He’s best known as the owner of Guthals Nursery on East First, but Clovis also lost an educational icon when Charles Guthals died Sunday at age 76.1969 election

Facts about Guthals and his service on the Clovis Municipal Schools Board of Education:

• He ran for a board position in 1967 but lost to Alvy Smith.

• In 1969, he successfully unseated one of Clovis’ best-known educators — W.D. “Doc” Gattis — for a school board position Guthals held until stepping down in 1996.

• He also defeated C. Max Lowry in the 1969 race, 596 votes to 438. (Gattis, for whom the city’s new middle school is named, had 398.)

• Guthals returned to the CMS board again in 2011 and remained until his death — 31 years in all, working with six different superintendents.

• Leon Williams — for whom Clovis’ high school football stadium is named — was on the board when Guthals was first elected.

• In January 1972, Guthals was president of the board so supportive of Superintendent Vernon Mills they rejected Mills’ request to retire. The board relented two months later and Mills retired at the end of the school year.

Buddy Klebold has no idea whatever happened to that silver dollar. He will never forget how he came to acquire it in 1948.

Clovis’ Klebold was reminded of his good fortune about two weeks ago while reading a book about his boyhood hero, champion steer roper Shoat Webster.

In the book — “Shoat: A Champion Roper” — author R.D. Carroll writes about Webster’s memories of a 1948 rodeo in Clovis.

An 8-year-old boy was cheering wildly for Webster and caught his attention. After the rodeo, the child — Klebold — said he approached his hero and offered congratulations.

“To have someone as young as that little boy pulling for me has meant a great deal to me over the years,” the book quotes Webster.

Webster handed his young fan a silver dollar in appreciation of the support and they talked for two or three minutes.

“That silver dollar was big as a steering wheel to an 8-year-old back then,” Klebold said last week.

Klebold said he had no idea his cheering for Webster meant so much to the roper until he read the book, a loan from a cousin.

After reading the passage, Klebold set about contacting Webster and found him still living in his hometown of Lenapah, Okla. Hours later, they talked for the second time in their lives.

“He is 87 and he’s had a couple strokes,” Klebold learned. “He remembered the silver dollar; we talked about him and horses and his favorites and why.”

Webster won four world steer-roping championships in his career, which led to induction into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1979.

Klebold, now 72, has also led an eventful life — riding broncs for Eastern New Mexico University’s rodeo team in 1966, dealing poker in Las Vegas for a few years, and inventing a spill-free spittoon, selling 1.7 million of them between 1976 and 1990.

(CMI staff writer Ryan Schaap contributed to this report.)

Clovis High School football teams have won 13 state championships since the New Mexico Activities Association began organizing such things in 1950.

The Wildcats also claim six unofficial state football crowns, all from 1926 through 1934.

The unofficial title declared 80 years ago, following an undefeated 1932 season, was shared with at least two other teams — all of whom agreed the money needed to settle the matter on the gridiron was better spent in other ways.

“Wildcats Reign Over Eastern N.M.” read the headline atop page 2 of the Nov. 25, 1932, edition of The Clovis Evening News-Journal.

The accompanying game report detailed Clovis’ 20-0 Thanksgiving Day victory over Portales at Cavalry Park, the approximate location of Bell Park’s baseball field near Sycamore Street today.

All the scoring came in the first half. Buster Riddle ran for two touchdowns. Langdon Skarda returned a punt 60 yards for Clovis’ other score. Clovis’ Bill Lawson was named the game’s outstanding lineman.

Beating Portales was no walk in Cavalry Park for Clovis in those days.

The communities’ schools were roughly the same size in 1932, and the rivalry more heated than today.

One year earlier, the teams played to a tie on a muddy field. In 1930, Portales beat the ’Cats, 19-6, for what the newspaper reported was a “sectional crown.”

The 1932 victory over Portales, which finished its year 5-1-2, left Clovis with an 8-0 record. Farmington and the Albuquerque Indian School also finished their seasons unbeaten, each with legitimate claims as the state’s best.

Teams discussed options of playing for an undisputed crown, but decided against it because of concerns about travel costs, the News-Journal reported.

The chairman for the state committee for the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools helped steer the decision with a letter to the schools.

“I am of the opinion that the association is definitely opposed to such championship contests,” Chairman J.W. Diefendorf wrote.

“I am of the opinion that the greater part of the agitation for such a post-season contest arises among the patrons of the community supporting the team, rather than among the school officials and members of the teams themselves.”

Diefendorf went on to say the association wanted to emphasize development of students within each school “without undue emphasis upon contests between schools,” CN-J reported.

Travel expenses were cited as the primary concern.

School budgets were dramatically smaller in those days.

Jose Cano, the chief financial officer for Clovis schools today, said minutes from a 1932 Clovis school board meeting show the district’s entire budget for 1932-33 was $161,235.

“That included salaries for teachers,” Cano said.

The travel and equipment budget alone for Clovis High’s football team this season is $58,000, Cano said. That figure does not include coaches’ salaries.

And so the 1932 high school football season ended with at least three champions.

Clovis won unofficial crowns in 1933 and 1934 as well, but its first uncontested state title came in 1960. Clovis went 6-4-1 that season, but beat previously undefeated Farmington, 20-14, in the NMAA’s Class AA championship game.

Aug. 31, 1918: Workers had finished paving the north end of Clovis’ Main Street, between Fourth and Eighth streets, with bricks that remain today. A Plainview company did the work after a winning bid of $32,846.20.

Clovis sorta got started 107 years ago tomorrow — on Aug. 29, 1905.

That’s when work began on Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway tracks between Texico and St. Vrain, heading west to connect with the main line near Belen.

A railroad siding, where cars could be pulled off the main line, was soon established 8 1/2 miles west of Texico.

A small store and post office were then located nearby and homesteaders began calling the site Riley, or sometimes Riley Switch, referencing a family of Rileys in the area.

It became Clovis in 1906, for reasons unknown, months before it was considered a townsite.

Many believed the siding was named for the first Christian king of France, supposedly because a railroad official’s spouse or daughter was studying about King Clovis at the time.

The only official railroad document related to the naming of Clovis, dated Jan. 17, 1906, reports it’s “an old French name.”

An earlier document suggests the siding be called Strohm, in honor of railroad Superintendent C.B. Strohm.

Happy birthday, Riley, Strohm and Clovis.

Aug. 18, 1905: A post office was established at Tolar in Roosevelt County. It closed April 5, 1946, according to a study by L. Keith Payne, less than two years after a train carrying 46 tons of military explosives leveled or caused major damage to nearly every building in town when it blew up.

Eastern New Mexico may not be known as a factory for producing professional athletes, but we have at least seven natives with close connections to the National Football League.

The website databaseFootball.com tells us five NFL players were born in eastern New Mexico.

Two of them — Hank Baskett and Jerry Nuzum of Clovis — actually played high school football around here, and their stories are well chronicled.

Here are a few from yesteryear’s stars you may not know so much about:

• Stan David was born in North Platte, Neb., in 1962, but he grew up in Tucumcari, where his mother still lives.

David, now city manager in Denver City, Texas, was drafted out of Texas Tech by the Buffalo Bills as a linebacker in 1984 and played all 16 games that season, according to pro-footballreference.com.

In all, he spent parts of three seasons in the NFL. Sports Illustrated in 1999 ranked David No. 48 among its “50 greatest New Mexico sports figures.”

• Bill Turnbeaugh, who was born and grew up in Tucumcari, spent about a week in the Green Bay Packers training camp in 1955. The Packers drafted the tackle from Auburn in 1953, then he was drafted by the Army about two months later, delaying his opportunity to play in the pros.

The Daily Telegraph, in Claire, Wis., reported Turnbeaugh was one of 60 rookies in camp in July 1955, but Turnbeaugh said he only stayed about a week before deciding to return to college and complete his degree in teaching.

Packers players earned $5,500 per year in those days, Turnbeaugh said, and the physical punishment would not have been worth it.

Now 82, he lives about 60 miles west of Las Vegas, Nev., having retired from a career in management in 1991.

• Mark Harris was born in Clovis in 1970, but went to high school in Brigham City, Utah, before playing four seasons as a wide receiver with the San Francisco 49ers (1996-’99)

• Wayne Mass was born in Portales in 1946, but went to high school in Sumter, S.C., before playing five seasons with four teams in the NFL (1968-’72). He was an offensive lineman.

• Danny Villanueva, a kicker for eight seasons (1960-’67), played for the Los Angeles Rams and Dallas Cowboys. He was born in Tucumcari in 1937, but went to high school in Calexico, Calif.

Note to fellow baseball fan Lee Lerner, who posted Josh Gibson’s Hall of Fame plaque on my Facebook page today:

The first time I heard Josh Gibson’s name was in a Gebo’s Farm and Ranch Supply parking lot in Clovis.

I was maybe 9 or 10, no doubt wearing my Astros cap, probably buying chicken feed or garden supplies with my parents.

An old man saw the cap and started asking me baseball questions:

• Did I like to play the game? (Yes)

• Were the Astros my favorite team? (Yes)

• Who was my favorite player? (Jim Wynn)

And then he asked if I’d ever heard of Josh Gibson. (No)

“He was the greatest player ever,” the old man said. “Some people said he was the black Babe Ruth.”

My parents whisked me off to the car about that time, probably in a hurry to feed the chickens or hoe the garden back home in Muleshoe, but I wish I could have spent some time talking with that old man.

I have a million questions about Gibson and Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell and the other stars of the Negro Leagues of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Did Gibson’s 700-plus home runs leave the park on a line or were they towering fly balls? Was Bell just fast or did he have great bat control, too? Was Paige the best pitcher or just the best showman?

I have no idea if the old man knew the answers to those questions, whether he’d actually seen Gibson play or just heard stories, but I’m certain he had a passion for their game and did all he could to keep their memories alive.

Thanks for the photo of Gibson’s Hall of Fame plaque, Lee.

Don’t you wish we could watch the Homestead Grays play the Kansas City Monarchs on a Sunday afternoon, with that old man from the Gebo’s parking lot sitting in between us?

• Aug. 15, 1935: Actor-comedian Will Rogers died in a plane crash with Aviator Wiley

Post near Point Barrow, Alaska, where they were vacationing. Rogers was 55. He was close friends with cattle raiser Ewing Halsell and a frequent visitor to Halsell’s Mashed O ranch, which spread across Lamb and Bailey counties near Muleshoe.

Aug. 13, 1962: A fireworks show was approved by Curry County officials for the 1962 fair, scheduled Sept. 5-8. “We also plan to hire a Western band and institute pony rides for the children,” County Agent Phil Crystal said. Fair board members also voted to continued a no-cost general admission.