by Dana Perino
My great-grandmother lived to be 100 years old, so I got to know her. She always sent us birthday cards that had $2 bills inside—we kept them for good luck. In her later years, my grandparents set her up with a house in town and she would visit with friends and family, watch soap operas, and braid throw rugs out of Wonder Bread plastic sacks. She had a garden in the backyard, and when we visited, she made sure we ate a lot. “STRONG!” she would say, making a muscle. From her front porch we could watch the Weston County parades on the Fourth of July and race around trying to get as much candy as we could that was thrown from the cowboys on horseback and rodeo queens in fancy pickup trucks.
I had a lot of pride in my great-grandmother, even though because of the language gap, we didn’t really communicate that much. We lived 350 miles away from one another and I didn’t think of her daily, but we had a special connection. When I was fourteen, I had a dream right before I woke up one morning that I can still remember. In the dream, my great-grandmother was with my sister and me in an office building in Denver. She went to get into an elevator, and I tried to pull her back because I knew the elevator had no floor. But I didn’t reach her in time and she stepped into the space and I watched her fall all the way down. She didn’t scream.
The next morning, I started to tell my mom about my dream and she interrupted me and said, “Your dad just got a call—your great-grandmother died in the night.” I believe Great-Grandma Rosi was saying good-bye to us in that dream—nothing else can explain it.
My grandpa, Leo Perino Sr., was born at the homestead in 1921, the second youngest. His childhood sounded like one out of a storybook—one with a good ending. Up at the ranch they had cold winters and hot summers, and he spent his time riding horses, studying, and doing chores. He spoke Italian at home and English at school. Once when we asked him for more chewing gum, he told us about how when he was a kid they could make gum last for months by placing it on the bedpost at night (it wasn’t exactly walking uphill both ways to school, but the message was the same). But he always gave us more.
As a young man, he served in the Marines in World War II and he fought in the Pacific. Surviving war on tropical islands, he contracted some type of skin rash. My dad remembers in the 1950s going with him as a young boy to VA hospitals in Cheyenne and Denver. Each time it took forever for him to get an appointment. His ailment was bad and the only thing that helped was Baby Magic Lotion, but I never heard him complain about it.
The war ended, and my grandfather sailed through the Panama Canal and pulled into port at his base in Philadelphia. His first night back, some friends wanted to set him up on a blind date with this nursing student they knew. He said no to a blind date. She similarly refused the suggestion. But the friends prevailed and a great love story began. Within a couple of months of that first date, my grandmother, who had never been west of the Mississippi River, left Philadelphia for a ranching life in the rural countryside of the Black Hills.
My grandmother’s name was Victoria Thelma Potts Smith Perino, and she went by Vicky. She was born in Pennsylvania and her dad worked in a coal mine. When she was very young, he hurt his back at work and could no longer take care of all the children. To help the family, the Methodist minister got involved and arranged an adoption by the Smith family of my grandmother and her sister. They were well taken care of, and she and her sister remained close all their lives. My grandmother decided to become a nurse and was finishing her training when she met my grandfather.
Love at first sight wasn’t in her plan, and she was a bit concerned about taking my grandpa home to meet her parents because Italians at the time were distrusted and disliked. However, her parents were very supportive of the match, and with their blessing, my grandfather asked her to marry him. She said yes.
The East Coast was not for him. Having felt like he’d traveled and seen enough, my grandpa wanted to go home to the ranch in Wyoming. Vicky readily agreed, even without knowing what ranching life would be like. They took the train back to Newcastle to introduce her to the Perinos.
My great-grandparents must have liked Vicky because after the wedding at the Methodist church they met the newlyweds at the ranch gate and gave them $100 (quite a lot of money in those times). But some of the other family members and people in the area were concerned that my grandfather had just brought in someone they basically considered a foreigner and “Weren’t the local girls good enough for him?” I see it as kind of a Wyoming version of Romeo and Juliet—they were meant to be together even if some didn’t think so. Over time, my grandmother more than earned her place among the hardworking women of Wyoming and became a local girl. She worked as a nurse in town and helped run the ranch in the mornings, evenings, and every weekend.
Through the years, my grandfather and his siblings grew the ranch in acreage. There was a homesteader who acquired a great deal of land throughout the Depression. After he died, his ranch was to be sold but no one in his family had the money to buy it all. Many families went in on a transaction to buy the ranch and parcel it out.
That’s when Rosi and Matteo’s children, Aunt Dora, Uncles Joe and Fred, and my grandfather bought a large part of that ranch and formed “the outfit,” a Western term that encompasses everything on a ranch and its owners. The outfit stayed together for quite some time, but as happens in families, disagreements occurred and it was split up in the mid-1960s or so. My grandpa had started moving away from farming as the mainstay and converted to ranching—cattle and horses for the most part. At its largest, through my uncle Matt’s work, the ranch was 50,000 acres, almost three times the size of Manhattan, where I live now.
My grandparents had three sons—my dad, Leo Jr., and my uncles Matt and Tom. Today, my dad lives in Denver. Matt continues to ranch in Newcastle, with his high school sweetheart, Donna, and their two sons, Wade and Preston. My uncle Tom, the very picture of an American cowboy, died from cancer in 2006, and his part of the ranch is still worked by his widow, Janet, and their family.
The ranch house sat at the bottom of a red-dirt hill at the end of a canyon. It was above the other structures—an old-fashioned red barn, a series of white-painted fenced corrals, a cellar for potatoes and other vegetables, a chicken house, and storage sheds. The soil around the ranch was red, almost like clay.
I loved the barn. It was large with several stalls for horses or cows, and a hayloft on the second level. It had been painted red with white trim years before I was a kid so the color was slightly faded. Tools, whips, and halters hung on the walls by the workbench. In the winter, sometimes my grandpa and uncles had to go down and help a cow that was having difficulty giving birth. They’d wrap chains around the legs of the calf and pull, doing all they could to ensure that the mother cow and the calf were healthy at the end of their ordeal. It was messy but rewarding work. My sister and I never had to muck out the stalls, and we felt bad that we weren’t expected to, but we never volunteered for the job either.
I used to go down the hill to the barn and climb up to the top of the fence that lined the barnyard and take a look around. I knew it was a special place, and it’s where I was most content. We were the center of our own universe, and the adults reminded us over and over to be appreciative of what we had.
It wasn’t all work on the ranch. Morning chores gave way to afternoon fun. Under the porch of the house, my cousins and I played with mini versions of the trucks, combines, and tractors the adults used on the ranch. Some of the toys were so old that my dad and uncles remembered them from when they were kids.
We had other amusements, too—my grandfather bought us an Olympic-sized trampoline that he set up in the storage shed while the big combine was used in the summer. My uncle Tom was the best jumper—he could do tons of tricks and he’d bounce us as high as we wanted until our moms threatened to scream if he didn’t stop. Then he’d bounce us one more time just to drive them crazy.
The real magic of the ranch, however, was in the other residents—the animals. Quarter horses, cattle, chickens
, goats, pigs, dogs, and kittens—all under my grandparents’ care—and then there were the coyotes and snakes that we learned to avoid. For years, peacocks roamed the area, and my grandmother had a vase that held all of the big feathers that we picked up for her around the property.
And always there were dogs. My grandfather mostly raised collies and Australian shepherds, but also the occasional mutt or housedog. My family trained the dogs themselves, to obey, work, and even do some neat tricks. My grandpa had several whistles that the dogs understood and they’d signal what job they were expected to do next (gather the mares, round up the cows, hop in the back). The livestock learned what the whistles meant, too, especially if there was cake involved (like a PowerBar but for cows and horses).
One of the most majestic of the shepherds was Blue. He never stepped inside the house even if it was 40 degrees below zero and he was invited to come in from the cold. He was too proud to go in (quite a different life from Jasper’s in Manhattan). The other dogs cut him a wide berth and let him eat first.
My uncle Matt and my aunt Donna owned another family favorite, a tricolored Australian shepherd named Robin. She had only one blue eye because when she was a puppy a horse had kicked out the other one. One time we grandkids were playing with Robin outside our uncle Tom’s double-wide trailer on a summer afternoon. All of a sudden Robin yelped and howled. A rattlesnake had bitten her.
Matt and Donna tried to save her and raced down the gravel road to get to a vet in Sundance, but Robin died on the way. Meanwhile, Tom got his rifle and blew the rattlesnake’s head off so that no one else would be hurt by it. I felt so sad for my aunt and uncle because Robin was like one of their children—she had been their first baby. I was also frightened because the snake could have bitten any of us.
My grandpa’s last dogs were Ray and Floyd. They ran as a pair. They’d just sit in the yard waiting to be asked to work, and they’d beat you to the pickup if they saw you leave the house. They hated to be left behind. If their services weren’t needed, they’d run off and have an adventure. When they came back, they’d be filthy and panting. Lord knows what they got up to out there. They didn’t seem to be afraid of anything, but why would they be when they had my grandfather’s permission to rule the hills?
We made our dogs a part of our games, like hide-and-seek. We’d sit in the back of the pickups with them and hold on to their collars while they put their heads over the sides and sniffed the air as we rolled down the road. I was taught the simple pleasures of the love of a dog from early as a kid—and the dogs I’ve raised with Peter—Henry and Jasper—have given me some of the greatest joys and best memories of my life.
Even after we moved, to keep the connection to Wyoming, my mom and dad would take my sister and me to the ranch several times a year. From Denver, it was about a seven-hour drive. We spent every Christmas and Easter holiday and our summer vacations there.
Since my sister and I didn’t live at the ranch full-time, we didn’t have specific chores. My cousins, on the other hand, had a lot of responsibilities. We’d help them out by filling the water tanks, feeding calves in the winter, and opening or closing gates. I’d do anything to get out of having to pick eggs. The chicken coop scared me—it was dark and smelly and the hens would peck me when I reached my hands in to get the eggs. To keep our cousins happy, we found that the best way for us to help was to either take specific direction from them or stay out of their way.
There were also ancient creatures to check out. As a kid, I loved learning about dinosaurs, so in the summers my dad would take us digging for belemnite fossils in a canyon road about a mile from the ranch. Belemnites were squid-like creatures that lived when the Black Hills were under an ocean over 250 million years ago. They were long-tailed and bullet-shaped. When we found one of their fossils, we would put it in a tin Folgers coffee can to take back to the ranch house to show my grandparents. They always seemed impressed.
In the winter when it snowed, my grandfather would put the wooden sleds into the back of one of his pickups (he was a Chevy man), and we’d pile into the cab. Then he’d drive us to the top of one of the big hills not far from the house. We’d get on our uncles’ sleds because they were heavy enough to give us a real ride, and we’d land in a big gulley that had double the snow. It was like flying and probably quite dangerous by today’s standards.
My grandpa didn’t make us walk up the hill to have another go; instead, he watched us slide down and then he’d drive down to the bottom to pick us up and take us back to the top. When we’d had our fun and started to feel the cold, my grandpa would get on the CB radio and call my grandma to tell her to get the hot chocolate and marshmallows ready.
When I was really young, my walkie-talkie handle was Big Bird and my sister’s was Cookie Monster. Sometimes a trucker driving in the area would hear us on the radio and call out to us. With our grandpa’s permission, we’d ask where he was headed, what he was hauling, and wish him a safe journey.
While we played with the radio, my family used it for work—it kept them informed about what was happening in the area. In the hot dry summers, they’d listen for reports of lightning strikes because one hit could turn into a full-blown forest fire. All of the neighbors pitched in to help one another contain or put out fires when they started.
My grandfather had a yellow fire truck that the Weston County firefighters acquired from the U.S. military as surplus equipment. My grandpa let my sister and me go with them as long as we stayed in the backseat. It was such a privilege that we didn’t dare move, and what I learned on those emergencies came in handy later at the White House when I was the spokesperson for the President’s Healthy Forests Initiative. I was one of the few people in Washington that had actually seen the problem of overgrown brush up close.
In the evenings, my grandpa would make us root beer or Pepsi floats, or we’d have some watermelon from his garden. We ate well, always a salad of cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes with olive oil and vinegar dressing and beef of some cut—usually cooked well without marinade. Sometimes there was a chocolate cake my grandma made or vanilla ice cream that was delivered by the Schwan Man, a grocery catalog delivery service.
The noontime meal was called “dinner,” and it was the main meal of the day. A big bell next to the gate leading to the house alerted the family that the food was ready. After eating, my uncles would take a bit of a nap with their hats covering their faces on the couch in the winter and out in the front yard in the summer. After about thirty minutes, they’d be back outside baling hay, gathering cows, shoeing horses, or fixing a tractor. No wonder they were so fit.
If the ranch seems like a bit of Americana to you, I would agree. And we weren’t the only ones who thought so. In the 1970s, a couple of men scouting locations for some ads for Marlboro cigarettes drove up to the ranch. They were hoping to find an outfit that had cattle and horses that they could work with to film the ads. My family agreed to help them and everyone worked in the background to help during the photo shoots.
My uncle Matt recalls that the Marlboro Men weren’t just models with pretty faces who wore a pair of Wranglers well—they were good cowboys, too, with skills and experience. My aunt Donna would feed them when they were visiting and she even gave them haircuts out on location. I got to hang with them one day, but I wasn’t smart enough to get their autographs.
As a part-time city slicker, I could still ride a horse, and that was my favorite thing to do. When my grandpa knew I was coming up for a visit, he’d have my uncles go get Sally, my pony, so that she’d be in the corral when I arrived. The first thing I did was climb on her back, hold on to her mane, and kick her gently in the ribs to get going. She’d walk slowly around the arena where my uncles and cousins practiced their rodeo skills. My grandpa said I was a pretty good horsewoman, and that was the highest of compliments in my book.
Sally was just a pony, but there were majestic horses, too. Jet was my grandpa’s pride and joy. He was a Triple AAA racehorse from southeast Tex
as that my grandpa wanted to cross with his quarter horse mares to give his colts some additional size and speed. The plan worked very well. My grandpa had his annual horse auction for around forty years and sold horses to people in every state in America and even to folks in a couple of foreign countries.
Once after taking Jet for one of his planned liaisons with a mare, my grandparents stopped at our house in Denver and Jet got to eat some city grass in our backyard. I was the envy of every neighborhood kid, and I lapped it up. When Jet died at nearly thirty years old, he got a special burial up on the hill that you could see from the picture window in the kitchen.
But not every animal was a pet. My uncles Matt and Tom were always trying to toughen up my cousins—Wade, Preston, Jill, Jared, and Logan—and every so often during dinner they’d remark on the steak we were eating, and say, “Well, Wade, your ol’ steer Biscuit sure turned into some good eatin’!” I never knew if they were serious, but I felt bad for my cousins who, younger than me, bit their lips and tried hard not to react. Cowboys and cowgirls don’t cry (much).
That was the reality of ranching life, and so was care for the animals—even the undomesticated ones. In the summers, my grandfather would create big slash piles of timber and brush that he cleared out of the forest. Those piles were supposed to be burned down, but my grandfather in his later years didn’t set the fires because he didn’t want the critters to be homeless. I loved that about him—he even protected the bunnies.
I’ll admit, it all sounds very Laura Ingalls Wilder. But it wasn’t always that way. We had to learn the hard lessons of ranching life, too. Once when I was about eight years old and my sister was only four, we were passengers in my grandpa’s pickup along the gravel road that led back to the ranch house. We liked to tell him all about the Smurfs and he pretended he could see little blue creatures with white hats up in the hills. I knew he was kidding and I went along with it for my sister’s benefit. We were having a great time, but when we came to a cattle guard along the road, he saw that one of his quarter horses had fallen through and broken its leg. The horse was in great pain and whimpering, his eyes rolling back into his head.