In honor of 50 years of coeducation at Albuquerque Academy, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of women alumni.
Laura Hochla ’97 was about to introduce America’s highest ranking military officer, General Mark Milley, to the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis. But she was thinking about her seventh-grade teacher Randy McCutcheon.
To convey the practical skills of writing, Mr. McCutcheon had assigned his students to draft letters to public figures. Laura had written to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and, weeks later, she received a reply.
“It felt very full circle to have written, in Randy McCutcheon’s English class, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs — and now to be running around Rome with another one,” she said.
Liaising between major powers is all in a day’s work for Laura, who is in her 19th year as a U.S. foreign service officer, currently as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See.
Service is also in her blood. Her dad was four when his family was driven from Czechoslovakia, and America eventually received him as a child refugee. “The sense of the United States having given my family everything,” Laura said, “is at the core of who I am.”
She grew up in Albuquerque, where her dad was a psychiatrist with the Veterans Health Administration and an air surgeon at Kirtland Air Force Base. On account of his practice, he dropped her off at the Academy as soon as the doors opened, but the hour didn’t dampen her boundless energy. Her homeroom teacher, Dave Barney, who was also an early bird, dubbed her “the little ball of fire.”
Later in life she would attend other prestigious schools, but she says the Academy was more rigorous than any of them. “It pushed me to the limits of my ability,” she said. “I was never bored.”
In particular, she loved her Spanish classes, including those taught by Cristina Quiroga and Martha Mentch. She still vividly remembers when, volunteering at a downtown homeless shelter, she needed to communicate with a man who didn’t understand English and made use of her budding language skills. “It was the first time where something that I learned in the classroom worked in my day-to-day life.”
The school’s experiential education program was also formative, she said, although she ruefully recalled the discomfort of her first overnight trips in the woods. “I cried, I was homesick. I couldn’t hold it together.” To the program’s credit, it turned around her perspective of nature. By her senior year, she was leading trips to the Philmont Scout Ranch.
Laura sees the program’s influence in the peripatetic lifestyle she’s now embraced as a foreign service officer, where every three years she is posted to a new location and her family has to pack up their lives and make a new home. She’s served in Kosovo, Colombia, the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and Spain — where her husband hails from — as well as domestic tours in Washington, D.C., at the State Department and the White House. “I love serving my country, but the food is better in other places,” she joked. “Except for New Mexico.”
The more she lives in places where national identity is tethered to ethnicity, religion, race, or language, the more she appreciates the unique character of the United States. “We’re a country founded on a set of ideas and ideals and values. And that is pretty radical,” she said. “And just how remarkable that is, and how fragile it is, has really come into sharp relief for me.”
