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Roswell Daily Record THE VOICE OF THE PECOS VALLEY

Vol. 124, No. 82 75¢ Daily / $1.25 Sunday

April 5, 2015

Sunday

www.rdrnews.com

Pope presides over Easter Vigil amid concerns

AP Photos

Above: Pope Francis baptizes Rachel Khayesi, from Kenya, during an Easter Vigil service at the Vatican, Saturday. Left: Pope Francis holds a lit white candle as he arrives for the service.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis presided over the solemn Easter Vigil service Saturday night amid mounting Vatican concern for modern-day Christian martyrs whose deaths have dominated this Easter season. Francis walked in the dark down an utterly silent St. Peter’s Basilica at the start of the vigil Mass, which precedes the joyous celebration on Easter Sunday commemorating Christ’s resurrection after his crucifixion. In his homily, Francis said the Easter mystery requires the faithful to seek an answer “to the questions which challenge our faith, our fidelity, and our very existence.” During the late-night service, 10 people from Italy, Portugal,

Albania, Kenya and Cambodia were being baptized. On Friday, during the Via Crucis procession at Rome’s Colosseum, Francis denounced the “complicit silence” of the international community before the massacres of Christians in many parts of the world by Islamic extremists. The latest was the Kenya university attack by al-Qaida-affiliated Somali militants that left nearly 150 people dead, many of them Christians. Francis has voiced increasing alarm about the attacks, which have led Christians to abandon communities in the Mideast that have existed since Jesus’ time. He is likely to refer to those concerns during his “Urbi et Orbi” message on Easter Sunday.

A hoppin’, boppin’ Easter Despite a mild cold snap, several Easter festivities brought families outside Saturday. The Easter fun included an Easter egg hunt at Spring River Park & Zoo, as well as contests and a parade at the Chaves County Courthouse lawn. Activities at the Courthouse were organized by MainStreet Roswell as part of its Easter Parade celebration. Left: Max Scally photo; Olivia Tang, 3, is dressed warmly for a breezy and chilly morning Easter egg hunt at Spring River Park & Zoo.

Below, right: Bill Moffitt photo; to the left, fiveyear-old Jazmyn Davis of Roswell shows her winning form and leaves the pack behind during a sack race on the lawn of the Chaves County Courthouse. Below, left: Bill Moffitt photo; finally, Little Bo Peep has found her sheep, played by her snoodle dog Bella. Sophia Gutierrez, 6, of Hobbs, won an award for the best overall costume Saturday in a costume contest at the Courthouse lawn.

At 80, weight lifter, gardener still going strong By Bill Moffitt Record Correspondent To say that 80-year-old Lester Peck has had an interesting life is like saying that there’s a lot of snow on an iceberg. He’s cheated death, fooled the Russians, pastored a church, played trumpet, was an inspector engineer for Roswell’s 12 Atlas missile sites, was stationed in Germany during the Korean War, is a record-holding weight lifter, was a city manager in Texas, was only two miles away the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, loves to work in his garden, does his own baking, runs Roswell’s Farmer’s Market on the Chaves County Courthouse lawn every year and bikes 10 miles every morning “before the traffic gets bad.” “I have a lot of irons in the fire,” Peck said.

Peck remembers being 10 years old on D-Day. He was born June 6, 1934, in Iola, Kan. Like many Americans, Peck and his family stayed glued to their radio waiting for news updates on the conflict. “People fail to realize how important D-Day was,” Peck said. “If they had not succeeded that first day the whole history of everything would have been changed.” Peck took up the trumpet in junior high school and continued to play through high school and two years of college. “I was pretty good,” he said. Today’s Forecast

HIGH 86 LOW 49

“I’ve still got the trumpet out there in the garage.” His trumpet-playing may have irritated some of his neighbors one day when there was a big flood in his hometown. “I grew up in Kansas and we had a big flood in 1951,” he explained. “I sat out on the porch See SPOTLIGHT, Page A2 Bill Moffitt Photo

Lester Peck shows the front page of a newspaper from Killeen, Texas, in 1991, the day after a gunman fired upon a restaurant that he and his wife visited almost every day for lunch. But that day they went to a restaurant about a mile away.

Index

Today’s Obituaries Page B6 • William Randall (Randy) Carter • Robert Louis Hatcher Jr. • Augustine Horton • Ruby Gonzales

• Brett Leach • Allene B. Sultemeier • Alfred Valenzuela

Classifieds...........D4 Comics..................A7 Entertainment. ....C4 General...............A2

Horoscopes.........A3

Opinion.................A4

Lotteries. ............A2

Sports. ................B1

Nation..................B6

Weather...............A8


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