Northern Wyoming News - Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years

In addition to all the gas stations on main street in Worland in the 1950s, there were still more found on 10th Street and further north. Following a hypothetical driver coming from Thermopolis, such a driver could take a left at 10th Street and Big...

Last week I talked about how a driver coming into Worland from Thermopolis during the 1950s would first cross the bridge that we now know as the old bridge. The first gas station encountered would be Scotty’s Texaco (or, perhaps, Scotty’s Sin...

In my short and modest career as a newspaper columnist, I’ve learned a few things. Importantly, I have learned that geezers know a whole bunch of important things. They may not know much about the Theory of Relativity or the artwork in the Sistine C...

I’ve noticed how Worland’s grocery stores have changed during my lifetime, but only recently have I looked more closely at this change and realized how extensive it has been. Today, the great majority of the grocery needs of our town are met by two...

I don’t usually write about controversial subjects in this column, but there’s one subject that’s arisen lately that I want to talk about. I’m referring to the Electoral College and the push by some folks to abolish it. I’ve also read columns declari...

As a boy, I always wondered about the source of the street names in my town, and about the men after whom they were named. My recent investigation into the Worland cemetery has provided me with interesting new information. One of the longer streets...

I took a drive into the Worland cemetery last week, entering by the middle gate. My purpose was to find the graves of some of the prominent people in early day Worland. Close to the top of my list was the grave of C. F. (Charles Fremont) Robertson,...

The other day as I was coming home from a walk along the river a young friend drove by and offered me a ride to my house. I climbed in, noticed that my friend had a rifle (he said he was going elk hunting in the coming week) and I asked him the...

I like to take walks from my home at Sixth and Culbertson to Worland’s River View Memorial Gardens. It’s a pleasant trek, with great views of the Big Horns, and I like to commune with my relatives buried in the cemetery (my grandmother, three aun...

When this column is published on Oct. 4, I should have just returned from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Let me tell you how this eastward trek came about. My wife and I have collected antique furniture since 1971 and our house is filled with 18th and e...

I remain fascinated by the weather; it is so wonderfully variable. I recall a meteorological reference to the weather being, “normal; chaotic.” Every year presents its own unique events. This year we’ve had a lot of up and down, especially recen...

After Archie Harvard was drafted in early 1942, he first went to Galveston, Texas, for nine weeks, and then took basic training for another nine weeks at Fort Bliss, Texas. He was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery. Archie’s first duty station w...

People often ask me where I get ideas for the columns I write. Usually, they come from my own experiences, but sometimes my readers suggest things I might write about. The other day, while I was at the Worland Post Office, Jerry Doerr said I should g...

The other day I was thinking about how things have changed during my lifetime. One of the things I mused about was the Cold War with the USSR. From a very early time, maybe as early as 1949, when I started school, it was obvious to me that Soviet...

Last week, my wife and I spent three days in Three Forks, Montana, at the Sacajawea Inn. Three Forks is a charming little town and the Inn is a splendid example of arts and crafts architecture. Celia and I, having lived in an arts and crafts house...

What is there about some boys (and some men) that compel them to classify things? My younger son, Dan, when he was 12 and 14, would put together lists of the greatest running backs, the best basketball players, and, as I remember, the highest...

Last Sunday morning about 6:45, a car pulled up next to my house, and it included Sharon Garrity and Jan Corbin, each a granddaughter of William Minnick. For the last several weeks, Sharon has been sending me emails telling me of her great desire to...

My wife says that I’m a slave to my habits, but you know how wives exaggerate these things. A little while ago she pointed out that on each day of the week I go to the same place to eat lunch, and that, no matter what, I have a TV dinner on M...

My wife, Celia, during her long exile to Tennessee, longed to see the Big Horn Mountains, and so this last Sunday, we got in our Suburban and went east. It was warming rapidly in Worland when we left, and I recall that the temperature just outside...

I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the last two or three months. Whenever I’m looking at a period of inactivity, I start shopping for books. When in Nashville in April and May, I went to a Barnes and Noble store just off the Vanderbilt campus. In...

I read with some consternation the other day that Worland will be losing scheduled air service after this summer. It’s not that much of a surprise, as it’s been talked about for years. Losing our airline service still bothers me, as much as any...

If you recall, in the last column I mentioned that at almost every stop of my Tom Horn tour, the first question was: “Was he guilty?” Well, this was the first question I heard in all but one stop in phase II of the tour: “Was he guilty?” demande...

When you’re 72, you’ve owned a lot of cars in your life. I bought my first car when only 14, a 1951 green six cylinder Chevy two-door sedan. I thought it was wonderful. I was almost 15 and sure that the day of my birthday I’d get a driver’s license...

I like to walk. We’ve always lived close to downtown Worland and so I developed habits of walking to the grocery store, to my office, and to the courthouse, bank, post office, etc. Unless a trip is more than, say, seven or eight blocks, I walk. A...

I’ve done quite a bit of reading during the last few months, starting with a stack of books I bought in Salt Lake City in November when my wife and I had to travel there for medical reasons. And then I got my usual bunch of books over Christmas. T...