by Dana Perino
My grandfather pulled over and was reaching for the rifle that hung securely in the back window before he came to a full stop. He told my sister and me to get down on the floorboards of the pickup, locked eyes with me, and said, “And don’t look up, okay?” I nodded.
I made sure my sister was covering her eyes and looking down, but I didn’t completely obey. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I stole a glance at him. Framed in the window of the pickup, I saw his profile—strong nose, cowboy hat, tanned skin, blue eyes, and glasses. A tear rolled down his cheek right before he pulled the trigger.
I choked back a cry and swallowed it so that I didn’t make anything worse or get in trouble for looking up. When he got back into the vehicle, he made us stay down until we’d passed the herd. As we drove up the road, he called ahead on the radio to my uncles to let them know what happened. Then he rested his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze, and I felt a bit of his character seeping into me. I learned from him that strength and gentleness go hand in hand.
My grandfather was slow to anger, but one winter my cousin Wade really got into trouble. The temperatures had been below zero for days and the grandkids were responsible for mixing up formula, putting the milk into bottles, and carrying them down to feed the calves whose moms had rejected them or died during the birth. We poured the leftover warm milk into huge cast-iron skillets and placed it on the barn floor for the cats. We repeated this process in the afternoon.
One day just before sunset when we got to the barn, we found that a little kitten had climbed into the warm milk and sunk down to his shoulders like a Calgon bath. The problem was that during the day the milk had frozen around him and the kitten was stuck by the time we arrived. Wade was really young and he picked up the skillet and started twirling it around his head making whooping sounds. Well, just then my grandpa came around the corner into the barnyard and saw what was happening.
Wade got in so much trouble. He ended up with extra chores for a week, but the most awful part for Wade was letting down my grandfather. That was the worst punishment. My grandpa’s lesson to us that day was that every beating heart deserved respect, especially the vulnerable that are in our care. Even when we killed a spider, he told us to make it quick and never let it suffer. Like most country people I’ve known, he had a real bond with the animals under his care. He knew his own life—his family’s livelihood—was tied to the animals’ safety and well-being. And he was a bit of a softy.
My favorite time of year was the cattle drive. It was better than anything you’ve ever seen in a movie. Every June, my family and friends from the community gathered together to take the little calves and their mothers up to the green pastures in South Dakota for summer grazing. My grandpa had to coordinate with the train conductor to make sure that we had enough time to get all the cattle across safely.
We departed the ranch at 4 a.m. As he and I sat on our horses watching the last coal train go by before we started the drive, he said, “There they go again, carting off Wyoming’s resources for all the people back East.” My grandpa was a real conservationist—people who work the land usually are.
I returned to the ranch as often as I could after college, though my visits were fewer than I’d have liked. It takes an entire day to travel to the old homestead, and once I started working, I had few vacation days to take. One June after Peter and I were married, we went for one of the spring cattle drives. At the end of it, we finished scattering the calves and their mamas around the pasture and we headed back, galloping in a line, like the opening of Bonanza. It felt like freedom: blue sky, tall green grass, and working the land with love for one another and patriotism toward our country. Even my British husband felt more American that day than any other. Plus he earned faint praise from my uncles, who said, “Peter’s a good hand… from the wrist down.”
The truth was Peter really could ride and he took direction well. He enthusiastically volunteered for the hardest chores, including barreling into the forest to find a lost calf and going out to break ice for the cattle’s watering holes in the middle of the winter. They liked how he didn’t let the hazing get to him. He gave back as many barbs as he got and had all of us laughing with his English accent. “Move along, ladies!” he yelled at the cows, and it all sounded so proper. And every time he left the house, he’d toss a little bit of cat food into Preston’s boots. “Damn you, Peter!” he’d yell when he slipped his foot in and stepped on the kibble. Once we took a friend with us on a drive, and after a couple of hours she asked, “Is everyone’s middle name God Dammit?!”
As I got older, I started to learn more about economics and politics from my grandpa Perino. He served as a county commissioner and was on the local Weston County Fair Board, which oversaw the Junior Rodeo. I saw him on more than one occasion bid up a youngster’s steer so that he could boost their confidence. Sometimes he ended up paying more than he intended.
My grandpa didn’t like the taste of alcohol and told me that at meetings he’d accept a drink and then pour it into a plant when no one was looking. Every day he recorded his observations about the weather—temperature, precipitation, wind, and anything else of note, which he’d then compare to the Farmer’s Almanac. In the evenings, he’d flip through the newspapers or quarter horse catalogs and he’d try to teach me things. He was the first to tell me about bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, because he was worried that some practices other ranchers were using could lead to its spread. When news of a BSE outbreak hit the papers years later, I was the only staffer in my Capitol Hill office that had ever heard of it. My ranching background often helped me in my work in Washington.
I watched all of the news with my grandparents when I visited the ranch—Good Morning America, Today Show, CBS This Morning, and then any local news from Rapid City, South Dakota, or Denver (which wasn’t very local but it provided a good weather forecast for the region). I would hear the TV early in the mornings and knew it was time to get up before I was yelled at by my uncles for sleeping in. The sun never rose before my family did, and everyone hit the hay soon after the sun went down, too. I’ve kept an early bedtime ever since, even though I’ve lived in cities and worked in jobs that required lots of late nights.
In the 1980s, I recall listening to political discussions—about death taxes and government spending, foreign oil, communism, the Bureau of Land Management and the Endangered Species Act, the mining companies and the EPA, the USDA, and on and on. I learned by absorbing thoughts and observing the arguments. I suppose that’s where the conservative values I hold now took root.
In Wyoming, you learned quickly that everyone had to pull his or her own weight, and that paying attention was key to protecting everyone’s safety. You were no better than anyone else, and showing off was the surest way to lose friends. Helping out a neighbor was second nature, and the kindness went both ways. At the ranch, you were the blessed recipient and the cursed landowner depending on what Mother Nature had in store. No one sat at a desk all day—the saddle was the office chair.
I also grew up watching a true love story. My grandpa adored my grandmother. He called her Mother and she called him Dad. She didn’t mind that he snored like crazy at night. They didn’t snap or bicker. They were kind to each other and accepting of flaws. She’d run him a bath and set out his clothes for his meetings in town, and he’d rub her shoulders and tease her to make her laugh. They adored their grandchildren and on Sundays we’d sit between them in the pickup and take a drive all around the ranch.
On the last cattle drive before my grandfather died, I remember seeing them sitting off to the side under a tree during our stop for a picnic lunch. After all those years, they still only wanted to spend some time alone. I’d been married only a short while, and I thought if I could just capture that for a few minutes now and then with my husband, Peter, then I’d have a good marriage, too.
For years, my grandfather had heart trouble and he carried around a little Bayer pill in his cowboy sh
irt pocket, just in case he needed it. It sat next to his Life Savers mints, Big Red gum, and Jolly Ranchers. But on the day after Thanksgiving in 2001, my grandfather was moving cows from one pasture to the next when he had a major heart attack. The Bayer pill never would have helped at that point, and despite my cousin’s efforts to revive him, my grandfather died, just two miles from where he was born.
Two months later I got a job at the White House. He never knew I went on to be the press secretary, but I think he would have approved. It was by his example that I kept in mind that speaking with graciousness, class, and poise was the most effective way to communicate and to keep your self-respect.
My grandmother died in 2010, after suffering from dementia and diabetes. But what really led to her death was being a widow. Her heart gave out emotionally after my grandpa died. She loved us all very much, but she lived for him.
The life my grandparents had was thoroughly American. They built a small ranch into a huge operation and fulfilled my great-grandparents’ dreams. Theirs was a different era—not without its problems and mistakes—but a simpler time of contentment and patriotism. And that was just on my father’s side.
My mom’s family history is a little less clear to me because her grandparents died before she was born. But we know that one grandmother, Lena Marie von Pertz, left Germany at age fourteen to come to America. She was a pianist and passed on that talent to my mom. The rest of her grandparents were born in America in the Midwest—Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois.
As with many people during the Depression, my grandmother Dorothy (“Dot”) was orphaned at age fourteen in Kansas and eventually sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Rawlins, Wyoming, where she met my grandfather, Thomas Brooks. He was born “Thomas Texas Ranger Brooks” in Port Lavaca, Texas (I love that). He changed his name to Thomas Raymond Brooks when he went into the military.
After my maternal grandfather moved to Wyoming, he joined the Army in 1943 to fight in World War II. He fought in Germany, where his mother had been born. Back in the States, my grandmother worked as a “Rosie the Riveter” and darned wool socks to send to the soldiers. Those must have been cold and lonely winters while she waited for news from the front lines about his safety. She saved enough money to buy a car, and when he got home from the war, they drove to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon in 1946. My mom was born in 1947. So I’d say it was a successful trip.
My grandfather had good business sense. He first worked for City Steam Laundry after the war and then was a banker with Rawlins National Bank. Later, he owned a business, the Thomas R. Brooks Insurance Agency. He was the sole proprietor of a gas station and an apartment building. The last business he owned was the Uptown Motel, which was on I-80 and got a lot of trucking traffic. He was on the school board and there’s a street named after him out by the town cemetery. My mom said her father taught her to have a firm handshake, repeat folks’ names and look into their eyes, and to ask questions and be interested in their lives. She said that was the key to all the marketing she did in her career.
When we didn’t go to the ranch on holidays or school breaks, we went to see my mom’s parents in Rawlins, Wyoming. Rawlins is on I-80, and it doesn’t really draw you outside. It’s one of the windiest places in the country. And since we didn’t have video games or computers, we played a lot of cards at the kitchen table—Kings in the Corner, Crazy Eights, Slap Jack, and War. Occasionally we went to eat at the Lariat, the best Mexican food for miles. There was a theater on Main Street that only showed one movie at a time, which was changed maybe every month. My aunt Patty Sue would take us to see movies like Back to the Future and Crusoe. We shopped the sidewalk sales on Main Street and took drives to the Snowy Range in the summers.
We watched a lot of TV in my grandmother’s living room. She called the sofa a “davenport,” the cushions were like bricks, and the fabric pricked at our legs when we wore shorts. My sister and I chose to share one of the large La-Z-Boy recliners and she took the other. When the news was on, my grandmother often remarked on President Reagan’s good looks. “He sure has a good head of hair,” she sighed (my grandfather did not).
The little things that I remember about my grandmother left a strong impression on me. I loved how she signed her name, Dorothy, on a card with just a dot. She let us pick out all of the marshmallows from the Lucky Charms box and throw away the cereal. She always made pies and would bake an extra crust with cinnamon sugar for us to share. Cookie dough was our weakness, and she’d let us scrape the bowl and alternated which one of us got to lick the spoon.
At Christmas, my grandmother carefully decorated scores of cookies that she gave away. She was detail-oriented and every Santa had blue eyes, a silver bell, and a coconut beard. She had a big showing at the school carnival, and people would make a beeline for her cookies, pies, and cakes, which were the prizes for a game called Musical Pies. (We gotta bring this game back… Music was played while people walked around the table, and when the music stopped, whatever was by their side was what they won.)
My grandmother may have been in a one-and-a-half-horse town, but she knew fashion. When she dressed up for a special occasion in a black dress, hose, heels, and her fur coat (which I now have), she looked great. She kept up with beauty trends through Better Homes and Gardens and Woman’s Day magazines. On her dressing table she kept Jergens Rose Milk Lotion, a glass jar of Oil of Olay, and White Shoulders perfume. My grandfather kept her supplied with that, and my mom has her last bottle, unopened.
She also made sure my mom and aunt’s dolls were in style, sewing a complete wardrobe for every doll they ever received. She sewed after her daughters went to bed so that they’d get a morning surprise in the light blue trunk that held all of their doll clothes. She made my mom’s clothes, too, including her wedding dress.
My grandma loved to sing to my mom’s piano playing and she danced the Charleston in the kitchen while she waited for a pot to boil, holding a wooden spoon as her dancing partner. When my parents moved from Wyoming to Denver when I was just two years old, my mom would set the timer on the oven and let us make an expensive long-distance phone call to talk with her. Hers was the second telephone number I memorized after our own and I still know it.
My grandfather died when I was around ten years old, and unfortunately many of my memories of him are of when he was getting cancer treatment. He used to let my sister and I grind up his pills in the mortar and pestle that they kept on the kitchen table. I don’t remember him ever complaining—he seemed resigned to his illness. He was on oxygen for a while and after one surgery had to use a device held to his throat when he wanted to say something because radiation had made it difficult to talk. He sounded like Yoda. He liked having us around, and he was generous to his daughters. He used to slip $20 bills into my mom’s pockets that she’d find later.
My grandparents had a traditional relationship—old-fashioned in a good way. For example, my grandfather had been the bookkeeper of the family, and by the time he died, my grandmother had never written a check. That was natural in their partnership—he took care of paying the bills and she ran the house and helped manage the businesses. Far from being overly dependent, she put her trust in him. I learned from that example that there is freedom in sharing a responsibility and not trying to control everything. That’s one of the ways that Peter and I have made our marriage work, too.
My grandmother was a sad widow, but she rallied by visiting us a lot and taking ceramics and knitting classes. She was a talented artist and even surprised herself with her results. We still have the blankets, chip and dip bowl, cookie jar, and a pie plate that she made for us.
She also spent a lot of time visiting the senior citizens home in Rawlins called “The Manor.” She and four friends from ceramics class formed the “Popcorn Gang,” a group that would make popcorn every week and eat and talk with the residents. The Popcorn Gang was such a fixture in the community that it got a mention in my grandmother’s obituary. She died from cancer in 1988 wh
en I was still in high school.
I believe that the war affected my grandparents’ approach to life, and I learned from them to appreciate how good America is compared with the rest of the world. Their patriotism was subtle. My grandfather didn’t talk much about the war, and in fact, most of what we know about his bravery we learned about after he died and went through his trunks. But I remember how he stood with his cap over his heart during the parades through town, and I’ve always been proud to be the granddaughter of two World War II veterans.
The war perhaps changed my grandparents, but mostly for the good. Grandma and Grandpa had the confidence to risk their savings to start small businesses in Rawlins, and they invested wisely. It was clear they relied on each other to help raise their family and keep the customers happy at the same time. Because of hard work, they moved up solidly to the middle class. But I don’t think money motivated them. From what I remember, they mostly enjoyed the little things—eating my grandma’s pot roast and cherry pie and then playing cards at the kitchen table, where we knocked to let the next person know it was their turn. Those are the best memories from Rawlins. They’re the best kind of memories—the ones that remind you that there were strong, caring people who helped make you who you are.
Mom and Dad
My mom, Janice Marie Brooks, was the older of two. Her younger sister is my aunt Patty Sue. They pitched in to help at the motel my grandparents owned, but they had a lot of time for school and play. My mom liked sports and played basketball, softball, and tennis—she’d try anything. She was also a clarinet player in the marching band.