Click photo to enlarge
The advertisement accompanying this photo from the 1950 New Mexico A & M Swastika, the yearbook of what is now New Mexico State University, reads, Cothern Cleaners, with the help of their driver, J.B. Copeland, see that your clothes are handled quickly and safely with the utmost care.
Related

LAS CRUCES - Howard Cothern was watching the 10 o'clock news when he saw the flames shooting out of the old white building.

"They said it was the Sun-News, but I said 'Sun-News, my a--, that's the old dry cleaning shop,'" he said.

Cothern Cleaners, owned by Howard's father, Wilford Cothern, stood at 250 W. Las Cruces Ave. for almost 30 years. Wilford Cothern was an influential businessman who served on the Las Cruces Independent School Board and was one of the first boosters of Aggie athletics, Cothern said.

The news that the old Cothern Cleaners had burned down failed to get Howard's wife Dora out of bed. But on Monday morning, he called two of his sisters, who were sad to hear that the building their father had remodeled was no more. Cothern, 70, also drove from his Fairacres home to the burned-out downtown site to see the old cleaners and take some pictures.

"I worked for my father at the dry cleaners all through high school," he said. "I never liked it, really ... My heart was in ranching."

Cothern said his father bought an existing dry cleaning business and grocery store in the one-room adobe building in the late 1930s. Wilford Cothern was a Texas farmboy from Waco who had come to Las Cruces to join his brother Leo in a milk delivery service, Cothern said. When that didn't work out, Leo bought a gas station and Wilford fell back on dry cleaning and tailoring skills he had learned in a brief stint during high school.

Wilford Cothern remodeled the building

Advertisement
in 1946, putting up a cinder-block front on the adobe and then adding two cinder-block buildings to the east and one in the back, Howard said.

"We had to sleep in the station wagon in front of the store when he was doing the remodeling because the building was open and anyone could just walk in," Cothern said. "My father kept adding rooms in the back and rented the space out to other businesses."

Thanks to the remodel, Cothern Cleaners sported a "U Drive Thru Service." Customers took a right at Court Avenue, drove through the building adjacent to the cleaners and exited onto Las Cruces Avenue.

Such businesses as Loomis & Sons, Stevens Furniture and Western Car Parts operated out the spaces built by Wilford Cothern. The New Mexico Labor Department was also a tenant in the 1950s, according to the city directory.

In advertisements that ran in the New Mexico A & M Swastika, the yearbook of what is now New Mexico State University, during the 1940s and 1950s, Cothern Cleaners highlighted its fur cleaning, hat blocking and mothproof cleaning services, in addition to the U Drive Thru service.

Cothern sold the business in 1965 to Eubanks Cleaners, according to Howard Cothern. While he served on the school board, Wilford Cothern was involved in the controversial decision to locate Las Cruces High School on El Paseo Road.

"He was very civic-minded," Howard Cothern said. "He even started a baseball team out in Lions Park in the 1940s."

Cothern said his father's name was all he needed to purchase clothes at downtown stores. One of his favorite memories from the 1950s was going into the old Safeway grocery store - the current Sun-News building - where there was a table of comic books.

"They put the comic books out for boys to read while their mothers were shopping," he said. If you were caught reading them when your mother wasn't there, that could mean trouble, he said. He said he once had a run-in with a truant officer there.

The Safeway was built in 1955, according to the Do-a Ana County Assessors' website. Before that, Cothern said a motor court for tourists existed on the site at 256 W. Las Cruces Ave.

The Cothern Cleaners buildings were vacant from 1965 to 1970. Eubanks Cleaners opted to consolidate its operations at a Main Street location, according to Howard Cothern. The Sun-News took possession of the former Safeway and the buildings once owned by Wilford Cothern in 1970, according to Sun-News archives.

The last time the old Cothern Cleaners was occupied was in the summer of 1997. The Friends of the Thomas Branigan Library ran a once-monthly book sale out of the building for many years, but left when the Sun-News needed the space for storage, said Arlene Dohr, 70, who later ran the book shop at its present location at the library.

"As a customer, I remember the book shop as dusty," she said.

At the time of the fire, most everything that was in storage had been removed years ago, said Frances Silva, Sun-News community editor. Unfortunately, she said, there were some photograph negatives still in there from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Upon seeing the ruins of his father's old cleaners shop, Howard Cothern said he thought to himself, "Well, it's a bygone era."

Cothern's father bought a ranch in 1962 that Howard ran until his father could devote himself to ranching full-time in 1965. Wilford Cothern died in 1969 at the age of 52, Howard said.

"He was a Texas farmboy who did good," he said.

Jeff Barnet can be reached at (575) 541-5476.