Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I used to go to Dan Buzzard, the lawyer in Clovis that I knew, who could keep me out of trouble when I would write up a column for the Curry County Times or the CNJ that some one didn’t like or I wrote something I shouldn’t had. I don’t have any history on Dan Buzzard, where he was born or when he came to Clovis. I know he was there in 1961, with his law practice at 704 Mitchell and in 1975. I did know that his wife Betty died on March 20, 1980. I just knew he was a good lawyer and a good friend. We would sit and talk about...
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives transformed the economic landscape of New Mexico, employing upwards of 40 percent of N.M.’s population during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Fifteen million Americans had no jobs in 1933. In Curry County the currency and the banks were unstable, farm prices were low and many people were about to lose their homes and their farms. For many of the population living conditions were desperate. In 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected at President he initiated many... Full story
Born in 1913 on the north side of the Running Water Draw near Pleasant Hill, Ardale “Pappy” Thornton started cowboying at age five by herding cows on horseback. When Pappy was old enough, he decided to try his hand at homesteading. Since there was no more homesteading land in Curry County, he filed on a section of land 21 miles southeast of Dunlap, south of Fort Sumner. I believe Ardale learned, as my father, H. H. McAlavy did, that the Dunlap country wasn’t suited for homesteaders trying to make a living on 160 acres, or ev... Full story
If Ceran St. Vrain ever passed through his supposed Curry County namesake, he didn’t know it. St. Vrain, the man, may have spent time in the northern Texas Panhandle where he owned partnership in a business for a while, but his visits to eastern New Mexico are not well chronicled if there were any. And he died of a stroke at age 68 in 1870 — 37 years before the St. Vrain post office was established 17 miles west of Clovis. Curry County’s St. Vrain was nothing but prairie grass until the early 1900s when the Santa Fe...
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series. The first part ran in the Jan. 25 Clovis News Journal. The forerunner of the comic book was of course comic strips. Comic strips have been around as early as 1896. The first “comic book” was a collection of comic strips by Richard Outcault. He created “Yellow Kid” which ran in the New York American and in March of 1897 and facsimile newspaper strip reprint collection came out. (Yellow Kid gave rise to the term “Yellow journalism” meaning cheap or common.) Commercial an...
(Editor’s Note: This column is the first in a two-part series.) One of my delights when I get a newspaper, any newspaper, is to read the comics, the funny papers as some of us like to call them. That hasn’t changed since I was a kid. Growing up in the 30s and 40s I spent a good portion of my hard earned money on 10-cent comic books, but at about age 16, I dropped them as being “kid stuff,” which most of it was, and sought new delights – girls, motorcycles, and heroes like John Wayne, Gary Cooper and a host of other b... Full story
Robert Anderson Crosby was born to ranching parents in Midland, Texas,Feb. 27, 1897. Called “Bob” Crosby, he was one of four other youngsters when the family moved to a ranch near Kenna eight years later. From a very young age a horse was his mode of transport whether it be school, work, or his faithful church attendance. Bob took up rodeo, as many did during those hard times, to add income to the family budget. His love and knowledge of horsemanship led him to raise and train these animals. Through out his life some of the...
“Dear Don and Harold. We do want to express our appreciation for the High Plains history book. “Thank you!” We are still reading and discussing History of Quay Valley. (Juanita Wallis is writing this letter.) “The residents of Quay plan to take lunch, a snake-bite-kit and go make some history. Some Saturday after the brandings are done and before it gets too hot, we plan to visit some of the old-old squatters dwellings located east of Quay Post Office, some on, and some south and east of Beck Ranch. And Bill, my husband...
James D. Hamlin founded the towns of Farwell and Texico. He was born in 1871 in Kentucky and received a classical education. By some accounts, he left home at 28 to seek his fortune in Alaska, but he ended his journey in Amarillo to relieve his chronic asthma. According to Globe-News files, Hamlin “crammed the next 53 years with law, academics, business and an insatiable zest for living.” In 1897, he founded the original Amarillo College with Willis Day Twichell and served as president and professor of Latin and Greek unt... Full story
Let’s see, how long have I worn those boots of mine? Well, the first boots I bought at Joe’s Boot Shop was when he was in Muleshoe. Joe used to live out in the country southwest of town and made boots at his farm-ranch for customers that found out that Joe could really make good boots. But it was when he moved his boot business to Clovis out on Mabry Drive and he expanded into clothing, mostly cowboy stuff, that I bought a second pair of his good boots. The reason I bought the boots that day was because the Citizens Bank cal...
T his is the reply young Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 W. 9th Street, New York, received in the form of an editorial written by the Sun’s Francis P. Church: Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are little. In this great universe of ours, a man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intelle... Full story
A Lone Scout, they tell me, is a Boy Scout without a troop or a troop leader. I didn’t know about the Lone Scout program until I met a Lone Scout who has been living in Clovis a long time. He was Sam Covington, who reached the age of 93, and passed away in Logan on Thanksgiving Day. This is his story. He told me about it along time ago. “I was born in Okolona, Ark., on Oct. 31, 1915,” said Covington, “a few miles southeast of Delight, which is not too far from Arkadelphia. It is sort of in the Southwest part of that state.... Full story
Albert Einstein was once asked what would happen if we ever had a nuclear holocaust. He thought for just a moment and replied: “There would be no music.” Music is a part of everyone’s life — and Clovis and our area has been blessed by the amount of musical talent that has either been nurtured here or imported here through our good senses. In a five-year period between 1954 and 1959 an explosion of music from this area was heard around the world. Most of that music, that major recording studios and producers calle...
I got my dratted Federal Income Tax form in the mail the other day, as did millions of others. It reminded me of what someone said: “This is a country of faith. On the installment plan you can buy what you can’t afford. On the stock market you can sell what you don’t own, and on the tax form they take away what you haven’t borrowed yet.” And that should be followed by this one: “We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful, and have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualif...
While citizens across the nation pause this month to remember a myriad of individual reasons for Veterans Day, Neil S. Durham (now of Idalou, Texas, outside of Lubbock and formerly of Clovis) may be turning the pages of a diary he kept on Guadalcanal during World War II. Yes, Durham kept a diary, but he put it aside because of the terrible war he help fight. Reconnaissance planes were important information gatherers of enemy positions, and Durham and others provided intelligence support. “We lost 22 pilots. They would go o...
I saw in the Florida’s St. Petersburg Times on Monday that Tony Hillerman had died this last Sunday of pulmonary failure. He was 83. I almost cried, as I had been reading his great books since 1971 and still have some of them now. Hillerman was born in Sacred Heat, Okla., and was a decorated World War II veteran. His daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father’s health had been declining in the past couple of years. He died at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. He has kept tapping at his keyboard even as his eyes dimmed, his...
Ike Stanford was born in 1905 in Pontotoc County, Okla. He was only a year old when he came with his family by covered wagon to these parts. His father, Richard Penn Stanford, filed a homestead four miles south of Blacktower. When Ike was 5, the family moved into Clovis so his father would be nearer his job with the Santa Fe Railroad. In 1914, when Ike was just 9, his mother died, leaving five boys and a girl. The boys were sent to their mother’s sister in Fort Worth for a while. Ike is also typical of those people whose f... Full story
“Uncle Sid” Boykin...
Sid Boykin was one of the cowboys of the early days on the Llano Estacado who made the successful move from the ranch to the business world. According to Col. Jack Potter, Boykin made his first trip to New Mexico in 1881 with Old Man George Taylor, when Taylor moved the Boot-Bar cattle from Texas. They arrived in December at the Hondo and turned the cattle loose with Jimmy Sutherland’s herd. Sid went back to Sweetwater, Texas, and stayed that winter and then came with Jim Newman to the DZ Ranch in the spring of 1882. Sid w...
A lady friend of mine in Clovis has asked me to re-print the 1978 tragedy column in Clovis concerning the botulism attack to alert those who haven’t heard of it. One of the most dreaded food-borne poisons known to man struck Curry County on Friday night, April 4, 1978. A group of people were at a banquet in the old Colonial Park Country Club that night. Some 30 members of that group became slightly ill to very ill. It was the dreaded botulism that killed two people in that group. One of them was John Garrett Jr., a noted f...
I think kids use their noses...
At Duffy Sasser’s 90th birthday party an inevitable question was asked: “What is it that you, Duffy Sasser, wish to finish — what would you still like to achieve?” Here’s what Sasser had to say: “There does happen to be one project that I was absolutely unable to even make a dent in and Don McAlavy should take it on. Don can find the way where I couldn’t. The project came back to haunt me when a feature article appeared on the first page of the Living section of the Sep. 20 issue of the Lubbock Avalance-Journal, he said... Full story
A newcomer to Clovis was asking if any famous people ever came to Clovis. I told him that one of the earliest famous persons to Clovis was Charles Lindberg, and his wife Ann Morrow Lindberg, and the famed pilot Amelia Earhardt. That was in 1929-1930 when Lindberg selected the air field, that is now Cannon Air Force Base, for the TAT passenger planes. Clovis became one of the national landmarks in the infant word of aviation. The biggest crowd of celebrities to come to Clovis was on March 17, 1949. Some 19 movies stars... Full story
A poker game in Clovis started out like any other poker game at the Cattlemen’s Club. You have to understand how these poker games can sometimes get tied up into courts of law. Really? You see, a young cattleman from Arizona showed up in Clovis in December 1954 with four truckloads of cattle. What has that got to do with a poker game? Well, the young cattleman, named Ben P. Snure, sold all the livestock he had for the $8,183, then headed for the Cattlemen’s Club. That’s reasonable, but Snure had been drinking and told the c... Full story
I was up at the Loring filling station at 21st and Main in 1978 when a furniture truck pulled in and the two men got out and inquired of me where Oakhurst Street was. I gave them directions and then made a few inquires of them, seeing the sign on their truck, Spike Brothers Furniture, Lubbock, Texas. Neither of them were Spike related, but it brought back memories of an incident I’ve heard many old timers tell about. The Spike Brothers store in Lubbock was run by descendants of Fred Spikes, who was once called an outlaw. H...
