Archives for July 2001

The 123rd annual Saints’ Roost Celebration gets underway this week, and visitors can plan to enjoy a new kind of rodeo and a new venue for the barbecue and crafts fair this year.

The celebration begins Wednesday, July 4, in downtown Clarendon with the Bicycle Parade at 10:00 a.m. Kids can sign-up the day of the parade at Eads Furniture & Appliance or the Chamber of Commerce Office. Line up will begin at 9:15 a.m. by the Post Office.

The fun continues on the Fourth at Thunder Junction with the Clarendon Tourism Council. They will serve sloppy joes and ice cream beginning at 1:00 p.m. while everyone enjoys the water slide, go carts, and miniature golf. Kids can pop their own fireworks from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. in a designated area at Thunder Junction. Parental supervision is required. 

The Donley County Horse Club will get Friday started with their Stick Horse Rodeo. The rodeo will be held in the vacant lot across from the Post Office from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. The rodeo is a fun event for all children nine and under. There will be an entry fee of 50¢ per event.

The annual Depression Lunch will begin at 11:00 a.m. inside the Main Street Ministry. The First Baptist Church will help serve the beans and cornbread for a low price. They will also be selling drinks and delicious desserts.

The annual Rodeo has changed this year to a Ranch Rodeo. The competition begins at 7:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday night at the rodeo ground with 24 different teams from ranches around the area.

Local teams include Cook Ranch, O’Brien Ranch, Finch Ranch, Running H Ranch, Matthews/Darsey Ranch, High Card Ranch, Sombrero Cattle Company, Spring Creek Ranch, Hall Ranch, JA Ranch, 3H Cattle Company, I Bar Ranch, Bar W Ranch, Spade Ranch, and the RO Ranch.

Ranch rodeo events will include Bronc Riding, Wild Cow Milking, Calf Branding, Team Doctoring, Team Sortin’, and the Open Wild Mare Race.

A junior calf and steer riding contest for kids ages 4-12 will be held each night along with the calf scramble for kids ages 12 and under. A free $200 beef certificate will be drawn each night. On Saturday night the drawing for the National Finals Rodeo/Las Vegas trip and the custom spurs by Wade Brannon will be held.

The rodeo dance will begin at 10:00 p.m. at the Panhandle’s largest open-air dance floor at the Rodeo Grounds with Young Country Friday and Saturday night. The dance concludes at 2:00 a.m.

The celebration gets in full swing on Saturday morning with the VFW breakfast at 7:00 a.m. at the VFW Hall. The RHAA Ranch Horse Competition begins at 8:00 a.m. at the rodeo grounds. The event is sponsored by McLean Feedyard and Clarendon Outdoor Entertainment Association.

The annual fair and barbecue on the courthouse square has been moved to the City Park due to construction beginning on the Donley County Courthouse. The relocation lends itself to the new “Art in the Park” designation.

The fair begins at 10:00 a.m. The Old Settler’s Reunion will begin at 10:30 a.m. at the City Park. The Shriners will begin serving a delicious barbecue lunch at 11:00 a.m. The annual Lions Club Cow Patty Bingo will be held at 1:30 p.m. also in the park.

The line up for the parade will begin at noon two blocks west of the City Park. The parade route will be from the baseball fields on Seventh Street to Kearney, then up Kearney to Third Street, west to Jefferson, and then back to the ball fields.

Actor Barry Corbin, star of screen and television, will lead this year’s parade.

Henson’s annual Turtle Race will be at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. Sign-up your turtle at the store from now until the race day. After the kids race their turtles, the VFW will raffle their shotgun.

Early this week, a last minute addition was made to the celebration. A carnival will be here Friday, Saturday, and Sunday beginning at 1 p.m. each day at Thunder Junction.

Have a safe and happy celebration!

By Mary Beth Nelson

W.K Hardin and Claudine Todd have been named as Clarendon’s Pioneer Man and Woman of the Year for 2001.

W.K, born September 17, 1909, in Hardin County, Tennessee, moved to Donley County in 1922 with his parents, Watt and Lola Hardin, one brother, Hall, and three sisters, Ruth Cearley, Mary K. Todd, and Annie Marie Estes. Another brother, Homer, was born to the family after their move from Tennessee.

Settling in Sunny View community, six miles east of Clarendon, the Hardins continued farming, a lifelong occupation to which W.K. has been happily dedicated. He grins as he mentions the family’s first car, a Model T with curtains for windows.

“In the summertime, we’d take the curtains off,” recollects our Pioneer Man of the Year.

In 1940, W.K. entered an Army one-year training program. After Pearl Harbor’s 1941 bombing, he spent 36 months in Europe and North Africa serving as wench operator in 591st Engineer Boat Regiment. After his World War II service discharge in 1945, he returned to the farm.

June 10, 1947, W.K. married Maxine Ellis, daughter of former Clarendon Doctor T.H. Ellis and Elizabeth Dyer Ellis. After a Colorado Springs honeymoon where the prestigious Broadmoor Hotel charged $23.00 a day (meals included), W.K. and Maxine established residence at 902 West 3rd Street where they currently reside. They attend Clarendon’s Episcopal Church and have parented five children – David, Cheryl, Shauna, Brent, and Kelli.

This hard-working gentleman continued to farm for 50 years. Is he still active? To answer that question, one has only to drive by his home to see an immense, flourishing garden and well-kept lawn on lovely, spacious grounds to which he tends, himself. Spending only three or four days in a hospital during his entire life, he remains healthy and enjoys staying busy with his accomplishments. While discussing his eagerness and obvious zest for daily work, W.K. remarked, “When I die, I want to have my shoes on.”

W.K and Maxine are both avid readers. His reading preference extends from National Geographic and numerous other magazines to authors, Louis L’Lamour and John Grisham.

Through the years, W.K Hardin has supported the Clarendon community and is proud to be one of its citizens. He sums it up best in his statement, “Clarendon is the best little town in the country.”

Claudine has always expressed a special pride in the Clarendon community of which she has been a loyal citizen most of her life.

Her earlier years were spent in Comanche County, her birthplace on January 24, 1911. At age 13, she moved to Brice, Texas, with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. D.T. Smallwood, and two sisters, Frankie McAnear and Mamie Cross.

Claudine was never a stranger to farm life. Having cut stalks and plowed, she relates, “I helped my daddy with farm work every day. I really liked the horses.”

With a sparkle in her eye, she reminisces about Clarendon’s early days. Her fondness isn’t concealed when she mentions Perkins’ variety store, Piggly Wiggly, Taylor’s Hardware, Rathjen’s shoe store, Stocking’s Drug Store, Caraway’s Cafe, and Clifford’s Grocery store. She loved the Saturday afternoon visits with “everybody” on Clarendon’s “buzzing” main street, and munching popcorn while absorbed in a Tom Mix movie at Mulkey Theater. A few years later, she attended Clarendon High School and Clarendon College.

Through the years, our charming Pioneer Woman of the Year and husband, Bill Todd, whom she married in August 1935, has vividly and constantly supported Clarendon’s growth.

One of the most invaluable contributions anyone can make to their community was made by Claudine Todd during her 41 year teaching career. Parents, students, and professional people will always remember her matchless encouragement and concern for Clarendon’s children.  When they realized she had something valuable to offer them, respect, desire, and possibility to succeed usually became more dominant in their lives. Her priceless, lasting contribution of touching so many lives in a positive way is irreplaceable.

Clarendon folks and Claudine share a mutual respect for our community. “Donley County has been good to me, and is made up of the best of people. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

Congratulations to W.K. and Claudine as Pioneers of the Year.

Donley County officials filed papers Friday saying they broke no laws and did not abuse their discretion when they set Constable Jimmy Swinney’s salary last December.

County Judge Jack Hall and Commissioners Don Hall and Bob Trout filed a motion for summary judgment in the recent lawsuit brought against them by Swinney. The motion filed with the 100th Judicial District Court claims the constable’s salary is not unreasonable as a matter of law.

The county’s two other commissioners also filed a separate motion for summary judgment. Ernest Johnston and Henry “Buster” Shields say they were not in office when the commissioners’ court set Swinney’s salary on December 28, 2000. Johnston and Shields took office January 1, 2001.

A hearing for the defendants’ motions has been set before District Judge David McCoy in the Hall County Courthouse in Memphis on July 23, 2001.

Swinney was elected last year as a write-in candidate for constable of Precincts 1&2, an office that had been vacant for 30 years. He filed suit on June 19 against the commissioners’ court, the county judge, and Donley County itself. 

Swinney’s petition asks the district court to command the county to set and pay him a reasonable salary. Previously he had sought a salary equal to the constable of Precincts 3&4, which is $17,146.95.

According to the papers filed by county officials on Friday, the commissioners’ court gathered information and sought advice from the county attorney, the county treasurer, and the Texas Association of Counties regarding a reasonable salary for Swinney. The court also gathered input from Precinct 1&2 Justice Jimmy Johnson and Sheriff-elect Butch Blackburn regarding the duties to be performed by the new constable.

The defendants say the commissioners’ court set Swinney’s salary at $3,170 based on the work he would be expected to do. The court used the following formula to set the salary: (1) $100 per month to serve an average of 14 notices or citations; (2) $20 per month to attend an average of one justice court jury trial lasting two hours; and (3) $10 per citation to compensate for any additional time based on serving 173 per year.

The defendants also claim that Swinney “has been overpaid” since he received $1,452.92 from January 1 to June 15 and, based on the commissioners’ formula, “actually earned only $667.50.” Their motion says Swinney has “served less than seven notices or citations per month since assuming office.”

The motion also claims that Constable Swinney’s salary amounts to $10 per hour while a deputy sheriff in Donley County earns $8.64 per hour.

The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (PPHM) at Canyon is exhibiting Those Who Came Before Us: The Indian Murals of H.D. Bugbee, which the Clarendon artist painted in the early 1950s. 

The exhibition will include Bugbee’s original thirteen murals for the Museum’s then-Indian Hall, plus three Indian dance murals he added to cycle later, and sketches and studies (some made in the 1920s) for the murals.  Much like Charles M. Russell, Bugbee’s idol-who depicted life on the northern Great Plains in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bugbee 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, William N. Lewis’s Between Sun and Sod, and S. Omar Barkers’ Songs of the Saddleman and others.  He also continued to make easel paintings.

Under President 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 Old Tascosa Room in the Herring Hotel; Amarillo Army Air Field (which now hangs at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum); and a set of murals on Native American life for the Museum.

Bugbee exhibited at the Tri-State Fair at Amarillo annually, the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition in 1936, the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition in Dallas in 1937, and in the annual West Texas art exhibitions at Fort Worth.  He also had numerous solo exhibitions in Texas, including 1930 venues at Amarillo and Clarendon, and exhibited at Taos.  In 1952 Bugbee became the first Curator of Art at PPHM, a position he held until his death. Over 250 Bugbee works – drawings, paintings, and sculpture – are part of the Society’s art collection.

The exhibition will run through September 15, 2001, in the Harrington Exhibit Gallery, and reproductions of Bugbee’s work will be available in the Museum Store.

Five years ago, folks in Clarendon felt like they were in an Internet no man’s land, forced to pay long distance charges to hook up to most service providers. Then Extended Local Calling opened up the phone lines to Amarillo and Pampa, bringing the digital world affordably within our grasp.

Now in 2001, we again find ourselves on the communications frontier as broadband Internet services have not yet found their way to our humble hamlet. As a result, local Internet users are stuck hopelessly in the digital slow lane – poking along at a pathetic 56k bps when all the planets are aligned properly and at 28k or less the rest of the time.

Cable Internet is unknown here. Digital Subscriber Line service (DSL) is also no where to be seen. But hope springs eternal. There is a possibility of attracting a high speed, wireless Internet service to come to town, but to do so we need your help.

An Amarillo-based company wants to know how many folks in Clarendon would be interested in their service. If you think you might be one of those people, then please pick up the phone and call the Enterprise at 874-2259 or e-mail us at Clar1701@aol.com.  We’ll give you all the details.