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.
The idea is that you work for 30, 40, or maybe 50 years, then take it easy. At least that’s the concept of retirement. Time doesn’t work out that way.
How many of you have heard a retired friend say they’re suddenly so busy they had no idea it was going to be like this? It’s a common theme.
On that note, I “officially” retired at 4:00 p.m. on May 31, 2012. It was a Thursday, and I confess I left at 3:54 that afternoon.
In the interim, it’s been nothing like the retirement you see advertised in movies, commercials, and sitcoms.
Initially, woodworking, construction, farming, and a little writing filled the day. Those roles have changed. I haven’t hired out on a construction job for over a decade, and my shop is sadly silent aside from a few Christmas presents.
Farming, at least my old version of it, consisted of building and fixing fence, chasing wayward cattle, and cutting, baling, and stacking a few thousand bales each summer. The hay season brought on the mechanic season as I cobbed my old tractors and swathers back into shape for another run. The ratio seemed about 3-to-1; that is, three times as much time with a wrench, welder, and replacement hydraulic hoses as spent in the field.
A new tractor, a complete professional rebuild on the baler and a used but high-end pull-behind hydra-swing took care of most of the mechanical time.
That left writing.
It’s become a full-time occupation. It’s all done in my “home office,” a room designed just for that 31 years ago when I built this house in 1995 with the help of my friend Tad McMillan and my nephew Mark Smith.
I often get a well-deserved “eye roll” from Sue when I remind her that “it’s the only room in the house that makes us money.” She still doesn’t care for the constant clutter.
In between covering football, basketball, volleyball, wrestling, swimming, cross country, and track and field for every team in the county, I write a column like this one each Monday and a sports-centered one on Wednesday.
A few features on farmers, ranchers, and many of the other exceptional individuals that call Fremont County home come around a few times a month, and each Thursday I get to write a local history piece.
The local history piece is the highlight of retirement.
It started four years ago at County 10, and now I have over 200 local history stories online.
All that research led to other projects.
In the past 18 months, I’ve written four books.
It started last year with “Rails to Trails,” the story of stage drivers, station masters, freighters, outlaws, blizzards, dust, mayhem, and sometimes murder on the winding two-track road across the desert from Rawlins to the Sweetwater River, then northwest to Fort Washakie.
Walking sections of that trail just added to the fun.
In 1995, I published “Twilight on the Prairie,” a compendium of columns I’d written weekly in the Riverton Ranger. Jump ahead three decades, and I took the same idea, albeit with just a few columns from County 10, and published “Under the Wyoming Sky.”
I’ve been fascinated with trains since my mom and little sister rode from Rock Springs to Sacramento on the Union Pacific in 1968. My grandparents, Eugene and Clara Gasser, took the Chicago and North Western on the final leg from Ellis Island to Riverton in 1921 and 1923, respectively. They’re the reason I wrote the story of the Chicago and North Western from Chadron, Nebraska, to Lander.
I had the 451-page book written but could not come up with a title. Sometimes the title is the most difficult part.
I asked the family last month for ideas. My nine-year-old granddaughter Jayne is a bright soon-to-be fourth grader. Without hesitation, she said, “How about Plains to Trains?” That was it. It’s been selling well on Amazon for the last few weeks.
As with “Rails to Trails,” I stopped at every town, rail siding, and ranch stop along the way for original photographs, some just pictures of foundations in the sagebrush. History never really vanishes. There is always something there to remind us.
Just two weeks ago, “Outlaw Grandpa” hit Amazon in paperback and Kindle format.
It’s the story of my friend Lonnie Woodard’s grandpa, Clarence Levi Woodard, a fascinating man.
Clarence began his life outside the law as a teenager. He was an associate of the Wild Bunch and did two stints in the state penitentiary, one for robbery and the other for horse theft. He apparently got away with robbing a bank, made some cash bootlegging, did another stretch in the state pen, and then became a loving grandfather. Quite a story with this guy.
I’ve missed opportunities a few times, none more profoundly than in writing “Heart Mountain High.”
I started this project back in 2003. I’ve written about 100 pages, but life got in the way, and it was shelved. It was the story of the high school at the Japanese internment camp at Heart Mountain in Park County.
One day I received a text from my longtime friend Tom Zingarelli. “You took too long. You missed the boat on Heart Mountain,” Tom wrote.
He was referring to the release of “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America” by Bradford Pearson.
Yep, swing and a miss on this one, or maybe not.
Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull have almost 500 books written about them at the Little Bighorn. Gettysburg has even more, an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 books and pamphlets on the battle. Maybe there’s room for a second book on Heart Mountain High School.
I have copies of every issue of the student newspaper, Heart Mountain Echoes, plus gracious access to the archives of the Powell Tribune. They’re (and this is rare for me) neatly packed and arranged in plastic containers waiting to be accessed.
Written interviews with Mas and Bunnie Ogimachi, who were Heart Mountain curator Aura Newlin’s grandparents, and Joe Suski, the athletic director and star baseball player who found himself at Heart Mountain, provide even more background for another tale of the camp.
I even discovered that the chicken coop I converted into a room so I didn’t have to share one with my little sister in high school came from Heart Mountain to the farm on a truck through the Wind River Canyon in 1948.
Maybe it’s all those trips around the sun, but somewhere along the way writing replaced the jobs of my youth.
If I have the energy, I’d still like to write a book about U.S. Highway 20 from Valentine, Nebraska, west to Shoshoni. When the kids were little, we took them to Valentine to visit their great-grandmother, Sue’s grandma Hahn. The little town is fascinating, but not as interesting as the trek across the Sand Hills in its entirety.
Shoshoni is the center of almost every book I’ve written. Wranglerville is a book unto itself.
Maybe. There are always angles to follow.