By staff writer: Brienne Green
Melissa Lopez points out her name, still taped below her mailbox, in the main office of Abo Elementary School. 
Melissa Lopez smiles after commemorating her 35-year teaching career on the chalkboard of her former first-grade classroom at Abo Elementary. 
A chalkboard in an Abo Elementary classroom notes the final day of classes at the underground school. 
Pictured is one of two hallways of classrooms in Abo’s U-shaped underground structure. 
Barricades in the bowels of Abo Elementary offer instructions for “survival” in the event of nuclear fallout. 
The Abo Elementary cafeteria is frozen in time, its original curtains and wooden stage dating back to the 1960s. The multi-purpose area was also designed to serve as a headquarters for emergency operations in the event of a nuclear attack.
“Oh, they’re still here!”
Melissa Lopez smiled as she gazed upward to the light fixtures in her old first-grade classroom at Abo Elementary in Artesia. Dangling in intervals from sturdy lengths of string were blue, red and yellow paper clips, from which once hung the art projects of the final students to begin their elementary educations at Artesia’s famed underground school.
Abo opened its doors in 1962, the only school in the nation whose doors happened to be situated several feet above. At the height of the tension and uncertainty of the Cold War era, it was designed to double as a nuclear fallout shelter. From ground level, it was a source of bemusement: three small, square, concrete structures situated atop a cement slab. Each featured a single entrance that opened onto stairwells leading down into the windowless halls below.
Inside the small classrooms lining those hallways, there was nothing out of the ordinary about being an Abo Gopher. By 1991, when Lopez began teaching, the unusual aspects of the school had, in fact, become something of an anecdote: Tucked away in the walls behind the cafeteria service station lay a complex system of air-filtration equipment, emergency generators, water wells, decontamination showers, food stores and bedding to accommodate more than 2,000 people… and a morgue.
While the Cold War was ending just as Lopez’s career was beginning, everyone who taught at and attended Abo over the years still possessed a sense that they were living history. Lopez recalls the not-infrequent sight of random individuals peeking into classrooms as they were guided through the halls by administrators — tourists from around the U.S. and the world who simply wanted a glimpse of the facility. Lopez herself was also a part of Artesia history, becoming the first Hispanic teacher at Abo Elementary. She took the helm of her first-grade classroom in a corner adjacent one of the three stairwells in 1992 and spent the next five years as a proud Gopher.
“There are so many memories, things you didn’t think were weird at the time,” Lopez said. “Never knowing what the weather was is one of those. You’d be downstairs all morning and then go up top for recess and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s raining!’ I can remember when I was working late and was the last person there, you’d hear that big door close up top with a ‘thuuung,’ and after that, you’d have to carry a flashlight everywhere you went because what if the lights went out? I’d also have to wedge myself through one of the decontamination showers to leave after the main doors were closed for the night.
“I remember sometimes you’d hear little noises above your head, pebbles falling and stuff, and you’d realize it was the little underground critters crawling around between your ceiling and up top. And I remember a telegram from President [John F.] Kennedy hanging on the wall in the office that he’d sent after the school first opened.”
Those hours alone in the silent hallways were made a bit more eerie by a tale Lopez only recently discovered was untrue.
“I just now realized the morgue is at the back of the cafeteria,” she laughed. “Somebody told me when I first started that the little supply closet under the stairs by my classroom was the morgue. I thought that was the truth the whole time; I wish I could remember who told me that, because they were apparently just trying to scare me!”
When Abo closed its doors to students on May 26, 1995, its teachers, including Lopez, moved to the new above-ground school constructed next door: Yeso Elementary. In 1999, Abo was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Lopez continued teaching for the next 30 years until announcing her retirement in May. As the final Abo-to-Yeso teacher in the Artesia Public Schools system, with her went both an era and a legacy.
“I’d tell new teachers to enjoy the time, because it flies by,” she said. “Thirty-five years — where’d it go? But I went out on a really good note. I feel satisfied and fulfilled. I got to teach in two amazing schools, made a lot of good friends, and taught a lot of great kids. So it’s all been worth it.”