I had managed to go home for Thanksgiving every year I was in college. The strange thing in 1985 was that I would go home to Artesia on Wednesday night, but come back up to Portales Thanksgiving Day and remain there for the weekend.
The plan was for my brother Loyd (who had started his freshman year at West Texas State University near Amarillo, TX) to come by Portales with some friends he had attended high school with. They would pick me up and we would go to Grandma Ogolon's for lunch and then drive to Artesia. It should have been pretty simple.
For some reason, Loyd started acting like a crank that day. Right before they left WTSU in the morning, Loyd called me and told me to get Grandma to make fried chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy and corn for lunch. I told him that we were going to have a turkey dinner the next day and there was no way I was going to ask her to do that. We were just going to have sandwiches and that was it. He got mad that I wouldn't ask Grandma to make us some real food because he knew that she would do it if we asked.
It was supposed to take about an hour and a half for them to get to my dorm. Three hours later, I was still waiting for them. Finally, they came and knocked on my door. They said they had to stop and help a girl from Artesia because her car had broken down. (This was back in the day when we didn't all have cell phones.) We all went over to Grandma's house and ate lunch. Then we headed home.
An hour and a half later, we were a few miles outside Roswell. The sun was starting to set. At this point, Loyd said, "Hey! I want to stop and go down into the missle silo." There was an old abandoned missle silo just off the main highway. Loyd had gone down several times before. Getting there basically involved trespassing. I never wanted to go because I knew I would get into major trouble. I also knew that going would delay our getting to Artesia by at least two hours. I said, "No, Loyd. It's getting late. We need to get home." "I WANT TO GO INTO THE SILO! THAT'S THE WHOLE REASON I WANTED TO COME DOWN THIS WAY!" Loyd's friend re-iterated, "Loyd! It's getting dark! If we hadn't been delayed getting out of College Station, we probably could have done that. But it's too late now!"
The whole rest of the way home, Loyd griped about not getting to go to the silo. I'm glad we won that argument. I could have just seen us getting trapped in the dark and no way to get out. I also could have seen this as the one time the cops would have come out to do a security check and found us there. I never would have forgiven Loyd if that had happened.
The rest of the weekend was fairly uneventful. I really don't remember much of what happened, except that I had to work while everyone else was eating at Grandma's. I still got to eat leftovers after my shift was done.
There's been an interesting development in the last few months. That missle silo was put on the market in December and had a buyer in the closing stages in January. The guy who originally owned it died. They were asking $295,000 for it. But I'll bet whoever buys it is still going to have a problem with trespassers.
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