Wanda Hansen

Wanda Lucille Hansen was a “Rach” star, not the head banging hip swiveling type but the eighty-eight black and white keys kind. She loved to play the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C minor as well as pieces by Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven, Lecuona, and McDowell. She even threw in Scott Joplin and some

bluegrass on occasion and could draw out Mary Had A Little Lamb to five minutes with extended arpeggios. Those days sadly ended when on October 7th Wanda quietly passed away at the Good Samaritan Health Center in Las Cruces after months of declining health. 

Her long life began in 1929 in Clovis, NM, but she grew up in Avis and Pinon on the eastern flanks of the Sacramento Mountains. When Wanda was eight her mother, Hazel Kirk Harbert who taught for years in a one-room school in Pinon, arranged to buy an old piano from a rancher and have it delivered to her teacherage in a well-used cattle trailer. Wanda quickly progressed in her music studies and, at the age of seventeen, was admitted to Eastern New Mexico College in Portales where she majored in piano and voice. While still in college, she met a dashing young navy man from Cloudcroft, NM named Bill Dick Hansen and they were soon married. A year later her first son was born and the young family moved to Las Cruces where Bill attained his degree in economics at New Mexico A & M or, as they called it,

Aggieville. Over the next seventy-three years, she raised two sons, Delwyn and Carl, taught kindergarten, and worked as a secretary at HELSTF on the White Sands Missile Range. And she played the piano. She often donned colorful hats and costumes to play for friends at senior citizen centers and at the Good Samaritan Retirement Village in Las Cruces where she lived for her last fifteen years. Her relatives and in-laws were many, including the Scotts, Kirks, Walkers, Harberts, Coopers, Bookouts, Mendoncas, Herndons, and Woolfs.

She was preceded in death by her husband Bill Dick and her son Carl and his wife Linda.

She is survived by her son Del and his wife Donna McCoskey-Hansen and by her granddaughter Cindy Aguilar, her husband Joel, and great grandchildren Mason, Layla, and Taylor. Family members wish to thank the staff of the Good Samaritan Health Center, High Desert Hospice, and Getz Funeral Home for their care and support in Wanda’s final days and in eternal life. Wanda deeply loved her husband, her family, her God, and her music. 

A graveside service will be held in the Sacramento Mountains at 1:30 pm on October 17 in the Sixteen Springs Canyon Cemetery east of Cloudcroft. In lieu of flowers, she asked that her friends and acquaintances remember her by paying it forward for the next person in line at the check-out. That would please her and

possibly her friend Sergei Rachmaninoff too.