Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Eastern New Mexico University is setting out a fine arts feast this weekend, starting with a jazz appetizer tonight, followed by main courses of opera and Greek drama, and finishing with a wind symphony dessert on Sunday. I’m hesitant to use the phrase “something for everyone,” but this is an especially good weekend to sample the familiar or explore something new. The Swanee Singers (under the direction of guest Conductor Ken Miller) and Rich Schwartz’ Jazz Ensemble combine...
Every year when I tuck into a bowl of Portales Kiwanis chili (as I plan to during this annual fundraiser from 5 -7 p.m. Friday in the Fellowship Hall at the First United Methodist Church, 200 South Avenue C, Portales), I think of … oddly enough … sea monkeys. A disclaimer seems in order: I promise that the always-delectable Kiwanis chili — whether you choose beef or vegetarian — has absolutely no sea monkeys in it. Not even a microscopic morsel. But the $8 tickets (half t...
When Leroy Thomas accepted the job as preacher for the Causey Church of Christ in August of 1970, he didn’t expect it to be a long-term post. “They said, ‘We’d like for you to come and preach for us until we find a real preacher,’” Thomas said. “Well, I guess they never found one.” Thomas and his wife, Gaynelle, are better known to many for their long association with The Print Shop, the business they began in Portales only a month before Leroy was called to preach in Cause...
You may never have participated in — or even heard of — a Chinese auction. But the Roosevelt General Hospital Foundation plans to change that for us, and use the proceeds to continue to “help make our community’s hospital a welcoming and trusted environment for healthcare.” That’s according to board member Mary Ayala. The Foundation is hosting a charity dinner and Chinese auction at 6 p.m. Feb. 16 in the Yam Theater, 219 Main St., Portales. Friday is your last day to nab a ti...
PORTALES — When Erika Garcia was a first-grader at Parkview Elementary School in Clovis, she really only wanted one thing: To be able to talk to and understand the other little girls so she would have friends to play with at recess. Three decades later, she looks back on that from a position with a slew of titles and professional memberships: family medicine doctor, director of the Roosevelt General Hospital Physicians Clinic, member of the American Academy of Family Physician...
From long before I was born, Sunday was a day to gather the relatives together for a big meal around my grandparents’ table. Our best old family photos show my aunts, uncles, and cousins, seated around a long, rectangular table piled high with platters of fried quail, deep bowls of mashed potatoes, vats of gravy, shimmering jello salads, goblets of iced tea. When my parents got married in 1957, they built an end onto the home my grandparents had built decades earlier. They h...
If teachers get to write “what I did on my summer vacation” essays, Portales High School Librarian Heather Christensen will have a winner come August. She is one of 12 educators (six high school and six college) from New Mexico and Arizona selected to spend a month this summer in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, “two countries I could barely spell and had never thought about before,” she said. Christensen said she received an email invitation last fall to apply for the program...
We were working our way through a mountain of dirty dishes in my kitchen after a branding several years ago. Fixing a meal for 50 or 60 people takes pretty much every dish in the house. A group effort was underway to get everything cleaned up and put away. A shirt-tail relative 30 years my senior was on dish towel duty when she stopped suddenly and exclaimed, “Why, that’s Aunt Lucy’s egg plate!” An egg plate, for the uninitiated, is a platter molded for one purpose and one...
It was a phrase reportedly born from doodlings on a restaurant placemat: “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Writer Anne Herbert gets the credit. The place was Sausalito, California, in 1982. It must have caught on quickly, because it wasn’t long before I had a shirt with that emblazoned across the front. A decade later, the editors of Conari Press put together a collection of tips and stories called “Random Acts of Kindness,” and invited readers t...
On a cold and blustery evening before Christmas, my daughter, four friends, a border collie, and I headed to Paul’s Lake, part of the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge south of Muleshoe. We were in search of sandhill cranes. Jude Smith, project leader for the High Plains National Wildlife Refuge (which includes Muleshoe), had alerted us that the numbers might be low on this visit — an unseasonably warm winter seems to have temporarily “short stopped” them in Oklahoma and Kan...
Twila Watkins has a mystery on her hands, and it’s one that surfaced — most appropriately — just in time for Christmas. A few weeks ago, Watkins was helping her nephew go through some old family belongings that had been in storage for years. They came across a battered cardboard box labeled “The 12 Days of Christmas.” “I said, ‘I think I know what that is,’” Watkins recalled. Her husband Gary chimed in, “The look in her face was priceless.” It was a box that took Watkins strai...
A creative Portales teacher and her four education assistants (EAs) have added a new standard and benchmark to their December curriculum: Kindness. Veteran teacher Annette Oviedo is in her 14th year with the Portales schools. Her self-contained classroom where 18 Portales High School students and their aides spend much of each day is home for the school’s “life skills” classes. The life skills portable feels more like a home than a classroom. There’s a kitchen, a twin bed, a...
As Eastern New Mexico University presents its annual gift to our community in tonight’s 7 p.m. Holiday Concert at the Campus Union Ballroom, at least four music students are lacing on their running shoes so they can dart quickly between ensembles with multiple roles in this always-beautiful (and free) production. Christopher Barber, a freshman from Muleshoe, Andres Labastida, a fifth-year senior from Hobbs, Adan Martinez, a junior from Clovis, and Cristian Zaragoza, a s...
H.L. “Woody” Woodward and his elegant wife, Myrtice, opened Woody’s Jewelry in Portales in 1955. Somehow they were friends of our family. I was only a baby in 1962, the year Woody’s moved to its present location on the southeast side of the square. We went to Portales maybe twice a month back then. We had regular stops once we got there: Our Aunt Blanche’s children’s clothing store, Odom’s Office Supply, Slaten Brothers Hardware, Skinner’s Western Wear, Grady’s Superma...
PORTALES — What better day than Thanksgiving to consider “radical inclusivity?” It’s not a new concept, but a phrase I first encountered a few weeks ago in the book, “A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community,” by John Pavlovitz. In a nutshell, radical inclusivity explores the importance of welcoming everyone, regardless of any kind of difference, to a common gathering. It is exactly what Joe Parie and Veda Urioste have been doing for the las...
Grab a cup of coffee (from a local merchant, of course), your calendar, and a pen. Here are some of the don’t-miss events on tap in our area. • The Roosevelt County Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon is at noon today at the Yam Theater, 219 Main St., with Mike McLeod of Xcel Energy on tap to talk about the Sagamore wind farm project. Tickets are available at the door for $15. • Woody’s Jewelry starts its going-out-of-business sale at noon today on the square at 117 West 2n...
As eastern New Mexico gears up to honor its veterans this weekend, Mike Woolley is one person who wonders why remembering those who serve in the military doesn’t happen all year long. He’s in a good position to ask. Woolley — retired United States Air Force Col. Michael S. Woolley, that is — is a Portales native who spent 36 years in service to the nation. He’s been a junior vice commander and trustee of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars, and is also a member of the Ameri...
After 63 years, it’s hard to have any secrets. But as the folks at First United Methodist Church, 200 S. Ave. C, Portales, throw their 64th annual turkey dinner today, I’m going to spill two. First, the 2,000-plus diners who come to this annual event never get to eat what is arguably the best part of the meal. It’s the crispy, crusty, toasted bits of dressing that are created when a little too much time passes in between stirrings of the 32 roasters of dressing that will...
It’s easy to overlook treasures in our own backyard, and that often seems to be the case when it comes to the Blackwater Draw National Historic Landmark. A surprising number of locals have never turned in at the gate six miles north of Portales, to venture down into the old Sam Sanders gravel pit and journey 13,000 years back in time. This weekend is a great time to discover … or rediscover … both the dig site and the Blackwater Draw Museum (reborn in May with fresh, inter...
We humans love our food festivals, so much so that the National Geographic Society even put together a list a few years ago of what it considered to be the best food festival by state. The Peanut Valley Festival inexplicably failed to make that list — the Viva New Mexico Chile Festival of Los Lunas slipped in to steal the title — but eastern New Mexicans know a good thing when we see it, and we’ve gathered for 43 years to celebrate our favorite underground legume. The 44th...
This is the kind of weekend where — if you play your cards right — you can score end-of-season veggies, eat a bratwurst for a good cause, round-up cheap reads, hear breath-taking choral and wind symphony music, nab a bike helmet and even get a free flu shot. The farmers’ markets in Portales and Clovis are winding down their seasons — possibly faster than they’d like to, thanks to the cold blast of air that arrived Tuesday on top of an unseasonably soggy fall — but farmer mark...
In a world that feels increasingly R-rated due to violence and language, I am especially grateful that Eastern New Mexico University has lined up a bevy of family-friendly festivities this weekend to celebrate its 2017 homecoming. This is the first alumni gathering since the Blackwater Draw museum underwent a major facelift and moved in May to the north wing of Lea Hall, at South Avenue K and West 15th Street. Curator Jenna Domeischel and her staff have created a real gem at...
My thinly disguised (or possibly blatantly obvious) inner nerd is rejoicing. Two of my passions — musical theater and spelling bees — are coming together a week from today when the Eastern New Mexico University department of theater and digital film presents “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” on the main stage of the University Theater Center. My almost lifelong association with spelling bees began with a soul-crushing defeat at a regional bee in the 1970s when I...
The announced beginning-of-the-end for the Sears department store in Clovis coincided recently with a search we had in our family for an obscure size of a replacement blade for a cutoff saw. Like most everything we own, this cutoff saw is a relic from long years ago, so finding new blades has become a challenge. During the day we spent looking, we called or visited in person three businesses in Portales and six in Clovis. We managed to eventually turn up five new blades — t...
While they may not earn an “A” for planning ahead, some compassionate Elida sixth-graders armed with buckets, scrub brushes, and soap collected $627 last week to help battle childhood cancer. Tresten Wolf, 11, said last Wednesday night he literally had a dream about holding a car wash with some of his friends. When he woke up, he decided it should be to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. His reason? “I’ve just seen their commercials and stuff...
