Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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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...
I have fresh appreciation this week for two of the appliances in my house: the washing machine and dryer. I may have lacked the proper appreciation for the luxury of in-home laundry services as a kid, but by the time I was a college student and entered the better part of a decade relying on commercial laundromats, I rapidly grasped the value of what I had left behind. My first apartment fitted with … gasp … a built-in washer and dryer … gasp again … was bliss. When my 40-some...
Seven years ago - on a February evening in 2013 - the Roosevelt County Chamber of Commerce surprised Vern Witten by naming him Workhorse of the Year. "To be honest," he told the Portales News-Tribune that evening, "I wasn't sure they were talking about me until they got down to the peanut brittle." To anyone else in the room - and frankly, anyone who ever met Witten - the only surprise that evening was that he hadn't already been named Workhorse of the Year at least a dozen...
Back in the spring of 1997, 13-year-old Brandon Reed was finishing his seventh-grade year as a student in the Floyd Municipal Schools. Anticipating the spring fever that strikes most kids as May rolls around, Reed said his school offered a series of enrichment classes. "This allowed us, for around two hours a week, to take fun classes that might interest us," he said. The one that caught his eye was "Introduction to Aviation," taught by Dink and Mitzi Miller, who still live...
PORTALES — After 40 years of marriage — and at the ages of 70 and 85, respectively — Grace and John Fair of Portales became new parents on July 15. Yes, you read that right. New parents. How that happened is nothing short of a love story, according to Grace Fair, one that involves an entire community … or maybe two. On the morning of July 15, I was honored to join the Fairs at the Clovis office of attorney Michael Garrett for a video hearing with Ninth Judicial Distric...
With all that is going on in our nation and our world — not to mention this brain-frying heat — I found myself turning this week to some wise words penned several decades ago by Robert Fulghum. Fulghum, a beloved American storyteller and retired Unitarian preacher, wrote “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” as his personal credo, a statement that he honed over the years and first shared with his congregation. Later, the story goes, he read it aloud at a prima...
With a little more time at home these past few months, I’ve found myself flipping through some of the vintage cookbooks that fill a couple of shelves in one of my bookcases. Two of my favorites are slim, battered, spiral-bound volumes that are in my rarely-used-but-I’ll-keep-them-forever-anyway collection. “What’s Cookin’ in Portales, New Mexico,” was published by the Portales Woman’s Club in 1948. “Our Favorite Recipes,” was compiled by the Homemakers Clubs of Roosevelt Coun...
I don’t know about you, but I think what our world needs right now is a heaping dose of Will Rogers. When he and his pilot friend Wiley Post died in a crash in Alaska in 1935, headlines at the time called Will Rogers “the world’s most famous humorist.” Rogers had published his first books in 1919, and in 1922 he began writing his syndicated newspaper articles. Between those, his radio broadcasts, and his foray into Hollywood (he had credits in 54 films and short feature...
If you are my age or older and grew up in rural Roosevelt County, I’ll venture a bet that you spent at least a nickel or a dime — maybe even a quarter or a dollar — at some point in your youth in Dollie Gordon’s store across the road from the Floyd schools. To say that Dollie Gordon was a pillar of the Floyd community is an understatement. In the 70-page index of the community history book, “Floyd: One Hundred Years,” there are few names with more page number references than h...
This ditty has been making the rounds lately on wall plaques, t-shirts, and social media posts: “Best childhood memory: Falling asleep on the couch and waking up in bed. I miss teleporting. It never happens to me anymore.” At my house, we didn’t “teleport” often from the couch — we were nudged to wakefulness and sent on our way. But on occasion, we did succeed in hitching a sleepy ride — about 30 yards or so — from the back of the family car, across the yard, and inside to our...
I’ve been thinking about the phrase, “left to their own devices.” It’s been around in one form or another for a few hundred years, loosely defined as being able to handle a situation with no outside assistance. My various books on word and phrase origins say “devices” was originally “devises,” which meant “wishes” back in the old days. Then along came all those goodies we collectively label as “electronic devices:” cell phones, laptops, tablets, etc. It gives new meaning to...
Of all the adaptations to tradition we humans have made in these past few months, I'll hazard a guess that one we may hold on to is the drive-by parade. These impromptu horn-honking, poster-waving lineups of cars, trucks, fire engines, baby strollers - you name it - have been used to celebrate graduations, retirements, birthdays, and anniversaries. But for greatest emotional impact, I'd have to nominate one that took place on Cherry Street in Portales on the Saturday of...
Whatever else we humans can or cannot find consensus on right now, maybe we can agree on this: When the going gets tough, the tough … um … er … the tough turn to comfort food. If that comfort food reminds you of your childhood home, even better. For Rob Borden — a Portales native presently living on the 33rd floor of a 36-floor building in Miami, Florida — it was a long-distance Mother’s Day visit with his parents, Sheryl and Bobby Borden of Portales, that got him thinking ab...
I’m writing this on a warm morning, settled in near the air conditioner with outside temperatures already well past 90 degrees and climbing. This was always a hopeful time of year when I was a kid. School was out — or we were breathlessly counting the minutes. The garden was planted. Our old mossy swimming tank was freshly filled with ice-cold water. We were close enough to watermelon season to taste them. We grew up without air conditioning. Our mother had a strange ave...
School administrators are regularly required to make those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” decisions. You know the kind I am talking about: Wondering if the buses will have time to run before the predicted snowstorm hits, or whether that freezing rain will make the highways too icy to be safe. Decisions about public education during a global pandemic, though. Sheesh. They make calling a snow day look like a walk in the park. And then comes graduation. Celeb...
I’m on the hunt for a grizzly bear. No, I don’t want a head to mount on my wall, or a rug to cover the floor in front of my fireplace. I want the real thing, alive and hungry, and here’s why. I’ve learned recently that grizzly bears love to eat moths — by the tens of thousands, they say — and have I ever got a banquet waiting. If you don’t live in the country, you may not even be aware that our annual springtime visitors — the miller moths — have arrived. They are having a...
Christopher Rustay is on the hunt for a few good playas in the Clovis area. Well, not really. In truth, Rustay is looking for a few damaged playas in the Clovis area, and he's bringing some serious funding to help private landowners of those shallow temporary wetlands make improvements aimed at extending the life of our region's most precious resource: underground water. Rustay is the conservation delivery leader for Playa Lakes Joint Venture (PLJV), a regional partnership of...
