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Friday, June 20, 2014
1427 - Wyoming GOP primary politics in 2014 interesting
This is the time of year when our Wyoming political world
truly becomes the crazy season.
Between
parades, celebrations and backyard meet-and-greets, the folks competing for
political office find themselves on the dead run.
It is already
July and the primary is toward the end of August. Most candidates have been
working on this since last fall so it is truly crunch time.
So, with that
introduction, let’s take a look at a couple of interesting races here in the
Cowboy State.
Most observers
would assume the incumbent Gov. Matt Mead should be a shoo-in for
reelection. Rarely has a Wyoming
governor lost reelection to a second term.
In my memory,
Governors Stan Hathaway, Ed Herschler, Mike Sullivan, Jim Geringer and Dave Freudenthal
all were able to win easy reelection to second terms.
Some folks believe
that two of Mead’s primary contestants might have a chance.
First, is
Supt. of Public Instruction, Cindy Hill, arguably the most controversial
politician in Wyoming in the last 30 years.
She is a
relentless campaigner and has built up a loyal following who support her.
This could
have been a very interesting Mead-Hill race except for the addition of another
aggressive candidate who also has a strong statewide following, Dr. Taylor Haynes
of Cheyenne.
Haynes appears
to be the most Libertarian of the three, which always plays well in the Cowboy
State.
Mead looks
like the front-runner and the fact that he has two folks going head-to-head
against him could be enough to put him back in office. Mead has made some missteps but overall has
done the job the folks who elected him four years ago expected of him.
The winner
meets Democrat Pete Gosar of Laramie in the general. Pete is a good campaigner
and the election could be interesting.
I attended a forum where four of the
Secretary of State candidates spoke and it sure looked more like a race for
governor. Not sure what folks were
expecting out of candidates, but the questions sure seemed to fit a governor’s
race rather than a race for the state’s SOS office.
From my
vantage point, it appears that Ed Murray of Cheyenne is spending the most
money. It is working to get him name recognition to the top of the group. He is
a long-time businessman, attorney, and land developer. His secret weapons are
his four daughters and wife who are tirelessly working for him.
He originally
hired the two Bills to run his campaign, Bill Novotny of Buffalo and Bill Cubin
of Casper. Both are very experienced. Novotny was involved in two of the most
expensive campaigns in Wyoming history:
Mark Gordon’s loss in 2008 to Cynthia Lummis and Gov. Mead’s victory in
2010.
Former State Rep.
Pete Illoway, Cheyenne, arguably is the best qualified. Besides being an elected legislator, he has
been a lobbyist at different times. He knows his way around state government.
He has hired Dave and AnneMarie Picard, Cheyenne, to run his campaign.
Another former
State Rep. is Ed Buchanan of Torrington (former Speaker of the House) who offers
the same experience as Illoway. But again he may be falling short of Murray
when it comes to spending money and getting his name out. Buchanan has Lorraine
Quarberg of Thermopolis, another former state legislator, helping him. Buchanan
may have gotten off the most interesting comment of the race when he claimed he
was not going to “hire any political hacks.”
Clark Stith of
Rock Springs is an attorney who has done wonders for the Republican Party in
Sweetwater County. His tough chore is
convincing people in other counties that his expertise makes him the best for
the job. He has Amy Womack helping his
campaign. Amy was running Liz Cheney’s campaign against Sen. Mike Enzi before Liz
bowed out in late December.
The winner
will face Jennifer Young, a member of the Constitution Party, in the general
election.
Running for
election in Wyoming in the Republican primary is an often confounding
experience. You have to be able to cover
vast amounts of ground. You need a
statewide network. And most of all, you
somehow have to differentiate yourself from the competitors by coming up with
some kind of reason why you are the better candidate.
Good luck to
all of you and thanks for spending all this time (and money) working to be
elected to what can be relatively thankless jobs that are very important to all
of us in the Cowboy State.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2014
1426 - Longest American highway crosses Wyoming
During a
recent road trip through nine states, I stumbled on to an interesting factoid:
the longest highway in America bisects Wyoming.
It is Historic US 20, which is
3,365 miles in length. We drove on that road a lot during our trip and it was
well worth it.
In Wyoming,
the highway enters the state east of Lusk on a truly crappy stretch of highway and
continues to Orin Junction where it joins I-25 and then heads north to Douglas
and Glenrock. It continues to Casper and then heads west to Shoshoni. My late
father always complained that long stretch from Casper to Shoshoni, was “96
miles of nuthin.’”
From Shoshoni
the highway heads north next to Boysen Reservoir and through glorious Wind
River Canyon to Thermopolis. It continues to Worland, Basin and Greybull before
turning west to Cody and Wapiti Valley where it enters Yellowstone as the east
gate. Along the way Historic US 20 picks up and joins U. S. highways 14 and 18
at times, before exiting the state.
An effort that
started in Ohio is underway to provide more recognition to Historic US 20, both
as a tourism corridor and also a tourist destination in its own right.
I have some
experience with foreign visitors, especially the Brits and the Germans. They love
to visit out-of-the way towns like Lusk, Shoshoni, Thermopolis, Worland, Basin
and Greybull. Europeans average five
weeks of paid vacation each year so they can afford to take leisurely trips
along the back roads of America.
They are going
to love visiting Historic US 20. Folks in Wyoming along US 20 who want to get
involved in this national promotional effort should contact Bryan Farr, who
wrote a book a few years ago about the famous highway. More information is at www.historicUS20.com.
Our trip saw
us travel by car through all these states as we headed to a wedding in Kansas
and ended up in Northeast Iowa at my 50th high school reunion
Roads were
generally good in all states although the wife of my best high school friend
Everett Rowland, who is a county supervisor in Fayette County, Iowa, claimed
that Iowa has the worst roads in the country and the third worst bridges.
That state’s
“governor for life,” Terry Branstad was all over the TV bragging about Iowa
being considered the “second best managed state” in the country. Who is first?
Wyoming, of course.
Branstand is
running again as the state’s official tightwad and if elected he will have served
24 years in that post. Amazing.
When you are in
the Midwest this time of year the big news is the weather.
Torrential
rainfalls that occasionally topped five inches in a single storm provided
flooding and hazardous driving conditions all over my home area of Northeast
Iowa.
Our planned
visit to my favorite childhood state park, Backbone, will have to occur at another
time since it was closed because of high water.
Earlier, while
in western Iowa at my wife Nancy’s hometown of Harlan, we were concerned about
tornadoes heading our way that had ripped through Pilger, NE. If you catch the images, it was
extraordinary. Dual monsters, a mile
apart, tore up parallel courses through that part of the Cornhusker state.
Although
Wyoming is officially the windiest state in the union, Iowa has turned into a
constant hurricane according to folks who live there. They all believe some kind of climate change
is occurring. It was easy to believe that one day when I tried to play golf in
50 mph winds with my brother in law Roger Thomsen.
My sister
Marybeth and her husband Steve hosted us in Dundee, Iowa, where I was able to
spend time with four of my 10 siblings.
I had earlier
joked with friends that I was “going to visit some old folks” at my class
reunion, which was held later that week at a riverboat casino in Marquette,
Iowa. Actually most of them looked pretty good.
Over half the
room was filled with folks who had been together over 45 years. The majority had gotten married at the ages
of 18 and 19. Nancy and I were 19 and 20
when we got married. I always told my kids that “it was true love, so why
wait?” But according to many of my classmates, it was also because of something
called the draft and the Vietnam War, which made us want to grow up pretty
darned fast.
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Saturday, June 14, 2014
1425 - Lost manuscript brings Wyoming history alive
True recollections of Wyoming history involving such things
as wolf roundups and recollections of historical figures like Gen. George
Armstrong Custer and Sacajawea come alive in a uniquely historical book, whose
story of how it came into being is almost as interesting as the stories it
tells.
Wind River Adventures by Edward J.
Farlow is an amazing book that details the early history of Wyoming. It
features some of the more amazing characters in our state’s history. And the
stories Farlow writes are exciting and full of detail.
This story
would never have come to pass except for the good work of an historian who
discovered it.
Does this
sound familiar?
That is the identical
story of the Best Picture of the Year just awarded by the Academy awards, 12 Years A Slave. That movie came from a book written as a
manuscript that was never published until a historian found it many decades
later.
Farlow’s book
was finally published over 50 years after he wrote it in the mid-1940s when he
was over 80 years old.
It took the good work of some
museum folks in Fremont County. Sharon
Kahin of Dubois heard about the manuscript at a history conference in Billings.
She worked with Lander’s foremost historian Tom Bell to locate it in the files
of the Pioneer Museum. How Ms. Kahin
ultimately put this all together is almost as interesting as the book itself.
She obtained a grant from the Wyoming
Council of the Humanities, which funded the project as part of the Centennial
initiative and worked with the publisher, High Plains Press (Nancy Curtis) of
Glendo. The foursome of Kahin, Bell,
Riverton historian Loren Jost (who helped round up photos) and Curtis plus
state staff teamed up to create this remarkable book.
We first promoted the book in 1998
through our local newspaper in Lander but I just recently reacquainted myself
with it, and was just blown away by how “current” history comes alive in this manuscript. These stories were written by someone who was
actually there at the scene in our state’s early days.
Here are some
of the tales included in this book:
• In August of
1917 Farlow describes a wolf roundup that involved 600 people. He put the event
together as he recalls by “enlisting the services of Indians, cowboys,
ranchers, sheep men, herders, camp movers and the young folks of the towns of
Lander, Riverton and Shoshoni. Many of the riders were girls.”
The Farlow
Wolf Roundup ended up not finding a single wolf but they did round up 100
coyotes, one bear, 500 head of cattle and 2,000 wild horses. “
Purpose of the
roundup was that Wyoming was home to some three million sheep and predators
were killing 60,000 each year.
• In 1922,
Farlow became involved in producing one of the most famous movies of that era. He joined up with the legendary filmmaker Tim
McCoy to make a movie called The Covered
Wagon.
McCoy called
him on the phone and said, “I need 500 Indians for a movie.” And he needed them
in a hurry.
The movie,
much of which was filmed in Wyoming, ended up costing an astronomical $1
million but was a huge success at the box office. Its total take of $3.5 million made it one of
the top 10 grossing movies for the decade.
• Farlow spent
some time locating Indians who had fought against Gen. George Armstrong Custer
in the battle of Little Big Horn.
He quoted an
elderly Indian named Plenty Bear who described how 1,000 warriors advanced to
the Custer’s force. Plenty Bear told Farlow that the soldiers would have gotten
away but when they got to the higher ground, they stopped and tried to fight
against the superior Indian force.
The fight did
not last long. Just 30 minutes. The dead
soldiers were mutilated and stripped of everything by the women and children of
the camp, not by the Indian braves.
• Legendary
Indian scout Sacajawea is buried at Fort Washakie if you believe Farlow’s
account.
He claims to
have known the son of one of her sons, whose name was Baptiste. There is no
doubt in his account that this was the famous bird woman who showed Lewis and
Clark the way to “the big water” of the Pacific.
Farlow spent a
lot of time with Baptiste’s son Andrew looking for a mysterious medal which was
given to the mother and worn on special occasions by the son.
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Thursday, June 5, 2014
1424 - My own (personal) Wyoming Painted Morning
Morning people have always impressed me. For some time now, it has been my desire to
reinvent myself as a lark, rather than an owl.
These two birds pretty much represent those two unique kinds of people –
the morning person and the night owl.
A few years ago, I discovered how beautiful it could
be early in the morning and I now delight in being up at an early hour. Let me tell you about a recent morning.
Maybe it was a sudden gust of wind or a deer bumping
into one of Nancy’s bird feeders, but something woke me up. I climbed out of
bed at an early hour and took in the full impact of my surroundings.
Is there anything on earth better than the cool
Wyoming air early in the morning?
My shadow loomed out far before me as I wandered
around the yard. My other Shadow (our
dog) was hot on my heels as we checked things out. Nancy’s bird feeders were busy with chattering
birds and some had been toppled by squirrels or raccoons.
After pouring myself a hot cup of coffee, the dog
and I headed off on a walk. We live near Lander City Park close to the Popo
Agie River. The dog and I took off to check out the flow.
The river’s channel was full. Recent rains were providing ample runoff. It
was running very high and was making quite a bit noise, even from a distance. You could hear big rocks clicking together as
the force pushed them downstream.
Watching the river is a great pastime. The ebbs and flows change constantly throughout
the year.
We had endured a 50-year flood event in 2010 in
Lander when I lost a cabin and a fourth of an acre of ground to the rushing
water.
This year we were luckier but other places were
not. Still the water I was looking at in
the raging Popo Agie was white with foam.
Drought? What drought?
We all know that with the sun burning through our
clear Wyoming sky and the consistent western winds, well, it will be dry again,
soon enough.
But to be able to enjoy the green and the wetness
here in Wyoming is worth savoring. I flew in a small plane over Fremont, Park
and Sheridan Counties earlier and I couldn’t recall ever seeing those areas as
green as they are right now during the month of June.
A relative of mine from Iowa used to tease me about
our state color being brown. “It really is brown out there,” he would exclaim,
which is the truth, especially compared to Iowa. But not now in June it is green.
But back to my morning walk. The colors are so vivid
at this time of day. These are “Wyoming Painted Mornings” as the golden light
of the sun illuminates the Wind River Mountainsides with alpenglow. You could
make out the Bears Ears rock formation that towers over Dickinson Park up there
in the mountains. You couldn’t help noticing how white the distant mountains
still were from the May snowstorms.
We are at the beginning of the summer season, a time
some people dread as they see it as a time of heat and wind. I see it just the opposite. It is a time of glory to celebrate the
beginning of another growing season and a time to reflect on the comings and
goings of nature’s wonderful gifts to us.
A rooster crowed over on Hillcrest Drive. A few
members of Lander’s town deer herd were stirring, too. A tiny fawn
hippity-hopped off in the distance. Some
dogs over by City Park were barking.
My dog and I spotted just the head of a big buck
with his new antlers above the waves of blowing grass near the river. With the river noise and the breeze, he
didn’t hear or see us approach. When he did, he jumped up and bounded over a
fence and was gone. Was he the latest incarnation of Uncle Buck, the huge
patriarch of the Lander deer herd? It
was hard to tell for sure, but that rack looked familiar.
As he headed off through the trees Shadow and I
headed back toward the house.
As we did, I looked back at my long shadow
stretching out behind me and took in all the glorious colors of the summer
morning. I called this my very own
Wyoming Painted Morning.
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Monday, June 2, 2014
1423 - Yellowstone lure draws visitors to Wyoming
If you like tourism like I do, then it is easy to appreciate
what Yellowstone National Park means to Wyoming.
Some three
million folks come to the world’s first national park each year. Almost a third of them are international
tourists.
This reality
came to me when a young Asian woman sat next to me recently on a flight from
New Orleans to Denver.
It was hard
for me to determine if she was American or one of those international
tourists. It was also hard to figure out
how old she was and what she was doing. She appeared to be traveling alone.
Then an older
Asian woman came up the aisle and handed her a baggie full of chips, nuts and
fruits. It was her mother.
I asked her if
she was from New Orleans? “No, I am from
Boston, “she replied, explaining that she was a graduate student at Tufts
University. Surprisingly, I detected a slight southern drawl in her speech as
she continued: “I grew up in Alabama. My undergraduate degree was from Auburn.”
“So why are
you going to Denver?”
“My parents
and I are going to Yellowstone National Park for the first time,” she
explained. “We will be there a week.”
I couldn’t
help myself with the next question. “Did you bring a jacket?”
She laughed
and said, yes, she had been warned that the nights are cool.
I had my iPad
in my lap so I showed her some wonderful photos taken in Yellowstone. She was impressed. She had heard of the park
but the trip was her parents’ idea. They
lived in New Orleans so they all decided to fly from there into Denver and then
rent a car and head north for a week.
It was fun to
give her some other ideas of where to go besides Yellowstone. She claimed to not have even heard of the Tetons. “You are in for a treat,” I said.
We also talked
about the other gates to the park including passing through the Wind River
Indian Reservation in Fremont County and all the wonders of the east gates
through the Park County entrances.
I continued
showing her photos of Yellowstone and Wyoming.
She was thoroughly impressed. She could not recall seeing much about the
park before.
She was
probably dizzy from all the information being showered on her in a short time but,
no doubt, she was a smart gal and would now figure out a wonderful trip.
Wyoming
tourism is so fortunate to have a lure like Yellowstone. Folks who come from all over to visit the
great park usually come by car and that means driving through the rest of the
state to get there.
For years,
folks at the Wyoming Division of Travel and Tourism worked especially hard to
steer Yellowstone visitors to drive the “long way” into the park by way of
I-80, I-25 and I-90, thus traveling through a big part of Wyoming either going
or coming or both.
Motels,
restaurants, gas stations, gift shops and retailers have all benefitted from
all the extra traffic they are getting because of Yellowstone.
I am partial,
too, because Yellowstone is my all-time favorite place. We have been going there on a regular basis
for 44 years. In the early years, we had an almost endless stream of out-of-state
relatives visiting us with an eye on going to the park.
Because of my
job requirements, I could usually only budget one day so we would get up at 4
a.m. and start the mighty trek. We would
stop at Jackson Lake Lodge to view the Tetons and then head north. Next stop usually was Old Faithful and then
the Norris Geyser Basin. Then the Grand
Canyon of Yellowstone and then end up grabbing a bite to eat at the Lake Hotel
and taking in the vast Yellowstone Lake.
We would then
head home, again stopping for a potty break in Dubois and walk back into our
front door in Lander at 10 p.m. Whew!
Seems like we
did that trip dozens of times.
So now, most
of our relatives had already gotten that earlier rush-hour tour so future trips
involved them spending a few days in the park to really get to know it
up-close.
The park is
almost always hospitable although snowstorms can hit in every month and in
recent years, the traffic can be fierce, especially to us locals.
But
Yellowstone always satisfies. It is the
crown jewel of America.
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1422 - D-Day;s 70th anniversary important to Wyoming vets
World War II was an extraordinary time in Wyoming with over
10 percent of the state’s population involved in fighting that war. Over 1,000
died.
The war cry, “Powder
River, let’r buck” was heard from Europe to Asia as Wyoming’s finest young men
and women risked their lives. This exclamation was first heard in 1898 when
Wyoming reportedly exceeded every other state’s quotas for providing soldiers
in the Spanish-American War.
All over our
state you can find impressive memorials to these brave citizens who left the
comfortable confines of the Cowboy State to go to the ends of the world to
defend their country.
These thoughts
are on my mind as we just celebrated Memorial Day and the 70th
anniversary of D-Day is occurring on June 6.
So what is
happening to all these old veterans? Across the USA, they are dying by the
thousands. Not many of them left.
At one time,
the state had reportedly 56,000 living veterans, just about one out of 10
citizens. This had to be one of the
largest ratios in the country, if not the largest.
What triggered
these notions is that my wife and I just toured the National World War II
Museum in New Orleans and it was unique in its design and function in its
presentations.
Not unlike the
Buffalo Bill Center in Cody, this museum really requires days (almost weeks) to
fully take it all in.
We spent four
hours and it was not even close to enough time.
Perhaps the
most impressive sight was on screen. It
took five years to create what was called a “4D, Imax movie” that depicted World War II.
Besides the
gigantic movie on the Imax screen, the show provided a multi-sensory experience
that took you to the real-life experience of being in war. It included real
airplanes, machine guns, and snipers in towers plus snow and smoke. The sound was loud (probably to help the World War II vets) and
it sure took you to a realistic place.
The statistics
surrounding World War II are beyond belief.
More than 65 million people died, more than in any war in history. In
Wyoming, perhaps no city or town made a bigger sacrifice than the tiny hometown
of former Gov. Stan Hathaway. Ten men
from little Huntley in Goshen County gave their last full measure in World War
II. Amazing.
The D-Day
invasion was the largest amphibian attack in history with over 5,000 vessels.
D-Day which was code-named
Operation Overlord, according to a huge display at that New Orleans museum,
involved 150,000 men in nine divisions landing on the beaches of Normandy over
a 50-mile stretch.
The freedoms
we take for granted today were earned on those beaches. It was interesting that General Dwight
Eisenhower did not have a back-up plan. The attack had to work.
Fast-forward
to today and we are seeing some terrible things happening to our vets.
Revelations of
veterans having to wait unusually long times for medical appointments is an
insult to these brave men and women.
This is
unforgiveable. Let’s hope the Veterans
Administration gets its act together.
All across Wyoming there are
statues and memorials to the vets.
The biggest of these is War
Memorial Stadium, the football field that hosts the University of Wyoming
Cowboys. It was built in 1950 as a tribute to the brave men and women who
fought in World War II and earlier wars. That gridiron has long been the
highest elevated field in the country at 7,215 feet above sea level.
A couple of weeks ago, our family
recalled the 14th anniversary of my father’s passing.
He was a World War II veteran and
spent a lot of time in Louisiana. He was
blessed when he broke his wrist in an accident and thus did not get shipped
with his original unit, which was virtually slaughtered in Europe. He was later sent to Tehran, Iran where he
coordinated huge truckloads of goods being hauled to Russia over some huge
mountain passes. That effort helped defeat
the Italians and Germans.
He ended up going around the world
a couple of times and also was active in the American Legion for years after he
got home from the war. He saw war up-close and became a lifelong pacifist as a
result.
My dad was part of a group of men and women
nicknamed “The Greatest Generation.” So
far, 70 years of history hence still shows they deserve that designation
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