Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
On this date ...
1945: Blair’s Food Market in Portales offered the following: Schilling’s Coffee for 29 cents per pound, apricots for 23 cents per pound, and 50-pound bags of flour for $1.99.
1952: Fire believed caused by faulty wiring swept through a barn on the Troy Fouts ranch seven miles south of Melrose.
The blaze destroyed feed and killed a prize bull, the Clovis News-Journal reported.
Losses were estimated at $1,000.
1952: The Snazzy Pig restaurant was open for business “in spite of the work on First Street,” according to a newspaper ad.
The eatery on East First invited “all to stop in for good food.”
The phone number was 3334.
1956: Hilda Greenleaf, who lived at 3016 Sheldon in Clovis with her husband, Master Sgt. Dexter Greenleaf, was the winner of a “fully automatic gas range” given as the grand prize at the Southern Union Gas Company’s cooking school.
Greenleaf, from New Rochelle, N.Y., said she had been cooking on a second-hand stove purchased when they first moved to Clovis from Roswell in February.
Mrs. Eugene Duval was the other big winner of a door prize. She received $200 cash for a down payment on a Stagner and Son home.
Prize winners were drawn from a revolving barrel by two little girls — Paula Drake, 3, and Shirley Ann Teel, 5, who were chosen from the audience.
1958: Clovis police arrested 12 people for gambling at Teddy’s Shine Parlor, 521 W. First St.
The Clovis News-Journal reported:
“Those weren’t the popping of shoe shine rags echoing from the back of Teddy’s ...
“Neither was the chanting that of a shoe shine boy.
“The popping was the dice hitting the sideboards of a pool table. The chant was the voices of players calling out for the dice to ‘win baby a new pair of shoes. ...’”
The newspaper reported a police officer cruising the streets noticed a crowd at Teddy’s, slipped up to the unguarded back door and heard the dice game in progress.
The officer recruited help and police swept into the business so quickly the lookout “didn’t have time to give out a warning,” the paper reported.
Police caught most of the ivory polishers flat footed, but most of the evidence was quickly destroyed or ended up in the hands of one player who managed to escape.
In all, police reported they confiscated $1.35 and one dice.
“Someone apparently swallowed the other piece of evidence,” the newspaper reported.
1970: Elvis Presley was starring in “Charro!” at the Tower theater in Portales. “On his neck, he wore the brand of a killer. On his hip, he wore vengeance,” read the promotional material.
Showtimes ran from 1:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. The film was rated G, meaning it was recommended for all ages.
A free cigar was being offered to dads from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
If dad wanted more movies after that, the Varsity drive-in offered a double feature: “Planet of Vampires” followed by “Night of the Living Dead.”
1971: U.S. Census figures showed Curry County was the second-fastest growing county in New Mexico during the 1960s.
Curry County’s population increased 20.6% during the decade, from 32,691 to 39,517, the Clovis News-Journal reported.
Only Sandoval County grew more, at 23.2%.
1975: District Attorney Fred Hensley announced he would abandon his private law practice on July 1 and become a full-time district attorney for Curry and Roosevelt counties.
Assistant DAs David W. Bonem and Robert Cochrane also would assume full-time positions as prosecutors on July 1, Hensley said.
Full-time status was an option at the time, but the New Mexico Legislature had set Jan. 1, 1977, as the date all of New Mexico’s district attorneys would be required to give up private law practices.
1976: Pearl Ramey, who arrived in Clovis from Kansas weeks after the city’s birth in 1907, died in her adopted community. She was 92.
Her first encounter with Clovis was not pleasant, she told historian Don McAlavy.
“My, the place looked terrible,” she said. “Just mud, mud, mud, mud, no people, no business district or anything. If there had been a way back, we would have taken it.
“However, the next morning things looked brighter, and we decided to stick it out.”
Pearl and her husband Cash Ramey became two of Clovis’ leading citizens for decades. She was a founding member of Clovis’ First United Methodist Church, the Order of Eastern Star and the Clovis Woman’s Club.
2006: Eastern New Mexico residents were preparing for new neighbors — Special Operations Command personnel at Cannon Air Force Base.
“There will be more people and quieter airplanes, much quieter,” predicted Lt. Col. Toby Corey, chief of the AFSOC’s program integration branch at Hurlburt Field in Florida.
Cannon had been a victim of a national round of base closures a year earlier, but was awarded a new mission with AFSOC.
Pages Past is compiled by David Stevens and Betty Williamson. Contact:
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