He could not serve in the military. He’s a “good old boy” who knows “nothing from books.” Among his greatest achievements is the caliber of love and commitment he had to his daughters in spite of all of this.
During the 60’s, at the height of Papa’s success at running the business of Funeral homes, he had eighth of them, had moved to Las Cruces and started collecting cars and art, jewelry and clothes. At about this time he began forging his own bronze sculptures. Growing up we had two of his dancing Indians as mantle pieces. A plaster of an Indian woman’s face covered with a head scarf sat atop a bookshelf in the living room.
It wasn’t until my twenties when I realized that these artifacts were relics from the better days, when my dad borrowed the Dennis boat and subsequently ruined it and the pool in their backyard by accidentally backing it off the driveway and into the pool. Those we before his business and a number of assets were seized by the IRS for tax evasion.
I had always known him simultaneously as the man who chased my dad off the porch with a shotgun in hand and the man who forgave my dad for ruining a new boat and new pool. I had never known the degree of fortune he amassed, but it lurked in the paintings and busts of the pieces he salvaged. His years of fortune were present in the cars slowly rusting in the carport. I knew the post- lapsarian Papa whose love was shiny and new, but whose possessions were very slowly rotting.
Link to inteview with Glenn Dennis I shot in December of 2003.
