Summer of Fifty-Seven - Stephen C. Joseph

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SUMMER OF FIFTY-SEVEN

      

SUMMER OF FIFTY-SEVEN

      Coming of Age

      in

      Wyoming’s Shining Mountains

      STEPHEN C. JOSEPH

       Photograph of the Cessna 172 on the cover appears courtesy of Cessna Aircraft Company.

      © 2003 by Stephen C. Joseph. All Rights Reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Sunstone books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, Sunstone Press, P.O. Box 2321, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2321.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      Joseph, Stephen C.

      Summer of fifty-seven: coming of age in Wyoming’s shining mountains / Stephen

      C. Joseph.—1st ed.

      p. cm.

      ISBN: 0-86534-367-5 (hardcover) ISBN: 0-86534-473-6 (softcover)

      1. Mountain life—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction. 3. Wyoming—Fiction.

      I. Title: Summer of ‘57. II. Title.

      PS3610.0676 S86 2002

      813’.6—dc21

      2002030200

      

WWW.SUNSTONEPRESS.COM SUNSTONE PRESS / POST OFFICE BOX 2321 / SANTA FE, NM 87504-2321 /USA (505) 988-4418 / ORDERS ONLY(800) 243-5644 / FAX (505) 988-1025

      

For Jedediah Strong Smith, who opened the way, And for Elliot and Jason Martin, who will find their own.

      

CONTENTS

       Foreword

       Preface

       Acknowledgments

       From Boston to Moose Junction

       Dick, Jim, and the Ghosts of John and Jedediah

       Billy Jiggs & the Hidden Falls Trail

       Sarah, Kitty, and the Three Bears

       Another Bear, and Trouble all Around

       Jackson’s Black Hat Gang

       Wyoming, “Let ‘Er Buck!”

       Up, Up Into the Shining Mountains

       Building Trail

       Epilogue

      For a boy’s will is the wind’s will,

      And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

      — Henry Wadworth Longfellow, 1807–1882

      He who has not a good memory

      Should never take upon himself

      The trade of lying.

      — Michel de Montaigne, 1533–1592

      JACKSON HOLE AND WYOMING’S SHINING MOUNTAINS

      

FOREWORD

      Our tendency to paste headline labels upon decades (such as “The Fifties: The Silent Generation”) is misleading for at least two reasons. First, any ten-year period in American history is suffused with such variety, across all facets of life, that any single label is of necessity simplistic. But, second, carving off ten-year periods that start out with a year whose terminal numeral is zero, and end with a year possessing the terminal numeral nine, places artificial and rather irrelevant bookends in the river of time, inevitably adrift, bobbing askew in the currents.

      One could argue that the crux that was to shape American culture for the remainder of the Twentieth Century, that was of primary impact in shifting virtually all the ground from “before” to “after”, took place during the latter years of the Fifties and the early years of the Sixties.

      From: Eisenhower Two, the coming of Castro, Jim Crow at Little Rock, the Bomb, the emergence of television as a major entertainment and commercial force, Sputnik, Elvis and the bridging of the black/white divide in popular music.

      To: John Kennedy alive and then assassinated, the Beatles, the Bay of Pigs, the Pill, videotape and the primacy of television as the primary information source, Martin Luther King.

      If there was ever a time “before the deluge,” it was that crux. At the beginning, there was a prevalent adhesion to Mom and Apple Pie, within a generally accepted cultural and social order. By the end, there were Vietnam and the Rebellions of ’68, and everything was up for grabs.

      Red Skelton, a brilliant mime and comedian of those decades, performed a TV skit that exemplifies well that late-Fifties/early-Sixties crux:

      The drunkard’s wife decides, once and for all, to teach him a lesson. She inverts the furniture and objects of his living room, nailing the furniture to the ceiling, on which is glued the carpet, hanging the pictures and mirrors upside down, and so forth.

      Skelton enters after a night on the town, unsteady of gait, humming tunelessly to himself, smiling innocently. He stops, confused. Everything is familiar. Everything is, in one sense, in its proper place. And yet nothing obeys the laws of memory or the laws of accepted physics. He, himself, is marooned on the ceiling, and unable to get himself “right side up.” Lost in space.

      To have come of age in the late 1950’s, as a White American Male, was to have your fingers upon the door handle of that room, but to have

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