Tipping my hat to friend and treasure-filled journals

A few weeks ago, my 97-year-old friend Jean Grissom called to ask me if I could find out more information about a story that happened 82 years ago this month.

Jean had been leafing through her journals, no small feat since she’s been religiously keeping a daily journal since Jan. 1, 1939.

She was in the first of her five-year diaries — she said the cover is starting to crumble, so she’s very careful — when she came across an entry she had penned on June 17, 1942.

Jean recorded that she and a friend had strolled over to the Roosevelt County fairgrounds that evening to watch a large group of men (she thought they might have been soldiers) who were walking in from Clovis that day.

“We watched from the station,” she recalled, which would have been a filling station located about where Stripes is today. She wondered if I could learn more about who that might have been.

Thanks to her accuracy in date, it took no time to find the answer on the front page of the June 18, 1942, Portales Daily News.

The headline read, “Soldiers Arrive Here on Hike from Clovis Foot-Sore and Weary.”

Col. C.D. Notgrass, commander of the 713th Engineer Battalion of Clovis, had taken his boys on a “shakedown march” from Clovis to Portales the day before, the story read.

Most of the men were recruits new to the Army, according to the article, with several having joined the battalion only a few weeks prior to the march.

The march served as a long distance warmup to see how they handled it, and also gave the accompanying cooking detachment some experience in setting up a field camp, which they did at the fairgrounds that evening to feed and house the men.

The original game plan was to march into Portales and circle the courthouse square upon arrival, the reporter noted, but that plan was scrapped because “the officers did not consider it possible on account of the condition of the feet of many of the men.”

I can only imagine.

The article, which was written bright and early the next morning, noted that the soldiers had departed by 8:30 a.m. to slog back through the sand hills to Clovis, “despite the sore feet and shoulders.”

On their overnight stay in Portales, locals — like Jean Grissom and her friend — had been invited to the fairgrounds to “see Army life firsthand.”

Two of the officers who had accompanied the soldiers told the Daily News that “they had as sore feet as many of the privates but they felt a lot better after they got a bath and shaved.”

No word on whether the privates enjoyed those luxuries.

Most of us — thank goodness — have never had to walk from Clovis to Portales in the middle of summer in Army boots and then walk back the next day, all the while contemplating a war raging around the world.

I’m tipping my hat this week to Jean and her treasure-filled journals, and to the young men who made that long-ago walk.

It’s a great reminder about keeping challenges in perspective. I’m not likely to ever do anything nearly as demanding as that … for which I am profoundly grateful.

Betty Williamson got blisters on her feet just thinking about that walk. Reach her at:

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