by Dick Cheney
My mother loved San Diego. She got to see her husband and had a great adventure, traveling farther than she ever had, seeing the ocean for the first time, and watching the San Diego Padres play. Her scrapbook is full of red and white Padres programs in which she carefully kept score.
What had been planned as a two-week visit turned into a two-month stay, and wonderful as life at Mildred and Elmer’s was, Bob and I missed our mom. One hot August day we decided that she had been gone entirely too long, and we were going to hitchhike to California to see her. We made it to the highway, but were intercepted before we managed to catch a ride. In fact, our adventure was interrupted at just about the time she was starting home. While she was changing trains in Ogden, Utah, she heard the news that Japan had surrendered. The war was over, and the Cheney family would soon be reunited.
DEMOBILIZATION PROCEEDED ON A last in, last out basis, so my father wasn’t discharged until April 1946. When he got back to Lincoln, he found there was a severe postwar housing shortage, and we were lucky to have friends offer us their unfinished basement. My mother cooked on a hot plate, and we shared a single bathroom with the family upstairs until my folks found a five-room tract house that was going up in the suburb of College View. We would drive out in the ’37 Buick that Dad had inherited from an uncle and impatiently watch our new home being built.
Our street in College View dead-ended in a woods that had what we called a stream running through it. In fact, our “stream” was really a drainage ditch for storm sewers, but it provided some fine crawdad fishing for the many neighborhood kids. The woods also provided opportunities to explore and climb, and there were hours when we covered considerable distances by stepping or jumping from tree to tree without ever touching the ground. In the winter a long, wide, sloping street in College View provided a terrific hill for sledding.
Granddad Dickey visited, one time pushing a stray mutt he’d found into our living room and letting my mother get used to the idea before he came inside himself. We named the dog Butch, and his claim to fame was his ability to sit up in a variety of places, from a bicycle seat to the palm of your hand. Our neighbors gave us a cat that was nearly as big as Butch, and the two developed a wary relationship. There was a throw rug on the hall floor, and whenever Butch saw the cat positioned just right, he’d run for the throw rug, landing on it so that he would slide down the hall and smack into the cat.
I don’t remember much of my early schooling, but a kindergarten report card my mother saved notes that I seemed “a little self-conscious when speaking before the group.” As the year progressed, I was “speaking more confidently,” asking “worthwhile questions,” and, apparently, showing persistence. “Richard does not give up easily,” Miss Korbel wrote. She also noted that I had good health habits. “He always tries to sit and stand correctly and to use his handkerchief in the right way.” My third-grade teacher, Miss Duffield, gave me top-notch grades in English, arithmetic, reading, and social studies, and although she noted that my work in art and music wasn’t all it could be, she still concluded, “I have enjoyed working with Dicky this year. He has the qualifications for a good leader.”
All the kids in College View rode bikes everywhere. I used to ride home from school each day for lunch. Even after my mother started working for the state health department downtown in the Nebraska State Capitol, I would ride the ten blocks home and cook myself a hamburger. Bob and I joined Pack 54 of the Cub Scouts. Mom was the den mother of Den No. 2, sponsored by the Sheridan Boulevard Baptist Church, which met in our unfinished basement. When we were older, the Boy Scout who was our troop leader would sometimes bring a pack of cigarettes, and after our meetings, we would go outside and light up.
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 Minh overran the garrison, delivering the French a terrible defeat.
When we first arrived in Casper in 1954, I read a lot about World War II. I checked Guadalcanal Diary and Those Devils in Baggy Pants out of the Carnegie Library, a redbrick building with a white dome on Second Street. I didn’t know anybody yet, so I was a regular patron.
Our house was the last one on the east side of town, and Bob and I loved to go out on the prairie. To a casual observer the landscape might have seemed barren and boring, but my brother and I, out there for hours, knew its different grasses, the sagebrush, the scrub pine, and all the animals that lived there—antelope, deer, jackrabbits, cottontails, and an occasional rattlesnake. We took our .22s along and usually returned with at least a couple of rabbits, which Mom would fry up for our lunchboxes the next day.
In Casper we were living in the heart of the old West, in a town on the Oregon Trail that traced its beginnings to a ferry that the Mormons established to take pioneers across the Platte River. As the number of wagon trains rolling down the tr
ail increased, so did conflicts with the Plains Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry came riding into the West—often at their peril. In 1865, not far from the site of the old ferry on the Platte, there was a battle that took the life of young Lieutenant Caspar Collins, after whom the town would be named, with the spelling only slightly altered. The following year, a few hours north at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors wiped out an army column of some eighty men, including their commander, Captain W. J. Fetterman. And ten years later, just over the border in Montana, Sitting Bull’s warriors killed General George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred men of the 7th Cavalry in a battle near the Little Bighorn River.
I became fascinated with the stories of the men who came before the pioneers, such as John Colter, who broke off from the Lewis and Clark expedition and in the winter of 1807–1808 made his way to what we now call Yellowstone National Park. People accused him of lying when he reported on the geysers and boiling pools he had seen, and although he wasn’t telling tall tales, exaggeration was part of the mountain man tradition—as were independence and self-reliance. Whiskey and profanity were part of it too—except maybe in the case of Jedediah Smith, a man of religion, who traversed vast sections of the West with his Bible and an unbelievable threshold for pain. When an encounter with a grizzly left him with his scalp and ear hanging off, he had one of his fellow mountain men sew them back on, and within a few weeks, he was back blazing trails. Hugh Glass was another great story. In an encounter with a grizzly, he was so badly wounded that his traveling companions left him for dead. His leg broken, his body gashed and torn, he crawled a hundred miles to a river, where he constructed a raft and floated to Fort Kiowa. When he had recovered, he set out to kill the men who had left him.
A. B. Guthrie’s novel The Big Sky re-created not only the era of the mountain men, but the remarkable land of high plains and higher mountains that was now my backyard, a place where “there was more sky than a man could think, curving deep and far and empty, except maybe for a hawk or an eagle sailing.” Guthrie’s book was a favorite of my teenage years, surpassed only by Bernard De Voto’s telling of the mountain men’s story in Across the Wide Missouri. De Voto knew well the land that the pioneers traveled as they approached the Platte River ferry, and vast stretches of it still existed, “gullies, knife-edges, sage, greasewood, and alkali,... covered with flowers in June, relieved by small sweet creeks flowing among cottonwoods.” I’ve reread Across the Wide Missouri many times since my youth. It’s one of those books I’ve never really put away.
DURING OUR FIRST SUMMER in Casper, I signed up for Pony League baseball, and at the end of the season I was picked for an all-star team that got to travel on a chartered bus to Richland, Washington, for a regional tournament. Although we had more fun than success, I made some good friends, including Tom Fake, who would be my best friend all through high school. When I got home and saw the newspaper stories about the trip that my mom had clipped from the local papers, I began to get an inkling of the support that a small town gives to its sports teams. A lot of adults wanted a bunch of thirteen-year-olds to succeed, and when we didn’t quite live up to their hopes, they were with us anyway, confidently predicting that next year would be our time.
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. He didn’t let us down. We tied with Sheridan for the state championship that year, which made us celebrities in Casper and shined a bright light on Geldien. He was soon as much loved by the community as he was by those of us he coached. He taught us about competition, focus, and discipline.
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 south
west, 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.