Had some hard lessons in hard times, but we've survived

Lots of folks wonder how in the world little towns on the High Plains ever survived and why people stayed on through the dust, drought and lean economic times. I guess we just did it.

My hometown of Portales for instance has motored along over the decades of its existence without a lot of change in its fortunes one way or another. We’ve come through depressions and recessions that brought the country to its knees without noticing much change in our quality of life.

Sure we’ve caught a few breaks. Getting Eastern New Mexico University here. Establishing ourselves as a peanut Mecca and enjoying an enhanced success with the dairy industry for the last 30 years or so among them.

But what has allowed us to roll with the punches and never get knocked completely out when we got hit square between the eyes by misfortune? Very likely it is diversification.

Likely no one in our town’s early years, except a banker or two, ever used that word diversification. To us it was a matter of not putting all our eggs in one basket for fear everything be lost in a stumble back from the hen house.

I was reading through a history article in a special newspaper supplement published in 1975 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of what was then The First National Bank. In a story about one of the bank’s early bankers, Arthur Jones, the early seeds of our diversity seemed to have been sowed by Jones and others in the 1920s.

He’d been a cowman and he preferred to do business with cowmen but his wakeup came after severe drought starting around 1918 and a crash of the cattle market in the early 1920s wiped the man out.

He was still a cowman but after that he got into the banking business with both feet and urged his depositors to adopt a program that county extension agents were pushing called A Cow, a Sow and a Hen. He imported dairy cows and sold them to local farmers and ranchers so they had cream money to survive on if the cattle market or the row crops failed to produce income for one reason or another.

In the town’s early days the economy didn’t turn too fast until crops or calves were sold in the fall. Some falls weren’t so good, other years every farmer drove a new pickup and the implement dealers sold machinery.

Things changed and the local economy eventually evened out more through the year. The way Jones put it, “Farmers had to agree not to live out of a paper sack.”

We got rid of the paper sack, though some may have still buried wealth in coffee cans. We learned hard lessons in hard times and made adjustments so that the next hard time wouldn’t hurt as much and we went on with life.

It isn’t setting the world on fire and it’s frustrating to those used to a faster pace, but we’ve survived.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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