Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Like many on the High Plains, we woke up without water on Monday morning in the sub-zero weather. It was a preventable problem, at least at our house, but I had grown complacent after a string of winters when we had dodged that icy bullet. Out here in the country, water and electricity go hand-in-hand. Our water flows with the aid of pumps powered by electricity. Most of the times we do not have water, it's because we don't have power. In fact, we are so well-trained that at... Full story
If you were out and about last weekend on U.S. 70 from Roswell to Clovis, you may have passed a young backpacker on the side of the road, moving east with quick steps like a woman on a mission. We like to call it "walking with purpose." Because, in every sense of the word, she is. Hannah Bacon blew through our area like a tumbleweed, and along the way completed "days 79 and 80, and miles 1149-1187" of a trek that she hopes will take her completely across the United States -...
Are you a singer, a dancer, a musician, an undiscovered cowboy poet? Do you have that one magic trick that gets requested every Thanksgiving, or a card manipulation that always fools your audience? Are you a closet yodeler secretly yearning to go public? Do you make killer tortillas and have a great how-to demonstration? If so — or if you have virtually (and virtually is the key word here) any kind of talent — the folks at the Eastern New Mexico University Department of The...
In the fall of 1928, only weeks before she got her first tooth, little Norma Mozelle Estes of Portales was named the "prize winning baby in the Best-All-Around Baby contest" at the Woman's Club picnic held at Arch. The memory is captured in a yellowed clipping pasted in a pink leatherette baby book, which arrived in the mail at the Portales Chamber of Commerce last fall. Chamber Director Karl Terry shared the book with me. The woman who sent it to Portales said she had...
I spent a good half hour recently digging through boxes in search of a handful of photos I took during one of the most beautiful and serene evenings of my life. When I found them, I was transported back - as I hoped I would be - to a hushed and snowy night in February of 1986. I lived near Washington, D.C., then and worked for a high school civic education program. For several weeks each year, our entire staff moved into a large hotel in the district where we played host to...
When my mother arrived in New Mexico as a bride in 1957, she brought two items that I doubt were in many ranch homes at that time: a pair of ice skates and a set of snow skis. She was a native of Ohio, a state where snow can endure for months on end. She had also spent the previous three years in Japan where the extremely favorable (at the time) exchange rate let her hit the slopes almost every weekend. It is reasonable to say that she welcomed snow in eastern New Mexico with...
When I was a little kid, and before I had enough sense to avoid carnivals, I eagerly boarded a ride one year at the Roosevelt County Fair. I don’t remember the name of the ride, but I do remember that four or five of us were seated in a pod. Those pods hung precariously on ends of long arms that hurtled us in circles as the ride spun. They also twisted independently, flinging us from side to side. It took only seconds to realize that stepping foot into that pod had been a t...
As we prepare for Christmas in the most non-traditional year of our lives, I have found myself remembering holidays from the past. Perhaps you have, too. I’ve come back several times to an event that we participated in most of my growing up years: the December “candle burning” hosted by my Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m betting that Aunt Blanche did the heavy lifting on this event, but Uncle Jack was always a willing and gracious partici...
After some hemming and hawing last week (or perhaps I should say hemming and sawing), I put up our annual Christmas branch. Yes, branch. We are Christmas branch people at our house, and with few exceptions always have been. Our house is surrounded by towering old Arizona cypress trees planted by my grandfather probably in the 1930s or 1940s. These trees have supplied many a Christmas branch to us for two reasons: They are fresh and they are free. Along with that, they happen...
Those crafty and civic-minded women in the Altrusa Club of Portales have come up with a clever way to brighten our community as well as provide a socially distanced activity for those of us who may be suffering from an ongoing case of cabin fever. If you have been out and about in Portales, you've likely seen the festive Christmas chairs in front of many local businesses. How many are there and where all can they be found? That, said Club President Beverly Bennett, is where...
When our daughter was but a little tyke, I stumbled across an idea in a parenting magazine about how to extend the magic and anticipation of the Christmas season with a month-long countdown of books. I collected children’s books long before I ever imagined I would have an actual child in the house. That collection exponentially expanded when our own little reader was born. Using Christmas paper, we individually wrapped 24 books (mostly off our shelves but including a few n...
If you’re tackling a turkey today, or having it out with a ham, imagine roasting up a small herd of cattle in preparation for several thousand guests. That was exactly what happened in 1933 in Portales for what may have been the largest Thanksgiving gathering that ever took place in eastern New Mexico. Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and the United States was smack dab in the middle of both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Thanksgiving was still celebrated o...
I was awakened in the wee hours one morning last week by the unmistakable odor of freshly launched skunk spray wafting its way through closed windows into our house. We haven't had a skunk visit for a while, but all it takes is a whiff and the memories come flooding back. I was but a young girl when my father killed both a skunk and a basketball on our porch one night using only a single bullet. You don't see that kind of marksmanship every day. My mother, though, was the...
A couple of colors have been on my mind the past several weeks. Perhaps you’ve been thinking of them, too: Blue and red. (Please note that I’ve listed them alphabetically, to avoid charges of favoritism or bias.) There’s a good reason why most of us don’t remember this obsession with “blue states” and “red states” from our childhood. We didn’t have it then. The notion of using colors to help illustrate election maps came about, not surprisingly, with the advent of color t...
I grew up in an era and in a region where there was a sweet payoff for both politicians and voters in the autumn weeks leading up to elections: Community gatherings to meet candidates and, yes, eat pie. Back then the rural communities took turns inviting local candidates to events in their respective community buildings or school cafeterias or whatever space they had that was roomy enough to seat a crowd. Someone would come early to unlock the building, set up folding chairs,...
Jean Fisher of Clovis has a mystery on her hands, and she's looking for our help. Fisher, who is 82, worked for 37 years as a nurse at the Retirement Ranch, but she's also a long-time quilter. That means (this will come as no surprise to other quilters) that she has accumulated a lot of cloth over the decades. She and her late husband, Gerry, loved to frequent auctions and estate sales, and were regulars at bidding wars all over eastern New Mexico and west Texas until Gerry's...
This was about the time each year of my mother’s life that she started working on her Christmas letters. Something about the leaves changing and the nights growing cooler threw her into her annual mammoth letter-writing project. She loved having a teetering stack of envelopes ready to place in the hands of the United States Postal Service on the Monday morning after Thanksgiving. In her prime, that required more than 250 stamps and several refills of her beloved fountain p...
Dear October, Consider this a love letter. Some say it is wrong to have favorites, but you leave me no choice. You are the one. The other months have their moments, of course, but they can turn on a moment’s notice to scour us with sand, scorch us with heat, pierce us with bitter cold. You are consistent and gentle and oh, so glorious. You seduce us with the fragrance of roasting green chiles and the intoxicating scent of campfires built from gnarled twists of mesquite and p...
In my ongoing quest to avoid reality (because really, who among us is interested in reality right now?) I found myself this week traveling back in time to the handful of years in the 1970s that my brothers and I were involved in junior livestock showing. This is, after all, the season when a good portion of farm and ranch kids break free from school to turn their attention to the endless diversions offered by county, state, and regional fairs. We showed our first steers in...
A 500-year-old game gets a fresh local twist today as part of Eastern New Mexico University's virtual homecoming that began Monday and continues through the weekend. Reach for the digital device of your choice and get ready for … I am beyond excited … tonight's premiere of … brace yourself … “Bingo with the Chancellor.” Because why not? What else about this year has been traditional? You can bet your B-17 that I've already signed up. Rumor has it there is some fine ENMU b...
We are a society filled with daily choices. Paper or plastic? Table or booth? Regular or decaf? Red or green? (For the record, my answer to all of these is, “It depends.” I like to make life as riddled with complications as possible.) Given our obsession with options, however, perhaps it should not have caught me off guard when I reported to a doctor’s office a couple of weeks ago for a covid test and was offered a most unexpected choice. (Also for the record, in case you’v...
A good many years back I had dinner with some new acquaintances who had recently moved to our area. After we ate, I asked the mom — I'll call her Daisy — if she happened to have a toothpick. Daisy directed me to a cabinet to the left of the kitchen sink and said toothpicks were the one thing her family — in all their many moves — always knew where to find. She said the first thing she did upon arriving in a new home was to put a carton of toothpicks in the cabinet that wa...
For at least two decades worth of students who were in the Future Farmers of America program in the 1980s and 1990s at Portales High School, a small but feisty woman they called "Ma Cone" was their secret to success. Her real name was Joyce Cone. She died Monday after dealing with ongoing strokes and post-polio syndrome. A woman who spent most of her life in service to others, Joyce Cone relished the relationships she had with her FFA kids. As a volunteer coach at PHS, she...
Almost 64 years ago, LaWanda Smith and her husband, Bobby, were a young couple living in Hobbs where they attended Rock Chapel Baptist Church. As Christmas approached, LaWanda remembers the church made an appeal to its members to consider taking in a child for the holidays from the New Mexico Baptist Childrens' Home in Portales. "We talked about it," LaWanda said, "and we wanted to." After a visit with administrator Dorothy Hubbard, the Smiths arrived in Portales just before...
I’ve been searching the past few weeks for a vintage photograph of my hometown of Pep. Once a bustling little burg, by the 1960s Pep was mostly housed in one building, a combination store/post office that was the heart and soul of our beloved “blink and you’ll miss it” community on New Mexico 206, less than a half hour south of Portales. (We’ve always liked to say that we live in the suburbs of Pep … 10 miles from downtown.) N.C. and Jessie Cathey owned and operated th...
