Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Sorted by date Results 52 - 76 of 499
On this date ... 1910: The Roosevelt County Herald readers learned 2,000 “of those special lemonades” had been created in a week at the Dobbs Confectionery — a record. “Better get in for one or more early in the week in order to avoid the rush,” the newspaper ad claimed. 1941: The Clovis News-Journal asked area judges about the strangest wedding ceremonies they had performed. Justice of the Peace W. E. McConnell said he married a couple on horseback at a riding academy and married a couple at the county jail just before th...
As our area schools fall into the rhythm of a new academic year, I had fun last week looking back 90 years ago as Eastern New Mexico Junior College was gearing up for its first “winter term.” Opened as a two-year college in June of 1934, a preliminary round of summer classes with 168 students in attendance had been successfully completed. By early September, 18 faculty members were engaged to welcome an anticipated 250 “farm boys and girls,” according to an article in the Sep...
On this date ... 1939: John Sparks, the son of Mr. and Mrs. J.C. Sparks, had learned a valuable lesson about riding his bike alongside a car. The boy was riding to the Portales swimming pool alongside a car driven by his friend Billie Kenyon when the bicycle “dumped him underneath the car,” according to the Portales Daily News. “His arm was run over,” the paper reported. Fortunately, both boys were Boy Scouts and they used their first-aid skills to stop the flow of blood from John’s arm. He was rushed to the Portales hospital...
On this date ... 1905: A post office was established at Tolar in Roosevelt County. It closed April 5, 1946, according to a study by L. Keith Payne, less than two years after a train carrying 46 tons of military explosives leveled or caused major damage to nearly every building in town when it blew up. 1916: Portales was preparing for its annual city picnic, with 2,000 people expected to attend. The Clovis Ladies’ Band was scheduled to kick things off with music at 10 a.m., followed by a few short speeches and then more m...
If I didn’t know that nostalgia can’t actually be transported, I would swear it must arrive each August on the Roosevelt County fairgrounds by the truckload. I was looking through some of our old Kodachrome family slides last week and found a few images that my mom captured at the Roosevelt County fair in 1965. In one of my favorites, I’m holding two soggy paper cones that I know for a fact contain the sticky remnants of red snow cones from the American Legion food booth...
On this date ... 1941: A Wichita Falls teenager was charged with killing two traveling companions and placing their bodies on the train tracks four miles south of Clovis. Officials at first believed J.V. Harden and Arthur William Hall had fallen from the tracks and been run over by the train. Charles Alexander then told authorities that the dead men had been traveling with him and Jess Fuller, but went ahead without them when Alexander and Fuller decided to rest for the night. Alexander, 15, theorized the dead men had...
On this date ... 1941: Clovis was about to become the “most important cold storage point” in New Mexico, according to Railways Ice Co., which was constructing cold-storage lockers. Facilities under construction in Clovis would ultimately contain storage for 55 carloads of produce, including butter, eggs, poultry and fresh vegetables, the Clovis News-Journal reported. Nearest comparable cold-storage facilities were in Oklahoma, Denver and El Paso, officials said. 1942: Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, was hon...
If you want to fall in love with your community, there may be no finer way to do it than from the top of a Ferris wheel at a county fair, ideally with a cone of cotton candy melting into your hand as you ride. If we’re lucky, we have a number of upcoming opportunities to do just that. Curry County’s annual fair runs from Tuesday through Saturday in Clovis, and folks in Roosevelt County will be following suit from Aug. 20-25 in Portales. I have no insider’s information on wh...
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...
