Once an actress and a teacher, Laura Warren, 56, is a restaurateur, innkeeper and mayor of Corrales (population 3,300 plus), N.M., near Albuquerque. Born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and raised in San Francisco, she has an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and master`s degrees from National College of Education and Northwestern University. For many years, she taught in the Chicago area. In a conversation with writer Norma Libman, Warren described the varied path that led to the office of mayor.
Following two years in repertory theater in New York, I spent about 6 1/2 years in Europe in the late `50s and early `60s. I worked for the Army Special Services for two years and then I went to the University of Berlin and the Sorbonne. And I traveled-skiing in Norway, that sort of thing. It was wonderful, but it was tough.
It was awfully hard working for the military, but part of the reason I did that was that I had three older brothers and they and their friends had all been in World War II. This made a terrific impression on me and had a great influence on my life. I wanted to know what had gone on in World War II and what had caused it. It was a driving force; I just had to see Europe first-hand.
Eventually I ended up in England where I was in repertory theater and studying children`s drama. That was an exciting time in England for theater. That was the time of Pinter and Beckett and Joan Littlewood and Ionesco. It was an experimental time. And, then, of course, the sixties were an exciting time in this country, too. There was that cross-fertilization of ideas.
It was over in England that I made a very big decision in my life. I came from a family of educators and I didn`t want to be in education because everybody always said to me, ”Boy, you`d really be a fine teacher.” So that was the last thing I wanted to be. And then slowly I came to see that that was really what I wanted to do. I was very idealistic. I had all these ideas of critical thinking and thought that I ought to put my efforts and abilities into teaching, after all. This was around 1962.
So I came back to the United States and went to graduate school. I had never taken any education courses before and tried to find every way to avoid taking them now. I didn`t want to waste the time. But I couldn`t find a way around it. I settled in Chicago at this point because of the schools. I went to National College of Education for a master`s in education and at the same time I was studying comparative literature at Northwestern University.
My first teaching job was at Lake Forest Country Day School. It`s ironic because I was a product of public schools, a deep believer in public education, and here I was teaching at an independent school. I was a reading teacher there for a year. I had done some work in reading at the University of Chicago and was intrigued by the whole act of reading, what comprised it, what were the roots of the difficulties people had, and what could be done about reading problems. Most people don`t even think about what goes into learning how to read.
That school was really not my cup of tea. It was too much the old preparatory type of school. I loved the kids because I`m nutty about children, but it was a rich children`s kind of school. A good number of those children were left in the hands of au pairs or whatever and were undernurtured, underprivileged kids, really, in a horrible sense. The poor little rich kid.
And there wasn`t enough going on. I had so much energy and activity, and here I was in this quiescent place. That wasn`t exactly what I had in mind. I had too many things to do and places to go and here I was in this sedentary kind of thing with the ”golden” people.
So then along came this chance to teach drama at the Francis Parker School in Chicago and I thought here was this experimental, creative place. Eventually I found out that the experimental period everyone was talking about had happened before World War II.
But it was wonderful teaching drama from kindergarten through the 12th grade. It was exciting because the drama was intertwined with the rest of the curriculum. This gave me a lot of opportunity to work on my philosophy of education and child development. I deeply believe that drama is the way you integrate experience and that play is a large part of child development and growth. And the variety of teaching all the different grades was terrific, but it was exhausting.
I left Francis Parker for the Children`s Bureau, which was a federal project funded through the Juvenile Protective Association. They wanted me to start a school for character-disordered delinquent children. After working so long with privileged kids, there was a lot of appeal to this. In the meantime, every year I had been directing a camp in the summer near Detroit, so I had experience dealing with children from varied ethnic and economic backgrounds. So I started this school in the basement of an old Methodist church on Diversey Parkway. The children that we got were recommended by the courts, the schools, the police. They were very difficult. The people at Francis Parker couldn`t understand why I left. I had to wear boots because the children would kick. I landed in the hospital with a concussion at one point.
I worked with Peace Corps people to develop techniques to manage these children. We`d chase them up ”L” tracks and down in basements. There wasn`t anywhere we wouldn`t go to get those children. And that surprised them because nobody had ever cared before.
People came from all over the world to see this demonstration school. And then Nixon came into office and the program was stopped. The school was dissolved, and I was out of a job after three years of hellish work. I was just devastated.
Frankly, at this point, all my energies were exhausted. I knew I had to do something to restore myself. I had to recreate myself. I had been through the West a number of times since the early `50s, driving through to visit my family in California. At first I couldn`t see much of what was here in the New Mexico area. It all seemed to be the same color and it didn`t do much for me. But after a while it grew on me and when this crisis occurred and I found myself out of a job, this was where I wanted to be.
I had a friend who had moved here with her children and I came out here and stayed with her, intending to find a teaching job in Albuquerque. That proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I even went up to Denver and tried there, also with no luck. This was during the recession in the early `70s and there just didn`t seem to be any possibilities.
Also, I was in my early 40s and nobody liked that I had so many degrees. That meant more pay. And I was older. I was not malleable; I might rock the boat. So I had experience, but what good was it? The value of experience is to share it with others and to use it, but I couldn`t.
Finally, at Thanksgiving, I got a job in Alamagordo, New Mexico. They were into about the 18th Century as far as teaching was concerned. I opened up the closet and there were all these paddles in there. Then the word got around that Miss Warren doesn`t paddle, and the kids would come and ask me if it was true, and the other teachers hated me.
The school system thought I was this kook from Chicago doing all these far-out things, like having sea-horses and chickens for the kids when they were still not even letting them speak in the lunch room. This job lasted six months.
After that I got a job teaching in Albuquerque and I`d been here a total of four years when Francis Parker called me and asked me to come back and be the head of their drama department, in 1974. This was to be my last foray into education.
I was not happy with what was going on out here, educationally, and I thought I missed the stimulation of the big city. I thought things moved too slowly here and were too provincial. I thought I missed the mix of people, the stimulation of ideas, the richness of the big city. I was ready to take on the world again.
So back I came to Chicago, and I was ready to leave again after one year. I spent every vacation out here; I talked about New Mexico all the time. I chased sunsets in my car. I got pneumonia, probably because of the weather change. And I hated the place. People were in such a hurry; they didn`t have time for anything. I grudgingly stayed a second year and then that was it.
One of the teachers that I met my second time around at Francis Parker, Mary Briault, had heard me talk so much about New Mexico that she decided to come out and take a look at it. She saw its charms immediately and since she was just about as fed up with the big city as I was, we both decided to come out here and start a school.
Well, the school was never to be. We started out by purchasing two duplexes and working on them in 1977 and `78. That turned out to be a very successful venture for making money. We needed the money to start the school, but we ended up using it to open a restaurant. We had driven out here to Corrales and found this piece of property that we liked. It was up for sale and so, together with a college friend of mine and a friend who had moved here from Michigan, we bought it and remodeled it. We did all the work ourselves, except plumbing and electrical work, which we didn`t know how to do. A friend from Chicago came down and helped us with the painting and final decorating.
Then friends and students we`d we had a place for them to stay had at Francis Parker would come overnight, too. And Mary and I, down and live with us. People both having lived in Europe, had would eat at the restaurant, which liked pensions and had had we named the Corrales Inn, and wonderful experiences in them. sit by the fire and say they wished We`d talked about having one, and everyone kind of pushed us into it. So the Corrales Inn became a Bed and Breakfast with six guest rooms.
After a year and a half we were so busy that we sometimes wanted to lie down on the floor and cry. But we loved our customers and we were truly having a great time.
We had had some zoning problems when we wanted to build the Bed and Breakfast, and that is really what led to my running for mayor. I never thought I`d be in politics.
But in 1986 I ran for the office mainly because I had grown to love this place so much and I could see that it was not going to survive in the coming years the way it was going. There was such a need for information about government. There was such a sense of complacency and lack of realism among the people here.
They just felt they were in a little island here and totally protected, but they`re not going to survive unless things happen. They thought of themselves as a rural farming community just three years ago, and now they see themselves as a suburb of Albuquerque.
I`m a reform mayor. That doesn`t make me popular. People are surprised that I`m doing the things I said I was going to do. Southwestern politics have their own particular chemistry and I came into this very idealistically. I made a very conscious decision not to be a cynical person. But I`m so glad I had the background of Chicago as far as politics are concerned.
To someone who is thinking of relocating, I`d say you have to really be conversant with yourself and ask yourself how important this really is. Is it really of top importance? And then, take the risk and do it. It is a risk and you can`t eliminate all the risk. But you have to take the bit in your teeth and do it.
It is harder for women to get jobs and if they have children they have special problems. But you never know where a move like this will take you. I certainly never thought it would turn out this way for me.
Despite all the difficulty I had making the decision, my roots are here now. This is where I intend to stay. This is where I belong. This is the place I love.
