I've been geeking out a little over local history

I’m a bit of a history geek and the more local the history the better.

I’ve been geeking out recently and as I write this column tonight on a little gift from my editor. He had asked me recently if I wanted any of the old newspapers in the old Portales News-Tribune morgue. The building was being sold and the contents that had been painstakingly saved for years and maintained carefully (at times by yours truly) were going to have to be moved to his office in Clovis.

Thinking of all the newspaper files and photos I have in boxes in several closets and the garage I declined. But I did tell him if he ran onto any of the old Progress Editions that we used to publish to snag them for me.

I knew they were a good collection of local history and also talked a lot about the business and industry of the area. They would be good reference and good reading without a trip to the library. He blessed me with copies of the 1972 edition, when Roosevelt County was 70 years old, and the 1977 edition when the county was marking its Diamond Jubilee.

The 1972 edition looked vaguely familiar and I was responsible for getting it into the hands of more than 100 readers as I had been a paperboy for almost six months at the time. The other one I remember a lot more vividly as I worked in the pressroom. The special section alone was 44 pages in three sections with color on the front section (that was in the days when we rarely ran color). On top of that was another 32 to 36 pages for the regular Sunday paper. We ran non-stop all week with all the other outside jobs we printed.

That 75th anniversary edition was a whopper of a newspaper when it landed on folks sidewalks that November. I was a freshman college student on top of that job, so I doubt if I read the thing cover-to-cover back then.

The recipe for those progress editions was to sell to businesses that didn’t always advertise alongside the regular folks. If they bought an ad and paid the price they would get a little story about their business as well. It was sometimes your only shot to sell an ad to an industrial client that could afford a big ad. Some newspapers contracted with out of town companies to sell and produce these things. The PNT did not do that, then or ever to my knowledge.

This one had sections for ranching, oil and gas, agriculture, industry and a good bit about forming the Roosevelt County government. This was a real blast from the past. The business people featured in the business stories were people I remember from 45 years ago and the history stories went all the way back to cowtown days before Roosevelt County was established.

I guess we’ve continued to progress in our little county in the last 45 years, I’m just not sure we could sell that progress on the printed page anymore.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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