Carr Takes Advantage of the Many Ways to Give and Touches Many Lives
Elsie Raye Rigney Carr's family has been associated with this university for nearly a century. Mrs. Carr's parents both graduated from New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in 1911. After a brief stint as the county agricultural agent in Chavez County, her father was offered a position as a professor in the horticulture department at New Mexico A&M, so the family returned to Las Cruces.
Mrs. Carr was the oldest of four children, and it was just understood that they would go to college before they did anything else. She enjoyed her college days very much. She was a member of Zeta Alpha sorority and the International Relations Club, and she had a part in the senior play. When the Aggie football team, coached by her Uncle Jerry Hines, won the Border Conference and was selected to play in the first Sun Bowl game in El Paso, Mrs. Carr was elected to represent the college as a Sun Bowl princess.
Mrs. Carr graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1936 with a degree in English. She taught school in Las Cruces for a year before securing a job with the Soil Conservation Service, first in Albuquerque and then in Amarillo, Texas. There she met and married a young doctor. With the start of World War II, he became a flight surgeon with the Navy, causing the family to move several times.
When he shipped out, she got a job with her former Amarillo employer who was moving to Washington, D.C., to take a position with a new international relief agency. Mrs. Carr's first marriage ended shortly after the war. She and her son Michael stayed in Washington until 1954 when she accepted a position with the Ford Foundation and moved to Djakarta, Indonesia. There she met Dr. Jesse Carr who had come with a team from the University of California, San Francisco to help the Indonesians modernize their medical school. After their two-year appointments ended, they returned to the United States, married and settled in San Rafael, Calif.
With many members of her family living in the Mesilla Valley, Mrs. Carr returned often to visit and maintained her connections with NMSU. Our campus has many reminders of her personal generosity. In 1973 she made a gift in honor of her mother to erect the sundial that stands at the east end of the Horseshoe.
In 1992, she created a four-year full scholarship for a female student selected through the President's Associates scholarship program. To date, four women have earned their degrees with this award. Her next investment came in 1998 during the campaign to renovate the old YMCA building and create a permanent home for the Honors program. The commons room in that building is named for the Rigney-Hines family.
The NMSU Foundation awarded her its Branding Iron in 2004 in recognition of her many gifts and her service to the university as a member of the NMSU Foundation board.