In My Time (6 page)

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 southwest, 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.

Our senior year was like a classic fifties movie.

Lynne Vincent and me in our high school yearbook photos. One of my best decisions ever was asking her out on our first date, January 31, 1957.

I was class president, Lynne was homecoming queen, and as co-captain of the football team for homecoming, I got to crown her. Everything seemed possible through that fall of football games, movie dates, and going to the Canteen, a town-sponsored teen hangout where the jukebox played the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. By the early months of 1959, Lynne had figured out that she would go to Colorado College in Colorado Springs. While I knew I’d go somewhere, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the details when an independent oilman in Casper, Tom Stroock, approached my friend Tom Fake and me about applying to his alma mater, Yale. Stroock thought that based on our grades, our athletic records, and the fact that we were both class officers, we’d be accepted. He said that coming from Wyoming would also help because Yale was interested in geographical diversity. Neither the Fakes nor the Cheneys could begin to pay for four years in the Ivy League, but both Tom and I were accepted and awarded scholarships that covered full tuition, room, and board. We’d have to work as part of the arrangement, but otherwise all we had to do was get ourselves there.

I’D NEVER SEEN YALE before I showed up in the fall of 1959 to begin my freshman year. In fact, I’d never been farther east than Chicago, and when I got off the train in New Haven, Connecticut, it felt a little like arriving in another country. At home in Wyoming, I had a great sense of wide-open spaces. You could see for miles in any direction. In New Haven everything was jammed together—people, buildings, trees. The most distant horizon was no farther than a few blocks away.

Many of my fellow students had gone to prep school. They had had experiences very different from mine and knew things I did not. I sometimes felt they were speaking another language—and they certainly played at least one sport I found strange. Students arriving at Yale took
a series of physical tests, one of which involved going through a door so small you had to stoop over. On the other side, a fellow handed me a racquet like the one he was holding and immediately began smacking a small, hard rubber ball against the wall. I had no idea what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to score. And that was my introduction to squash.

I was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Instead of being president of my class and hanging out in the student council office, I was waiting on my classmates in the dining hall. Most of all, I missed Lynne. I spent most of my time thinking about the next time I would see her and trying to scrape together a couple of bucks so that I could afford a long-distance call to Colorado Springs.