In My Time - Dick Cheney [17]
I got a part-time job reading to a retired air force colonel who had lost his sight. He was getting the credits he needed to become a counselor for the blind, and four nights a week I read his textbooks to him for $1.75 an hour, paid for by the Veterans Administration. I also spent a fair amount of time studying and got very good grades, almost all A’s—as I would do for the rest of my years in higher education.
In late September 1963, not long after I’d started back to school, President Kennedy came to Laramie to deliver a speech at the university’s War Memorial Field House. I stood among the crowd of thousands and listened to him deliver an eloquent call to public service. He talked about the Greek definition of happiness—the full use of one’s powers along lines of excellence—and said that working for the public good could provide that kind of satisfaction. He talked about the importance of bringing what we were learning to the task of building a better nation and a better world. When he had finished I left the field house by a back door and saw his motorcade pulling away. He was riding in an open convertible and hundreds of students were running after him, wanting a last glimpse as he departed the campus. He had inspired us all, and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described. When he was killed only two months later, the mood at the university was especially somber. Everyone remembered that he had been with us so short a time before.
DURING MY FIRST YEAR at the University of Wyoming, I spent most of my weekends in Boulder, where Lynne was working on her master’s degree at the University of Colorado. At Easter we went home to tell our parents we were going to get married, and we set a date—August 29, 1964.
While Lynne and her mother worried about flowers and silver patterns, I went back to work building power line. One of the things I was saving for was the honeymoon Lynne and I were planning at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. But I came down with a terrible case of food poisoning and had to be hospitalized for a week. I had no health insurance, so in addition to losing seventeen pounds, I spent all the money I had been saving on medical bills. We still had a nice wedding, complete with bridesmaids and groomsmen, with my little sister, Susie, as our flower girl and Lynne’s brother, Mark, as the ringbearer.
Our wedding party – my sister, Susan and Lynne’s brother, Mark are the young attendants in the front row.
Leaving the church, August 29, 1964.
But our honeymoon afterward was one night in the Holiday Inn in Laramie, Wyoming.
Our first home was in a yellow, cinder-block apartment on the edge of campus. It was a real bargain at $53.65 a month furnished, but it lacked any kind of insulation—something of a drawback when the temperature dropped to 30 below. With an elevation over seven thousand feet, Laramie was known for its challenging winters. If you had a car, you had to install a head bolt heater and plug it in at night or else the engine block would freeze. Still, the natural setting was beautiful, with the Snowy Range and some good trout streams close by. When the fishing season opened, it was possible to get up early, drive up into the mountains and catch a few trout, and still make it back in time for morning classes.
As graduation neared, I decided to stay on and earn a master’s degree, and it was as a graduate student that I got my first taste of politics by working as an intern in the Wyoming state legislature. Half my stipend