If it were possible to travel back in time, the summer of 1973 or 1974 might have tremendous appeal to an aging segment of Fremont County.
It’s been over half a century, but the memories of carefree nights spent dragging Main in Riverton, Lander, and, yes, even Shoshoni, are nostalgic ties that tug at the heartstrings of Baby Boomers now receiving Social Security checks each month.
All three towns are vastly different from what they were 50+ years ago.
Shoshoni is just a shell of what it once was, a town now dominated by a brightly lit, 24-hour-a-day business that seems strangely out of place for the otherwise sleepy little town. The Fast Lane is the only larger-scale business on either U.S. Highway 26 or U.S. Highway 20. If there is a more ideal location for a convenience store in Wyoming, it hasn’t made an appearance as of yet. It has become a landmark on the way west from Casper, north from Riverton, or south from the Big Horn Basin.
It wasn’t always that way in Shoshoni.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Shoshoni still rivaled Riverton and Lander in Fremont County.
By the early 1970s, you could still buy a car at the Chevy Garage in Shoshoni, catch a Trailways bus north to Billings or south to Denver, and sit at the counter and enjoy the best malt ever made at the Yellowstone Drug.
Syd’s Gambles anchored a dying business district. It was a “big box” store before the term was known. If you couldn’t get it at Syd’s, it probably wasn’t worth getting.
The Shawver Hotel still took in travelers, and the Wrangler Café on the west end of town had a steady clientele.
For the kids, that is the teenagers of the 1960s and 1970s, the Shoshoni A&W was a hot spot, so was the bowling alley next door.
On many sub-zero nights, kids from Thermopolis, Riverton and Pavillion would meet at the A&W for a teen burger, some fries and a Coke before moving next door to the six-lane bowling alley.
The same was true on hot summer nights, though more time was spent dragging Main than sitting in a booth at the A&W or waiting for your ball to roll back at Shoshoni Lanes.
It was eerily reminiscent of the Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age movie by the legendary Peter Bogdanovich. The Last Picture Show was set in dusty West Texas, but it could have just as easily been set in the shadow of the Owl Creek Mountains a couple of miles east of Boysen Reservoir.
The depiction of teenagers desperately trying to become adults while avoiding responsibility was a universal theme in the 1970s. Bogdanovich hit a generational nerve with this classic black-and-white film.
By the 1980s, all of this was gone. A fire destroyed Syd’s in 1978. The A&W closed, the bowling alley had a water leak, and the lanes buckled, and only the Yellowstone Drug remained to bring in youngsters. The malts were awesome, but they weren’t enough to fill a Saturday night.
In nearby Riverton, the car cult was in full swing from 1958 to 1983, when the VCR arrived, and kids began to stay home to watch movies. The legal drinking age increased from 19 to 21, and gas prices skyrocketed.
An entire generation, plus a few extras, kept Main Street and North Federal hopping on Friday and Saturday nights.
There were many more enticements in the larger town than Shoshoni could offer.
Anchoring the west end of Main Street was the Dash In and the West Drive-In theater. To the south was Tom Knight’s Knight Drive-In. In between was the Arctic Circle, which became the Mad Greek, Betty’s Pizza, Paison’s Pizza and another A&W. This A&W featured cute high school girls in short skirts that waited on cars and pickups. The Riverton boys enjoyed the A&W, but it was also a destination for teenage boys from Missouri Valley, Midvale, Pavillion, Hidden Valley and as far west as Crowheart.
Many a Friday or Saturday night was spent by young men trying to make time with the cute carhops at the A&W before rolling back onto Main Street for an endless loop of “dragging Main” or to take in a double-feature at the West Drive-In, or possibly a “dusk to dawn” marathon at the Knight.
Hell’s Angels movies were popular fare at the Knight.
The prevalent belief among teenage boys of the era was that if you had a date, you went to the dark, secluded West Drive-In where you could get Cartwheels, fries and steak fingers at the Dash-In, which doubled as the concession stand for the theater. If you didn’t have female companionship, you loaded up your buddies and headed to the Knight.
There was always the chance of a fistfight with guys from Lander, other guys off the reservation, or just a raid by the Riverton Police Department searching for underage kids with beer.
The youngsters of today would scratch their heads if they heard these stories.
It was life in small-town America.
Kids from Tennessee to Washington, from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, lived remarkably similar lives. They cruised Main Street, listened to AM radio, ate burgers in their cars, and hoped the prettiest girl in school would notice them.
It was a rite of passage for two generations.
That rite of passage had a soundtrack, a soundtrack that covered two-thirds of the continental United States. KOMA, 50,000 watts of AM power emanating from massive steel towers in Oklahoma City, provided the backdrop for millions, perhaps billions, of miles from 1958 to 1979, as teenagers like the ones in Fremont County drove up and down streets across the vastness of the American continent, listening to 1520.
It came in after dark, the perfect time for teenage boys and girls.
KOMA was as clear in Dubois as it was in Pavillion, Ethete, Shoshoni, Lander, or Riverton.
In Lander, the kids had the reverse of Riverton, a hill on the east end of town, rather than the west. The two larger Fremont County towns shared one practice that kids in Dubois, Pavillion, Hudson, Shoshoni or Jeffrey City never could, the infamous “Chinese Fire Drill.”
How many thousands of these drills were performed at the intersection of Main and Fifth in Lander, or Main and Federal in Riverton, will never be known. It was usually done by a car full of girls. When they hit the red light on Main, everyone would pile out and run around the car. The driver moved to the back seat and one of the back seat passengers jumped behind the wheel. It was almost always accompanied by an orchestra of car horns celebrating the event.
It wasn’t done in the smaller towns because you needed a stop light; there weren’t any.
Nearly every car and pickup had a pencil on the dashboard. It wasn’t for taking notes, but rather for keeping musical notes in tune.
The 8-track tape player was standard in newer vehicles, but only a handful of teenagers had one of those. Most of them drove early 1960s Fords and Chevys. The 8-track player was mounted under the AM radio (widespread FM arrived a few years later). Boys did their own wiring. They connected the positive lead on a wire spliced into the 12-volt power for the radio, grounded the other one, then patched into the car’s speakers with even more splices. Black electrician’s tape was a premium item most boys carried in the glove compartment. It was handy when repairs had to be made.
That pencil on the dashboard was shoved into the 8-track deck when a tape started to drag. It was usually placed in the lower right corner, near the drive wheels that pulled the 8-track tape through the player.
A generation of sound engineers was born in Ford Galaxies, Chevy Novas, and single-cab pickup trucks.
For kids working on the farm between Hidden Valley and Morton, there weren’t as many nearby distractions. You could get ice cream at Gardner’s Market, or a candy bar, or pop. The same was true at the Kinnear Store, the Missouri Valley Store, or at Midvale.
In Pavillion, the Basketeria was a bit of civilization in the vastness of alfalfa, oats, corn, and cattle. Across the street at Barb’s Conoco, you could fill up, then take in a game of pool. Barb had a pizza oven and a freezer full of Tombstone pizzas. She had a cooler full of pop and a jukebox.
Jukeboxes were still popular into the early 1980s. For a quarter, you could get four or five songs. Most of them were standalone, but a few places still had the tabletop, glass-covered, spinning musical menus.
The last one was at the A&W in Thermopolis before it closed.
Across the valley in Lander, there were always cartwheels at the Dairyland, across the parking lot from Fremont Vocational High School, later Lander Valley High School. They’re still there. The other teenager’s favorite in Lander, the venerable A&W, is not.
The A&W is now barely a remnant of a once-proud franchise in Greybull. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were A&W Restaurants in every town from Lander to the distant Montana state line.
Lander, Riverton, Shoshoni, Thermopolis, Worland, Basin, Greybull, Powell and Cody all served “Momma, Poppa and Baby Burgers” to the delight of teenage customers, their younger brothers and sisters, and their parents and grandparents.
The fare was the same, the secret sauce and Coney dogs exemplary, and the cold air flowing out of the walk-up window offered the same cooling sensation across Fremont County and the Big Horn Basin.
In Lander, the kids dragged Main until it was dark, then headed to the Diane Drive-In. The Diane wasn’t as protected as the Knight and West were in Riverton. Nearby homes offered a clear view of the giant screen for free. When the theater switched from wired speakers to short-range FM transmission, the view from the “cheap seats” only increased in value.
Finding a way around paying for something was another rite of passage.
At the West, there were promotions for “dollar a car” nights. Kids would pile into farm trucks and travel into town with dozens of excited teenagers getting into the drive-in for just a buck.
The drive-in made up for it in the concession stand.
At the Diane and Knight Drive-Ins, many of the incoming cars sat a little low on the rear axles. They would be with the added weight of two, three or four teenagers crammed into the trunk. A single driver drew a bit of suspicion from the ticket taker, but if you had a girl with you, or at least, another guy in the passenger seat, they’d wave you through.
Once inside, when it was dark, you opened the trunk and your enterprising friends hopped out to join you in the rear seats.
The adults knew what was going on, and they also knew they’d make their profit at the concession stand in popcorn, pop, French fries and hot dogs.
It was American enterprise in action on the long, lonesome stretches of the isolated American West.
The films of the late 1970s reflected the ending of an era. The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti are generally considered the defining films of this genre.
By the time The Breakfast Club and Stand by Me were hits in the mid-1980s, the era of dragging Main, pulling up and eating in your car at fast-food restaurants, and catching a movie at the local drive-in was gone.
The Diane, Knight, and West Drive-ins were all closed in the 1980s. Their departure ended an age that will never return.
Today the streets are quieter, the drive-ins are gone, and most of the A&Ws have disappeared. Teenagers carry smartphones instead of eight-track tapes, and playlists have replaced KOMA after dark. But for one generation, every Friday night began the same way. A full tank of gas, a few dollars in your pocket, friends piled into the car, and another endless trip around Main Street. It was a small-town ritual repeated thousands of times across America, and for those who lived it, it remains one of the sweetest memories of growing up.