September 3, 2024 | By Jennifer Levin

St. John’s Santa Fe is turning 60! To celebrate, we’ll be looking back at key figures, moments, and movements from the campus’s past, all of which have proved instrumental in transforming the foothills of Monte Sol into a beloved home for generations of Johnnies. We sat down with Pioneer Class graduates Daniel Cleavinger (SF69) and Melissa Benedict (SF69) for a trip down memory lane—one that will be followed shortly by a literal return to their college days when the two attend September’s 2024’s in-person Homecoming festivities.

There’s no expiration date on friendship—or romance—for Daniel Cleavinger and Melissa Benedict. Forty-five years after they both graduated from St. John’s Santa Fe, the two reconnected at a milestone reunion in 2014 and began spending time together. “It was a very fortuitous thing,” Cleavinger says. “It was nice to have that history of St. John’s in common, people we both knew. We’ve been together for 10 years now.”

Cleavinger is an Albuquerque native whose mother hails from Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. He enrolled at St. John’s in 1965 following an unsatisfying first year at the University of New Mexico. As for Benedict, her stepfather was a National Park Service engineer, so their family moved often. She attended boarding school as a teenager, where her best friend was Connie Weigle (SF68)—the daughter of former St. John’s president Richard Weigle—and came to St. John’s after an equally unsatisfying year at Grinnell College.

“I visited Connie during my spring break,” she recalls. “I went to class with her and realized this was the classical education and academic ethos I was looking for.”

Post-graduation, Benedict became an accountant who often works in the nonprofit sector, and Cleavinger went into law, eventually serving as a magistrate judge in the City of Aztec. They have attended Homecoming regularly since becoming a couple, and they often assist the Alumni Engagement Office by contacting members of their class year before the event. The two sat down and shared their favorite St. John’s memories with us in the leadup to this year’s Fall Homecoming, which is scheduled to take place in Santa Fe on September 13-15 and Annapolis on September 27-29.

What do you remember most about your college years? What was Santa Fe like back then?

Benedict: I was struck by how beautiful this part of the world is—the light and the quiet; the sense of spirituality that is pervasive.

Cleavinger: The college was at the edge of the city then, and Santa Fe was magical—very different from Albuquerque, and inspiring for me. We thought it was something special to get the college going here. There was a sense of pride and excitement in being part of the early classes.

Benedict: The roads near the college were dirt, and there were no homes up there, so we had a kind of wilderness experience in our backyard. And we had horses. That was so fabulous. A tutor named Dean Haggard set up the program, and volunteer students helped build the horse corral, logging downed trees from Rowe Mesa. We would ride up there bouncing around in the back of this flatbed truck—the kind of thing that would never happen today, but we had so much fun. The college got the horses from the community by asking if people wanted to board their horses for the winter. Riding was a perfect complement to the St. John’s experience, which was so cerebral. You could just go out there and saddle up a horse and ride up into the hills.

Cleavinger: Outside of the college, it was a crazy time. A lot of things were swirling.

Benedict: We’d all witnessed the assassination of John F. Kennedy when we were in high school, and the Vietnam War was very threatening to all the men in our classes. Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated in our junior year. I think we all felt a sense of refuge, being so far from all that. And it was a time when women were considered pretty unimportant in society at large, but I could be respected at St. John’s, and that was wonderful.

What did you do after graduation?

Benedict: I started working in Santa Fe. I eventually went to graduate school for accounting at UNM. I’ve worked for a number of organizations in town, in CFO positions, including Santa Fe Prep. Education is very important to me. I’ve been a trustee and volunteer accountant at Santa Fe Girls School since 2010.

Cleavinger: I got married in our senior year, and we went to Peru with the Peace Corps. But that ended suddenly with the Ancash Earthquake of May 31, 1970, in which 70,000 people were killed, including four of our Peace Corps colleagues. That changed my life. We came back to the states and went through difficult times, but I made it through law school at UNM. Most of my legal career was in Española and in Tierra Amarilla. Later, I worked in the district attorney’s office in Farmington, when Governor Bill Richardson appointed me magistrate judge.;

How have you carried St. John’s with you?

Cleavinger: The Program gives students plenty of opportunities to present in class, debate, and read difficult texts. These skills were needed in law school and in practice afterwards. I did feel comfortable in law school and in my legal career because of having attended SJC.

Benedict: I loved the study of logic. That’s probably what I carried forward most from St. John’s into accounting: the pursuit of logical thinking. The way we were educated, having seminar-style discussions, demonstrating on the blackboard—you really learn how to use your intellect. The whole idea is to become an educated, thinking person. Dan and I are both lifelong learners. We’ve been studying Spanish for decades. We read a lot of books. It’s that whole lifestyle that comes from being a person with a lot of curiosity and interest in the world.