Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Dear diary: 83 years of storytelling

I have lost track of the number of times I've started journals or resolved to keep a diary - if nothing else, at least a bare-bones occasional record of events and important dates.

After a week or two - at best a few months - it gets set aside and forgotten. In conversations with others, I find this is a common human experience.

That makes the story I am going to tell you even more remarkable.

At the age of 94, Jean Grissom is making entries in her 17th five-year diary.

I'll do the math for you. Jean has been keeping a diary - daily - for the better part of 83 years.

A former resident of both Clovis and Portales (as well as a few other places along the way), Jean has lived in Paris, Texas, since 2009 when her husband, Hollis, died, and she sold their home on Kansas Street in Portales and relocated to be near her son.

After numerous letters and phone calls with this lady, I can vouch for her amazing memory ... even if she does admit to dipping into the diaries now and again to confirm dates.

Jean is a born storyteller.

In the beginning

"I started keeping a diary on Jan. 1, 1939," Jean said. "My grandmother told me to write 'the news' as well as my play and school activities."

An example from that first year: "I have down how I played 'cops and robbers' with the little girl that lived behind us," she said, "and also the fact that Czechoslovakia had fallen to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

Jean was born in 1927 on Danube Street in Portales, brought into this world by Portales doctor John Sidney Pearce. Her mother paid off the $10 delivery fee by working in Pearce's drug store.

"The day I was born - April 26 - that was the day Charles Lindbergh was presented his airplane 'Spirit of St. Louis,'" Jean said. "He flew it across the Atlantic a month later. Calvin Coolidge was president."

Jean's father - a railroad man - "left my mother before I was born," she said. Her mother, Florence Nelson, remarried while Jean was barely a toddler, but tragically died at the age of 26 while giving birth to the baby who would have been Jean's little brother. He also died.

Jean's grandparents - Charles and Hilda Nelson - took 4-year-old Jean in to raise as their own.

It was not an easy time.

My mother is an angel now

"I was 2 when the stock market crashed," Jean said. "I was 4 when my mother died. We went through the Depression without enough to eat. I asked my grandmother why she didn't put me in the orphan's home. She said, 'If there had been two of you, I would have had to.'"

Jean still remembers "the first time I was in the newspaper."

"I wrote a letter to Santa in 1931 that was published," she said.

I found Jean's letter in the Dec. 17, 1931, Portales Valley News.

It reads, in part, "Grandma says to tell you I am a good girl. I would like you to bring me some candy, nuts and oranges, and anything else you think a little girl like me would need. My mother is an angel now."

Jean's grandparents had homesteaded in the Roosevelt County community of Red Lake between Dora and Elida in 1914. Charles Nelson was a teacher but was forced to quit at the age of 50, which Jean believes was not uncommon at the time.

He found work at the Carr Feed Company in Portales, where he put in 23 years.

"I remember my grandmother telling me that he made $10 a month at Carr Feed," Jean said.

School years

Jean started school in 1933, with school supplies purchased by her grandmother from Doc Pearce's drug store: "a Big Chief tablet, a box of crayons, a pencil or two.

"I still have a rusted metal protractor from grade school," she said. "I usually had a little metal lunch box that would carry two tiny peanut butter sandwiches. That is about all. We had no money to buy much of anything.

"I had three dresses, even through high school," she said, "all homemade on a treadle machine ... one for Sunday School, two for school."

The family home had no electricity until after Jean graduated from high school.

On her writing desk in Texas, she still has one of the two coal-oil lamps that lit the home, carried from room to room as needed. One of her childhood chores was to keep the lamps filled from the coal-oil barrel out back.

Jean said that for her whole life she has bonded quickly with those around her, possibly because of being without parents or siblings from such an early age. She held onto many of those bonds with help from the postal service, quipping that she is a "letter writin' fool."

She thinks there were "about 108" in her Portales High School class which received diplomas in May of 1944. Some of them, like the late Joe Blair, had enlisted early and were fighting in World War II by graduation day. Others, like the late Jim Warnica, would be leaving soon to join the action.

The PHS class of 1944 had "the best reunions," she said, probably in part because of their wartime bond. She's one of the last survivors now.

With Warnica's recent passing, "I'm pretty sure all the boys are gone," Jean said.

Jean Grissom's story cannot be told in one newspaper column. It will continue on Sunday.

Contact Betty Williamson: [email protected]

 
 
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