Bill Sniffin: Columns and Articles

Friday, October 22, 2010

043 - Notorious Miss Wyoming-World back in the news

In Wyoming’s history, there have been many weird stories and odd people.

For example, there was the guy who parachuted onto the top of Devil’s Tower in 1941 captivating the nation until he was rescued weeks later.

Or the wild outdoorsman dubbed the Tarzan of the Tetons (Earl Durand) in 1939, who killed four pursuers until he was gunned down while robbing a Powell bank.

But in 1977, Wyoming became notorious because of a former Miss Wyoming-World, Joyce McKinney, for her antics in kidnapping an LDS missionary in England.

And she is back in the news again. This time as a film subject.

Her life has been so crazy that the country’s most famous documentary film maker (Errol Morris) has featured her in his new movie Tabloid, which details how the British press covered these events. The documentary debuted at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival last week.

Her story goes something like this.

The vivacious and statuesque McKinney grows up in a small town in North Carolina and moves to Utah. She is awarded the title Miss Wyoming-World, the rights to which are controlled by a gal she meets in Salt Lake City.

After losing in the Miss World pageant in New York, she stays in Utah and falls in love with a young man named Kirk. She claims he asks her to marry him.

He is a member of the LDS faith and for whatever reason (probably because his family already discerned Joyce to be incident-prone), he starts a two-year religious mission to Great Britain.

Joyce is stunned when she finds out that Kirk is gone. She does not know where.

She moves to Los Angeles and does some acting to raise money to hire investigators to find Kirk.

They discover he is in England, so she goes there to “rescue” him.

He does not want to be rescued. She and accomplices kidnap him.

This is where it gets off the wall.

The 6-5, 245-pound victim later escapes and tells British authorities he has been kidnapped and raped. Raped by a 112-pound woman.

She is arrested, and the case goes to trial.

The British tabloids go berserk.

If you have ever seen British tabloid news in action, well, it is awesome. The National Enquirer is a piker compared to these publications for their raw excesses and flagrant sensationalist style.

Thus, the basis of the movie.

It comes out during the trial that British law has no provision for “a woman committing rape on a man.”

Joyce is a sensation during a bail hearing when she tells her colorful story to a rapt audience. Tabloids from one end of the country to the other headline her story but when the trial date arrives, Joyce is gone.

Throughout all this news coverage, she is referred to as “Miss Wyoming.”

The Associated Press published the following:

“"McKinney made headlines throughout the world in 1977 when she was charged in London with kidnapping a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was accused of knocking him out with chloroform, handcuffing him with fur-lined manacles to a bed in a remote cottage for three days and forcing him to have sex with her."

Of course, Morris’ documentary is receiving worldwide attention and “Miss Wyoming” will again be used to describe McKinney.

The website The Playlist offered its review of the documentary:

“The film employs interviews with animated montages and archival footage, but the real star is the story itself. Intoxicatingly entertaining and outrageously wild, Hollywood`s top writers could never have dreamed up something like this. Met with applause and big, hearty laughs throughout our screening, the film is an easy lock for a deserved Best Documentary Oscar nomination. It`s certainly unlike any documentary we`ve seen this year and the film easily ranks among Morris` best.”

The story does not end here.

Joyce McKinney was again notorious a few years ago when she surfaced in Korea having her favorite dog, Booger, cloned. Again, she was referred to in the tabloids as “the former Miss Wyoming.”

And then finally, Internet news reports say she turned up three years ago in Tennessee accused of allegedly hiring a young man to burglarize a house to raise money to pay for an artificial leg for a three-legged horse. Incredible.

Certainly in our state’s history, a lot of people have done worse things but, based on these antics, she has to rank as one of our state’s most enduring nut cases during the last four decades.

Monday, October 11, 2010

042 - Windy stories including some from Wyoming

   As I was being blown along, heading east on Interstate-80, it was easy to believe that Wyoming is the windiest place in the nation.
   It would blow so hard sometimes it seemed like my car was coasting.
   Besides the huge wind farms near Evanston, and Medicine Bow on I-80 and that huge farm south of Cheyenne along I-25, we saw way more wind mills on this trip than our last trip to the Midwest a year ago.
   Seems like wind energy is becoming the big deal that it had been predicted to be for so long.
   And although there are many windmills in Nebraska, it was in Iowa where I was surprised as the frequency and size of the turbines.
   Although Wyoming is the “windiest state,” and Texas has the most wind turbines installed (9,000), it is Iowa that leads the nation by getting 14 percent of its energy from wind, by far the largest percentage of any state.
   There are wind turbines all over Iowa, it seemed to me. And during a hot quiet spell in October last week, most of them were not turning.
   States like Iowa and Texas still rely mainly on Wyoming coal to create electricity but these new numbers indicate that in some places, anyway, wind is really getting to be a big business. One wind industry spokesman claims there are 85,000 people working in the wind industry in the USA right now. Impressive.
   On the subject of wind in Wyoming, I thought the man who advises Gov. Dave Freudenthal on energy had some interesting insights on wind during a recent talk at the University of Wyoming.
   Rob Hurless had this to say:
   “Wind, I don’t have to explain to anybody in here (at this conference) about wind. The attribute of wind with respect to development in Wyoming are the words “transmission constraint,” but if you look at the wind maps and they classify them by the quality of wind, which basically means how often it blows at a sufficient speed to make electricity.
    "The corridor here in Laramie and north of Cheyenne for about 75 miles offers the best wind on the ground (short of the coastal winds off the coast of the USA) anywhere in the country. And it is just you have to be able to get that wind to market.
     “There is a huge demand and there are willing developers. They have their meteorological data, they wind up bank financing and they’ve made arrangements with land owners including the state.
      “But we can’t get it to market. Here again, you’ve got to think through what it actually takes to get this stuff done and how to execute it. It is not a question of potential and it’s not a question of market. It’s a question of can you execute and what does it take to get done?
      “In the case of transmission, Rocky Mountain Power stepped up to the plate and announced 15 months ago, a $4 billion project to move energy from Wyoming to their service territories, which are six states in the west; Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. That project they have broken it into two legs: Gateway West and Gateway South. Gateway West is underway. That project, the permitting process of that project is probably two and a half to three years long.
      “Then you’ve got construction. You are buying steel in a marketplace where steel has probably doubled in the last three or four years, which of course adds to the cost of it and adds to the difficulty of it, so you are looking at a time frame of probably five years to actually have an electron flowing over that system. That’s if everything goes right, if there are hiccups along the way that just adds time.
      “So when you start to look at the ability to execute on these things it is not trivial.”
       So as I was motoring along on our annual fall trip to my wife’s hometown in western Iowa, I could not help thinking about what Hurless had to say about wind.
   But then I was interrupted by watching one of the longest trains I had ever seen paralleling us on the Union Pacific Railroad.
   Only it was not a ubiquitous coal train.
   Nope. It was a long, long train loaded with windmill stands and blades. And that train seemed to stretch forever.
    Was this the future that I was seeing?

Saturday, October 2, 2010

041 - The Virginian was the original Wyoming story + others

    Just finished reading The Virginian, a wonderful old book written about Wyoming circa 1889 by author Owen Wister in 1902.
   I am not one for requiring students to do things but this would be a great book for junior high age kids in Wyoming schools to have to read.
   It fairly accurately describes how life was in our state more than a century ago and it vividly describes a world where it is easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
   This richly detailed book follows the author as he describes visiting Wyoming. He gets off a train in Medicine Bow and then rides 270 miles in a horse and buggy with a southern man known only as “the Virginian.”
   The story weaves back and forth between the Tetons of Jackson Hole, the Wind River Country, historic Johnson County and the vast high plains north of Laramie.
   The book was re-issued in 2002 by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. The book’s dedication is to a close friend of Wister’s named Theodore Roosevelt, who had not yet been elected president.
   It was almost impossible to read the book without thinking about the Code of the West, which was recently adopted by the Wyoming legislature as the official “code” for the state.
   This old book features lots of references to how a “man’s word is his bond” and also shows how deferential and polite to women, even the most hardened of villains would be.

   Code - My favorite item in the so-called Code of the West is “Ride for the Brand,” which means you should be loyal to the folks who have hired you.
   Recently on Facebook was a sign purportedly to be from a disgruntled Department of Transportation employee. The whole thing was a fake, but was sure funny.
   As you approached Buford on I-80, the huge lighted sign read: “Exit 329 closed. Sucks to be you. But I got fired today so don’t expect any help.”

   Colin’s loss - The general election campaign for governor has sure been quiet and most folks just seem to want to forget about it. But some political junkies still have questions about that primary.
   One of the biggest mysteries was how come House Speaker Colin Simpson of Cody did so poorly? Often considered the front-runner, he finished a distant fourth.
   A theory about that poor showing comes from writer Bill Croke:
First was that Colin was the victim of the country’s anti-incumbent feeling.
   Although he was a six-time elected State Representative, I never viewed him as an “incumbent” when it came to the governor race, but perhaps many voters did?
   Second, Croke also felt the Simpson name was no longer magic in some Wyoming Republican circles. Despite 60 years of service by Colin’s grandfather Milward (governor and U. S. Senator) and his father (State Representative and U. S. Senator), the brand perhaps had become somewhat worn out.
   A third reason was that Colin had been elected six times in his home county but never faced an opponent. Actually campaigning against others was a new experience for him. Took too long for him to hit his stride.
   Croke formerly lived in Cody and now lives in Salmon, Idaho. His article was in the American Spectator.

   Yellowstone - My column last week about Yellowstone generated a lot of comments but none so interesting as from Karen Gibbons of Laramie.
   Karen writes: “I was in the park on 9/11 and sitting in the beautiful Lake Hotel lobby where someone had brought in a TV hooked up to a satellite. There we all were, transfixed, as we watched the Twin Towers fall with the tranquility of Yellowstone Lake just beyond us. The juxtaposition was startling and will remain in my memory forever.
    “And in many ways it was like the movie Groundhog Day.   People kept coming in, watching in horror for the first time, finally seeing on television what they had been hearing about as they wandered through the park. There were lots of tears and mostly disbelief with many having friends and relatives in the towers.
“With no phone service and the possibility that they would not be able to travel home, as all air travel had ceased, the level of fear was palpable. But there was also a camaraderie that brought comfort to us all. There were quiet conversations and hugs and tears that entire afternoon and evening. Everyone was trying to comfort each other. It was memorable.”