Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I have a little page in the notes app of my phone where I enter column ideas as they come up because the hardest part of this whole deal is having a topic. Last week I knew I had something written in there but I couldn’t recall what it was so I opened it up to find the words “time capsule” as the last entries. Something came up somewhere in an email, a TV show, a story someone was telling or a Facebook post that made me write that down, but a little over a week later I can’t...
Remember when the price for a barrel of oil was actually below zero? Remember when interest rates were real close to zero? It wasn’t really that long ago, but it seems so distant. These fellers that call themselves the Fed are working hard to make me relive my youth. They’re doing a pretty good job. According to a New York Times story on Thursday, mortgage rates had stormed past 7% for the first time since 2002. That meant that the national median mortgage payment had ris...
My wife and I have been binge watching a new show on YouTube. Kent Rollins Cowboy Cooking has apparently been around a long while, but we’ve just stumbled onto his videos in the last few months. I put it on the tube one night before either of us had slumbered off to siesta time in our recliners and three or four episodes later we were still both awake and hooked on this Oklahoma cowboy named Kent Rollins and his chuck wagon and outdoor cooking. He hams it up in high cowboy sty...
A conversation-starter question at a meeting I was at last week asked those at the table to describe their first paid job. It was right down my alley and those at my table had to suffer through my long story of paperboy to publisher. We moved to Portales in 1970 and I turned 11 that spring. I saw an ad needing kids for newspaper routes, so I inquired about the opportunity. Circulation Manager Lewis Toland listened to my spiel and told me he was sorry but the minimum age to...
One of the fun things about my job is that folks expect the local chamber of commerce to know everything. Including, very frequently, local history. That might include someone trying to figure out where great-grandpa's homestead was or where the business granddad started in the 1930s might have been located. I get a lot of calls from confused people who have an old Portales address that dated before all the street names got a change. They'll get to looking at present day maps...
Briefly last week I thought I might have an identity crisis, but it turns out I’m just becoming more unique. The man on the radio asked me if I’d ever searched my name on the internet and if I needed to repair what’s out there. So naturally, with the World Wide Web as close as my cell phone, I did as I was told. It seems the most popular Karl Terry out there seems to be an old dude at least 20 years my senior who is a long-time rock and roll singer in Liverpool, Engla...
Recently I managed to combine two pieces of heirloom jewelry and I’ve gone back to wearing a wristwatch again. Nearly 20 years ago my wife bought me a nice Bulova watch with both yellow and white gold accents and a rim around the crystal with tiny diamonds. Very classy and I wore it all the time until the clasp on the band quit closing and the watch repairman I went to school with moved off to Santa Fe. Recently some of my late dad’s jewelry came out of the safe and I was aske...
I’ve never been squeamish at the sight of blood, but the Good Lord has been testing me out on that claim to fame lately. I’ve never had stitches other than for my appendectomy when I was in high school. That didn’t go so well, as I developed an abscess below the surgery incision and had grown something about grapefruit size on my tummy by the time we went to the doctor to see about it. He took matters into his own hands or more precisely a scalpel and opened up the incis...
Country life is hard, rough and tumble, then Youtube bans your channel. My latest binge-watch on Youtube was about a ranching family with like nine children from age 16 down to 2. The ranch house was something like 17 miles off the pavement and the ranch itself was bordered with or nearby the famed Area 51 where the government is supposedly hiding alien beings and testing alien aircraft and the like. At the turnoff to the ranch was a famed “black mailbox” where Area 51 fan...
I’ve been to a lot of places but I’ve never been in Cahoots. Apparently you can’t go alone, you have to be in Cahoots with someone. I’ve also never been in Cognito either. I hear no one recognizes you there. I have been in Sane. They don’t have an airport, you have to be driven there. I have made several trips. I know, I know, that’s an old Facebook groaner there but it describes just about how lost folks get these days without a map. I had a good friend drift through the...
Around these parts, if we’re not complaining about the lack of rain, we’re grousing about the weeds. My grandmother said of her father when he was looking for land in this country that he wanted two things — a place with shallow water and a place without Johnson grass. I’m not sure he was successful long-term on either account. I guess I officially switched gripes last week. On the way out to check the rain gauge, I found myself ankle deep in a patch of goat heads. Some of you...
As a red-blooded American male I have no problem recalling the vehicles I’ve owned in my lifetime. Most guys have no problem telling you everything about their first car; girls are a little fuzzy on make and model but most can recall the color and maybe the number of doors. I had no trouble recalling my 1968 Ford Fairlane 500 Fastback. But then, no, that wasn’t the first vehicle I drove. That could have been maybe steering granddad’s 1959 Chevrolet Apache stepside pickup or da...
I can’t believe the summer has slipped away so fast. I looked down the other morning and realized I haven’t even had time to sweep last year’s leaves off the patio yet. Kids these days seem to go back to school entirely too early in the year. I’ll bet that’s a sentiment nearly every teacher shares right about now. On the other hand there are parents just counting down the days until they go back. Basic school supply lists haven’t changed too much from my day. They still want...
I guess if I had to come down with the COVID virus at least it is satisfying to know that President Biden got it a couple of weeks later. He told me if I got vaccinated I wouldn’t get it. There goes that theory. I don’t wish it on anyone else. I lost some really good friends to the illness and it’s no joke. I’m just thankful that it’s not the same virus that we had at the beginning because my darling immune-suppressed wife got the stuff at the same time I did. I am thankful...
Cowboy poetry isn’t every person’s cup of tea and I didn’t know I was a fan until I became acquainted with Baxter Black. Sadly, we lost the retired large animal vet and Western philosopher recently, and a bit too soon. My first exposure to Baxter Black was through his weekly columns in the Quay County Sun back in the 1980s. He hadn’t yet hit the big time in cowboy poetry or maybe he had and the literary form just hadn’t seen its day yet. Either way, his columns didn’t co...
Ours has become a senior citizen home with the realization of the mortality of our youngest pup. None of us are spring chickens but she’s the youngest, even figuring in dog years. If she’s about 8 that would make her 56, but she’s a very rotund 56 — more rotund than even her daddy who has her beat by about seven years. She’s had a cough off and on for a good while. We treated it once with antibiotic and it seemed to get a little better but it would come back, then get better f...
Having lunch with a couple of guys that are older fogies than myself, I couldn’t win, So I just listened. The talk turned to hamburgers and how cheap we used to buy them growing up. When they got down to a quarter, I knew I couldn’t beat that myself. I can maybe remember a 35-cent burger growing up but mostly I would say they were 50 to 80 cents back then. In high school nearly every day at lunch I had the same thing -- jumbo cheeseburger, fries and cherry Coke at Pat’s Twin...
I’m not sure if grade-school kids actually have a music class these days, one with a teacher equipped with a piano and sheet music, but I did. Each student was shuttled through a music class and an art class. I believe we did one or the other each week. The music building, an old WWII-era barracks, was across the street near the equipment playground. I guess that way the racket didn’t disturb students studying other subjects. Bless her heart, Mrs. Brasell tried her best to...
I grew up on an irrigated farm, or maybe I should say farms, in Roosevelt County just before the handwriting appeared on the wall. Irrigated farming was destined to change and eventually cease in eastern New Mexico. Some had dared mention it in the 1960s but it wasn’t until I was off the farm in the 1970s that everyone knew the problem was dire and wouldn’t reverse itself. I was reading the 1977 Special “Progress Edition” of the Portales News-Tribune that I mentioned a few col...
I’m currently undergoing climate change inside my home. I’m worried. My garage is heating up like nobody’s business. It’s pretty easy to sweat completely through a shirt just getting loaded up in the car. The car displays the outside temperature in the garage as 91 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s pretty warm. But as high as that temperature is there is an advancing ice age in my freezer. When that sucker started frosting up it really got with it. I thought it would take humid con...
Ever wake up 40 years later and wonder what you did to be so blessed by God? That’s what I’m doing today as my wife and I celebrate that milestone of 40 years. I found the right person at the right time in my life and I’ve never looked back — well except maybe on special anniversaries. I think about all of the couples who give up and throw the towel in at the first sign of trouble. Granted we are both too hard-headed to give up most things, especially marriage. If we gave up...
I’m a bit of a history geek and the more local the history the better. I’ve been geeking out recently and as I write this column tonight on a little gift from my editor. He had asked me recently if I wanted any of the old newspapers in the old Portales News-Tribune morgue. The building was being sold and the contents that had been painstakingly saved for years and maintained carefully (at times by yours truly) were going to have to be moved to his office in Clovis. Thi...
Christmas has its poinsettia, Thanksgiving a cornucopia, St. Patrick’s Day its shamrock and Easter is known for lilies. Memorial Day has a simple but bright red poppy as its symbol. Nearly a decade ago I wrote a Memorial Day column that got more comments from people than anything I’d written for a while. With our nation currently not directly involved in a war for the first Memorial Day in more than two decades I felt like we needed a reminder of the real price of war. Our...
As far as I’m concerned the best part of waking up is Folgers in my cup. I mostly like my coffee pretty plain. Black with sweetener in it works for me. As far as my wife’s cup is concerned, the sweeter and milkier the better. We went 20 years without making coffee in the morning. But the breakfast table became our refuge and rehab as she was recovering from health concerns. The drip coffee maker I only used when my parents stayed with us got pressed into service every mor...
Word came last week that the building where I spent a good portion of my youth was finally about to be repurposed. Soon, the Portales News-Tribune building will be home to an insurance company. Once we moved to town in 1970 I figured I needed a job and the only thing available to a young man was newspaper carrier or paperboy. The only problem was a paperboy had to be 12 to get on at the Portales News-Tribune. I applied anyway. I talked to a bespeckled man named Lewis Toland...
