Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
On this date …
1915: The Clovis Woman’s Club appointed a sanitation committee to ensure the city’s livery stable was cleaned out twice a week.
Club minutes also tell us, “Mrs. Anna Janes reported that the box supper will be December 8, proceeds of which will be used for the library fund. Be sure to bring your husband and remind him that his bids are to be very generous.”
1969: A black airman at Cannon Air Force was being court-martialed for refusing to cut his hair.
Airman First Class August Doyle said he believed the order to cut his Afro-style was unlawful because it was an expression of his black cultural identity.
A five-member hearing board found Doyle guilty of “willful disobedience of a lawful order” and sentenced him to three months of hard labor and reduced his rank to airman basic. Doyle was also fined $180.
Doyle, 21, later told Jet magazine he had learned what it’s like to “challenge the white-oriented system.”
1970: Clovis Memorial Hospital was offering a “near-complete physical examination” for $10,” the Clovis News-Journal reported.
The SMA 12 tested 12 aspects of body chemistry in about two minutes, hospital officials said.
1971: Tucumcari District Attorney Vic Breen was shot to death on his way to court.
The prosecutor’s killer was a recently released mental patient who was waiting outside Breen’s home with a high-powered rifle.
Jose Rosendo Garcia was returned to a state mental hospital after the shooting. A court declared him mentally incompetent to stand trial for the slaying.
Breen had been a prosecutor 20 years. He was 54.
1972: John Kendrick, former president of an organization called Water Inc., had spoken at the annual meeting of Curry County Water Inc.
“There has always been a fight at the water hole,” he said, “and I guess there always will be.”
Kendrick, a Brownfield, Texas, banker, talked about a dream of establishing a trans-Texas canal to bring water to the High Plains from the lower Mississippi River.
“We are concerned with our depleted water supply,” he told the group, “and we want to ensure that we people in Texas, as well as you in eastern New Mexico, will get our share of the Mississippi River water.”
1976: Local law officers had made two major drug busts, confiscating more than 380 pounds of marijuana.
In Clovis, three men were arrested and narcotics agents found more than 278 pounds of marijuana at a motel on East Mabry Drive.
Officials also recovered an estimated $15,000 in cash and a pistol.
The Clovis News-Journal reported it was the largest pot bust in Curry County history.
In an apparently unrelated incident, a Portales man had been arrested on the highway near Elida with 107 pounds of marijuana.
1977: A number of eastern New Mexico women were in Albuquerque attending the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau’s annual convention.
Mary Blakely, a Roosevelt County farm wife and president of the Farm Bureau Women, conducted a meeting that included a cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, noting it was a critical and potentially life-saving skill for rural families who were far from medical assistance.
Other east-side women who attended the meeting included Pauline Davis, Thelma Elliott, Evelyn Hadley, Helen Kelley, LeAnn Monroe, and Mary Qualls.
1990: Roosevelt County commissioners had authorized an audit of the jail commissary fund to investigate “suspected irregularities” in the management of inmates’ money.
Officials said the fund was showing profits disproportionate to the price of merchandise.
Pages Past is compiled by David Stevens and Betty Williamson. Contact:
