Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
We had that Friday off. With just an eight-game “round robin” schedule against the same four teams, Byron, Basin, Shoshoni, and Dubois, each team had to take a weekend off to fit the schedule. This was Wind River’s idle Friday.
Dad had no problem filling that Friday afternoon for me. Mom was always adding on to the house, whether it was to double the first floor with an addition, add a second floor, remodel the kitchen, or, in this case, knock off all the old stucco siding and replace it with green steel; it was always something.
We started a few weeks before, pounding the cement-based stucco off the railroad tie walls of the original house. I soon discovered that a prybar and a square shovel worked a lot faster than pounding the stucco. Just pry it up, keep working the chicken wire mesh that held it together, and you could get big sheets of it to fall in sections.
We had the old siding removed the week before. That Friday afternoon, we started with the new steel. The process was quick, but dangerous; the steel had sharp edges where we cut it to length.
Late Saturday, we had the north, west, and south sides finished. We started after church around noon on Sunday.
At 1 PM, we tuned in to a static-laden KTWO out of Casper to listen to Bob Martin and Larry Zimmer as they announced the Broncos/Steelers game.
I’d listened to Cowboy basketball on the antique Zenith console radio in my bedroom for years, but this was the first time my dad and I listened to an NFL game together.
The NFL instituted overtime in the 1974 season to end ties. Ties compounded the calculations for playoff spots. It was easier to calculate just wins and losses.
The Broncos were decided underdogs. The Steelers were loaded, just not quite good enough to beat the Fish (no, I’ve never liked the Miami Dolphins.)
Regulation ended 35-35. In the first regular-season overtime in NFL history, we listened as Joe Gilliam tried to put the Steelers over the top, and Charley Johnson played conservatively throughout the extra period. Denver was playing for the tie.
So, in a paradox, the first overtime game in NFL history, a system designed to eliminate ties, ended in a tie. Life is strange sometimes.
It was the only time I ever listened to a complete ball game with my father. We watched college and professional football together a lot over the years.
Dad particularly enjoyed watching games with me and Brian on the big screen at our house. My son, a college strong safety, and I, a coach with eventually 30+ years of experience each, thought we knew the game best. Dad loved the banter and the friendly bets as we watched defenses shift just before the snap and predicted plays.
Televised sports are great, I watch a lot of football, but rarely do I watch start to finish anymore. There are just too many distractions.
You didn’t find those distractions when I was coaching.
Many long miles across the vast darkness of Wyoming in either the “Tiger Bus,” a converted Trailways coach, or in a “Yellow Dog” (66 passenger Bluebird bus) were spent with the radio tuned to a game. It was sometimes the Wyoming Cowboys in a late evening football game, but it was most often the Cowboy basketball team that filled the tinny bus speakers with the banter of Larry Birleffi or, later, Dave Walsh and Kevin McKinney.
Sitting sideways in a seat designed for a third grader, feeling the rumble of the road underneath us, getting blinded by oncoming headlights, and smelling the scent of diesel in the air filled many memorable trips home to Lusk from Burns, Pine Bluffs, Guernsey, Saratoga, Cheyenne, St. Mary’s, or Saratoga.
Later, it was a trip down the Big Horn Basin from battles in Lovell, Greybull, Byron, Basin, or Burlington in below-zero weather on crisp winter nights or the much shorter runs from Dubois, Pavillion, or Ethete. The memories remain vivid from three decades ago.
One memorable night, the Tigers were traveling home from Hanna Elk Mountain after a 29-2 win over the Miners in Carbon County.
We stopped to feed the kids at the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, then turned north up the Shirley Basin for Casper, and then another 104 miles home in Lusk.
We picked up KGOS 1490 out of Torrington near Casper. The broadcast was filled with the static AM stations suffer through before the sun sets completely.
Lingle was hosting Guernsey-Sunrise. The Doggers were pounding the Vikings senseless. They were ahead by 50 points and still throwing deep and going for two on conversion attempts.
Our head coach, Jerry Fullmer, was a Lingle Ft. Laramie grad.
By the time we reached Douglas, we switched to a clearer signal on KERM FM, 98.3. FM was always cleaner than AM, but it dropped the signal completely if it wasn’t line of sight with the transmitter.
I asked Jerry why Lingle was pounding Guernsey so badly. His response was classic small-town Wyoming. “Payback, they ran it up on us in 1965.”
It was 1981, 16 years had passed, but the memory of that embarrassment remained in the collective memory of the Lingle Ft. Laramie Doggers and their fans.
It was just a play-by-play broadcast of two small towns slugging it out, but it was more; it was Americana in a nutshell.
I still enjoy listening to games on the radio.
I’m blessed to work with three of the best in the business in Scott Fuller, Jerrad Anderson, and John Gabrielsen. They make the games come alive, usually in the confines of my pickup as I head home from Dubois, Ethete, Pavillion, Lander, or Shoshoni.
Once I get back to the house, I rarely tune in to AM or FM. I get the same play-by-play but with crisp video on the County10 YouTube channel for Riverton and Lander games.
The talking heads claim that radio is dead, as they once said print media is dead. Well, if you’re reading this, it’s in print, and it is very much alive, just in a digital rather than a paper format. The same is true for radio.
In the summer, I often listen to the disappointing Colorado Rockies from the cab of my tractor, and sometimes on the car or truck radio as we travel across the west.
That voice in the darkness remains a powerful one.