In My Time - Dick Cheney [12]
Life in Wyoming was turning out to be everything we had expected and more. In 1954 my granddad Dickey joined us for a family fishing outing to Dubois. We stayed in a motel with a kitchenette so we could save money by cooking our own meals, but its main attraction was that it was right on the banks of the Wind River. We thought it was great to be able to walk outside the room right in the middle of town and start fishing. We didn’t know that some of the best water in Wyoming was only a few miles away in the winding streams that fed into the Wind River. We used nightcrawlers as bait occasionally, but in those days we were mostly hardware fishermen, using metal spinners and lures.
Granddad Dickey was the life of our small party, but he had had a couple of heart attacks and seemed to grow frailer with each visit. When he came to see us again in the spring of 1955, it was clear that he wasn’t doing well. One morning when I was in the living room and my parents were outside working in the yard, I heard him calling from his bedroom down the hall. “Dicky, come here, I need you.” I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, clearly in pain. He told me that he thought he was having another heart attack. I ran outside to get my folks, and they called for help. I ran down to the street corner to flag down the ambulance and make sure it came to the right house. In those days there wasn’t much the drivers could do except put Grandpa on oxygen and rush him to the hospital. I held the screen door open as they carried him out on a stretcher. My folks followed the ambulance to the hospital, but they were back home within an hour and told Bob and me that Grandpa had died.
He was buried next to Grandma Dickey in Lincoln, but we couldn’t go to Nebraska for the funeral because Mom was nine months pregnant and couldn’t travel. One week later, my sister, Susan, was born.
ALTHOUGH CASPER WAS A small town, it had a big high school. The next city of any size to the south of Casper was one hundred twenty miles away. You had to go west a hundred miles before encountering anything larger than a gas station. The towns east and north were very small. So Natrona County High School drew from all over central Wyoming, and there were nearly five hundred kids in my freshman class. When Casper athletic teams wanted to compete with schools of comparable size, some pretty big distances were involved. We thought nothing of loading into a school bus and traveling two or three hundred miles to Rapid City, South Dakota; Scottsbluff, Nebraska; or Grand Junction, Colorado.
I played football in the fall and American Legion baseball in the summer.
The Natrona County High School Mustangs football team in Casper, Wyoming, 1958. I’m number 20.
I tried basketball my freshman year, but gave it up when our coach, Swede Erickson, told me I had two problems: I couldn’t shoot and I couldn’t jump. Swede also once paid me a compliment about my football ability. “Cheney, you’re the finest ‘mudder’ on the NCHS team,” he said. Trouble was, it never rained in Wyoming during football season.
Our coaches had a big impact on us. They worked us hard on the field and made sure we kept up in the classroom. Two of my coaches, Bob Lahti and Don Weishaar, were also my teachers, and very good ones, of chemistry and calculus. Harry Geldien taught biology until he took over as head football coach in 1957. He’d been a star tailback at the University of Wyoming, and the whole town counted on him to bring our team out of its doldrums.