Archives for August 2000

The death of a Howardwick man that first fueled speculations of murder was ruled a suicide last week.

Roger Howerton of 2200 Carroll Creek Acres in Howardwick was found dead in his home last Tuesday afternoon, August 15, by Chief Deputy Butch Blackburn.

Howerton’s father had not heard from his son for about a week and contacted the Donley County Sheriff’s Office. Blackburn entered the home on a welfare check, and the man was later officially pronounced dead by Justice of the Peace Jimmy Johnson.

An autopsy was performed on August 16 in Lubbock, and a preliminary report gave the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Blackburn said the 40-year-old man had probably been dead for six or seven days before being found.

Sheriff Jimmy Thompson and Texas Ranger Gary Henderson assisted with the investigation.

Looking for some good barbecue?  Come on over to St. Mary’s Parish in Clarendon at the corner of Montgomery and McClelland to take part in the third annual St. Mary’s Day Celebration on Sunday, September 10. 

The meal will be from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and tickets will be $6 for adults and $3.50 for children.  In addition to the meal, there will be entertainment, a country store, and quilt raffle. 

St. Mary’s Day originated three years ago as an event to recognize the history of the parish and to serve as a fundraiser for a much needed parish hall. 

Parish members continue to be dedicated to building the parish hall and encourage the support of families in the area to attend the barbecue meal on September 10.

For more information about St. Mary’s Day or to acquire tickets, contact Dorothy Harvey at 874-5097 or Leon Church at 874-2926.  Hope to see you there!

The Donley County Commissioners’ Court approved the issuance of $550,000 in tax notes this week to provide matching funds for the restoration of the 1890 courthouse.

The notes issued during Monday’s regular session of the court will be paid off in 2007 and will be funded through ad valorem taxes. The first payment will be August 1, 2001.

All three local banks are participating in the county’s financing. The Donley County State Bank and the Community Bank will each hold $175,000 of the debt, and the Herring National Bank will carry $200,000.

The interest rate on the notes is 6¼ percent, and the notes can be called at any time. In other words, the county can pay the notes off ahead of time if it has the money.

Ken Smith of Southwest Securities set up the tax note offering for the county.

“I think you’ve got an excellent deal from the local banks,” Smith said. “They’ve been real good to you, especially Jerry Woodard [at Herring].”

County Judge Jack Hall said the court appreciates the help from the local banks.

“The commissioners and I are grateful for their support,” he said. “We think it’s a good reflection of the local support for this project.”

Smith said that 6¼ percent was a very good interest rate and that it would have been more difficult to make the notes callable if the county had gone through a public offering.

The money can be placed in an interest bearing account while the county waits for bills to come in on the restoration project, Smith said. Interest earned on the money must be used on the project itself or to pay on the notes.

Earlier this year Donley County was awarded $2.9 million from the Texas Historical Committee to completely restore and refurbish the county courthouse. Money from the tax notes issued this week will be used for the county’s 15 percent match and for other expenses related to the project.

Built in 1890, the Donley County Courthouse is the oldest functioning courthouse in the Texas Panhandle and is one of the most unique structures of its kind in the State of Texas.

Also in Monday’s session of the court, the commissioners considered a contract with Sun City Analytical, Inc., of El Paso for the abatement of asbestos, lead paint, and bat guano from the courthouse.

Sun City’s proposal would have cost the county $23,656. Following a telephone conversation with the court however, Sun City lowered their price by more than $2,300. The commissioners agreed to a contract in the amount of $21,521.

For more information on the restoration of the Donley County Courthouse, click here.

Clarendon High School will field a baseball team next spring following a vote by the school board last week.

The decision came in a unanimous vote of Clarendon CISD Trustees in their regular meeting Thursday, August 10.

School officials had been studying the possibility of adding baseball for sometime, according to CISD Superintendent Monty Hysinger. The enthusiasm of the Athletic Director Roger Hoeltzel and the coaching staff helped finalize the deal, he said.

“The athletic director said we could do it with our existing staff and on a shoestring budget,” Hysinger said. “And we have a group of students who really want to play.”

One of Clarendon’s newest coaches, Danny Brittain, will lead the Broncos onto the baseball diamond with the assistance of Coach Hoeltzel. Brittain was the head baseball coach for three years in Aspermont and was named coach of the year there. Hoeltzel played baseball in college, Hysinger said.

“I took this job with the hope that Clarendon would start baseball,” Coach Brittain said, noting he was glad it happened in his first year here.

“We have a lot of enthusiastic kids,” he said. “At least 18 kids may come out for the team.”

School officials say they plan to play their games at McClellan Field near City Park.

The Broncos will have a very small district this year, facing only Wellington and West Texas High at Stinnett, and should be a shoe-in for the playoffs since three teams advance from the district level.

Hysinger said the school plans to talk with female athletes to determine if there is any interest in forming a Lady Bronco softball team.

Meanwhile, the Broncos will start working out the first of February and will likely play their first game toward the end of that month, Brittain said.

School officials say they do not know when the last time was that CHS fielded a baseball team. Yearbooks in the school library don’t show baseball teams during the 1950s or 1940s, and no yearbooks are on file for the 1930s.

Clarendon High did however have a baseball team in the 1910s and mid 1920s. (Oddly, in 1926, the baseball team was called the Roosters while other teams were known by the more common nickname, the Bronchos.)

The work of one of Clarendon’s most acclaimed talents will be celebrated next month in Canyon.

Clarendon artist H.D. Bugbee in his studio in about 1925.
Photo courtesy Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
 
The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum will open a retrospective of the Southwestern artist H.D. Bugbee on September 9, 2000. 

To observe the 100th anniversary of Bugbee’s birth, the museum will bring together 100 of Bugbee’s finest works in oil, watercolor, pen-and-ink, and sculpture. 

Bugbee, who lived much of his life in Clarendon, portrayed historic and then-contemporary Southern Plains life, including cowboys, American Indians, and flora and fauna of the region.

At the suggestion of his cousin, cattleman T.S. Bugbee, Harold Dow Bugbee came to the Texas Panhandle from Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1914 with his parents.  He studied at Texas A&M College in 1917 and the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1920.

Advised by cattlemen Frank Collinson and Charles Goodnight, Bugbee rendered the landscape and wildlife of the Texas Panhandle, as well as nostalgic paintings of Indians and cowboys.  Each fall, until the late 1930s, the artist traveled to Taos to paint with his fellow artists “Buck” Dunton, Frank Hoffman, Leon Gaspard, and Ralph Meyers, often packing into the mountains to paint with either Meyers or Dunton.

By the mid-1920s, galleries in Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York handled Bugbee’s work.  With the Depression and decreasing picture sales, in 1933 Bugbee turned to magazine illustration, a practice he maintained for some eighteen years.  He did pen-and-ink illustrations for Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream, among others.  Additionally, Bugbee also illustrated a number of significant books on Western history including J. Evetts Haley’s Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, Willie N. Lewis’s Between Sun and Sod, and S. Omar Barker’s Songs of the Saddleman and others.  He also continued to make easel paintings.

Under Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Bugbee painted the first of five murals for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum’s Pioneer Hall in 1934.  He later painted additional murals for the Amarillo Army Air Field and a set of murals on Native American life for the museum.

Bugbee exhibited at the Tri-State Fair at Amarillo, Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition in 1936, the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition at Dallas in 1937, and in the annual West Texas art exhibitions at Fort Worth.  He also had numerous solo exhibitions in Texas and exhibited at Taos.

In 1951, Bugbee became the first Curator of Art of Panhandle-Plains, a position he held until his death.  Over two hundred thirty Bugbee works are part of the Museum’s art.  Exhibits of Bugbee’s illustrated letters, his work in Taos, NM, and his illustrations for J. Evetts Haley’s books will be ancillary to the larger retrospective.

H.D. Bugbee: 100 at 100 will include works from the museum’s collection as well as objects from public and private collections across the United States.  The exhibition will run through February 18, 2001.

AUSTIN – Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander last week allocated $275.5 million in sales tax revenue to 1,107 Texas cities and 119 counties.

Locally, Clarendon saw its rebate slip by nearly five percent from the same period last year for a total of $25,315.18. Hedley’s rebate was up 2.62 percent to $695.18, and Howardwick was down more than 43 percent to $916.40.

For the year to date, Clarendon’s rebates are up slightly while Hedley and Howardwick are running behind.

August sales tax rebates represent sales taxes collected in April, May and June and reported to the Comptroller in July.

For more details of August sales tax payments go to the Texas Comptroller’s website.

Trustees for the Charles E. and Thelma A. Bairfield Memorial Foundation awarded $8,000 to four local groups last week.

 
The Bairfield Foundation awarded a total of $8,000 to four different groups last week. Shown here are (back) Jimmy Swinney of the VFW, Clarendon FCA Choir co-sponsor Mike Ray, Bill Holden of the VFW, (front) Bairfield Foundation trustee Rev. James Ivey Edwards, Clarendon FCA Choir co-sponsor Michelle Ray, and Hedley Community Choir director Bruce Howard. Not pictured is Jack Moreman of the Adamson-Lane chapter of American Legion. 
Enterprise Digital Photo.
 
The Hedley Community Choir and the Clarendon High School FCA Choir each received $3,000.

The Hedley choir will use its money to purchase ties and vests for its members, and the Clarendon choir plans to use the grant to help offset the cost of sending its kids to either a leadership camp or a mission camp.

The Donley County Memorial Post #7782 of the VFW received $1,500 to purchase flags for veterans’ graves around the county. Another $500 was awarded to the Adamson-Lane Chapter of the American Legion in Hedley for flags at the Rowe Cemetery.

The Bairfield Foundation was set up in 1993 and has awarded approximately $58,000 to just causes since that time. Previous recipients have included the Saints’ Roost Museum, the Clarendon Volunteer Fire Department, the “Something More” After School Program, Clarendon Little League, Clarendon Girl Scouts, the Donley County Capital Fund (for the courthouse project), and the City of Clarendon (for the City Park renovation).

An evening wreck near Clarendon sent two people to the hospital after an RV ran into a semi-truck last Friday.

 
This RV came to rest just a few feet from the BNSF railway about a mile west of Clarendon after it collided with a semi-truck late Friday night.
Enterprise Digital Photo.
 
The RV, driven by 74-year-old Alice Milner of Lake Dallas, Texas, was westbound in the right-hand lane of US 287 about 0.4 mile west of Clarendon. At the same time, Ronald Joe Bulger of Quiln, Missouri, was driving the semi-truck in the left-hand lane, passing Milner.

According to a Department of Public Safety official, Milner began to pull into the left-hand lane to turn around and come back to town when she ran into the semi-truck at approximately 8:42 p.m. The RV ran off the highway, coming to rest a few feet from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks.

Milner was transported by ambulance to Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo where she was listed in stable condition, DPS Trooper Chris Ward said. Milner’s passenger, 67-year-old Bobbye Riney of Lake Dallas, was not injured.

Bulger was also uninjured, but his 22-year-old daughter, Melissa Bulger, suffered minor injuries. She was transported to Northwest Texas Hospital where she was treated and released.

A citation was issued to Milner for unsafe passing, Ward said.