In My Time - Dick Cheney [10]
I supplemented my allowance by mowing lawns during the summer. I also had a paper route delivering the Lincoln Star, from which on a good month I could clear thirty dollars, very good money for a twelve-year-old in those days. My enterprise even led to my debut in newsprint in a short feature headlined “Star Carrier Dick Cheney.” I told the interviewer that I had bought a clarinet with a portion of my earnings, but I was saving for college, where I planned to become an architectural engineer. For most of the year, I enjoyed those early morning rides, when the sun was just coming up and everything was quiet. But there were some cold mornings when even my thick gloves weren’t enough, so I bought a small hand warmer at an army surplus store. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes with holes poked all around it. You pulled out the innards, doused them with lighter fluid, and put them back in the small tin box. Once ignited the wick would burn slowly without any flame. I’d steer with one hand through the frozen postdawn streets and keep the other in the pocket with the warmer.
In the summer we all played Little League baseball, and in the fall it was Pop Warner football.
With Bob and our friends, Ed and Vic Larson, in our Little League uniforms in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1952
I was probably seven or eight when my dad started taking me to some of the farm ponds and slow-moving creeks just outside Lincoln. We fished for bullhead and carp with bamboo poles, using worms for bait. I remember a trip to visit my mom’s brother Ward in Idaho Falls, which was the first time I used spinners.
I read a lot. Arthur Draper’s Wonders of the Heavens explained the shooting stars we saw in the vast Nebraska sky. Other books introduced heroes like George Washington, Kit Carson, and Lou Gehrig. The whole family listened to the radio, and very early in the fifties we acquired one of the first television sets in the neighborhood. When President Eisenhower was inaugurated on January 20, 1953, the entire sixth-grade class of College View Elementary crowded into our living room to watch the event on our small black-and-white screen.
In 1952 both my parents had voted for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, but it was the new Republican president who was responsible for a major change in the Cheney family’s life. One of Eisenhower’s earliest initiatives involved a reorganization of the Department of Agriculture, which included the Soil Conservation Service. My father was given a choice of new assignments, and he chose Casper, Wyoming, over Great Falls, Montana. Casper, which was known as “the Oil Capital of the Rockies,” was in the central part of Wyoming. With a population of about twenty-five thousand, it was the second-biggest city in the state. Only the capital, Cheyenne, was larger—and not by much. We had driven through Wyoming on a few car trips west. We’d seen the mountains and fished the trout streams. We remembered the crisp morning air of the high plains and the sunny afternoons, one after another. As much as we liked College View, the Cheney family couldn’t wait to get to Casper.
THE SPRING BEFORE WE moved, I began following the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. I’d sit on the floor of our living room, the newspaper spread out in front of me, and pore over maps of the battle as it unfolded week after week. I’d watch the nightly news reports of the communist Viet Minh besieging French forces and the French driving them back until ultimately the Viet