Harold Brown was a businessman. A butcher by trade, he took his meat-cutting skills to a tiny town on the west edge of Wyoming’s central desert and opened a grocery store.
Brown’s Grocery, and later the Regent Theater, and finally the Cactus Drive In are his legacy.
Brown married his wife Mayme Counselor in 1944, in Texas while Harold was on leave from service in the United States Army.
Brown was a staff sergeant in the 2517th Army Air Force Unit from 1942 to 1946.
Harold reached the rank of staff sergeant serving with the 2517th, a unit of the 8th Air Force that bombed Nazi Germany with thousands of B-17s during World War II.
After the war, the couple moved to Shoshoni.
Mayme had family in Shoshoni and nearby Riverton. Her sister-in-law Velma was a math teacher at Shoshoni High School, and her brother Art was a carpenter.
Mayme’s other sister, Winifred, was married to Thom Knight, owner of the Acme Theater in Riverton.
The couple opened a business on Shoshoni’s Main Street, across from the bank and south of the Yellowstone Drug on the first floor of the Shawver Hotel. Next door was the Heyer and Berger Building, home to a popular home merchandise retail store.
It was the perfect location for a grocery store, and their timing was impeccable.
Shoshoni was about to boom.
The town was founded in 1906 as the staging point on the Chicago North Western Railroad for Wyoming’s last homesteading frontier, the Riverton Reclamation Project.
That summer, Shoshoni boomed to a population of 10,000 people, making it the largest city in the state for a few weeks. The population quickly moved west to homesteads on the ceded portion of the Wind River Indian Reservation north of the Big Wind River.
Tents and flimsy wooden buildings lined the dirt streets of Shoshoni. The only permanent structure was C.H. King’s Bank on the opposite side of the street from where Brown’s Grocery would eventually be established.
In 1908, most of Shoshoni burned down in a massive fire that swept through the little town.
A dozen miles north, the first dam on the Wind River went into construction under Asmus Boysen. The dam provided Shoshoni and neighboring towns and farms with electricity for the next 15 years until a massive flood swept over the dam, washing away the tracks of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. The ensuing lawsuit by the railroad forced Boysen to shut down the operation. It was subsequently blown up, opening up the wild Wind River for a few more years.
The location for a hydroelectric dam was too good, engineers began designing a new dam soon after Japan surrendered, ending World War II.
In 1947, construction of a new Boysen Dam began.
The first year was a tough one for Harold and Mayme. There was competition in the grocery business with two other stores in Shoshoni, and seven more in Riveron just 22 miles away. Country stores at Moneta, Lysite, Polly’s Trading Post, the Missouri Valley Store and Midvale kept rural customers supplied with necessary groceries and home merchandise.
Harold offered something the other stores didn’t: he had a meat counter, and he was an expert butcher.
Brown’s Grocery had an advantage over the rest; it had Harold’s expertise as a butcher and one of the premier meat counters in all of Fremont County.
They had a soda fountain near the front of the store, a produce section, and ample canned goods, but the refrigerated meat case was the store’s draw.
In the back Harold built a 20×24 garage, but it wasn’t for vehicles, it was a wild game processing area. Harold skinned and cut up antelope and deer, with an occasional elk or moose. His extension to the rear of the store was filled from late August to early November each year with wild game.
“My mother and grandmother worked for them for a while,” Dick Currah said. “Then I began working there around 1958-59 sweeping and mopping. Brownie processed wild game behind the butcher case display area in an attached garage. I skinned and salted the hides during hunting season. I worked until I started high school as they decided to close.”
The construction of Boysen Dam from 1947 to 1953 brought hundreds of workers and their families to the project. They lived in camps near the dam, in nearby Bonneville and many of them lived in Shoshoni.
Brown’s grocery was a destination for many of the young families, and the soda fountain was a hit with the kids.
The influence of Harold’s brother-in-law Thom Knight’s success with the Acme Theater in Riverton led to Harold and Mayme opening the Regent Theater in 1948. Knight expanded his business with the opening of the Knight Drive-In in 1949 and the Gem Theater in 1952.
The Regent didn’t have a balcony but seated 284 people. The concession stand was near the double doors entering the theater from Main Street, and the ticket office was a small, telephone booth-like structure outside the entrance on the sidewalk.
Eli Bebout, a 1964 graduate of Shoshoni High School, remembers the Regent Theater and the soda fountain at “Brownies,” as residents often called Brown’s Grocery.
“As kids, we’d go to the movies, get a cherry coke, and have a whale of a time,” Eli said.
The Regent was memorable for another reason to Dick Currah.
“I watched Psycho there when I was 10 years old,” Dick said. “It scared the hell out of me.”
Horror movies were all the rage in the late 1940s, and early 50s along with sinister science fiction films, and dark crime dramas.
“I watched Frankenstein at the Regent,” Rusty Havens said. “It scared me to death! I had nightmares about it, I wasn’t in grade school yet.”
Boysen Dam was completed in 1953, but Shoshoni rode the wave of prosperity for a few more years,
In July 1955, Harold and Mayme opened the Cactus Drive-In on the southwest side of Shoshoni, above Poison Creek, on land leased from John Herbst.
The Drive-In had the capacity for 250 cars.
It was the influence of Knight once again that had the Brown’s opening the Cactus.
It didn’t last, closing in 1959, but it lived up to its name.
“It was called the Cactus for good reason,” Paul Worden said. “One learned early that heading for the concession stand in the dark could be a sticky hike, in more ways than one.”
Though the Cactus Drive-In was a small theater in a tiny town in the least populated state in America, it drew first-run movies.
“I was just a child. The only movie I ever remember seeing was the Alamo,” Rusty Havens said.
Harold and Mayme adopted two children, Sarah and Steve.
Ruby Calvert (Bebout) has found memories of Harold and Mayme, the Shoshoni downtown and the theaters.
“Of course, I remember the drive-in and the Browns grocery store, and I am thinking they also had a Theater in town next to the grocery store,” Ruby said. “But the most lasting legacy was Yellowstone Drug. I can still remember the original store underneath the Shawver Hotel. I can remember going to the drive-in out where Herbst’s now have a house. You were able to see the rolling hills from the drive-in for quite a while there on top of the hill.”
Ruby and Eli’s parents, Hugh and Dessie Bebout, were mainstays of the Shoshoni community, and one evening, they took their young family to the drive-in.
“We went to drive in with Eli and Nick for the first time,” Ruby said. “We were so loud and playful in the car that dad hung up the speaker, and took the family home before the movie was over.”
The Cactus closed in 1959, the Regent in 1962, and the grocery store soon after.
The business climate of Fremont County was changing. Improved roads and more reliable cars and trucks had rural residents driving to shop in Riverton, Lander and Thermopolis rather than at smaller, local stores.
Television has always cut into the revenue for movie theaters since it first became widespread in the early 1950s.
Rural Wyoming was no exception.
The Bebout’s lived in an apartment above the Derby Bar, owned by Dessie’s brother Nick Svilar. KWRB TV out of Thermopolis began broadcasting in 1954.
“I tried to sneak downstairs to watch Maverick with Eli,” Ruby said. “Dad would have none of it.”
A few years later, Dessie was instrumental in getting a translator to broadcast Casper’s KTWO TV to the Shoshoni area from a peak in the Copper Mountains.
Harold and Mayme sold out.
Harold went to work as a meat and milk inspector for the Wyoming Department of Agriculture, a position he held for 24 years.
The couple moved to Lander, where they retired.
Harold passed in 1990, and Mayme in 1994.
“I remember going to shows at both places. Mama would come into town from the ranch in the summer to do laundry as we had running water in town,” Cecil Slafter said. “She would give me a quarter to go to the Saturday matinee. It was a double feature of cowboy shows.”
The double features are long gone. The frame for the screen at the Cactus survived into the early 1970s, but it, too, is just a memory.
In 2018, the crumbling remnants of what was once Brown’s Grocery and the Regent Theater, along with the Derby Bar, Sid’s Gambles, the Heyer and Berger Building, and the iconic Shawver Hotel, were all leveled by the wrecking ball.
Shoshoni’s business district was no more, and just the dusty winds from the west remained to remind us of what once was.