King, Bruce, 1924-

Bruce King was born on April 6, 1924, in Stanley, New Mexico, the third child of William (Bill) and Mollie Sue King, Texas homesteaders that arrived in the Estancia Valley with only a 1918 Ford Model T to their name. Trading their Model T to a homesick Texan for a 160 acre homestead on the western edge of the Llano Estacado, the Kings took up the challenge to settle in an area long held to be impossible to sustain human life. The Kings increased the size of their ranch by buying up abandoned homesteads of people moving to the growing urban centers like Albuquerque and Santa Fe. By the time that Bill King died in 1949, his ranch had grown from the original 160 acres with a tar paper dugout to 10,000 acres stretching east of the Sandia and Ortiz Mountains. Currently, the King family is one of the largest land owners in New Mexico, possessing over 400,000 acres across Santa Fe, Torrance, Sandoval, Valencia, Catron and Bernalillo counties.

Growing up in Stanley, Bruce worked the King family ranch, tending to cattle and the corn fields and was a boy scout along with his older brother, Sam, and younger brother, Don, while their sister Leota helped Alice in the house and their father worked with the state highway department. In 1936, New Mexico Governor Clyde Tingley dedicated the new Stanley school, inspiring Bruce to consider a career in politics. Bruce played football for Stanley High School and at the University of New Mexico before he enlisted in the United States Army in 1944, serving with the occupation army until he was discharged in 1946 as a corporal. Within a week he met Alice Martin (born May 13, 1930), the granddaughter of eastern New Mexico pioneers who arrived in the Estancia Valley by covered wagon, at evening church services at the Moriarty Baptist Church. They married the next year, on June 1, 1947.

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