Pages past — June 19

On this date ...link

1975: Santa Fe Archbishop Rev. Robert Sanchez was making plans to visit all of the Catholic parishes in the Clovis-Portales area.

“The complexities of the times with its inherent changes necessitates my movement among the people,” he said.

1960: Funeral services were being planned for a former Clovis resident who fell trying to scale the 14,000-foot Blanca Peak in Colorado.

Max Cooper, whose father J.M. Cooper was an early-day Clovis settler, was killed, along with Neal Campbell. Both men worked at the Los Alamos atomic research lab.

They became separated from a group that included a dozen other climbers.

Their bodies were found at the base of a sharp drop in deep snow.

1955: About two inches of rain pounded Clovis, but the city escaped large hail that wiped out wheat and cotton crops near Friona.

Officials said winds were clocked at 63 mph during the storm, but no major damage was reported.

Melrose and Fort Sumner residents were without power for more than three hours after a lightning strike “broke an insulator off a cross bar and wrapped two of the three wires together,” the Clovis News-Journal reported.

1945: Opal Jackson of the Fitzhugh Addition in Clovis received a telegram reporting the death of her husband, Pvt. James D. Jackson, on May 11 on the Okinawa Island in Japan.

Jackson had previously been reported missing in action.

The private had lived in Clovis and the Grier community all of his life, the Clovis News-Journal reported. He was 26 and survived by his wife, his mother, and two children.

Pages Past is compiled by Editor David Stevens. For more regional history, check out his weblog at: http://www.highplainsyesterdays.com