Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

So much history in our towns

If you have even a passing interest in New Mexico history, odds are you have at some point encountered the F. Stanley books — dozens of slim softbound volumes that tell the stories of some of our region’s tiniest communities.

My first exposure was back in 1979 when I was a new student hire in Special Collections at Eastern New Mexico University’s Golden Library.

I had your average college freshman’s interest in history (somewhere between little and none), but I do remember being intrigued by these booklets because they claimed to tell the stories of places I knew well, like Milnesand, Dora, Causey, Rogers, and Elida.

To be honest, I’d rather forgotten them until recently when I was given copies of five of the booklets.

It was like being reunited with some friends I’d never gotten to know very well.

At 56, my interest in history is light years ahead of where it was back in college, and these curious little books are fascinating.

My college brain was so buried in the sand that I never knew that my boss at the time — Mary Jo Walker — was writing “The F. Stanley Story” during the years I worked for her. It was published in 1985 by the Lightning Tree press in Santa Fe.

F. Stanley was a pen name for Louis Crocchiola, who was born in New York in 1908. When he was ordained a priest in 1938, he added the names Stanley and Francis ahead of his given name. He’s best known as Father Stanley, in part because of the books, but, Walker clarified, the “F” was for Francis, not Father.

The prolific grassroots historian/priest is credited with 177 titles in his lifetime, the majority being the “place books,” as Walker called them, named for the towns they represented.

By my count, there were 122 of the 20-24 page volumes devoted to New Mexico towns, ranging alphabetically from “The Abiquiu, New Mexico, Story” to “The Zia, New Mexico, Story,” and at least 20 short volumes on Texas locations from Canadian to White Deer.

The soft-bound booklets are 5 1/2 inches wide, and 8 1/2 inches tall, and highly recognizable with their state flag colored covers — yellow with red print for New Mexico stories, blue with white for tales from the Lone Star State.

He also wrote a slew of longer works, all devoted to Southwest history.

Walker wrote that “one of the ironies in Father Stanley’s career as a writer is that he did so much, yet profited so little from his contributions in any sense.”

He was criticized for “quantities of small, careless errors” in his works, Walker noted, but she defended him for the sheer volume of material he gathered, saying without his efforts, much of the information he preserved “would have remained virtually inaccessible for most people.”

In a forward used in a reprint of F. Stanley’s “The Grant That Maxwell Bought,” New Mexico historian Marc Simmons credits Walker’s “sympathetic biography” of Stanley as helping him have a more charitable view of the history-loving padre’s body of work.

“The fact is,” Simmons wrote, “despite his deficiencies, he managed to make in his own quirky way a not insignificant contribution to our regional history.”

If you’d like a peek at these quick reads, there is an ample local selection. Clovis-Carver Library shows 68 F. Stanley works in its online catalog, the Portales Public Library has 88, and Golden Library has 89. All three also have Walker’s biography.

“The body of work produced by F. Stanley will become part of the vast lore about the Southwest,” the late author Jack D. Rittenhouse wrote. “Future writers will correct its errors, just as their mistakes will be corrected by later scholars. But someone had to start it, and F. Stanley was the man.”

Betty Williamson regrets never meeting Father Stanley. Reach her at: [email protected]