Opinion: Pioneers, a lion and the 'Whoozit Gazette'

This weekend was supposed to celebrate the region’s trailblazers. The annual Pioneer Days parade, rodeo, reunions and more were scheduled Thursday through Saturday until we were all thrown by the coronavirus.

So that makes today a good day to remember Clovis’ first Pioneer Days, on June 5, 1935.

The Clovis Evening News-Journal, one of the event’s major sponsors, reported 15,000 people were in town that Wednesday. That’s significant because the town’s population was about 9,000 at the time.

A parade kicked off festivities at 10:30 a.m, followed by a rodeo in the afternoon at Cavalry Park, now home to the Bell Park baseball stadium. An old fiddlers contest started at 7 that evening, back on Main Street. After that, the 300 block of Main was “washed and coated with powdered boric acid to make it slick for the free street dance,” the newspaper reported.

The first two dances were square dances before a stringed orchestra began playing more modern tunes.

A few of the day’s highlights:

• The parade was so long “it ran into itself,” apparently meaning the back of the procession had not yet left the starting point around the courthouse square when the leaders had completed the route, returning to the courthouse.

News accounts show 25 floats were part of the festivities, in addition to scores of horses with riders, buggies, automobiles and “other features too numerous to mention,” the newspaper mentioned.

Most parades of the day just traveled six or seven blocks north to south down Main Street. The first Pioneer Days parade stretched out for two miles. It started down Mitchell Street from Eighth Street to First Street, then turned onto Main and marched north back to the courthouse.

• The Lions Club entered a real lion in the parade, and the king of Clovis’ zoo was not happy about it.

“The lion was securely caged, but in transferring it from its cage at the zoo into the one on the float, Bill Nelson was scratched on the shoulder when the animal took a swipe at him through the bars,” the newspaper reported.

• Multiple prizes were awarded throughout the day, including $25 for the naming of the city’s newest park. Several people suggested “Hillcrest Park,” but judges determined O.J. Cloppert, who lived at 1009 Thornton St., was the first to suggest the name so he got the cash.

• Other parade entries included an ox team pulling a cart, a prize-winning whiteface bull, and a gigantic ice-cream cone and bottle of milk from Campbell’s Ice Cream.

The newspaper passed out special editions of its “Whoozit Gazette” created for the day. Clovis Steam Laundry’s float featured a scantily clad man pounding clothes with a rock in a pool of water. And the Lyceum and Mesa theaters shared a float on which rode Frankenstein, Mae West and Shirley Temple, as portrayed by local residents.

But the real highlight of that first Pioneer Days was, as it has been for the last 85 years, the gathering of old friends, catching up, sharing hopes and dreams and probably swapping some lies.

As it should be, and will be again, hopefully next year.

David Stevens writes about regional history. Contact him:

[email protected]