In My Time - Dick Cheney [13]
When I was vice president, I was invited to address the Wyoming legislature, and my friend Joe Meyer, the Wyoming state treasurer, whom Geldien had also coached, arranged for a small reunion with Geldien and another of our teammates, Mike Golden, justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court. The best part of our get-together was seeing how proud we had made the coach.
Except during football season I always had a part-time job, everything from delivering newspapers and cutting lawns, to working as a janitor at Ben Franklin, a five-and-dime store, and Donell’s, a candy store in the Hilltop Shopping Center. One summer I loaded hundred-pound bags of bentonite onto railway cars at a plant west of town and another I worked as a laborer at the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo grounds. That last job ended about a week before football started, and I joined three friends and football teammates, Tom Fake, T. J. Claunch, and Brock Hileman, on a fishing trip in the upper reaches of the Middle Fork of the Powder River.
By this time I had done a fair amount of fishing. Sometimes with my mom and dad and sometimes with friends, I had fished the Alcova Reservoir, about thirty miles southwest of town. I’d also gotten to know a stretch of river above Pathfinder, a dam about fifty miles to the southwest, which always gave up lots of big trout. The stretch is called “miracle mile,” and it was where I fished for the first time using streamers instead of hardware or bait, although I was still using a casting rod instead of a fly rod.
Now, along with Tom, T.J., and Brock, I was headed to the upper reaches of the Middle Fork. The section we wanted to fish was in a very rugged deep canyon, so we camped on top and climbed down to the stream every day. With a used fiberglass fly rod and a handful of flies I’d purchased at the local hardware store, I tried fly-fishing for the first time in my life. We had a magnificent trip, and it was my introduction to a sport that has since taken me all over the world.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that happened to me in high school was that I fell in love. I’d known who Lynne Vincent was since I’d arrived in Casper as a thirteen-year-old in the eighth grade. She was blonde, very smart, and very attractive, in addition to being the state champion baton twirler. I didn’t summon up enough courage to ask her out until we were juniors, at the end of January 1958, just before my seventeenth birthday. She agreed to go to a formal dance with me, and after that there was no looking back.
With Lynne at the Natrona Country High School senior prom in Casper, Wyoming, 1959.
That summer I was selected by my high school teachers to attend a five-week program for promising students at Northwestern University. One of the local service clubs raised enough money to pay for my round-trip ticket, and Dad drove me down to Rawlins to catch the Union Pacific train. I went to Northwestern with the idea that I was going to become an engineer, and while I liked the summer program, I discovered I didn’t like engineering. I saw my first Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field that summer, but my best day was when Lynne came down from Wisconsin, where she was competing in a baton-twirling competition, to spend an afternoon with me.
Our senior year was like a classic fifties movie.
Lynne Vincent and me in our high school yearbook photos. One of my best decisions ever was asking her out on our first date, January 31, 1957.
I was class president, Lynne was homecoming queen, and as co-captain of the football team for homecoming, I got to crown her. Everything seemed possible through that fall of football games, movie dates, and going to the Canteen, a town-sponsored teen hangout where the jukebox played the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley.