Marty Shaeffer soared as Clovis grew

Earl Martin Shaeffer, known to most as "Marty," left a legacy in Clovis — and around the nation.

Shaeffer, who died Jan. 26 in Phoenix after a short illness at age 86, came to Clovis from Silver City with his family in 1964.

They soon set to work on a real estate development and construction company responsible for about 180 houses and more than 100 other residences here, as well as commercial properties.

If you live in the Colonial Park subdivision or golf there, odds are good you are enjoying some output of the Martin Shaeffer Construction Co., for which Ellen Claire "EC" Shaeffer, his wife, supplied design work.

The golf course was already underway by the time the Shaeffers arrived, but he soon became "a moving force" to expand the course another nine holes and take it to country club level, his obituary reads.

In a career made largely of building homes, Shaeffer and his were familiar with their product. Their daughter recalled living in over a dozen houses before they ended up on St. Andrews Drive.

"We lived in 17 different houses growing up, and most of them were on Fairway Terrace," Jo Ellen Shaeffer said. "We lived in model houses, basically. Many times he would start to build my mom a custom house and halfway through somebody would walk through and want to buy it. ... My mom wouldn't call it fun (moving down the block frequently) but the rest of us thought it was fun."

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Marty Shaeffer's work ultimately included projects in Midland, Denver, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, family members said.

With all that travel, it wasn't long before he found the utility and joy of aviation, a hobby that soon became a passion.

"In the beginning it was a hobby. You know, people used to fly a lot. Instead of driving some place, they would fly," Jo Ellen Shaeffer said. "It was much cheaper and more economical at that time. It isn't necessarily so, now."

"Everybody was a pilot in those days," EC Shaeffer said. "A lot of the professional people — doctors, dentists, the people that had things to do or places to go or just wanted to have some fun. And a few women, too. I actually passed the written exam and I soared. ... But Marty really put his heart and soul into aviation. He was an excellent pilot."

Marty Shaeffer did not bring flight capability to Clovis, but he made inroads in the region significant enough to earn recognition at the federal level.

As a key owner of aviation service centers in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2005 he was honored "for his participation in furthering the field of aviation" with a plaque at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hawzy Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport in Fairfax County, Virginia.

That museum opened two years earlier as a "companion facility" to the National Air and Space Museum in the nation's capitol, according to its website.

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Marty Shaeffer's impact through aviation had a more specific and local manifestation, too. His wife said Wednesday that it was the larceny of their Cessna airplane that landed a Muleshoe native into the New Mexico prison from which he attempted a daring 1988 escape via helicopter.

EC Shaeffer said she and her husband returned to Clovis from a trip out of town for her birthday in 1986 and found his plane missing from the hangar. That didn't raise alarms at first.

"When we came back he went out at the airport and said 'My plane's gone, I wonder who took it?'" she said in a phone interview from Phoenix.

It was a simpler time. In fact, Marty Shaeffer and his aviation peers were not unaccustomed to borrowing each other's aircraft from time to time, but in this case it turned out someone had sawed off the lock to the hangar, found the keys inside the plane and took flight.

Six weeks later the culprit, Randy Lackey, was found in North Carolina after landing the plane in a restricted area at night, EC Shaeffer said. He was tried back in Curry County and convicted "of stealing a Cessna T-210 Centurian airplane from the Clovis Municipal Airport," according to newspaper archives.

During trial, Lackey "tried to tell people that Marty had loaned him the plane," EC Shaeffer said. "He got word that people did that in Clovis back in those days."

She said Lackey had even taken free flying lessons on a similar plane prior to the theft, courtesy the generous hearts of Clovis.

Lackey, who stole the plane "within a week of his escape from Bailey County Jail," was sentenced to nine years in prison, records show.

Yet on July 11, 1988, Lackey was in motion again, this time in such form to draw the entire nation's attention to New Mexico. It was on that date a helicopter plucked Lackey and three other prisoners from the exercise yard of the Santa Fe prison. Lackey was arrested again the same day after the chopper landed at Mid-Valley Airport outside Los Lunas, according to the Los Angeles times.

"(Lackey) was probably the one who set (the escape attempt) up," Chief Deputy District Attorney John Cassell said at the time. "Or he was the one they were trying to break out."

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Marty and EC self-published a book on their lives together, she said, but she wasn't sure if there were any copies still in Clovis since they left in 2004. That book is some 350 pages, one of many records he left — not to mention the buildings, the people and the stories.