Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
On this date ...
1967: Eastern New Mexico University had opened its new Greyhound basketball arena. Now the community was busy “figuring what sort of events can be staged in this facility,” according to the Portales News-Tribune.
“The lighting and acoustical properties of the building were impressive, and the setting would be ideal for a symphony, or almost any sort of spectacular requiring a lot of floor space and ample seats for the audience,” newspaper Editor Gordon Greaves wrote in his front-page column.
“The big question is where the people are to come from to fill the seats. Saturday night’s opening basketball game drew not quite 3,000 according to the official count. Although that’s a respectable crowd at any ball game, there was plenty of room for nearly as many again.
“The arena would hold one half the population of Portales, but it’s not every day that you can get half the population of Portales interested in the same thing.”
But Greaves said he remained optimistic the arena would prove beneficial for the city and the university.
“We recall the opening of the gymnasium in the old high school, back in 1923 or ’24, when people thought it was far too large for any reasonable expectation. Scarcely 200 people could be accommodated in the cracker box gym,” he wrote.
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