Ask the News - Oct. 6

I heard the Clovis High School student newspaper wasn’t always called “The Purple Press.” It had some kind of foreign language name? What can you find out about this?

Clovis High School Class of ’73 alumnus Jay Parmenter said it was called La Sesalpha.

With the proper name in hand, the internet opened up with a few references to the CHS student newspaper.

“It’s not Spanish,” CHS Spanish teacher Laura Mondragon said.

“It was called that when I was in high school,” said retired Clovis Municipal Schools administrator Lonnie Leslie. He is a member of the CHS class of ’66.

Former Clovis school board member Mark Lansford said he was the last editor in chief of the La Sesalpha. “They changed the name to The Purple Press (in) 1975-76,” he said.

According to an article in the sports section of the Nov. 25, 1937, edition of the Clovis News-Journal, the name “La Sesalpha” once belonged to the CHS yearbook.

In a feature titled Pressbox Chatter, writer Dee Blythe wrote of the CHS yearbook having that name.

Specific dates elude research but somewhere along the way the CHS yearbook became The Plainsman and the student newspaper became La Sesalpha.

What does La Sesalpha mean?

In the 1937 article, Blythe writes, “I often wondered about the name La Sesalpha, and Walter Howell tells me it is a combination of the names of two rival literary societies that flourished, then-Sesame and Tri-Alpha.”

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