A century ago, members of the 1898-99 NMSU Tennis Club dressed in hats and bow ties for this studio portrait. The club included Walter Holt, front row left; professor Barker, front row right; A.M. Holt, professor E.O. Wootten and professor C.T. Hagerty, middle row; and Ed Coe, back row middle. The rest of the members' names are unknown. If you can identify them, please contact Aggie Panorama. The NMSU Tennis Club has since grown to nine men and nine women, according to Don Ball, head tennis coach. Last year, the men's team qualified for the NCAA tournament and the women's team came close. Women's team member Simone Bock is ranked 80th in the nation, and the doubles team of Adrian Contreras and Jason Noble is ranked 37th. (Photo provided by the Rio Grande Historical Collections at the NMSU Library.)

At age 81, Elnora Wiley, '36, '37, NMSU's former registrar, is officially retired. Just don't tell her.

Wiley still goes to work most days at the hardware store that bears her late husband's name. Her desk there is cluttered with invoices, envelopes and scraps of paper, all of which fall into piles below a bulletin board of family photographs showing her husband, Hayden, their two sons, Harry and Joe, daughter-in-law Ruth and grandchildren Virginia and Robby.

On her way home in the evenings, she normally stops by to visit her sister-in-law, Betty Williams, who lives in the house where Wiley grew up from 1927 to 1938. She habitually has Sunday lunch there, too, and afterwards plays bridge with her niece, Kellie Dinsmore, her nephew, me, and our mom. We call her Auntie. She plays a mean hand of bridge.

Customers of Hayden's Hardware in Las Cruces who have visited the original store on Foster Road have, no doubt, seen her toiling away in the store's corner loft, as she has been doing regularly since she and Hayden purchased the place in 1959. Since then, under family management from the onset, three more stores have opened Ð one in Las Cruces, one in Canutillo and one in El Paso - and all of them are successful.

But the nuts and bolts of her life are about more than hardware. In her golden years, this remarkable woman has been wildly prolific, compiling family memoirs and speaking to various groups about the history of the Mesilla Valley and her place in it. She also authored a 1990 book, Inside The Shalam Colony, which is about to go into its second printing. The book concerns a turn-of-the-century settlement of religious people who came to the Mesilla Valley seeking their own vision of Eden. The vision soured, but the story remains fascinating.

Wiley lives on the working farm where the colony was situated, and during her tenure as registrar for NMSU (1968 to 1985), she first processed a transcript request for, and later developed a pen-pal friendship with, the daughter of the man who founded the Shalam Colony.

Based on that chance acquaintance by mail, the two began a long correspondence on which the book is based.

But not everything in life is like a good story. She's endured tragedy in the deaths of her youngest son, Joe; her husband of 56 years, Hayden; and her brother, Jess Williams Ð my dad. Through it all, she has led her family by example: always optimistic, a paragon of hard work and generous to a fault with the people for whom she feels love and loyalty.

She is a big believer in the value of education, and has provided financial support for many young people to pursue their college educations. I know this to be true. Neither my sister nor I ever had to worry about where our tuition money would come from, and we never had to ask: Auntie wrote out the checks like clockwork.

"I honestly don't know how many people I've helped," she said, smiling, "but they all got the same lecture before they got the first check: Education is the greatest asset anyone has going for them. Once you learn something, it can never be taken away from you, and it can only make you a better person."

Her own degrees - a bachelor's in English and a master's in bacteriology - may sometimes seem an odd fit for a woman whose life has been about teaching, farming, writing, selling hardware and administering NMSU's first computerized registration process, but she insists that she never wasted a minute in a college classroom, and that everything she ever learned came in useful at one time or another.

Looking back at her life and her career - as a businesswoman, administrator, teacher, mother and wife - Wiley said each role taught her something about herself and her place in the world. But before I could wring any more of those lessons out of her for this story, her office phone rang, and she had to get back to work. And therein, of course, is the biggest lesson of all that Elnora Wiley has to convey: Keep going, keep smiling, keep working, keep living. Make every minute count.

Thanks, Auntie. I'll remember that!

Jess Williams, '85, '97

Elnora Wiley