Sunnye mention the city of Cloudcroft, New Mexico and it brought to mind the time 4 young men from Pecos spent a week in that lovely little city.  I am failry certain the statutes on limitations has run so I am gonna mention names and the entire unabashed story.

Charles and David Bowers, Johnny Passmore and yours truly spent a week up there one summer.  It was not our intention to get in trouble but it just seemed to cling to us like lint.  Our first mistake may have been in staying in a motel owned by the city marshall of Cloudcroft.  It did not take much for him to keep his eye on us.

There was the pin setter at the bowling alley who for a small fee would sweep pins for us when we bowled, which we did every day.  If you bowled over 285 you got to bowl a game for free.  She was a comely lass with one brown eye and one green eye.  Dont remember her name but can still see her face.  We only paid for the first game we bowled that week and got all other games for free.  It is surprising that 4 young men who constantly bowled above 280 were not more well known in the bowling circles.  Hey, we could have become professionals.

We picked cherries at a cherry orchard one afternoon and ate 3 times as many as we picked.  There is a malady associated with eating excessive amounts of cherries.  It is not a situation that you want to be in with 3 other people in a motel room with only one toilet.  I think the medical term used to describe what we had is “Sweet cherry quickstep”.

Then to top off the week, we ran into a group of young ladies who were attending a morman church camp in Ruidosa.  I think there were about 30 of them staying in a lodge on one of the streets that run up the hill towards the gold course.  In Johnny’s black 57 chevy running up and down that hill every few minutes, it only took a short time to attach their attention.  We spent several days trying to entice them to either 1. slip out of the place at night or 2. slip us into the place at night.  I dont remember any names other than the girl we called “skinny Virginny”. They were all from El Paso. 

The straw that broke the camels back and got the law on us was a pinball machine.  One of the cafe/bars in town had a back room with several pinball machines.  We figured out that if you wedged a paper book of matches under the two front legs the the ball rolled slower and sometimes even stopped in an area that rang up free games.  It made a bit of a ringing noise when it was rolling up free games and that put the owner on to us.  When you have 2525 free games on a machine you have pretty well set yourself up for a life of pinball fun.  We also played the song ” Book of Love” approximately 2000 times on the jukebox.  The owner of the bar didnt not like that song.

Since the owner’s son was the maid service, remember the owner is town marshall, we gently asked him to clean our room first.  Remember, we had that sweet cherry thing going on and when rebuked I guess we got a bit more forceful and it ended up nasty.  Not violent nasty but name calling nasty.  Anyway, the next thing we knew was there was a loud knock on the door and we were ejected from our living quarters. 

My parents were there in town with some other people and I went to stay with them.  David, Charles and Johnny went immediately to El Paso.  The church enclave had broken up the day before and the young morman girls had gone home. 

There are several things you never want to do in a small New Mexico town.  Mess with a gal that has one brown eye and one green eye.  Do not threaten the son of the town marshall, and do not run up thousands of free games on a pinball machine.  These are not jailable offenses but sometimes it just makes certain folks a bit uneasy.

Gary