Pages Past — Nov. 27

On this date ...

1968: Tickets were on sale for the annual Clovis Chamber of Commerce banquet scheduled Dec. 14 at the Holiday Inn. Tickets were $6.50 and included admission to the entertainment portion of the evening, in which the Levee Singers were to perform at Marshall Auditorium.

1961: Lane Pattison, a New Mexico State University student from Claud, had been released from the hospital after a tree fell on him in northern New Mexico. Family members said he was unconscious for several weeks, but could now sit up five or six hours a day. He was recovering at an apartment in Taos.

1957: Big news in Elida: Mr. and Mrs. Claud McDowell were driving a new Mercury car, the community was still talking about the recent bonfire pep rally/wiener roast at the high school baseball field, and Johnnie Creighton, who was operating a barber shop in Ruidoso, was in town visiting his friends and parents.

In national news

1970: A Bolivian artist disguised as a priest tried to stab Pope Paul VI with a foot-long knife. Aides threw themselves in front of the pontiff, subdued the assailant and the uninjured pope went ahead with a full day of activities, United Press International reported. The suspect said he wanted to “eliminate” the pope because he didn’t believe in ideology or religion and the pope was the symbol of “superstition and hypocrisy.”

Their business

1970: Clovis High School’s Rock Staubus Gym is named for one of the school’s first coaches. When Staubus arrived form Chandler, Oklahoma, in 1924, he was the high school’s only coach, and found a locker room “big enough for two men and two lockers,” the Clovis News-Journal reported. He coached multiple sports, but was best known for his basketball teams, which won 14 consecutive district championships, from 1927 to 1940. They won the state championship in 1930. Staubus died April 12, 1950, at age 51 after suffering a heart attack five months earlier.

Pages Past is compiled by Editor David Stevens. Contact him at:

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