VI. Lonesome George
It all started this summer. The Summer of ‘22 I’ll call it. It was when I decided to return to my old hometown after forty-one years in the big cities across the country. I will say one thing for sure: We were so much younger then, we’re older than that now. Or is it, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now
Anyway, this trip it was different because I didn’t stay for just a week or a day. I packed up everything I owned lock, stock and barrel and headed back to the high prairie of Cheyenne for good.
Among the many things I learned is that invariably, the more things change—the more they dang well change!
So the brick buildings stayed up all over town. The wood buildings came down, “The Hole” is still there. The bricklayers kept working, the carpenters learned new prefab building tricks.
They put the traffic lights back in downtown with no “kitty corner” walking—or escalators, either. You see. Cheyenne, so goes the legend, was the first town in the world to have diagonal crossing upon green “walk” lights— along with the first electric street lights! And you heard about the Penney’s escalators going the way of the buggy whip. Though remaining only vestigially, Kemmerer-founded JCPenney too, for that matter. I heard a rumor that there is an escalator in Casper.
My trip home was definitely a catharsis; a resurfacing of all the sweet childhood things that were there when I was last there. The streets were still named the same, though UW trained traffic engineers have made them nearly impossible for me to negotiate.
The main drags had been meticulously paved; all roads leading to Frontier Park. Since there’s no state, federal or corporate tax in Wyoming, roads outside the city, in the county where the ragged people go, have not been.
I found there are things in Cheyenne which are much different now. Other things aren’t. The lack of people and the religiously fierce independence of those folks who remain, for one.
Most men wore beards. They were no doubt railing against Gillette’s New York-based advertising campaigns or any other effeminate taste-maker styling emanating from the East.
Some under thirties (Gen-Z) seem to appreciate the low slung, hip-hop style pants which originated, by the way, in the beltless prisons and jails of New York City. The women with these men invariably wear tattoos. You’re not gonna want to see that in fifty years! Maybe they don’t think we’ll even be here then.
If a photograph were taken of people at The Depot and developed in black-and-white, you wouldn’t see a difference between now and 100 years ago. And there were guns. Plenty of guns. People would hand them to me to show them off. Different than in New York where I walked in front them a couple times. This bellwether trend coincides with the Supreme Court’s recent concealed carry rulings, not only here but for New York City.
There were trucks. In fact, the highest truck ownership ratio per capita in America. And the trucks had no mufflers, making my W. 42nd Street Time’s Square apartment building seem like Central park at rush-hour in comparison— and that’s with the massive construction project going on outside my kitchen window. The Harley riders didn’t run mufflers, either.
Top it off with with the people I call “The Walkers.” People with no money, no cars, no hope; walking zombie-like through the Cheyenne’s hi-ways and byways on their way to halfway houses, or meth houses. Some walkers even living right downtown a block from the most beautiful, old, iconic buildings in the city; the Plains Hotel for one.
No wonder, Wyoming’s capital city lies as if a target at the bullseye of America, Interstates 80 and 25. This Bellwether County has captured the hearts of America with her politics. She has gathered those who did not know which way to go and held them. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
The biggest change was in me. Like I said, the going is the easy part– it’s the coming back that’s hard.
I had been planning my move back home to Wyoming for ten years or more. My family worked for the railroad, Mom as a UP nurse, brother as a switchman-brakeman/conductor Dad as an iceman. So the question to myself, and from everyone else was, why do you come back to Cheyenne when you’ve worked at every number one radio station in the largest markets in America from Los Angeles and Chicago to Nashville, Cleveland, Salt Lake, New York, Denver, and at all the major Fourth Estate (media) electronic outlets: ABC, NBC, and CBS? Or how do you compare Smith, Lansing and Lane (or it’s Cheyenne stand-in) with advertising agencies like Foote Cone and Belding, J Walter Thompson, and the others where I also worked. Or does working at major bank headquarters like Citibank, US trust, Chase Manhattan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan, CS First Boston and the like compare with Cheyenne Federal Savings and Loan? I temped at every network, major nonprofit, and miscellaneous company in New York during my forty-one years and I was still itching! But for what I didn’t know
I came here to be an actor. I was washing dishes at the Plains Hotel in the summer of 1981 when I saw and add in the Denver post to go to acting school in New York City. I had already worked all over the place in radio, so I said what the heck. StilI haven’t “done“ New York yet!
I hadn’t been here but three days when I got a job DJing the morning show at Viacom’s WMHK, the number one Country Western station in New York and thereby the nation. C&W was big then.
After that I had the world by the tail on a downhill pull. Creatively, I got an agent at The William Morris Agency who hooked me up with former editor of Rolling Stone to create a motion picture about my great great uncle Buffalo Bill Cody. Oh yes Ive traded heavily on that familial name.
I got to act, write music, and sing in a few movies. Ive been an integral part of my church, First Baptist, for thirty years, building dozens of stained glass windows, refurbishing the historic 125 year old woodwork and singing the greatest music ever written with full orchestras in our illustrious choir! Classical music led my singer wife (of 2 years!) and me into opera management with Metropolitan Opera-level talent at my own agency, George Wienbarg Artist Management.
When I left my job as a dishwasher at the Plains back in 1981, originally setting foot in New York to began studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, etc where Robert Redford, among others studied, I have no idea I would instantly call within three days land the job at Viacom’s WLHK.
Let me back up to before my springboard from Cheyenne. It was just a few months after having sold the Hollywood Sign. I know that sounds crazy but let me explain. My buddy Hank Berger who had been living out in Los Angeles studying various get rich quick scheme‘s suddenly hit upon the bright idea to sell the Hollywood sign which I’ve just been removed from Mt. Lee a year or two before. Hank had reckoned we could cut it into pieces, frame them handsomely, then mount and sell the resultant 1 5/16 inch pieces from the original sign before anyone realized they were gone. The sign’s salvage had been languishing in an orange county self storage. So we got the keys from Bill Welsh at the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and grabbed about a half a ton of material the original letter H. The very same letter H the peg Entwistle “signed off” from in 1936. This is all happened after the revamped sign replaced “our” original in 1978. I did the publicity and garnered 1 billion advertising impressions placing Hank and me in articles in every newspaper and magazine in the English speaking world! From Time Magazine, to The LA Times, Washington Post, People and US —plus The London Times, to weeklies in Europe – Germany and Spain. It was also the summer of cocaine in America, and The Iran-Contra affair and our Hollywood sign project needed to be funded somehow. That’s when I skedaddled and got the job washing dishes at the Plains Hotel. I’m a good swimmer but that was over my head.
I wrote for Rolling Stone when they publish a press release I had written but Jann Wenner, the publisher put another guy‘s name on. That’s when he and Jack Craciun I had a little letter writing tiff. But meanwhile I got another PR coup with the CBS TV Network, Tome Magazine again, Soldiers Weekly and lots of radio. Jack and me co-produced the first rock concert in the history of the U.S. military for America’s bi-centennial at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 1975. It all emanated with my press releases out of Cleveland Ohio which we soon repackaged as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Capital of the World. The show, produced the month after the Vietnam war ended, starred Joe Cocker, Pure Prairie League, Rufus, the Earl Scruggs review and current Hugh Hefner eye candy, Barbi Benton. She’s still not bad for 71. She’s exactly my age, and we haven’t changed a bit.
After making my decision to move back to my roots in the Magic City of the Plains this summer, I drove back across the country with a U-Haul containing every single thing I owned Dash plus the two suitcases and dobro that I started out with 41 years ago.
Upon then arriving back in Cheyenne at beginning of July, I immediately secured a job driving the little buses for the Cheyenne Transit Program. The other very droll drivers who were “training” me, three police officers and an ex military dude, did not want to hear about any of the above adventures no matter how much I endeavored to tell them. In fact the idea that I was from New York and was voting for Liz Cheney was anathema and I was immediately persona non grata for the two week duration of my tenure there. In fact. As I left Cheyenne two months after I arrived, I was on the outs with them and practically everybody else I had ran (I was going to put “run” but decided to leave “ran” in deference to the language barrier there) into. Everyone made it quite apparent that I was not going to be “one of the boys/girls“.
But then, as my “luck“ would have it, I secured job at KGWN Television as the weather/news/multimedia reporter right as I was making my decision to leave. The job paid $18 an hour—thirty-five cents an hour more than the city para-transit driver job. If you wondered why your local TV station sucks, that’s one reason. The jitney drivers are pretty good though!
In short, I loved seeing my old friends – the ones of us who were still living, and I think they loved seeing me. But after conversations of an hour or two we were ready to say goodbye and head out in our own separate ways for another 40 years—or to Facebook!
Like I said, the leaving was easy, it’s the coming back that was hard.
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PS— There is lots more happening with now that I’m back here in New York! —AND Cheyenne both, all with contacts I made while back home there. So stay tuned! With my luck, this could get very exciting! One thing is for sure: the Internet has made our little town part of one very, very big one! GW
