Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center opens Aug. 20

The Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center opens the weekend of Aug. 19-21 at the Park County site of the former World War II Internment Camp. I was at the site most recently in June 2010. The center's building was finished but the interior was still bare. While built of modern materials, the structure duplicates the look of the tar-paper barracks than once housed more than 10,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens. Reporter Don Amend wrote about his tour of the almost-complete center in the Aug. 9 Powell Tribune.

The center will open officially with a dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 20, and the foundation is preparing for nearly 1,000 former internees, their families, friends and supporters of the center.

Longtime U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), a decorated World War II, veteran, will present the keynote address. Inouye will be introduced by former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and former Congressman Norman Mineta, who became lifelong friends as Boy Scouts while Mineta’s family was interned at the camp.

Others who will participate in the grand opening are Tom Brokaw, former news anchor and current special correspondent for NBC; Los Angeles County Superior Judge Judge Lance Ito; Irene Hirano Inouye, president of the US-Japan Council; and Dr. Melba Vasquez, president of the American Psychological Association.

Brokaw, whose book “The Greatest Generation” describes the experiences of those who fought World War II, will speak at a Pilgrimage Dinner at 6 p.m. Friday, Aug. 19.

Mineta, Ito, Hirano Inouye and Vasquez will participate in a panel discussion on various perspectives of the Japanese-American experience and its lessons for civil rights issues today during a grand opening banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Go to http://www.powelltribune.com/news/item/8608-heart-mountain-relocation-center-final-preparations

In memoriam: Mary Hartman

Tonight I raise a glass to my old friend, Mary Hartman. She died last Friday, alone, which is a shame on us all. Her neighbors took her to the hospital and Mary, independent to the end, ordered them to take her home. They did, and that's where she died, home, alone.

There will be no memorial service. Mary was not religious. Still, her friends need to remember her in some way.

Words will have to suffice. Mary was a writer. Words will have to suffice.

Here is what I know. Mary left her Nebraska home as a teen and took the train to Los Angeles. Stars in her eyes. She was a looker, that Mary. Beautiful voice, too. She sang at the USO during the war years. L.A. was hopping. Here's what the California Military Museum web site says about L.A. during that time:

During World War II, Los Angeles was the boom town of boom towns. The Los Angeles metropolitan area grew faster than any other major metropolitan area in the U.S. and experienced more of the traumas of war while doing so. By 1943 the population of metropolitan L.A. was larger than 37 states, and was home to one in every 40 U.S. citizens. By the end of the war, the L.A. area had produced 17% of all of America's war production.

Pretty heady stuff for a Nebraska kid. Mary sang with a number of lounge singers and someone along the way, met up with a U.S. Marine named Jack Lummus, all-America athlete from Ennis, Texas. Soon they were engaged. He shipped out and was killed on the sands of Iwo Jima and was awarded the Medal of Honor for the sacrifices he made that day. He has a U.S. Navy ship and an intermediate school named after him.

Mary never got over it. She wrote a memoir about it and later a children's book. "Texas Granite: Story of a World War II Hero" (see photo). She was married, briefly, long enough to have a boy whom she raised alone. She was a newspaper reporter and free-lance writer in Nebraska and Arkansas. In the early 1990s, she moved to Cheyenne, Wyo., to be near her son and grandkids. As a writer, she was drawn to other writers, and that's how we met. Mary was the age of my parents, Great Depression and World War II babies. I was drawn to her for that reason and because we both wrote fiction, loved history and Liberal politics.

Mary and I and another writer formed Southeast Wyoming Writers (SEWW)  in 1992. We also were in the same writing critique group for awhile. Mary shepherded a World War II oral history project through budgets through script through filmed interviews. This video is now part of the U.S. Library of Congress World War II collection. On Veteran's Day 2002, barely a year after the beginning of yet another American war,  Mary was interviewed on National Public Radio. It was almost impossible not to be moved by her decades-old memories, still fresh after all of these years.

Mary and I had lunch together fairly often but not often enough. A few years ago, she tumbled down the back steps of her apartment building and broke both of her wrists. I visited her in the hospital. She dearly wanted to get out. She did, not quite healed but ready to move on with her life.

How do you say good-bye to some who has already departed? I'm not sure. I can see Mary, though, singing with a big band in some smoky L.A. club. The world is her oyster. Her life is ahead of her. She is a loving spirit who gets her heart broken in a big way.

Words will have to suffice, Mary. It's all we have in the end.

Farewell, my friend.

Dear Pops: Happy Father's Day from Netroots Nation

Thomas Reed Shay (a.k.a. Big Tom)

Alone on Father's Day. That occurred to me as I awoke this morning. I'm in Minneapolis, Chris is in Cheyenne, Kevin is in Tucson and Annie in Denver. By the end of the day, Chris and I will be together on Father's Day, which is important to both of us. Our kiddos have their own lives, as they should.

My father, Thomas Reed Shay, passed away eight years ago. Wonder what he would have made of the Netroots Nation conference? He turned my age of 60 in 1983, when we were knee-deep in the Reagan era. He was happy with the Reagan era and I was not. He was a moderate conservative, one of those people in the South who first went from Democratic to Republican for Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972. The beginnings of the vaunted Republican Southern Strategy, which culminated in two terms of Ronald Reagan chipping away at federal government programs and protections. And now look what we have.

My father would have found some common ground among the working people at Netroots Nation. He would have objected to some of the tough talk against Republicans. Not sure if he would have much in common with Tea Party Republicans such as Michelle Bachmann, a guest speaker at The Right Online conference held across the street from Netroots Nation. T.R. Shay was a William F. Buckley fan and watched him regularly. Free enterprise, hard work, small government. He believed in all of those principles. So do I.

He was the first in his family to go to college and he did it on the G.I. Bill after four years (two in Europe) as Government Issue (G.I.). He bought his first house with no down payment courtesy of the U.S. Government. He worked on government contracts for Martin-Marietta (now Lockheed-Martin) building ICBM missile silos across the West. Later, he worked on the space program with G.E. and NASA. Government programs.

He was a Florida state government employee (now an endangered species, thanks to wacky Republicans) and later had his own accounting business. He was the first one of us to own a personal computer -- the Apple IIe. We considered it a strange and wondrous thing. He seemed at home with it. He built his own crystal radio sets as a boy in the 1930s and, in the 1950s, built his own hi-fi. Not surprising that he was a radio operator with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II.

If my father were still alive, would he be a blogger? I have no doubt that he would be a confirmed user of Facebook. His handle would be Big Tom, which is what his grandkids called him -- at his insistence ("I'm too young to be a grandfather!") If he blogged, he would be somewhere in the middle, caught between moonbats such as myself and wingnuts such as Andrew Breitbart et.al. He might also find himself closer to what I do, as the center has moved to the Right at the insistence of the Right.

As you can see, I'm thinking about my father today. We didn't always agree. But he was always my father. I miss him.

Bob Greer comes to Cheyenne to talk about his books and African-American history in the West

My wife Chris is on the planning committee for the annual Cheyenne Juneteenth celebration and the fund-raising banquet put on by the Wyoming NAACP. Chris and I are both proud members of the NAACP and freckle-faced Celts of Scots (she) and Irish (me) heritage. My Mom was Black Irish, if that means anything.

Chris asked me about a speaker for the Juneteenth dinner. I suggested Robert Greer, Dr. Robert Greer, "Bob" to most of us. Bob found a fine literary magazine, the High Plains Literary Review, back in 1986 and accepted my first published story in 1990. I'm eternally grateful for his good taste. I've read two of his CJ Floyd novels and listened to the audiobook for another while driving across Wyoming several summers ago.

CJ Floyd is a bailbondsman working out of the colorful Bail Bonds Row across the the Denver Police Department. Several of CJ's adventures have taken him all the way to Wyoming. Usually he is ferreting out miscreants and consulting with his sources in the city's Five Points neighborhood, which was the black section of town during the racist days of red-lining. Denver attempted to keep all the "Coloreds" in Five Points, Larimer Street and Lower Downtown, now the Yuppie and artsy enclave of LoDo. Denver thought that an invisible red line would stop minorities from migrating to the swankier parts of town.

My mother used to take us to our family doctors down in Five Points. Our doctors' names were Kobayashi, Momei and Hosakawa. Colored folks. Nisei. Two of the three fought with the 442 Regimental Combat Team in World War II. My father, a World War II vet of the European Theatre, never went with us. He never objected to my Mom's choice of doctors. But he was a product of his times and he was damned if he was going to go to a "Jap" doctor.

Denver has an intriguing history and Bob does his best to inject it into his mysteries.

Bob will come to the Cheyenne Holiday Inn on Saturday, June 4, to speak at the annual banquet of the Wyoming NAACP. His theme will be the contributions that African-Americans made to the history of the West. He will sign copies of his books from 6-7 p.m.. Dinner will follow, with Dr. Greer's speech at 8 p.m. Tickets are $35 per person, $50 per couple. You can purchase tickets for the event by calling Abe Stevenson at 307-634-8304 or Bennie McLaughlin, 307-634-5527.

When he's not writing, Dr. Greer is a professor of pathology, medicine, surgery and dentistry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in. He also holds a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Miami University of Ohio, his alma mater.

Greer has lived in Denver for thirty years. In 1986 he founded High Plains Literary Review and continues to serve as its editor-in-chief. He is the author or co-author of three medical textbooks and over 125 scientific articles. His short stories have appeared in dozens of national literary magazines and his short story collection, Isolation and Other Stories, published in 2000 by the Davies Group Publishers, is also wonderfully illustrated.

Greer has been involved in cancer research at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center for more than thirty years. In 1983 his research group was the first in the world to report a synergistic link between smokeless tobacco use and human papillomaviruses in certain cancers of the mouth. That research foundation is the basis for the plot of his novel,The Devil's Hatband,the author's first novel featuring Denver bail bondsman and detective CJ Floyd. Several of his novels are set in Wyoming.

Spoon, Greer’s 2009 novel of the contemporary American West, won the Colorado Book Award for literary fiction. It also was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award and received the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union 2010 Media of the Year Award. Wyoming’s Craig Johnson, author of Another Man's Moccasins and The Dark Horse, had this to say about the novel: "With Spoon, Robert Greer tells the story of a modern-day range war in wildfire prose both taut and lyrical."

Greer also reviews books for a Denver National Public Radio affiliate, KUVO, and raises cattle on a ranch in Platte County, Wyoming

Acting U.S. Solicitor General acknowledges office's lack of candor led to WWII Japanese-American internment

Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general of the United States, wrote an official post Friday acknowledging that evidence was deliberately hidden about alleged anti-American activities by Japanese-Americans at the outbreak of World War II. 

Most Americans acknowledge the fact that the internment of Japanese-Americans was a terrible and unnecessary act. Official apologies have been issued, but it's somewhat gratifying to see that the entire exercise was a paranoid miscarriage of justice.

If you are curious about this episode and its place in Wyoming history, you can attend the grand opening of the new Interpretive Center in August at the Heart Mountain Internment Center Historic Site neat Cody. I've visited the site often over the past 20 years. Until recently, all that remained was the brick power plant (seen in the distance in photo) and several tumbledown barracks. The Interpretive Center was modeled after the barracks that housed some 100,000 American citizens from 1942-1946. And I use the term "housing" loosely. 

Grand opening dates are Aug. 19-21. Go to www.heartmountain.org. Here's some info from the web site:

Registration is now being accepted for the three days of activities, including the Pilgrimage Dinner and All-Camp Get-Together, Dedication Ceremony, tours, mountain hike, and a Gala Banquet which are all part of the Grand Opening of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center Aug. 19, 20, and 21, announced event chair Kathleen Saito Yuille.  Registration deadline is June 20.The opening of the ILC’s doors on Aug. 20 will symbolize the beginning of a new era of understanding and help remind the nation about the importance of tolerance and the need to balance our concern for national security with a commitment to respect the basic civil rights of all our fellow citizens. 

Sen. Al knows his chickens and his grit

Our future, according to Big Al: Baby Boomers pick grit with the chickens. 

I'm accustomed to seeing Big Al all over the state.

He was at the grand reopening of the BBHC in Cody. He was featured in a juvenile justice documentary speaking about his own run-in with the law as a teen. He attended the 2010 Governor's Arts Awards in Cheyenne to support fellow arts patron Naoma Tate.

He's been very involved in the refurbishing of the Heart Mountain Internment Center near Cody. During World War II, a young Al Simpson and his Boy Scout troop joined forces with the Scout troop at Heart Mountain on some community projects. That's how he and former internee Norman Mineta, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, became lifelong friends. They were both at the rededication of the historic monuments at Heart Mountain in several years ago. I anticipate that both will be attending the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center's grand opening Aug. 19-21.

Sen. Alan "Big Al" Simpson,a Republican from Cody, is one of the most visible politicians in the country. During the current Congressional fight over the budget, he may end up being one of the most recognizable moderates in the news. Seems funny when you consider that Sen. Al retired from elected office way back in the last century.

But he keeps popping up. He co-chaired with Erskine Bowles the president's deficit commission, nicknamed the "cat food commission" after a quip by the senator. The senator has a million of them and many are funny or, at least, catchy.

Sen. Al had a front row seat two weeks ago for Pres. Obama's budget speech. Talking to reporters after the speech, he uttered another quotable quote. Here's part of the story from The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

“Pray for the Gang of Six,” Mr. Simpson told two reporters after the speech, referring to a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate who are working on a deficit-reduction plan. “They are six guys, three Republicans, three Democrats, that are committed to doing something.

The “Gang of Six,” are Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mike Crapo of Idaho. 

“Just pray for the Gang of Six,” he said. “You guys your age, keep praying.”

What happens if the Gang of Six fails? Mr. Simpson was asked.

“Guys like you will be picking grit with the chickens when you are 65,” he replied. End of interview.

That's the fear of millions of Americans, that we will spend our retirement picking grit with the chickens. That's even worse than eating catfood. Nutritional value of grit=0. Nutritional value of catfood (especially the gourmet kind)=much more than zero (look on your catfood label).

This "Gang of Six" is not the answer to the budget battle. As far as I know, none of them has brought up raising revenue along with budget cuts.

The House version of the budget-cutting bill will go nowhere in the Senate. Those already on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security will be rattled and may vote for more Democrats in 2012. Those about to retire are nervous due to the fact that I have no chickens and I don't like grit. If the Repubs get their way, I will have to follow in the footsteps of my locavore brethren and sistren and get a coop filled with Rhode Island Reds.

Wyoming, of course, has plenty of grit to pick. I'm staking out my claim now.

Cheyenne statue project should include all those people (and creatures) who influenced Cheyenne

Interesting front page article in today's Halloween edition of the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.

Local gallery owner Harvey Deselms is promoting a project to put bronze statues on every corner of Capitol Avenue between the Historic Depot and the Capitol Building. That's eight blocks times four corners equals 32 statues.

A cowboy is next up, which is no surprise. There are no shortage of cowboy and/or cowboy with bucking bronco statues in Cheyenne. Sure, I guess there's room for a few more cowboys along the street. But this represents only a small part of Cheyenne's heritage.

I like the two new statues proposed for Depot Square. A young woman "dressed in 19th-century garb" leaving the train station and a cowboy on his way into the train station. The titles are, respectively, "A New Beginning" and "Hard to Leave."

But why cowboy-era cowboy and woman? Why not have a World War II G.I. emerging from the station to be greeted by his family? Wonder how many soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen traveled in and out of the depot during the war? Our entire region, from Colorado Springs to Cheyenne and up to Casper, were hugely influenced by war industries. It's often said that many young men who trained in Denver and Cheyenne and Colorado Springs returned here to live after the war. They were drawn by the wide-open spaces and mountains and climate. The Tenth Mountain Division soldiers returned from the war to create the modern ski industry.

I'd love to see oilfield roughnecks and miners and Basque sheepherders represented on the streets of Cheyenne. Native Americans, of course. It is pleasing to note that the renovation plan for the Capitol Building complex will include Esther Hobart Morris and Chief Washakie flanking each other in front of the historic building. We have a Buffalo Soldier in the pocket park outside of F.E. Warren AFB. But we need one on the city's downtown main street.

This is suggested only partly in jest -- what about a guy in a suit carrying a briefcase? Cheyenne is a government town, after all, and government employees outnumber agricultural workers (a.k.a. cowboys) any day of the week. Wyoming soon will add a statue of Governor Stan Hathaway next month to the front of the Hathaway Building. A governor is a bureaucrat -- probably the state's chief bureaucrat -- so it would be appropriate for the Gov statue to be surrounded by his aides and assistants and all the people who make the state work. This is not myth. This is reality.

We should consult the Cheyenne and Arapaho and Lakota tribes who used to inhabit the region before the railroad and horse soldiers arrived. While Wyoming's Chief Washakie is a great addition to the Capitol Complex, he was a Shoshone, a mountain tribe. As far as I know, we have no representation of the many Native American horsemen who inhabited these lands. 

Speaking of the railroads... Irishmen? Scotsmen? Chinese? Local visionary (and fine writer) Lou Madison has proposed a number of sculptures for the city. I especially like his idea of a monumental sculpture for the Cheyenne rail yards which would show workers building the rails that led to the founding of Cheyenne. The city would just be a bump in the road if not for the railroad.

And the highways that bisect our city limits. They are works of art unto themselves. Downtown Cheyenne offers some historic markers dedicated to the Lincoln Highway, and we have a huge Lincoln head at the top of the pass that marks the thoroughfare. But thousands of trucks and cars travel down I-80 and I-25 every day. How about a monument to a trucker on one of the downtown corners? How much money do truckers spend each day at the county's truck stops and restaurants and motels? Perhaps we could commemorate a trucker stopped by a blizzard that closes the Summit? Trucker sits in a booth at a truckstop while waitress serves him coffee and a slice of apple pie. Could call the sculpture: "Long haul trucker parks his ass." Something like that. Maybe "Night owls at the diner?" I think that's already been used.

My father built ICBM missile silos from Kansas to Colorado to Washington State. We should have a representation of that bit of history along Capitol Avenue. In many ways, nukes made Cheyenne. We could have a statue of a missileer at his/her station, or a down-sized version of an MX.

We can't forget our geological history. Cheyenne was once on the fringe of an inland sea. Wouldn't it be great to have a huge ancient crocodile rising from the concrete, trying to snatch its prey? The tourists would love that. Lots of photo opportunities. You could actually put a dinosaur bronze or one of a prehistoric mammal (woolly mammoths, sloths, etc.) on each downtown corner. 

Cowboys are wonderful. That's apart of Cheyenne's heritage. But that's not all there is. Delve into the history and let's come up with a sequence of statues that speak to Cheyenne's interesting and sometimes strange history.