Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The skyline in my little hometown underwent a big change in the last week.
At the time of this writing the old concrete Worley Mills grain elevator was still in the sky above downtown Portales but it looked more like some of the bombed out sky rise apartment in Ukraine’s large cities. At the rate the demolition is proceeding it may be down completely when you read this story.
The skyline for the prairie town of Portales has had its share of character. We had twin “high rise” dormitories on Eastern New Mexico University’s campus (one is down and the other soon may be gone). We have the water tower over Rotary Park that lets you know you’re home coming in from the west. We once had another water tower downtown near where the grain elevator stood but it’s gone now too. We still have the Roosevelt County Courthouse and I guess it’ll have to serve alone as the downtown skyline now.
The answer is, yes, I had been to the top of all those structures before I got out of high school. We climbed both water towers in the dark of night without getting caught. I was in students’ rooms on the top floor of the dorms and we went to the top of the grain elevator and the courthouse to take photos for the annual staff.
For years I’ve wondered how they would take that elevator down when it came time to do so. Then over this last year word got around that it was going to happen. I had always hoped they would use explosives and implode it. We could have made a fortune selling popcorn on the square if they had. A crane and wrecking ball was to be the towering structure’s executioner.
Everyone in town has bemoaned the structure’s demise on the pages of Facebook. It really has struck a chord. I’m no different; it was a part of my life as a farm kid from as early as I could remember.
We didn’t always have much choice, stay at the field with Dad and the combine or ride to town in a truck with Grandaddy Bob or mom or one of the hands. At the grain elevator we knew we had a long wait in line in a truck with no air conditioning and an AM radio. But once you got to the scales there was ice cold soda pop and a piece of candy offered up by one of the kindest, most gentle men I knew, Bob Worley. In his white shirt, tie and dark horn-rim glasses he was the face of Portales business for that era. A business community that depended on the income those grain trucks were hauling to downtown Portales.
It’s sad to see the changes in our little community but things change and we have to move on and dream about our next skyline.
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: