Former editor talks about New Mexico boyhood

After five years of writing a column for the Curry County Times, I got a call from the editor of this newspaper: W. W. “Bill” Southard.

This was right after Jan. 1, 1982. He told me I could get more readers if I moved over to the Clovis News Journal. I moved and he was right. My first column for the CNJ was on Red Ryder’s creator, Fred Harman, who had been a friend of mine for several years.

Southard, 10 months before, had entered the Bantam Books/Twentieth Century-Fox First Western Contest. He won first place and received $25,000. The book was “Season of Vengeance” and Bill went on to write two more western novels.

He had this to say: “Writing Westerns is, for me, a natural reaction to the Southwest’s infinite blue skies and majestic mountain-desert landscape, the kind of country that spawned a special breed of men: bold and self-reliant, rawhide tough and big-hearted to a fault. If you look closely, you can find traces of those qualities even today among the old-timers who inhabit New Mexico, the setting for “Season of Vengeance.”

“New Mexico was also the setting for my boyhood, years spent hunting, fishing, exploring on horseback and helping wrest a living from land that was more hostile then fertile.

“Following an unremarkable performance in high school, I enlisted in the Navy in time to catch the final act of the Korean conflict, serving as a radar operator aboard an amphibious assault ship.”

“After a four-year hitch, I returned to New Mexico and enrolled at ENMU, ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in political science.”

“Newspapering has been my life’s work since. I’ve had stints on dailies in Texas, New Mexico and Kansas. For the past decade I have served as managing editor of the Clovis New Journal situated in the heart of New Mexico’s High Plains region and an hour’s drive from the site where Sheriff Pat Garrett fed Billy the Kid Bonney a fatal dose of lead barely one hundred years ago.

“I grew up in a world of Westerns. On my tenth Christmas, I was suffering from a head and neck injury caused by a spill from a horse and I was supposed to be resting my eyes. Therefore, I had to hide in a closet because I was so eager to read my gift – one of Graham M. Dean’s juvenile Westerns. Years later I worked for the old gentleman, as editor of a newspaper he owned.”

“I read most of the great Western writers; Zane Grey, Max Brand, Luke Short, Clarence Mulford, Ernest Haycox and in later years, a master of Western storytelling, Louis L’Amour. For a youngster whose earliest ambition was to become a cowboy, they provided a wealth of enjoyment and, quite probably, the seeds of a yen for writing.”

“Such were the stepping stones which led me to write my first book. In it I have tried to give readers a picture of that New Mexico about which I spoke.”

“In my typewriter now is a second novel set in the New Mexico Territory of the 1800s. Despite a degree of bondage to a typewriter, I make time for my wife and three children and a recalcitrant gelding that regularly forgets he’s broke to ride.”

Bill wrote this in September of 1980, before his first book was published. Bill was writing his fourth Western novel and didn’t finish it. He died of cancer on May 23, 1984. I wrote a column about Bill on May 27, 1984. But this time he’s telling his only story in this column. Can’t imagine he’s been gone nearly 21 years. I read his first book again this week.

Don McAlavy is Curry County’s historian. He can be contacted at:

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