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.
Some memories remain vivid no matter the expanse of time. We were leaving for Wyoming the next day, but I’d talked dad into letting me use the lawnmower one more time to finish a lawn for a young sergeant living on the far north end of NCO family housing at Mather Air Force Base outside Sacramento.
The house was a duplex, with an airy open porch separating the two units. Times were good for a 14-year-old kid with a regular lawn mowing route. When I was 12, I started mowing lawns for $1.50 each; just two years later, the rate was two bucks.
I shut the mower off, grabbed the lawn rake, and started to pile up the clippings. The sergeant’s pretty young wife brought me a glass of Coca-Cola on ice. She sat on a table under the porch and talked to me for a few minutes. Good duty for a teenager to catch the interest of a 20-something gal. As we talked, a hit from the previous summer came over her radio. “Indiana Wants Me” by R. Dean Taylor hit #1 on the charts in 1970. It was still popular a year later.
I finished the Coke, finished raking, said goodbye to the nice lady, hitched the mower to the back of my bike, and said goodbye to my life in California.
When I sometimes hear “Indiana Wants Me” on my SiriusXM 70s channel, I’m taken back to that scene almost magically.
The next day, we loaded everything into an Allied Van Lines trailer, then packed the back of my parents’ 1962 Nova station wagon, and then filled the bed of dad’s 1969 Dodge pickup. Late that afternoon, Mom drove the Nova and Dad the truck, and we headed nonstop to Riverton.
You sometimes hear of palindromes; the easiest is Bob, spelled the same way forward or reverse. Racecar is another one, a bit more difficult one, but a palindrome, nonetheless.
Numbers can be that way as well.
It’s sobering to think that we left Sacramento 54 years ago in 1971, 54 years before that, my grandfather was 19, in the Swiss Cavalry in war-torn 1917 Europe. We aging “Baby Boomers” are often confronted with this concept. We have lifetime checkpoints or milestones, and when we look back and then subtract that distance, suddenly it’s the 1920s or possibly the Great Depression or World War II. How does that happen so quickly?
We arrived in Riverton in mid-August 1971. Susie was going into 6th grade at Wind River Elementary and I was an incoming freshman at Wind River High.
School didn’t start for a couple of weeks, and my parents hadn’t completed the purchase of their farm between Kinnear and Pavillion.
We stayed with my aunt Nellie and uncle Quentin for a few days as Mom and Dad drove back to California for another load in the pickup.
When school started, we moved to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Gasser Road. I rode to high school with Leroy Sinner and Chuck Frost for the first two weeks of school before we moved to the tiny 24×24 house on the farm.
To say it was culture shock was an understatement.
At Mitchell Junior High School in Rancho Cordova, the school that the kids at Mather Air Force Base were bused to, I was in the accelerated academic program. I took Algebra I in 7th grade, Algebra II in 8th grade, and high school biology in 8th grade as well. There wasn’t much left to take at Wind River in math and science when I arrived. I took geometry and chemistry as a freshman, and that was it until I was able to take a semester of physics as a senior.
What was available were regular fistfights at lunchtime, almost every day a couple of guys were smacking each other around between the two big pine trees in the front of the school or if it was serious, out back by the Ag Shop.
Those first few weeks of school, I was in a couple of fights a week. I couldn’t figure out why I was getting singled out. The other freshmen didn’t fight at all.
It was always a Native kid who wanted to throw down.
One day Mr. Frost pulled me aside in PE class and said, “I see those fights you’re in. Let one of them win, and it’ll stop.”
I thought he was nuts, and he could tell by my expression.
“Don’t let them beat you up, just take a few shots, throw a couple of punches, and then say you’re done, you don’t want to fight,” he said.
I tried it, and magically the fighting stopped. I asked him why.
“They’re just trying to figure out where you are on the pecking order,” Mr. Frost said. “Now they know. You won’t have any more trouble.”
He was right. It worked. Imagine that today.
On the home front, it was tight inside a house that was less than 600 square feet. We had just two bedrooms, a single antiquated bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a living room, with no garage.
Susie and I had to share a 12×12 bedroom. Dad built a plywood partition down the middle, leaving each of us with just a six-by-12-foot “bedroom.” We each had single beds. I had an end table for a lamp since I read until well after midnight, and an antique 1927 Zenith upright radio that the previous owner, Roy Walker, had given me. Susie didn’t like the radio, so I had to play it at about three decibels and could barely hear the broadcast from KOMA, 1520, in Oklahoma City each night.
I decided to do something about it in November. We had an old 10 x 14 chicken house out in the yard. We didn’t keep our hens there. Dad built a coop over by the barn. It was abandoned. I asked if I could convert it into a room and move out there. They said yes.
I shoveled out the decayed chicken manure, washed down the walls, installed a window I found in the barn and then stuffed newspaper between the studs for insulation. I wired it with a couple of outlets on each wall and one overhead light. Dad hooked it up to the power pole for me. I took some of the plywood that dad and I had salvaged from an old hospital that was being destroyed at Mather Air Force Base and covered the walls and ceiling.
I bought a couple of rolls of 90-pound rolled roofing and waited for a warm day to roll it out on the roof. The place was finished. I had a couch that folded flat into a bed, a gigantic 200-pound black and white television, my old Zenith radio, and an electric space heater. I was set.
I lived there until we built the addition on the west side of the house in the summer of my junior year.
As I researched a story on Cottonwood Courts a couple of months ago, I came across a photograph of the buildings at the Japanese Internment Camp at Heart Mountain. There, on the side of an image of the camp barracks, was my chicken coop.
Like many farmers throughout the western part of Wyoming, someone had loaded that building in the late 1940s and carried it to the little farm on Summerhill Road.
I lived in a piece of history, long before I knew that history.
I still have the sign I placed on the only door into the room: “Use Other Door,” printed in block, military letters, on a white sign.
It’s all that remains, aside from the memories.