Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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On this date ... 1940: More than 6,000 New Mexico farms were being serviced with electricity. “This means that nearly 15% of the farms of the state or about one farm out of seven is now receiving high-line service,” a New Mexico Extension Service spokesman said. 1941: Farmers Electric Cooperative announced plans to string 35 miles of power lines over the next year. “All the new wire will be laid in territory immediately around this area and will be designed to fill up the gaps in the existing coverage,” said project Superin...
I was out of town when Bernalillo Hall - the last remaining high rise on the campus of Eastern New Mexico University - was demolished last month. Even though it had long outlived its useful life, it was bittersweet to see the photos as it came down and even more so to drive past the mountain of rubble last week. Bernalillo opened in the fall of 1967, according to the ENMU yearbook, The Silver Pack, as well as stories in the Portales News-Tribune. Built to house 450 female...
On this date ... 1951: A pioneer railroad conductor died in the Clovis hospital. Samuel L. Sutter, 69, of 1216 Main, had fallen ill the same afternoon. He came to New Mexico in 1900 to work for the Santa Fe Railway at Las Vegas. He went to work on the Belen cutoff when construction started in 1906 and made his permanent home in Clovis in 1910. He worked 48 years for the Santa Fe until his retirement as a conductor in 1948. 1960: Area softball players were preparing for the weekend Clovis Jaycee Invitational tournament at...
If you're looking for a feel-good story, you've come to the right place. Please allow me to introduce you to Mike Davidson and Gary Watkins of Portales, or as Watkins described them both, "just two guys wanting to make a difference." Since mid-July, you can find these two most evenings in the Portales City Park, armed with hoes, shovels, and weed eaters, tackling a couple of relentless foes: goatheads and trash. Davidson and Watkins met as second graders at the old Steiner...
Ever on the hunt for adventure - and with blissful ignorance - I signed on to help drive a 26-foot rental truck from Texas to New Jersey this month, a journey of 1,800-plus miles through eight states. Much to my surprise, anyone with a driver's license can waltz into a rental agency and pick up one of these boat-sized vehicles and drive it away with absolutely no instruction whatsoever. Our truck – a gigantic mustard-yellow creation – was theoretically designed for three: the...
Summer is often a season for moving, and this year that includes a significant number of my friends and family members. Some are only relocating to new abodes in their existing communities; others have quite the jaunts ahead of them, with the longest tackling a trek of nearly 2,000 miles. No matter the reason and no matter the length of journey, when someone I know is moving, it inspires me to look with a fresh eye at my own accumulation of “stuff” (this is a family paper but...
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series about that time in 1978 when Gray and Sara Wilson bought the Roosevelt County community of Pep. There may not be many things more daunting than moving into a new-to-you small community and finding your niche in a place where everyone else seems to have known each other forever. When Gray and Sara Wilson bought the town of Pep in 1978, they didn’t know a soul here, but I can’t remember anyone who ever more joyously embra...
Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series about that time in 1978 when Gray and Sara Wilson bought the Roosevelt County community of Pep. For a lifetime, I've received my mail in one of the tiniest hometowns around - the community of Pep, located 24 miles south of Portales on NM 206. During my growing up years, besides the post office, there was a store. In the window of that store - for long enough to become yellowed and dusty - there was a sign that read, "For...
A few weeks ago, my 97-year-old friend Jean Grissom called to ask me if I could find out more information about a story that happened 82 years ago this month. Jean had been leafing through her journals, no small feat since she’s been religiously keeping a daily journal since Jan. 1, 1939. She was in the first of her five-year diaries — she said the cover is starting to crumble, so she’s very careful — when she came across an entry she had penned on June 17, 1942. Jean recorde...
’Tis the season for reunions … families, classes, schools, whole communities. When summertime rolls around, we seem to have a predisposition to gather with those with whom we share a commonality, whether it’s blood relatives or folks who happened to be living in the same school district as we did as young whippersnappers. I come from a small and widely scattered family, so our family reunions have been few and far between, but like about 200 others in this area, I’m fresh o...
The Eastern New Mexico University campus feels quiet this time of year with spring graduation in the rearview mirror and many students opting for online summer classes. Two community-minded librarians have decided that makes it the perfect time to lure local residents into Golden Library and the Golden Student Success Center and onto the beautifully manicured campus for some weekly free events. I met up with Hollie Bellinger and Alex Engels last week on the main floor of the G...
If they give out prizes at the summer reading programs at public libraries across our region this year for the person who came the farthest to be there, Andy Mason is lined up to take home a suitcase full of them. As the crow flies, from where Mason makes his home these days in Les Martys, France, to eastern New Mexico is a little over 5,300 miles. What brings this singer/songwriter with long Portales ties back to the area? He is spending his 20th consecutive summer...
As I poke around in the dusty corners of local history, it's not uncommon to come across someone I wish had met. Such is the case with Lillie Mae Wright. Lillie Mae Wright was born in Comanche, Texas, but she spent most of her hundred years of life in Portales after she and her husband, Robert Durward Wright, moved there sometime in the 1920s. It was in her role as a mother that she is most remembered in Roosevelt County, because Lillie Mae may have been the only double Gold...
I had a gentle reminder recently that really hit home with me. I’m sharing it here because I thought it might hit home with you, too. A couple I know went through a scary situation in our area two weeks ago. I’m going to omit names and specific details. Suffice it to say the woman was unexpectedly assaulted in a place where she often walks and where it never occurred to her to feel unsafe. Fortunately she was not critically injured and an arrest was made within hours. A few...
Tassel and mortarboard season is upon us. You’ll be able to see them in almost any direction you look for the next month. Clovis Community College and Eastern New Mexico University both conferred degrees recently, and our area high schools are celebrating seniors in ceremonies all month long. There’s one more place you can see mortarboards next weekend that you might not be expecting: on nine “dropouts” – “Beauty School Dropouts,” to be exact – in the Portales High School prod...
Pure, unadulterated joy ... it can show up in the most unlikely of places. This time it was at the Portales cemetery on the last Friday of April. A fair-sized crowd had gathered for a bittersweet military memorial service for Homer Mitchell, a World War II veteran who had died in 1944, but whose remains had only recently been identified and returned to his hometown. Some of Mitchell's extended family members there that day included brothers David and Bob Tanner (their...
I spent an hour that went way too fast earlier this month with a troupe of pint-sized storytellers and their mentor, retired teacher Lynette Harris. When the time was up, I didn't want to leave. I don't think they did either. Our setting was a classroom in the Arts Academy at Bella Vista, a Clovis elementary school. For an hour or so every week, Harris collects her five first-grade storytellers from their regular classrooms and whisks them away for a session filled with...
When Patsy Acuff of Clovis was growing up, she remembers there was always a trunk in the back of her grandmother's closet in Portales - a trunk that she, her siblings, and their cousins were taught to never touch or talk about. The trunk contained the belongings left behind when Homer Mitchell left Portales in 1943 to join the United States Army. Mitchell - who was Acuff's uncle and the son of Gussie and Roy Mitchell of Portales - was killed in action in Pachten Forest near...
When young Ashley Prewett was growing as part of the third generation to live on his family's farm west of Pep (a tiny community in southern Roosevelt County), "I was all about baseball, basketball, and hunting," he said. But by the time he graduated from Dora High School in 2002 - president of the 13-member senior class - he was quite literally singing a different tune. In the 2002 yearbook, there's a photo of Prewett assisting the Dora School music teacher Ginger Tull by...
We Americans are increasingly skilled at finding things that divide us, but last Monday legions of us found a common interest … even if only for a few minutes. The experts estimated that about 32 million residents of the continental United States lived in the path of that well-publicized total solar eclipse that spread like a beauty queen’s sash from Texas all the way to Maine. Untold millions more of us — present company included — made a pilgrimage to the path in hopes o...
Words of wisdom can turn up in the most unexpected places, and sometimes from people who have already left us. That happened to me on a couple of occasions recently. The first was a little over a week ago at the memorial service for Leroy Thomas, a retired pastor, tireless community servant, and the longtime owner of the Print Shop in Portales. He died March 24 at the age of 89. He and Gaynelle, his wife of more than 72 years, were steadfast supporters of every good cause you...
Some of my most dismal high school memories are of those dreaded ventures around Portales attempting to sell yearbook ads. Even as a teenager, it felt to me like we were asking for something we probably didn’t deserve, and even then I knew that every business we walked into was being visited by kids from every other school with requests like ours. That may be part of why I loved hearing about an experience Leslie Creighton had with a student who came into her family’s Por...
But for one missing college credit back in 1967, it's quite possible that Don Criss would have never met his wife, settled in eastern New Mexico, helped create and establish our local public television station, and become a beloved member of this community. On top of that, more than 40 years of children in Portales and surrounding areas would have missed out on a Santa Claus who welcomed them with open arms, and kept their parents groaning with the corniest collection of...
As bargains go, it’s hard to beat the one being offered this month by the folks who volunteer with Clovis Area Fifty-Plus Olympics. For a $20 bill (or two $10s, a fistful of $5s, or any combination of your choice) anyone who is age 50 and older can register, participate in up to 10 different sports (many with multiple events), nosh on drinks and snacks, and even attend the end of season awards banquet in May. On top of that, for first timers that $20 also covers a t-shirt e...
Wayne Moore may be best remembered as the coach who led the Eastern New Mexico University women's basketball team for 22 seasons - from the fall of 1980 to the spring of 2002 - amassing an impressive 318-259 overall record. But for those of us who grew up in Roosevelt County in my era, he's also well-remembered as a towering gentle giant of a coach who oversaw the boys' teams at Melrose High School - but who also never failed to offer an encouraging word to any kid who needed...
