Pages Past: April 16

On this date ...link

1950: Portales’ five Baptist churches set an all-time record for Sunday school attendance, Rev. L.A. Doyle said. Doyle said 1,525 people were in Sunday school, shattering the previous record by 137.

1910: I.D. Johnson, 6, arrived in Clovis by train with his parents. “He learned to swim at a lake located on the corner of what is now 10th and Main Street,” his son, Bob Johnson wrote in a report for the history book “Curry County, New Mexico.”

“He earned extra money by peddling empty beer and whiskey bottles back to the Free Coinage Bar (located in the 300 block on Main Street). This ambitious enterprise was brought to an abrupt halt by the newly elected city commissioner, his father.

“And on one hot summer day, he pulled his drowning best friend Hubert Bell from Dutchman’s Lake (now known as Greene Acres Lake) and was unable to revive him on the bank.”

Johnson grew up to become a dentist and began practicing in 1928 in Portales, claiming he wasn’t sure Clovis would welcome him because of all the mischief he had created there as a boy. He moved his dentist office to Clovis about 1932. Johnson and Cotton Simms started the Colonial Park Country Club on Clovis’ north side.

Transitions …

1970: John David Dabau, 68, a prominent farmer-rancher in eastern New Mexico, died in a Tucumcari hospital following an extended illness. Dabau owned a wheat farm and ranch that stretched through parts of Curry and Quay counties.

1966: Ollie Powell, who homesteaded in the Dora community in 1906, died in Roosevelt General Hospital. He’d lived in Portales the last 20 years, where he was in the real estate business.

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

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