Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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To our readers, You regularly check out Curry County Historian Don McAlavy’s column and most of you don’t care for Amy Alkon’s advice column. That’s what you told us in a recent survey published in the paper. We received more than 300 responses to the surveys, most telling us they “always” or “sometimes” read columnists McAlavy, Grant McGee, Anita Doberman and “Dear Abby,” along with comics “Family Circus,” “Blondie” and “Beetle Bailey.” Regular features the majority of you told us you “never” read include the spicy...
Franklin Dorothy Franklin is Pintores Art League’s featured artist of the month for November. Her paintings are on display at the Clovis-Carver Public Library. She started taking art lessons in the early 1960’s from Mary Lou Garrett. Franklin, along with Don McAlavy and three other painters, stocked the former Paint’n Place Gallery with their paintings, frames and art supplies for 18 years. Her paintings are included in many private collections across the United States and in several banks in the area. Franklin’s paintin...
George H. Sasser, a native of Alabama, came to New Mexico in 1915 and joined the staff of the drugstores at Artesia, Carlsbad, Hagerman, and Roswell. He came to Clovis in 1922 where he organized the Fox Drug Companies, probably the largest drugstore in the State of New Mexico. Sasser always did things in a big way. In 1927 he bought Fox Drug from Ivan G. Bridges. While at Hagerman he became acquainted with Addie Anthony, who became his bride. Their one son was Duffy Sasser, who became a well-known citizen of Clovis. Fox...
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series. The second part will run next Sunday. I was about 16 years old in the summer of 1947. About sundown our paperboy delivered the Clovis Evening News-Journal to our porch at 719 Wallace in Clovis. The tragic news in the paper that two of our young men in Clovis, Jimmie Gressett and John Hardisty had been lost in the northern mountains of New Mexico in an airplane startled all of Clovis. Gressett and Hardisty had chartered a small plane, a Luscombe 75, from the small Clovis A...
The Miller family first consisted of Vernon and Elma (Forbes) Harrison; Vernon born in Kansas in 1891 and Elma was born in Tennessee in 1895. They were married in Clovis on June 29, 1916. They first lived in Albuquerque where Vernon was in the grocery business. They moved back to Clovis and their first child was Doretha Ellen who was born in 1918. They soon moved to Kansas where first son Donald Myron was born in 1919. In 1920 they moved back to Curry County to the old Paul farm northwest of Texico, but later moved to the...
This story is told by the daughter of Clyde Sparks, Neva Riggins of Clovis, and takes place in the fall of 1945. “Dad said that he lacked two rounds being completely finished with the wheat harvest in that field. It was close to sundown so he felt that he could get it finished before dark. Then the combine bogged down. “He said that he could see that the canvas looked like it just needed a jog to unclog it. He said he lowered himself into the thresher without touching the canvas and pulled himself back up as a trial just to...
The parents of Harold and Sheila (McGinnis) Phillips were Quakers, and so were Harold and Sheila who had come to Clovis in 1953. In 1977 Sheila gave me two books written by her mother, Edith B. McGinnis who died in 1976. The books were “First Quakers in Texas,” and “I Remember” (the remembrance of her life when she was in her 80s). To tell of the life of Harold and Sheila one has to step back in time. Sheila’s grandparents and her mother (who was only 2 years old) went from California to Kansas by covered wagon (to visit kin...
Harry Barton spent 39 years as a music teacher to thousands of Clovis High School students. He was one of the best known and beloved teachers in high school, a gentleman all the way. Harry E. Barton was born Aug. 22, 1901, at Plymouth, Ind., and came to Clovis in 1928. Jack Winton, formerly of Clovis and a 1951 CHS graduate, tells how Barton, music and choral director, taught music: “Mr. Barton would work and work to produce two or three really big shows each year. We did Fred Waring’s musical ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ We...
On Oct. 30, 1921, some of the workers in the railroad yard of the Santa Fe Railroad went on strike. Back in May of 1921 the railroad had ordered a 20 percent wage cut. Dr. I. D. Johnson, a retired Clovis dentist, in 1982 said he went to work for the Hammond Supply Co., a dispenser of food and drinks at the railroad, about then. “The railroad hired some cowboys from down in the sand hills to ride around a high wooden fence topped with barbed-wire, to protect railroad property,” said Johnson. The Santa Fe Railroad had had sev...
Not too many people will remember Roland F. Dickey. He was famous to us historians. He was born in Clovis in 1914, grew up here, and moved away in 1934. His father, Albert Lull Dickey, homesteaded in 1906, “two miles north of Clovis.” That’s right off Prince and East Manana now, where Office Max is located, across from the North Plains Mall. Perhaps what Roland F. Dickey is noted for, among other things, is that he became president of the New Mexico Historical Society, retiring after several years. In 1977 he was livin...
Not many people today know that the old yellow brick courthouse built in 1911 in the middle of the courthouse block is not the first courthouse in Clovis. The first courthouse was in the tallest building in Clovis, built in 1909, at 118 West Grand Ave. It was on the north side of Grand Avenue. Steeds Undertaking Parlors were just to the east of the courthouse. This building was actually the three-story Owen Building. It caught fire in January 1910. Night Marshal Bob Duncan discovered the fire about midnight and notified the...
This story was told to me by Clovis’ first historian, Tom Pendergrass, in his weekly radio broadcast in the early 1950s. I later read the notes he made of a broadcast on June 19, 1953. The story he was broadcasting was about the early movie houses in Clovis and the blasts in 1910. Our first “jitney” show (jitney being slang for a small coin or an outdated automobile) was in the 100 block of West Second Street known as the Lyric, Pendergrass explained. They charged everybody a nickel, and hooped their show to 2,000 feet of fil...
The man who built Clovis’ first school and first courthouse came to New Mexico to restore his health. He didn’t live long but he accomplished much in Clovis. His name was J. Sterling Marsh, born 1878, near Lynchburg, Va. Marsh first located at Albuquerque, but then to El Paso, Texas. When Clovis was put on the map by the Santa Fe Railroad and the Belen Cutoff, he settled in eastern New Mexico. The invigorating climate of Clovis and the area was thought to have cured his illness. Marsh chose to settle in the new railroad tow...
Back in 1989 a tribute by CNJ staff writer Todd S. Bergmann was printed in the Clovis News Journal about Bert Cabiness, who they called the city cashier. That tribute has been edited and follows. While most people do not enjoy parting with their money, they enjoyed meeting Bert Cabiness. They said she made the parting with money a little less painful. “All the money the city takes in comes through me,” Cabiness said. “I validate bills and give receipts.” For more than 20 years, she took care of handling the money from th...
One of the nicest guys in Clovis is Ellison Green, who after all these years wrote about his growing up in a home in Hillcrest Park. Here is his story he told to me. I wish you could have known the people and the times when I was young. My dad, Ellis Green, was the city of Clovis park superintendent, and died at age 49. I was 19 at the time of his death. He had been baptized in Christ just six months before he died. My mom, Merle Taylor, died at age 93. She buried two more husbands after my dad, C. J. Doose and Chick Taylor...
Between 1943 and 1960, Clovis citizens called for a vote and we went dry, meaning no liquor sales. Curry and Roosevelt counties were the only dry counties in New Mexico. One had to go to De Baca, Quay or Chaves county or to Amarillo to buy legal liquor. The 1950s was the private club or “bottle clubs” era, as they called it, as bootleggers discovered that prohibition could be easily circumvented by the use of the private club law. You could become a member of a private club by paying $1 in dues and purchasing a bottle the...
On Dec. 28, 1999, I gathered together some old-timers, calling them the “Sons and Daughters of the Pioneers,” and took them to dinner at a nice restaurant. It was about remembering the old days. The guests were Lynell Skarda, T. E. Willmon Jr., Jim Burns, Dale Campbell and his wife, Annabel (Luikart), Marguerite Sellers, James Ridgley Whiteman, and Paul Dee Barnes and his wife, Nancy. Chick Taylor Sr. and Lee Ross Hammond had planned to be there too, but Chick was down with the flu and Lee Ross was out at his ranch on the...
Hundreds of Curry County residents had a small taste of fame when the movie “Believe in Me” was filmed in the area in October 2004. More than 600 locals were used as extras for crowd scenes and about 20 landed small speaking roles, according to Clovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce movie liaison Liz Eisenbraun. However, this won’t be the first time a Curry County resident has appeared on the big screen. In the mid-1920s, Charles “Buddy” Rogers began appearing in silent films. He was in two big hits right away, including...
Shortly after coming to Clovis in 1908, according to a story told many times, Charley Dennis secured some iron stakes from the Santa Fe Railroad, and with Jack Pritchett as his automobile driver, logged the first road from Texico to Albuquerque. Charley didn’t give any details about that trip to Albuquerque and back. In 1913 or early 1914, there was to be a highway between Amarillo and Albuquerque by way of Clovis. Charley Dennis’ son, Fred E. Dennis, went along with I. C. Johnson and “Vic” Johnson, chosen by the Chamber of C...
Editor’s note: This column about Texico’s history is based on an article published in the 1913 weekly Clovis News. Full names of the residents mentioned are not available. William M. Franklin was the first man to settle on the spot where Texico now stands. He came here prospecting in March 1902, but found no one here, so he went to Portales. He came back in May 1902 and built Texico’s first house. Mrs. Boone is the second oldest settler of Texico and is still here. Mr. Franklin was the first railroad agent. The follo...
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of profiles of Curry County high school basketball teams based on the book “Ghost Town Basketball,” by Steven Flores of Albuquerque. Flores can be reached at [email protected] and 294-4275. • Lincoln-Jackson High School was established in Clovis in 1924. The school’s basketball team, the Tigers, started playing in the 1930s. Only blacks attended the school, one of four segregated high schools in New Mexico. The team was not allowed to compete in county, district or state tournamen...
Clovis school teachers voted 189-163 not to back the New Mexico Education Association Council’s decision to strike in Santa Fe. Voting was by secret ballot. … More than 250 airmen from the Air National Guard were planning to travel to Cannon Air Force Base, where they would undergo 40 days of training. … The Clovis-Portales Arts Council held its first meeting at the Clovis Chamber of Commerce, 215 Main. Don McAlavy was acting as chairman. … Jack Vaughn was looking for support in the District 2 City Commission race....
The book “Ghost Town Basketball” about former high school basketball teams of New Mexico was published in 2006 by Steve Flores of Albuquerque, a former high-school teacher and coach. Profiles follow for five of nine Curry County schools based on information from the book. The other four will be profiled next week. • The Bellview High School was open from 1914 to 1940. The team was the Yellow Jackets. Bellview began playing basketball during the 1925-26 school year and was one of the first schools in the area to play baske...
When we published our High Plains History Book in 1980, following the 1978 Curry County History Book, we made the effort to record as many area cemeteries as we could, listing the names and dates of 68 cemeteries that contained nearly 17,000 names. The cemeteries we recorded covered all those in Curry County, numbering 17, and 28 in the southern half of Quay County; eight cemeteries in DeBaca County; and six in Texas in Bovina, Farwell —new and old — Oklahoma Lane, Rhea and West Camp. At the time we didn’t know the name...
Seventy years ago, in 1937, the news of the day included a lost man, an air circus, and a train robbery and killing. The news said, “Lost, One Man and One Earthquake.” The Tucumcari Chamber of Commerce received a note from a Cleveland, Tenn., woman, Harriette E. Wells, middle of November 1937. She was a friend of the “man’s mother” that got lost. Her note said: “Somewhere near Tucumcari, during the time of the earthquake around 6 years ago (1931?), there lived a boy by the name of Charles Franklin Petitt. His mother woul...
