In My Time (5 page)

A few months later, my mother decided to visit my father in San Diego. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Elmer, good and gracious people with no children of their own, offered to look after Bob and me.

My dad home on leave from the Navy during World War II with my mom, brother Bob and me in Sumner, Nebraska.

We had a fine time, chasing chickens, floating corncob ships in the horse tank, and following Elmer everywhere. The farm wasn’t mechanized, and Bob and I got to ride around on the horse-pulled wagon. Uncle Elmer took naps in the afternoon, and I would lie down beside him, hooking a finger in his belt loop so that I would know if he got up. Every afternoon I would wake to find he was gone, and I’d run out of the house looking for him. I’d find him someplace in the farmyard, wearing his big straw hat, smiling, and holding out his arms, ready to lift me into the air.

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 trail 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.