Pagosa Springs Rotary Club
Larry said that by generally accepted lore, his family is related to Kit Carson. The McClintock roots go back to Tennessee, he told us, where Leroy Carson, a relative born in 1820 is locally remembered as one of the “Immortal 600,” members of a Civil War regiment captured and misused as prisoners.
But his branch of the family moved west, and Larry grew up in Las Vegas, New Mexico, which he pointed out had been where Teddy Roosevelt recruited many “Rough Riders” for the Spanish-American War. The city for years was the site of Rough Rider reunions, he added.
Larry recalled the early years of his youth when vestiges of the “Gilded Age” of railroad barons and industrialists remained in Las Vegas, which in 1879 had become a major junction of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. Among the features described by Larry were vast castle-like mansions, and ponds from which the railroad harvested winter ice for cooling.
One of the mansions over time had become a monastery, and Larry described the monks out and about in the town in their cassocks, even including when they joined in playing winter ice-hockey games.
After graduating from high school, Larry went to college, but soon dropped out to join the US Army. With a flair for languages, Larry was sent to the Defense Language Institute on the California coast near Monterey, where he said he went through an intensive course of instruction in German, while living in what (according to his description) must have seemed a near-perpetual fog bank. Then he was sent for training in radio intercept technology at a base in Texas, before being posted in June 1970 to a listening station near the town of Gartow on the Elbe River, then the border between West and East Germany.
Larry described border incidents during his period in Gartow, including a pair of East German border guards who escaped by crawling across the river on the winter ice, and announced “We surrender,” at a Chateau then being used to house US Military. The escapees were welcomed with a few drinks, Larry recalled.
Larry was in Germany for four years, during which he was married to a German woman. But when he left the service, she did not return with him to the US.
Larry then attended New Mexico State, got a degree, and became a CPA. He met wife Margaret, also a CPA, and both practiced in Albuquerque for many years, before they moved to Pagosa.