Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Clovis hosts its annual Pioneer Days events this week, highlighted by a parade on Saturday.
Promoters are promising fun times for all involved. That may be true, but the times probably won’t be as dangerous as they were during the first Pioneer Days parade.
That happened in 1935 and featured Leo the Lion.
Leo was a real lion — a real dangerous lion, as Bill Nelson found out when he tried to load the beast into a cage the night before the parade.
“The lion was securely caged, but in transferring it from its cage at the zoo into the one on the float, (Nelson) was scratched on the shoulder when the animal took a swipe at him through the bars,” the Clovis Evening News-Journal reported on June 5, 1935.
The Clovis Lions Club had the brilliant idea of including Leo on their float. They laughed in the face of the danger a day earlier.
“When Claude ‘Squatty’ Dennis accepted election to the office of ‘tail twister’ in the Lions club recently, he really had no idea what the duties of the office entailed,” the newspaper reported on June 4, 1935. “Now he wishes he’d died when he was little.”
The story said the club tail twister traditionally was responsible for collecting dimes when members violated the club rules. This year, club members joked, he was supposed to get that lion to behave.
Dennis declined the job, but club President C.L. Dobbs appointed a “lion-loading committee” that included himself, Nelson and four others.
Only Nelson was injured, and apparently not seriously.
The Lions no longer include actual lions on their parade floats.
Other noteworthy events from that first Pioneer Days:
• An estimated 15,000 people “jammed the business district” to watch the parade, which spread out over two miles, the newspaper reported.
• Parade highlights, in addition to the lion, included an ox team from Denton, Texas, a Melrose float that featured a covered wagon, a “gaily decorated cart drawn by a burro,” and a Woodmen of the World entry, with men carrying axes over their shoulders.
• The Mandell’s department store float featured men’s apparel from 1909 to 1935, which “aroused much merriment in the crowd,” according to the newspaper.
• Campbell’s Ice Cream was represented in the parade by a “gigantic ice cream cone and an equally large milk bottle.”
• “Hillcrest” was selected as the name of the new city park. Officials said they received 115 entries in the naming contest. O.J. Clopper, who lived at 1009 Thornton St., won the $25 prize.
• The weather was uneventful on the day of the first Pioneer Days parade, but organizers must have been sweating it a little. The night before, the area between Muleshoe and Friona reported up to 10 inches of rain in places, with hail a foot deep. The Evening News-Journal reported it was a “terrific rain.”
David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
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