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“Stop thanking me. I love it.”
“—but I need to get to work.”
****
It wasn’t that simple to wrap up the call with Mom and there was me to get ready and Shadow to care for, but I did get myself to the KWMT-TV newsroom in decent time.
A snowflake, big and sloppy, far more like an Illinois flake than a Wyoming flake, hit my forehead just before I reached the door and slid over my eyebrow onto my cheek.
“It’s snowing,” I announced to the group standing near Audrey’s desk. After all, reporting is my business. “Snow. It’s supposed to be spring. The snow sure doesn’t know it’s spring.”
“Sure it does,” Diana said cheerfully. “It’s spring in Wyoming.”
Nala chuckled.
She was fitting in here a little too well.
“I was just about to tell the others,” Leona said, “I came up with a great idea for Mike for selling Sherman to prospective KWMT hires — we recreate Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch. That should get some attention.”
“Sally Rand?” Nala repeated, obviously not knowing who she was.
“Nude ranch?” I repeated. An instantaneous memory of a recent ride on Slinger, the sweet-mannered horse Tom and Tamantha gave me for Christmas, surfaced with the idea of doing it nude superimposed and produced an involuntary, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” It had been bad enough with the effects of cold weather. Take off protective layers and... Ouch, ouch, ouch didn’t do it justice.
“Emphasis on the nude, not the ranch,” Leona said dryly. “It was part of a World’s Fair in San Francisco.”
“San Francisco? Sally Rand was famous for doing her fan dance at the Chicago’s World Fair — 1933,” I added with some pride that I remembered the date. “It celebrated Chicago’s centennial. The fair, not the dance.”
Diana chuckled.
“And for a bunch of astronauts decades later. You should look that up,” I added to Nala’s wide eyes.
Leona stayed on topic. “Yeah, I guess. But there was another World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1939. And that’s the one that had Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch — it said Dude, but the first D was crossed off and replaced by an N. The girls were in areas behind glass and the customers moved past... or sometimes stopped for a while... while different groups of girls did rope tricks or fed baby farm animals or played badminton.”
“Badminton?” Nala repeated.
“Because one does on a ranch,” Diana said dryly.
Audrey sighed. “Might get attention, but not the kind we want.”
Leona appeared ready to argue the point. With an eye on the clock, I interrupted “I wanted to ask you, Leona, what you know about Wendy Barlow’s uncle, the original owner of the Elk Rock Ranch.”
“Not original. Far from original, even if you’re just talking about it being a dude ranch. Started as a cattle operation when people were first starting that around here. Another family made it into a dude ranch for quite a while. Barlows were friends of theirs. Came out here for a couple weeks, then bought the place right out from under them.”
And now Randall Kenyon was trying to repeat that history.
“Nice friends,” Audrey said, “buying the ranch away from them.”
“Didn’t seem to bother the folks selling all that much. They went off and started another one. New Mexico, I think. They weren’t from around here,” she added, explaining their odd behavior in choosing to go anywhere else.
“That would have been Chester’s father who bought it. A real warm and cuddly type.” Her tone said the opposite. “Family came out for the summer for about a decade or so — except the father, who was back East piling up money. Kids got older and that stopped. Seemed like they forgot it. Left a foreman to run the place, which he did just fine with some locals.
“Then, out of the blue, here comes Chester back to take over, turning it back to a dude ranch. What we learned soon enough was he’d mostly broken with his family — or vice versa — after some hijinks back East. Had to be about thirty by then, so he’d had a lot of years of hijinks.
“Guess the other Barlows accused Chester of playing around with the ranch, ignoring the real work of the corporation. Easy to tell they’d never done any ranch work. Give Chester credit, he did work hard at running the Elk Rock. Expect his family thought he’d come crawling back. Not him. He told them to — well, you get the idea. And the rift continued into the next generation. Except Wendy, who came out here to work one summer she was in college. Apparently, she was something of a rebel, too, and the family thought a summer of hard work would cure her, though not prepared to hand her over to just anybody to administer her discipline. So they sent her to Elk Rock for a summer under her uncle. And she never left.”
“How’d that go over with the Barlows?”
“Major, major tizzy. Her father was the big muckety-muck in the family business by that time and he restructured the trust or something or other so she’d only get an equal share if she came back into the fold. She blew raspberries at him and his trust. Not that she was cut off entirely. Still was part of her grandfather’s trust, though most of that rolled into the next generation — except Chester, of course. Still, Wendy probably got more each month than Cottonwood County’s version of big earners make in a year or so. But nowhere near what her brothers got when their father died. And keep getting.
