Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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As we prepare for the (peaceful) transfer of power this week it’s a great time to look back on some of my favorite quotes by American presidents. Who knows, we might get a new doozy during the inaugural address. Here are some of my favorites. Dwight D. Eisenhower — “I like Ike.” OK, he was only in office the first year of my life, so I don’t remember anything he said. That’s just as well because a Google of his quotes is just as boring as the man. But that campaign bu...
For most of my life I thought the first president I had ever voted for was Jimmy Carter. When I got to thinking about it last week, I did the math and figured out that fact about me was stored incorrectly in my memory. I think I would have voted for him if I had been born six months earlier because he was a peanut farmer and I had lived on a peanut farm myself. I also liked the fact that he didn’t speak like other politicians and he seemed genuine. I do remember that c...
Raise your hand if you thought the bald eagle was our national bird all your life. We found out in the last few weeks we were all wrong about that. Somehow we put the bald eagle all over our currency, our military uniforms, our architecture and in a good portion of our patriotic merchandise without ever officially passing a bill through Congress adopting the symbol. President Joe Biden signed the bill changing all that on Christmas eve 2024. Evidently a drawing of the bald...
What a crazy, weird year 2024 has been. I had such high expectations and achieved so little realization. I retired in March and received a wonderful sendoff. So many friends and well-wishers attended that it warmed my heart and almost made it hard to leave. But I vowed I was off to fish and travel the country. I guess I did go fishing if you count the state park pond six miles down the road. But I’ve yet to use the state park pass I purchased to get motivated to get out t...
It probably was a silent night over 2,000 years ago when Baby Jesus was born — at least until the heavenly host struck up the chorus. Last week, I went caroling with my church and even though we had a book of about 34 carols I made sure we sang “Silent Night” at each of our stops. We also sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” at each place but only did the “Figgy Pudding” verse once. In my mind there is no doubt that “Silent Night” is far and away the most popular Christmas...
Far and away my favorite Christmas movie of all time is the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” for its nostalgia and relation to my youth. The movie is set a decade before I was even born and in a Midwestern town very different from Portales, New Mexico, but somehow it evokes the way I felt at Christmastime growing up. The family dynamic itself to me is hilarious. The narrator speaking what’s happening inside Ralphie Parker’s mind as the movie plays out is somewhat like the voi...
They say patience is a virtue. Some days I show very little virtue. I guess if it were easy we would all be able to walk on water. When Peter saw Jesus walking on water he immediately thought that was something he was ready to do too. Peter’s faith wasn’t finished and when he took his eyes off Jesus he began to sink. We all get impatient and try to tackle things we didn’t take the time to patiently prepare for before embarking. I’ve never done a great job of preparing for a tr...
Anybody else out there fondly remember his grandmother’s pantry? I can close my eyes and still see and smell Grandma Ereth’s pantry. She had stuff in there that I didn’t normally get anywhere else. One unique thing was it was a walk-in pantry. Few people that I knew when I was little had one of those. Food at our house went in the kitchen cabinets. It wasn’t a big pantry. It was only a two-bedroom house that had been my great-grandparent’s home. My mother had grown up in a o...
I do believe that YouTube is the instruction manual for everything. With a quick search of the social media site a person can find a video on how to repair or build anything you can imagine. From car repairs to the owners manual for your coffee maker or any other device you might have on hand that you’ve forgotten how to operate or program. I usually have those manuals somewhere in a drawer but I can look it up online faster than I can find that manual. I’ve diagnosed and fix...
Thought of as an innocent way of deciding who went first or who got the last piece of candy, the game Rock, Paper, Scissors is actually a game with a long history stretching across the world. Surfing the channels once I noticed a show in a Las Vegas bar playing the childhood game in which the players pump their clinched fist in rhythm three times, “throwing a symbol on the third representing either rock, paper or scissors.” For those who never played, rock crushes scissors, pa...
Sometimes I wonder whatever became of my 8-track tapes. I’ve wondered, but not enough to go search the closets at my mother’s house to see if they’re still there. Last I saw it, the collection, prized by me through high school but not all that impressive compared to others, was safely nestled inside the padded, genuine simulated leather case. Cruising in our cars, vans and pickups was my generation’s most important social activity, collecting the music of the day was probabl...
You frequently hear people reminiscing about the days of the Sears Wishbook and all the wonder it brought to our lives. When I was growing by this time of year half the pages would have a corner turned over and our favorite toys carefully circled. I’m not sure Santa Claus paid any attention to those subtle hints but it was a great trip for the imagination to see yourself on that Stingray bicycle or catching the neighborhood pitchers with that great looking catcher’s mitt. It...
The year was 1986 and I suddenly found myself being asked to step way outside my comfort zone — even into countries I might never travel to in my life. Let me explain. At that time I had only been married four years and my life was changing in so many ways and I was being challenged with work and life. I had begun a role in sales at the newspaper and was doing well and a couple of people I really looked up to conspired to get me into the local Rotary Club in Tucumcari. I w...
I live on the edge of town in a quiet neighborhood — quiet enough I don’t get trick-or-treaters interrupting whatever important program I’m watching on TV. My late wife used to lament the fact that we never or rarely ever had any of the candy freeloaders show up on our doorstep. I kinda liked the fact that she would stock up on chocolate candy and someone had to eat it. I liked it even more at the places where we lived out in the country with absolutely no chance of having to...
Did you see the aurora borealis? I’m not sure this time. I saw them on everyone’s Facebook feed but mine last Thursday night. So I took a drive on a dark country road to see what I could see. Using my imagination, I could detect a faint glow above the horizon — or maybe it was the glow from the lights of a dairy or Cannon Air Force Base. After I got back and saw a few more photos online and on the late news I went back out in the back yard and could see the magenta caste...
If you’re old enough to remember licking trading stamps for your mother, you likely grew up in the 1960s or earlier. Somehow a conversation with a Gen Z coworker got off onto the topic of trading stamps. Talk about a quizzical look on someone’s face as I began to describe what I was talking about. My head might as well have been purple with horns in place of my ears. So this column will be a walk down memory lane for those of you my age or older and for the two or three Gen...
Every dog that’s ever adopted me had its own unique sleep habits, some of them a bit strange. Take for instance, when we first got the little dog Maggie, who sleeps with me every night in the bed. The first night with her, when bedtime came she jumped into the dirty laundry basket and was asleep before I got into bed myself. Later she still took naps in the laundry basket but she soon figured out sleeping in the bed with the humans was allowed. One stretch when my late wife w...
Watching the classic rivalry of New York Jets vs. New England Patriots as I write this column on a Thursday night, I’m struck by one thing. It’s just no fun hating the Patriots anymore without Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. When Brady retired, then unretired, much like myself a few short months later, he went on to lead Tampa Bay to a Super Bowl win. Hating Brady then, without Belichick wasn’t the same, even when he beat my favorite quarterback Patrick Mahomes for the honor. Su...
Retirement was pretty good and then they called me off the bench and put me back in the game. I was starting to get rested up and I’d even loaded the van up for a camping trip once and didn’t quite make it down the road. Things didn’t work out and my old job as Chamber of Commerce executive director is open again and I agreed to help out in the interim on a “part time” basis. When people figure out I’m back I tell them one of two things. The first is I’m just back for an encor...
My phone rang last week and the caller ID read Jim Love. There’s only one Jim Love in this area, Coach Jim Love. He was the best thing about ninth-grade football, which proved to be my swan song in the sport. He was one of the best things about Portales High School. All the students and teachers loved Jim Love. He had a way of calling you out if you were out of line that got the message across quickly without him becoming the bad guy, unlike some of the other coaches. We h...
Rowdy has left the building, and my home may never be the same. Rowdy is a very cute, very energetic young dog who came to visit my much older little dog and me for the past week. Did I mention that he was young and energetic? I don’t know about Maggie, but I’m pooped. I volunteered our services as dog-sitter for my sister and her husband’s dog. After a play date to try things out, which went well, they dropped Rowdy off. It’s been a while since I had a pup around and even th...
I usually love it when readers of my column write me. I like it even more when they write me and I end up learning something. After my column on George Causey a few weeks ago, Will Anderson wrote me to ask if I had ever heard of a gunfighter nicknamed Portales Bill. He said he had seen the man mentioned in one of his father’s many history books. The moniker clanged around a bit in my brain but after looking for a bit I had to write him back and tell him I wasn’t aware of som...
It’s the way most science fiction books I ever read started out. A short space flight, with very slim chance of problems, suddenly goes wrong. Turns out you’ve booked a ride on a Boeing manufactured space vehicle after Boeing’s heyday has come and gone. On “Gilligan’s Island,” Gilligan and the Skipper’s SS Minnow took off for a three-hour tour that turned into two television seasons and decades of reruns, shipwrecked on a deserted island with all the conveniences...
It only happens every four years, but I’ve never caught Olympic fever. Hope that doesn’t put me on a black list for national pride. I’ve always caught the headlines and even enjoyed the telling of a heartstrings, overcoming-the-odds story. But I never have had any event at any Olympics that I didn’t want to miss. I know New Zealander Rex Maddaford, a distance runner at Eastern New Mexico University who competed in Mexico City in 1968. But that’s about as close as I’ve come...
After a really brief but bawdy monsoon season, seems like we’ve jumped straight out into the frying pan around here. Two weeks ago, I logged nearly 2 inches of rain in a little over an hour, triggering a flash flood warning for a couple of days running. A few days later we were receiving heat warnings from the weather services for multiple days. I don’t have a lot of trouble with the heat these days because I don’t have to get out in it. I just turn the thermostat down until...
