Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I’m privileged to have a Bill Vance original bolo tie and I’m not certain how I came to possess it. Just for the record, I did not steal it or find it on the street, but the true story of how it came into my possession is a bit foggy. First let me talk about the tie and then I’ll get to the story. Bill Vance was a gentleman who lived in Portales most of his life and I suspect was not a stranger to much of anyone in town. I knew his family because his youngest daughter Jill...
Last week we held our annual banquet at the Roosevelt County Chamber of Commerce and it marked a milestone for me as it will be my last as the Chamber’s executive director. Many of you probably know that I announced my plans to retire to our board last fall so they could be prepared before my Medicare kicks in this spring and I’m relaxing on Easy Street. Sure, I’ll have to get familiar with where all the soup kitchens are located and maybe check out those senior meals, but I d...
This the last in a three-part series tracking my trip through skin cancer. I’m happy to report the squamous cell cancer in the bald patch of my head is now gone. If you’ve been following along here since Christmas you know that after dragging my feet more than I probably should have, I was diagnosed with the skin cancer in early December. I was very fortunate that I was quickly passed off to a second dermatologist in Lubbock who was able to get me in quickly and do the sur...
This is the second in at least a three-part series about my journey with skin cancer. After getting the reaction I had received from several medical professionals, I was pretty resigned to the fact that the biopsy taken by a Roswell dermatologist was going to come back positive for cancer. A week later, it did. The doctor told me the lesion on the top of my head, right in my bald spot, was positive for a type of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma. It is the...
Not many of you can claim you received a rainbow for Christmas, but I think I did. Let me explain. My late wife, who passed in May, always dreaded the idea of cancer; thinking about it or hearing about someone suffering cancer would send her into a full-blown clinical panic attack. It was so consuming that she couldn’t be convinced to do regular screenings such as mammograms and pap smears. It worried me, but I eventually resigned myself to her fear. Shortly after she died, I...
I’ve always heard that in order to move forward in life these days a person has to continually reinvent himself. As 2024 rolls in, it looks like I’ll be doing just that one more time. Change should invigorate us, challenge us, even scare us. As I get ready to retire from my career as a Chamber of Commerce executive director, I expect to experience all of that and even more. I don’t yet know my last date, other than telling my board I wanted to be done before Medicare started i...
To say it hasn’t been a joyous Christmas holiday for me would be an understatement. I have boxes of Christmas decorations in arm’s length of where I get out of the car every night but the only hint within my home that it’s Christmas this year are the Christmas cards I’ve carefully placed on the mantel as I’ve received each of them. It’s my first Christmas without my sweet wife in 42 years and it hurts — a lot. I knew I would miss her, I just had no idea how much. Add to...
Are you ready for a Christmas party or three? I’ve got my share coming up and I’ve been to my share of office parties that were both excruciatingly dull and recklessly drunken. I never understood why someone you least suspected would end up getting totally smashed at the company Christmas party. Lots of people turned out each year just to see who it would be and how bad it would go. I suppose the Christmas parties I’ve organized over the years have always been a bit too corpor...
Technology has changed the world right down to the very part of that world I live in myself. It doesn’t take long to gather a long list of things we would have never dreamed of in our younger days. At the top of that list for me is cell phones. I didn’t have to dial the operator for every call and wait while she connected me, but my family did have a party-line phone service and rotary dial phones. Either of those would blow a young person’s mind today. By the way, the days...
Our Leadership Portales class, organized by the Chamber of Commerce where I work, recently finished up its annual section on “History and Heritage,” dealing with everything from when Clovis hunters butchered ancient bison just north of town to the travails of our local water situation. I lead a history windshield tour around town and my favorite stop is a place nearly everyone in town has noticed but no one has a clue what it symbolizes. The little structure next to a win...
With nothing left of Thanksgiving dinner now but leftovers, inquiring minds want to know if the big Thanksgiving debate reared its head at your table. I’m not talking about Republican versus Democrat values. I’m not even talking Dallas Cowboys versus Philadelphia Eagles. What I’m referring to is did you have dressing or stuffing on your table? To some it may seem like semantics. Isn’t it the same side dish, some would ask? No, it is not and your semantics and underst...
Thanksgiving has an incredibly interesting history, some of which you may not have been aware. Did you realize it took the pilgrims 66 days to make the crossing to the New World and they were subjected to terrible conditions involving lack of working plumbing and disease? Gov. William Bradford invited the Wampanoag tribe to the new settlement of Plymouth Colony for a feast that first fall. The Native Americans supplied five deer while the colonists added the labors of four...
It’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Take for instance our recently completed municipal election in Portales. Water (or the lack of it) was perhaps the most important issue in the City Council election. In our first election 124 years ago water was among the reasons that spurred an election. Since the dusty cow town sprang up along the tracks of the Pea Vine (Pecos Valley & Northeastern) Railroad in 1898 the town had struggled to fight fire. N...
I suppose there are worse places than Tater Town where a body could grow up. While Chicago is known as the Windy City and New York as the Big Apple, Portales had its choice of nicknames when I was growing up. Some called us Goober Gulch and others preferred Tater Town. Either one fit us as we grew both peanuts and sweet potatoes but somehow we eventually became known more for our peanuts. My dad grew both crops. He was able to obtain peanut allotments from the government so...
I love all God’s creatures, but I’ve never been a feline fancier. I have two different cats that greet me at my mailbox. They trade off hanging out in my rose bush and I can cat talk with either with yowls but neither will approach. That’s kind of the way cats are, things are on their terms. I experienced a bit of childhood trauma because of a barn cat and her fuzzy little kittens. It all happened early one morning when I had nothing better to do than torment my little siste...
I think I may be slowly evolving into a water snob. No, this change has nothing to do with the tribulations of my community and its municipal water supply. Instead, the evolution arose from my aging refrigerator. My fridge has an icemaker; it just doesn’t work. I’ve replaced it once but it eventually stopped working again. I believe the problem is rooted in the hard water we have in these parts that deposits a crusty scale on plumbing, coffee makers and icemakers. I dec...
I love fall, but not for the pumpkin-spice-flavored drinks. I prefer piñon coffee when the mornings turn chilly. Speaking of chile, I prefer mine green when the leaves turn gold. I may have discussed it before, but I bemoan the fact that for most of my working life I’ve been too busy in the fall to really get out and enjoy this spectacular season. Sure we’ve taken our road trips in early October to do a little leaf peeping. My late wife’s birthday fell on Oct. 4 so we had a...
It’s unique New Mexican cuisine, tasty and half a century old. I can’t be talking about anything but the Allsup’s burrito. No, the burrito itself hasn’t been sitting under a heat lamp for that long but the concept has endured for 50 years. That’s right, since 1974, they’ve been frying those yummy little gut bombs at an “Allsup’s near you.” Apparently we’re about a month into a year-long celebration of the world famous burrito from eastern New Mexico. A month in and I stil...
Food trucks are a hot thing these days but the idea of making your business mobile has been around for a while — take for instance, the first business in Portales. According to the book “Roosevelt County History and Heritage,” sometime prior to 1898, Josh Morrison operated a really small general store in the Big Salt Lake area just west of the Texas state line in east-central New Mexico. It was nearby what was known as Portales Springs, where ranches, including the DZ Ranch, r...
Just last January the auctioneer, the former wife and trustees of the estate proclaimed “It’s Now or Never” and dropped the gavel on the jet that’s been sitting at the Roswell airport, which once belonged to Elvis Presley. The aircraft has been the subject of several news stories over the years and has been listed in at least three previous auctions. It’s been parked on the tarmac in Roswell, out in the weather for 40 years. It popped back into my attention span while bro...
I know I’m a little late to the match, but I want to throw my hat into the pro wrestling ring as a big fan of Terry Funk. The wrestler from Amarillo passed away late last month at the age of 79. If you’re going to be a fan of a sport you have to have a hero. For a time I was a fan of “Big Time Wrestling” and in particular the Western States Sports promoters out of Amarillo, which Terry’s family owned. Along with his father Dory Funk Sr. and Dory Jr. the trio represent...
It passed without notice by most of the readers of this newspaper. But once it was a special day for myself and others who grew up doing what I did for spending money. Yes, National Newspaper Carrier Day on Sept. 4 probably slipped right past you last week. Indeed, if I hadn’t been alerted to it by a television news anchor it would have gotten by me too. One of the news anchors seemed stupefied by the fact that newspaper carriers had their own day and even a hall of fame. T...
I scroll Facebook a lot. It’s not as good as it once was, but still I scroll mindlessly. Despite all my scrolling on the “bubblegum for the mind” app, I nearly missed out on one of the greatest social media marketing ploys in decades. Have you seen the chaos that is the Wendy’s Facebook feed? I was alerted to it by a story I read about it on Inc.com . I get a daily email with story headlines from the online version of Inc. Magazine. It sometimes has some pretty good busines...
The two pups and I are still adjusting to life without my sweet doggie-loving wife who died in May. Lots of people asked me if either of the two dogs was mourning for her and as much as she would have hated to hear it, I really haven’t noticed any behavior from them that looked like they were mourning. That’s not to say that we haven’t been on a bit of a rollercoaster since she left this earth. We’ve had the older dog, a shepherd possibly pit bull mix, for 15 years this fa...
When I decided to write about the excitement of the local county fairs, I realized right away that wasn’t exactly a unique topic for me in August. Just for fun and because as you may know by now if you read very often, I am my own greatest fan, I took a look back at my column files. Sure enough, I haven’t missed many Augusts in the past 20 years without writing about the fair. There is the column where I just made lists of the sights, sounds and smells I had experienced at the...
