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 met as freshmen at the FFA County Creed Contest. We hit it off right away. I knew there was some connection with the store and gas station on the way to Wind River High School, but as a 14-year-old kid who had been in Wyoming just a few months after traveling around the country with my parents in the U.S. Air Force, I didn’t make it until later.
Greg Gardner was my first friend outside the confines of the tight hallways at the old Morton K-12 school that became Wind River High School.
Greg was a Shoshoni kid. He was my first connection to the little town that I’ve grown to love. There’s something magical about the ties to Shoshoni that so many people tell me about.
Neither of us could “legally” drive. But we were farm kids. I quickly learned to drive all our tractors, the old air-cooled Wisconsin 4-cylinder-powered swather with twin-handled controls, and all the trucks. My dad taught me how to drive a “three-on-the-tree” manual transmission when I was eight.
Greg was more adept. He was driving before I was on his parents’ Dave and Claudine’s farm. Greg was the oldest of the Gardner boys. Bret was just a couple of years younger, and Kelly was the baby brother. Though he’s a grizzled, experienced farmer and fireman today, he’ll always be the baby. Even now, when he’s eligible for AARP. I’m proud to call all the Gardners friends.
Greg didn’t play football after suffering a bad injury when he was pulling a ditcher and rolled the tractor. I didn’t play basketball after my freshman year because of a badly dislocated left knee. We had our injuries in common as well.
If you can’t tell. I’m a huge fan of the “Gardner Clan” as I often refer to them.
The family has taken some huge hits since Dave passed a few years ago, and with the passing of members of another incredible family that married into the Gardners, the VonKrosigk’s.
Greg passed last week. It was a shock. We are the same age, just a few weeks apart.
We’ve been friends since 1972.
I blew up the engine on my first car, a 1962 Chevy Nova, racing Greg on a straight stretch of the Missouri Valley Highway one night in January 1975. We were both seniors, and I beat his Ford on the two-mile run by a dozen yards or so. He won in the end when I discovered an oily grey mix coming out of my radiator overflow hose the next morning when I was filling up in Riverton. Yep, a cracked block.
Kids say they run around together, well, country kids, drive around together. With my friends Pat Wilson and Cubby Furlong, we found ourselves in District 24 (Shoshoni) many Friday and Saturday nights. Hanging out with Greg, Bruce Peil, Ron Blumenshine, John Hoffman and Walt Runyan. We thought we were suave, stylish 70s guys. Looking back, we were hopeless country boys looking to have a good time on a limited budget with limited opportunities.
We dragged Main in Riverton together. We even did it in Shoshoni if our buddies from Thermopolis could convince a few Hot Springs County girls to meet us at the A&W or bowling alley.
Once in a while, we even bought the girls malts at the Yellowstone Drug.
Greg and I lost touch for a while, but we quickly reconnected when I took the teaching and coaching position at Shoshoni in the fall of 1985.
It had been 10 years since we were seniors at Morton and Shoshoni, and the world had changed a bit.
Greg had married into another marvelous Fremont County family, the Ramage’s. He and Barb had three children. Heidi, and the twins, James and Jason.
Heidi was the nicest junior high kid you’d ever want to meet. Friendly, studious, and blazingly fast. What a girl. She’s grown into a wonderful adult. She remains one of my favorites.
The boys, well, let’s just say, they were boys, all boys. James and Jason were fun, all wrapped up into tall, skinny early teenagers. I’d sometimes listen in on their conversations with the Jarvis boys about their weekend shenanigans. It’s no wonder Greg had grey hair before I did.
The magic of Greg and Barb is that these wild little hooligans grew into solid, respectable, honest men with great families of their own.
Teenagers do grow up. As I often told teenagers, the best thing about freshmen is that they’ll be sophomores in a year, then repeated it while changing to juniors and finally seniors as they went through school
For many years, on my way to work in Shoshoni, I’d discover the Gardners trailing cattle along the highway from the Missouri Valley pasture on the east side of Boysen
One morning, I pulled up as they hit the causeway and got out of the truck as Greg rode by.
“You have an extra horse?” I asked with a grin.
“Sure, call in sick and saddle up,” he said with a smile.
We both knew I couldn’t do it, but I appreciated the offer.
Greg had a heart transplant a few years ago. It worked out well for him.
One night at the County Fair Rodeo, I headed to the beer garden for a cold one. Inside were Kelly, Greg, and Bret, along with Bret’s son Chad.
Knowing that Greg couldn’t drink alcohol because of the anti-rejection medicine he was taking for his heart, I said, “Hey Greg, let me buy you a beer.”
“Sure, why not buy three more?” he said with a grin. He did the math. One for me and the other three for his brothers and nephew.
I think Kelly ended up buying the round for all of us.
Greg is gone from our presence, but not from our memories.
I’ll never be able to think of Lysite, Shoshoni, or Missouri Valley without memories of our friendship coming to the fore.
That connection to the store east of Wind River High School was Greg’s grandparents. That’s why it was called Gardner’s Market, though Fuzz and Marilyn Foster owned it.
Greg came from good stock on both sides. He was part Shoshone, from his mom’s lineage. Claudine was a Stoll with connections all the way to Black Mountain west of Crowheart.
I talked to Greg for the last time in early February when we ran into each other at Smith’s. He looked good. We talked about the fire last summer, the lack of snow, and replayed a couple of stories from our teenage years.
We live in a wonderful community with so many connections that memories drop on you like cobwebs in an old basement when you walk through after many years.
They’re always there, just under the surface, waiting for a chance to connect.
I’m thankful that I had the connection to Greg. He is a man who will be greatly missed.