White Rock named 'crowning jewel' of happiness in new travel blog

Feb. 27—WHITE ROCK — Tim Benjamin took a break from delving into his sloppy Joe sandwich at the White Rock Senior Center to consider the surprising news.

White Rock has been named the happiest small town in the United States.

"We only have one bar — how could it be happy?" Benjamin, a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, quipped.

Well, that's what The Travel says. The online travel journal recently listed the 10 happiest small towns in the country — defined in the article as having 8,000 or less residents — to live in based on poverty, crime and unemployment rates. (But not based on the cost of housing which, based on an online search, hovers in the $600,000 median price range in White Rock.) White Rock made the top of its ranking.

'With a rural feel and a close-knit community, White Rock is one of the happiest small towns in America, where the abundance of picturesque landscapes is great," The Travel says, calling White Rock "one of the crowning jewels in the U.S."

Interviews with about 15 White Rock residents brought about nothing but smiles and confirmation they are part of a very happy lot.

Even Benjamin, who sports a good sense of humor, said he has lived there for over 40 years.

"It's pretty hard to find a place that is better in terms of climate, low crime, friendly people," he said.

From dance instructors to restaurant owners to retirees to cannabis lounge operators, White Rock residents were happy to hear the news about how happy they are. Not one had a bad thing to say about the community, which is about 7 square miles large and the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else's name.

"Every time I walk around town doing errands everybody seems relaxed and happy," said dance instructor Karina Wilder, who lives in Santa Fe but works at the Dance Arts Los Alamos studio in White Rock.

Where else can you step outside and see beautiful mountains surrounding you from every angle? she asked.

Though most of the other nine locales cited in The Travel website "happiest town" list are incorporated towns, cities or villages — like Bisbee, Ariz., or Caribou, Maine — White Rock is not. That fact did not bother Wilder or anyone else who spoke about the designation.

"I think the people who live in White Rock have a solidarity together, whether it's a town or a community," she said.

"We are growing into a town," said Christa Tyler, who runs the 420 Tea Time cannabis consumption lounge in White Rock. While some people may walk into her business unhappy — particularly those with painful medical conditions — "we try to make them happy before they leave," she said.

Still mostly a bedroom community for people who work at Los Alamos National Laboratory some 10 miles away, White Rock sprung up as a "temporary community" for construction workers in the late 1940s and 1950s, according to a text box on the wall in the White Rock Visitor Center.

The original town was "razed" in 1958 and reborn in 1962 as living space was needed for those who worked in the lab, the text box says. The community takes its name from nearby White Rock Canyon, and the overlook park at the canyon remains a popular place for community gatherings and visitors.

White Rock resident John Tubbs, 85, recalled living in Los Alamos in the 1950s and 1960s.

"If you were 12 or older you had to have an ID card because it was a closed town," he said in an interview at the senior center. In those days White Rock was a good dirt-and-rock place to hunt and kill rattlesnakes — which do not, he said, taste like chicken.

"They taste like rattlesnake," he said.

The U.S. Army veteran worked at the lab as a designer/illustrator and moved with his wife to White Rock in 1973. He said he "absolutely agrees" with the designation of happiest small town in the country.

"Everybody's friendly; everybody knows everybody," he said. "You go to the store and there's always somebody there you know."

Not far away, at 420 Tea Time, Santa Fe-born Leah Frazier said in some ways White Rock reminds her of how Santa Fe was 25 or 30 years ago when she would roller-skate on the Plaza, always running into people she knew and feeling she was part of a small town.

Now living in White Rock, she summons forth images from a once-popular 1960s TV program to describe her feelings about the community.

"It turns out to be a Mayberry place," she said, the name of the small town in The Andy Griffith Show. She said she likes the fact most of the community is tightly woven together by business and housing in a span of a mile or two right off of N.M. 4.

It's not a mass of neighborhoods, she said — "White Rock is a neighborhood."