Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Never let your mind write checks your body can’t cash. That vacation in Colorado I wrote about last week in advance of leaving went off mostly as planned. I soaked in a hot spring and each of those little boys got an opportunity to reel in a fish. My body and fish whispering allowed those checks to be cashed. It was that last full day of vacation that tripped me up and darn near killed me. It was decided by the family group of six that tubing the San Juan River would be l...
Fishing is good for your soul. Fishing with two little boys — well, we will see. By the time you’re reading this I’ll know if my fishing trip with these two great-nephews was a success or if short attention span won out over Uncle Karl’s ability to talk with the fishes. All three of us have had a rough spring and even if we don’t catch a fish getting out and about in the mountains will be a great distraction from our problems. There might be S’mores, ice cream, pool time,...
Even though I didn’t follow in the steps of my father it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the path he cut. Both my dad and my father-in-law collected and restored antique and classic cars. Wandering a car show or seeing classic cars shined up in a parade still gives me a strong connection to them. I fetched tools, I helped load cars, I drove parades for them when they needed another driver, but I never really caught the bug. They sought cars out and then worked on them until...
This Friday will mark 142 years since the death of Henry McCarty, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, a.k.a. William or Billy Bonney. On July 14, 1881, most historians believe Billy the Kid died around midnight in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom in Fort Sumner. That fact has been challenged and debated for years concerning just who did Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett gun down in the dark from Maxwell’s bedside. Some believed it wasn’t Billy and that he lived for decades in Hico, Texas. Former Gov...
I saw a news item flash across my iPhone last week noting the 16th birthday of the iPhone. And so I clicked on it and was reminded just how many items the marvelous device in my pocket had replaced. It replaced my home phone for starters. I no longer have an alarm clock at my bedside either. I hung on to a specific model of cheap desk calculator until a few years ago when I realized the one on my cell phone was as good and as easy to see and use. I quit wearing a wristwatch...
I have this framed print of Geronimo hanging on my office wall at home and as I stared into those piercing dark eyes I saw him a little differently than I have since I hung the piece on the wall. I wrote about acquiring him in the fall of 2018 and I told of his exploits in that column, but I didn’t tell the whole story because perhaps I hadn’t aged enough to understand it fully. The portrait shows him posed with a rifle supposedly on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona bef...
I recently received greetings from a governmental body along with a request for my service — jury service that is. I’m very much all about people doing their civic duty through juror service but I really didn’t need this in my life right now. July is chock full of work commitments and I’m trying really hard to get back into a good work mode since I’m no longer a caregiver. It hasn’t been easy. These days you take the jury questionnaire online where your answers go into cyber-...
After being on the other end of the equation a month ago, this week I found myself on the outside looking in at a funeral service. This was no ordinary funeral service, however. Only one person at the gravesite had been personally acquainted with the deceased. Most of the family never met him. The family of Thomas Vernon Long gathered at the Portales Cemetery last week to lay the World War II veteran to rest for the second time. Others have told this incredible story in this...
I may have mentioned previously my current vehicle philosophy. It hasn’t always been my philosophy, but it’s worked for the last five or six years. I think I’m ready for a change. My philosophy, as I’ve recited it to numerous folks over the years, is to have enough junker cars in front of my house that at any one time I can go out and depend on at least one of them to start and run. Granted I’ve had a few times when I had to jump start more than one vehicle to have a driver....
Deep down inside us all there lives a treasure hunter. I believe that is true to one extent or another. For some the treasure is in searching antique shops. For others it’s junkyards or auctions. For some it may be shopping malls or finding a new restaurant or winery. Lately I have a YouTuber I’ve been following who lives in Southwest New Mexico where he raises lion trailing hounds and rides and packs mules on his trips into the desert mountains around where he lives. On one...
The last few weeks have been a long, sorrowful journey. Two weeks ago, I watched the love of my life take her last breaths here on Earth. I’ve watched her health falter for the last 20 years. At times she would rebound, but it always seemed like the next setback for her was never far away. Since the first of the year a new problem among all of the others she had presented itself with a fury. Alzheimer’s attacked my sweetheart’s memory. The last few weeks of her life I had t...
I recently went blind in my right eye and I’m blaming Joe Biden and the IRS. OK, I’m not really blind, folks — it just seems like it as I write this column as I squint at the screen. Expect that there will be typos. So I was sitting at this same desk, frantically working on my taxes on April 18 when a tiny fly began flitting around between me and my 1040. No amount of hand waving was doing any good and I soon realized that it must be one of those vision floaters that many...
The boss editor sent down a message to his minions last week with the tip that it had been 50 years since they cut the ribbon on the Kakawate Road. I drew the short straw and got the assignment of doing a column about the road. I guess someone who has driven the road all that time should be able to write about it. First, I want to relate that the road was there before Mayor James Kiker of Portales and the Muleshoe mayor met at the state line to snip the ribbon, it just...
My mind has been brought to the history of Portales this week thanks to Ruth White Burns. No, I haven’t been talking directly with Ruth, just her family. But it started me to remembering her and her love for history and her family’s prominent place in it. Her family is in the midst of preparing for an estate sale and they’ve asked me to help find a home for a couple of items too special to fall to the auctioneer’s gavel. One of those was the double-door safe from the Blanken...
I learned many Easter egg hunts ago from none other than Elmer T. Fudd that wabbits are wascally. I was convinced at a very young age that my Daisy BB gun was going to take down one of the long-legged jackrabbits running everywhere in our part of the country. I put in the hours hunting those long-eared bunnies but I’m pretty sure I never hit one. Mostly because they were usually a long way out and running fast when I got a shot. I did club one with the stock one day while foll...
One of the things I cherish the most are the memories my Grandmother Musette Terry related at the urging of her daughters. One of the chapters in that book of sorts (it’s also on cassette tape in her words) is the description of how they wound up in town during World War II and my Granddad Bob’s work to get back on his feet financially and out on the farm again — his own farm. In 1940 things weren’t going well and Granddad had taken work with a local contractor buildin...
I normally write this column on Thursday night and this Thursday was the 16th anniversary of the tornado that ripped across Roosevelt County and then took a swath out of Clovis. That day I was on a day off from my then full-time job as managing editor at the Portales News-Tribune and in the check-out line at Walmart when the cell phone rang. It was the boss editor from the Clovis office who was on his way back from a conference in Albuquerque, relaying to me that there had...
The skyline in my little hometown underwent a big change in the last week. At the time of this writing the old concrete Worley Mills grain elevator was still in the sky above downtown Portales but it looked more like some of the bombed out sky rise apartment in Ukraine’s large cities. At the rate the demolition is proceeding it may be down completely when you read this story. The skyline for the prairie town of Portales has had its share of character. We had twin “high ris...
When I was growing up, my Granddad Ruby laid across the bed every afternoon and took a nap. It didn’t make sense to me back then, but it does now. Several years ago, I got my sleep apnea under control with a CPAP machine and that kept me from dozing at my desk. But as I’ve aged, I still love a nap in my chair. Give me 20 minutes at lunch and I finish the day refreshed. Of course I’ve found, even with the CPAP, I don’t sleep very long at night as an old fart. But with the CPAP...
Around here folks used to say the sand would blow for three days straight before the wind would lay. I’m just glad we didn’t get three days in a row as bad as last Sunday. I don’t know if that old saying about a three-day blow has any basis in statistical fact or not, but I remember a lot of times in the spring when it would blow several days in a row, sometimes with a cold front accompanying the wind, but always with dirt in the air. But when it broke we always had the prett...
As I write this column I sit at my home office desk — naked and afraid. OK, my only fear is knocking out this column before midnight. And I am not that naked. I’m wearing boxer briefs and dress socks, but that’s more than you wanted to know about my column writing. But I was thinking of another time when I had been naked and afraid. I’ve recently learned that a new episode of the Nat Geo series “Naked and Afraid,” was filmed right here in eastern New Mexico. It took place...
I remember a time in grade school when we marked both the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We did it on their actual birthdays and we didn’t get a day off. We were in school learning about each of them and about how they influenced the growth of our nation and its ideals. One of the things I should have been learning, and maybe I did or maybe it was picked up much later on the History Channel, was that Washington was the only president elected u...
It’s Super Sunday and in answer to Bocephus’ question for years — yes, I am ready for some football. I’m a bit of a throwback in that the most important thing about this year’s Super Bowl is that Tom Brady won’t be playing quarterback in it. No, actually that’s the second-most important thing. The most important thing is the game itself — football. While I’m happy that Brady won’t be making an appearance, I’m sad that neither will my Denver Broncos. I’m also sad that it...
I stumbled onto a great story from the 1977 Portales News-Tribune Progress edition about a 1951 coyote hunt in the Elida and Kenna area. The story was a reprint of one of Editor Gordon Greaves’ “By The Way” columns. He started it out with a comparison to the English version of “riding to the hounds.” He explained the hounds, in this case were hybrid greyhounds. The chase started before daylight on the mesa west of Elida with two vehicles, a Jeep and a pickup, with 10 dogs a...
Lots of folks wonder how in the world little towns on the High Plains ever survived and why people stayed on through the dust, drought and lean economic times. I guess we just did it. My hometown of Portales for instance has motored along over the decades of its existence without a lot of change in its fortunes one way or another. We’ve come through depressions and recessions that brought the country to its knees without noticing much change in our quality of life. Sure w...
