Gerald Lovato had a lot to do before his next fight. A physical. An eye exam. Blood work.

Swinging by his Albuquerque home that afternoon, Gerald found his roommate making tacos. Mikey, also a professional fighter, was studying massage. “Before your fight?” Mikey asked, gesturing to his massage chair in the corner of the kitchen. Gerald smiled. Later. 

Both were men of few words. For Gerald, the tendency toward quiet started with childhood abuse. Then, out celebrating his 21st birthday, he got mixed up in a brawl. A stab wound that debilitated his right hand also left him anxious about crowds.

A physical therapist suggested he try mixed martial arts. Gerald got good fast and turned pro. Mikey, his teammate, was like a brother.  

Mikey was in the kitchen when Gerald left to finish his pre-fight tasks and get his daughter from school. She remarked how good it smelled when she got home. 

“Mikey made tacos. We’ll have that for dinner.”

But Mikey wasn’t around. 

Gerald woke that night to Mikey’s girlfriend banging on the front door. She couldn’t get him on the phone. 

Gerald knocked on the door to his friend’s room. No response. He tried the handle. Locked. He forced it open. 

Mikey’s death ignited Gerald’s drive to understand the pervasive silence surrounding suicide. Gerald was no stranger to suicidal thoughts. The two men could have helped one another. 

But there was still the match. As Gerald prepared to enter the ring, an unusual thing happened. 

“This guy walks in and he’s like, ‘Hey, anybody want a chair massage?’ It just felt like Mikey fulfilling his word.” 

He lost a close fight. But the chance encounter reminding him of Mikey stayed in his head.

He fought for several more years, till his body couldn’t keep pace with the sport’s demands. Gerald rekindled a love for art he’d abandoned as an insecure child.

A move to San Diego to get his daughter closer to her mom landed Gerald in painting school. 

Painting alone in his studio, the flow he’d felt in the ring coursed through him again. He found personal peace and catharsis, but Mikey’s death, and those of other friends, pushed Gerald to address the silence surrounding suicide through art. 

Back in New Mexico he hosted art events to bring his community together. That led to an introduction to a University of Wyoming American Studies professor who encouraged him to study in Laramie.

This spring, he’ll graduate with a master’s degree focused on art’s role in suicide prevention. Experience Gerald’s research in action at “Wyoming Unite” from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie. 

Inviting his community to connect around suicide terrifies him more than a fight. It’s important work, but he’s still a quiet guy who gets nervous in crowds. 

He knows what to do in moments like this. You tape up your fists, believe in yourself and get in the ring.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

The post He fought professionally. Now, he battles stigma of suicide through art. appeared first on WyoFile .

When Jaelin Kauf zipped through moguls and jumps to win two world freestyle skiing titles this winter, she was far from the cowbells, gluhwein, chocolate and other slopeside paraphernalia that speckles historic European ski venues.

She skidded to a stop March 1 at the bottom of Kazakhstan’s Shymbulak Mountain Resort, a central Asian slope on the other side of the globe from her hometown of Alta, Wyoming. With two more races still on her international schedule, Kauf had just beaten Japan’s Rino Yanagimoto in the dual moguls event and secured the season’s crystal globe trophy for that discipline.

In besting Yanagimoto, she had also accumulated the most points for the season in both mogul events — the head-to-head duals and the single-skier competitions.

Her phone started buzzing.

“I was texting my parents … checking,” she said. “They said, ‘you also just secured the overall.’”

Kauf couldn’t believe it.

“Are you sure?” she texted back. “Are you positive? I don’t want to believe it or say anything if it’s not actually true.”

It was all true, but only half the season’s story. Within a couple of weeks, Kauf went on to Livigno, Italy, to win the freestyle single’s globe and then to fabled St. Moritz, Switzerland, to win the duals medal in the world Championships.

All those points, globes and medals might be as confusing to flatlanders as a mogul field is to an intermediate skier, but they shake out to simple truths.

Wyoming’s Jaelin Kauf, 28, dominates the freestyle moguls circuit. She won an unprecedented American crystal globe hat trick on the International Ski Federation tour this winter. She won the 2025 dual mogul world championship and is headed to next season’s Olympics in Cortina, Italy, where she hopes to add gold to her 2022 Beijing silver.

360s at the ’Ghee

Born in Vail, Colorado, to parents who skied on the pro mogul circuit, Kauf and her family moved to Alta and Grand Targhee Resort when she was three. Moguls — German for “small hills” — didn’t suit her at first. But she was determined to follow her older brother Skyler through the obstacles.

Then came mother Patti.

“My mom taught us how to do 360s off a catwalk or [by] just hitting road jumps or things around the mountain,” she said.

Skiers have long tested one another by racing down smooth courses and between gates set tightly for slalom and farther apart for giant slalom and downhill. Moguls were mine fields where grooming machines and racers didn’t venture.

That’s until the 1970s when Canadian Wayne Wong donned his white-rimmed mirror shades, got in the back seat and twisted his way through bumps in a new, expressive style — hot-dogging. Wong even incorporated a flip, the Wong-banger, into a bag of tricks that catapulted him onto posters found above many ski tuning benches across North America.

Today’s freestyle competition requires racing through manufactured snow moguls and over two kickers that enable skiers to perform aerial acrobatics. Judges rank competitors on time, style and form. In duals, skiers race side by side.

Kauf’s hometown hill, Grand Targhee, is blessed with snow and even moguls, but it’s not a mecca for budding aerialists. Kauf’s best simulation was on a trampoline. By the time she entered high school, the family had moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

That town is home to storied Howelsen Hill, a rare natural ski-jumping venue. Building on that heritage, the town also created one of the few American ski water ramps where athletes can practice aerial maneuvers in summer above a safe landing.

With aerials under her belt, Kauf in 2016 earned the rookie of the year title on the World Cup tour. Since then, she’s bumped and jumped her way to glory.

She has 16 World Cup victories, 50 World Cup podiums, a World Championships gold medal, seven U.S. Championship titles, and an Olympic silver medal. Along with Breezy Johnson, this year’s world champion downhill and team combined alpine champion who calls Jackson Hole Mountain Resort home, Kauf has again elevated Wyoming to the top of the world podium.

On to Cortina

At the culmination of Kauf’s season in St. Moritz, her family — mother Patti, stepfather Squeak Melehes, father Scott and stepmother Muffy Mead-Ferro — joined a smallish band of spectators and fans. Freestyle hasn’t captured the Europeans as completely as downhill and slalom, events in which stars bask in as much limelight as NFL quarterbacks do in the U.S. Nevertheless, “the locals or people free skiing would definitely stop and check out the event and see what’s going on,” Kauf said.

Regardless of the immediate audience, Kauf has been on the largest sports platform, including competing at two Olympics. In Beijing, even though COVID clouded her experience, the Olympic aura shone through.

“I got to walk out in opening ceremonies and perform on that stage,” she said. “It was still the Olympics.”

Kauf visited China again this year when Beidahu hosted a moguls event and where she found welcoming hosts. “They are very excited to have us there,” she said. “Everyone was really friendly and nice.”

She’s now focused on Cortina, which last hosted the winter Olympics in 1956. The coming games offer a double chance — individual and the duals medals.

“It’s not just focusing on that singles run,” she said. “You have to think about duals strategy as well.”

She’s eyeing “a very clean, zipper line right down the middle … hoping to bring in a bit higher degree of difficulty into my jumps.”

Wyoming will be there with her. Kauf wears “Deliver the Love,” on the back of her helmet, “Grand Targhee” on the front. In her gear bag, she said, she’s even got “a few brown and gold things.”

The post With freestyler Kauf, Wyoming celebrates another world ski champion appeared first on WyoFile .

History jobs aren’t easy to come by. So when a position for a digital archivist opened at the University of Wyoming in 2020, Rachael Laing uprooted their life near Chicago for small-town Laramie. 

Laing, who has a master’s degree in history, has spent the last five years undertaking a project to digitize hundreds of thousands of historic Wyoming newspaper microfilm pages and make them free to the public. 

The project is part of National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to create a searchable online database of newspapers. Laing and other archivists contributed files to Chronicling America, which is now home to millions of pages of American newspapers published between 1789-1963. Laing’s position was seeded by a $209,000 grant from the Humanities Endowment. 

The UW Libraries grant has been renewed in the five years since, paying for Laing to facilitate the total addition of nearly 300,000 pages of Wyoming newspapers to the database. 

Last week, however, the grant was terminated as part of significant cuts made to the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. 

And Laing was abruptly out of a job. 

Though Laing’s own life and career have been disrupted by the sudden firing, the archivist is more concerned about the fate of the project. 

“I liked that the work seemed important,” said Laing, who uses they/them pronouns. “It felt like we were creating something that was going to be very helpful to a lot of people.”

The project is among the latest Wyoming casualties of DOGE, which Trump champions as a voter-backed effort to reduce federal bureaucracy and expenditures. DOGE cuts have resulted in an array of Wyoming impacts — from U.S. Forest Service employees losing their jobs in Jackson to federal office closures in Cheyenne and sudden funding cuts for organizations like Wyoming Humanities. 

For Laing, it all happened incredibly fast, and they are still reeling. They are also saddened to think about the scope of programming nationwide that was axed without preamble. 

“I’m just really disappointed that suddenly this federal agency that was dispersing grants to really amazing projects was just … washed away,” Laing said. 

Frozen, aborted

Last week’s cuts targeted two federal agencies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Studies. Actions included placing staff on administrative leave and cancelling grants, according to reports. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities was founded in 1965, under the same legislation that enacted the more well-known National Endowment for the Arts. The Humanities Endowment has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries and other organizations, according to its website.

A significant piece of the Humanities Endowment’s overall funding, 40%, goes to state humanities councils like Wyoming’s. Those councils act as umbrellas, partnering with other organizations to support cultural events or awarding grants to projects. Humanities councils in all 50 states received notice last week that their grants were being terminated, according to reports. 

“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes,” read the letter that Wyoming Humanities received, adding “the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” 

NEH funding makes up 80% of Wyoming Humanities’ budget, covering staff expenses, travel, marketing and other operational costs for the nonprofit. Staff is reconsidering the group’s future in the wake of the change. 

Along with state councils, the Humanities Endowment funds individual projects in Wyoming. These include a recent grant to Meeteetse Museums to replace its roof and install solar panels and another grant to the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum to update Indigenous interpretation. Both were terminated, according to museum directors.

The federal agency also funded the UW Libraries grant. Laing’s first indication of trouble happened early Thursday, they said, when a person connected to a similar project in Florida contacted them asking if they knew what was going on. All that day, Laing heard grim updates from across the country from people who had been notified of cancelled grants. 

“So it was kind of like watching the dominoes fall, and I was just sort of waiting to get the news,” Laing said. Their supervisor delivered that news on Friday. “My job had just been dissolved.”

Keeping history alive  

Laing has spent much of the past five years in a windowless basement office, painstakingly digitizing microfilm newspapers for the project. It’s quiet work, and it suits them.  

Laing gathered microfilmed newspapers from the Wyoming State Archive and worked with vendors to digitize and format the files. The result is that issues of newspapers such as the Platte Valley Lyre, Cody Enterprise and Cheyenne Daily Leader are now on the database. They reach back to 1873, when in a June issue the Daily Leader announced Byer’s Hotel and French Restaurant in Cheyenne was back open following a remodel, and that in Chicago, railroad executive Horace Clark had fallen ill. 

With interest in genealogical research growing, Chronicling America eases access for amateur historians who no longer have to visit these libraries in person to scan microfilm records, Laing said.  

During each two-year grant cycle, Laing endeavored to digitize 100,000 pages. The project was nearing the end of its third grant cycle, with about 10,000 pages remaining to satisfy the goal, they said. 

Laing was actually planning to move on from the job at the end of the year. That fact may take some of the sting out of the loss, but still, they said, “there’s never a good time to lose your job.”

Since the termination notice arrived, Laing’s supervisors have been trying to come up with a plan and have been very supportive, they said. Laing and others are worried about the integrity of the collective work in the long run.

“For a long time, we thought that we were building something that was going to last,” Laing said, “and now for the last couple of days, we’ve been accounting for all of that data, just in case all of that work is lost.” 

Other impacts 

It has been less clear how cuts to the second federal agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will affect Wyoming. WyoFile requested an interview with State Librarian Abby Beaver and had not heard back by publication time. But in an open letter on its website, the Wyoming Library Association said IMLS funds are granted to the Wyoming State Library and pay for a statewide database, staff development and training opportunities. 

Last year, 633 nationwide grant recipients entered into legally binding agreements with IMLS, according to library advocacy group Every Library. “The sudden termination of these grants not only breaches these agreements but also undermines the essential services that libraries and museums provide to communities across the nation,” the organization said in a statement accompanying a petition. The petition oppose the “unlawful” actions. 

The National Humanities Alliance, meanwhile, rallied against the Humanities Endowment cuts. 

“We condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms,” the coalition of cultural advocacy groups said in a statement. “Cutting NEH funding directly harms communities in every state and contributes to the destruction of our shared cultural heritage.”

For Laing, the prevailing feeling is disappointment. They brought up a recent talk they gave to a Wyoming historical society, where members kept Laing and their supervisor late with questions. 

“They seemed really excited about the potential of the project,” Laing said, “and to know that that’s just something that might completely go away seems like a lot of wasted time and effort.”

The post After five years archiving Wyoming history, library specialist fired in latest DOGE cuts appeared first on WyoFile .

Since former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson died on March 14 at 93, admiration and remembrances have poured in from politicians, dignitaries and prominent figures around the country.

On Monday morning in the small sanctuary of Christ Episcopal Church in Cody, it was time for the people closest to Simpson — his children, grandchildren and brother — to recount their own fondness for the towering Wyoming politician. 

“He was authentic, genuine,” his son Colin Simpson said. “He changed lives. He was full of grace for his fellow humans … Dad’s good works will live on in all of us, in his thousands of good deeds and his thousands of friends and his thousands of letters. He will be well and long remembered.”

Those gathered for Simpson’s memorial service recounted a man of enormous wit and kindness whose hilarious observations helped ease life’s troubles. 

“Al found the balance between making people laugh and unrelenting candor,” grandson Nick Simpson said. “He knew exactly who he was and what he stood for. But he also loved the absurdity of life. As he would put it: ‘If life was logical, men would ride side-saddle.’”

Though he is best known as a storied politician who served three terms as a U.S. senator, Simpson was also a husband, father, lawyer, brother, athlete and hooligan. He grew up in Cody and returned there after his time in D.C. to live out his life; the town’s history is inextricably linked to the Simpson family.

It was only appropriate that his final goodbye was held in the church where he and his family had worshipped. There, to a standing-room-only crowd, the people who knew him most intimately shared anecdotes of a remarkable life honed with a dagger-sharp humor. All agreed that Wyoming residents are better for having known Simpson.

“He is gone now, but not really. Because he lives in all of us,” daughter Sue Simpson Gallagher said. “I will carry [his] spirit, love and kindness into every day for the rest of my life. I encourage all of you to do the same.”

The kid from Cody

Alan Kooi Simpson was born on Sept. 2, 1931 to Milward and Lorna Kooi Simpson. He grew up in Cody with his older brother, Pete, who would be his dearest friend in life. The brothers got into plenty of trouble during their time, though Pete Simpson joked Monday that as the eldest, he was mostly just the getaway driver. 

Simpson didn’t speak until he was 3 years old, Pete Simpson said, after which he never stopped. 

Both sons attended the University of Wyoming. It was there that Simpson met Ann Schroll, who Pete Simpson described as the biggest catch on campus. When his little brother told him he intended to marry her, Pete was incredulous. Simpson was a little stung.

“I felt that he had lucked out,” Pete Simpson said. “And look here. Look at this family. Look at this result, this legacy. Yeah, he lucked out, certainly we all did.”

This was one of many tributes to Ann, who was credited with stabilizing her husband and for being an unerring matriarch.

Simpson’s political career began in 1964 when he was elected to the Wyoming Legislature as a representative of Park County. He spent 13 years as a state lawmaker.

In 1978, Simpson won a U.S. Senate seat. He was re-elected twice, serving for 18 years. His role as whip — combined with powerful positions held by cohorts like fellow Wyomingites Dick Cheney and Malcolm Wallop — represented an unprecedented level of prominence for the Equality State that has since waned.

Much has been made of Simpson’s across-the-aisle work in Washington and his policy and professorial roles, but Monday’s service was more about the personal Al Simpson touches. The way he read “Wind in the Willows” to his children before bedtime, the Frankenstein costume he often donned for Halloween, his love of fine art and his devotion to sustaining his 70-year marriage with Ann. The way he encouraged those around him to take risks, be quick to forgive and love generously. 

As a politician, Simpson’s currency was people and his expertise was communication, family members said, and he was perfectly suited for that vocation. 

“He had uncommon, unconditional generosity,” Pete Simpson said. “And the love he felt underpinned everything that he did.”

Al and Ann Simpson championed Wyoming in every far-flung venue they found themselves, Pete Simpson said. 

“When they went back to Washington, when he went into all of those grand parties, when they went into those halls of the powerful and the elite … they carried Wyoming with them,” Pete said.

When the Simpsons returned to Cody, Al and Ann poured their energy into bolstering Wyoming with contributions to institutions such as the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the University of Wyoming. In the wake of his death, it feels to many in Cody that a landmark as large as Heart Mountain has fallen, said Rev. David Fox. 

“He lightened our weary, weighted and worried souls,” Fox said. “He was a joy to be with.”

“Al is the kind of man that took nothing that he didn’t give back in spades,” Pete Simpson said, before closing with an excerpt from an Edwin Harkham poem about Abe Lincoln’s death. “He went down, as when a lordly cedar goes down, with a great shout upon the hill, and leaves a lonesome place in the sky.”

“Goodbye Al,” Pete said, to a standing ovation.

Chuckles and belly laughs

Monday’s service capped off a week of remembrances and rites that passed in true Simpson fashion — with a whirlwind tour through the state. 

The one-time statehouse legislator lay in state in Wyoming’s Capitol for roughly 30 hours last week in Cheyenne, where family, friends and admirers paid their respects to his flag-draped coffin. 

Events then moved to the University of Wyoming, Simpson’s beloved alma mater, where on Saturday a who’s who of dignitaries shared anecdotes and laughs over the lanky senator. Emcee and former UW Foundation president Ben Blalock introduced congress members, tech CEOs, former senate staffers and governors. He read a letter from Simpson’s old Senate colleague, Joe Biden, who called Simpson “a man of enormous decency and integrity.” 

Speakers emphasized Simpson’s character, his mischief, his family and his stalwart love of the University of Wyoming, which he and Ann endowed with high-profile visitors and fundraising help. Speakers returned again and again to his humor and his proclivity to tell the same joke ad nauseam. 

Former UW president Philip Dubois recalled returning to Laramie for the 2024 dedication of the Alan K. Simpson Center for Clinical and Experiential Learning in the College of Law, where Simpson spoke. 

“He was so typically Al on that occasion,” Dubois said. “He reminded us that the Simpson Center was the only building on this campus named after a C student. That he ranked 18th in his class, out of 18. And, how many times have you heard that ‘he didn’t graduate cum laude, but thank the laude.’” 

Former aide Mike Tongour shared a rare unheard Simpson witticism.

“Just when you all thought you hadn’t heard any fresh Simpson material lately, let me channel a bit from a memo I just found that hasn’t seen the light of day for 35 years,” he said before reading: 

“An administrative note of intimate detail. The bum fodder, also known as toilet paper, in my Capitol office is industrial strength. Fine-grained sandpaper. Is there anyone in the government that uses Charmin or other soft, delightful tissues? If not, then please buy me some. I’ll pay cash money out of my pocket.”

Tongour went on to speculate about all the rich conversations the insatiably curious Simpson will enjoy in heaven — with figures like Mark Twain and Milward Simpson, Norm Mineta and George Bush. 

“God bless you, lovable, curious, hilarious Al,” he concluded. 

Speakers also struck earnest notes in recalling a remarkable lifetime of achievement. 

Rev. Allen Doyle of Laramie noted that Simpson “taught not politics, but morals.” 

“He was the Cowboy Code before we had a Cowboy Code,” U.S. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said. “He was our native sun, he was our north star, he was our rock star.” 

“We all know Al’s humor and his warmth and his love,” Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney said. “But he was a huge intellectual.” 

Even Cheney, however, couldn’t help but drop one funny anecdote when she recalled a sage pearl of wisdom he gave her. “‘The thing you have to know, Liz, about the seniority system of the United States Senate, is that it’s just like a cesspool. And the biggest turds rise to the top.’”

She chuckled and apologized before composing herself. 

“What a man, what a life,” Cheney concluded.

CORRECTION: A cutline in this story previously misidentified a church acolyte. -Ed.

The post Simpson’s soaring sendoff: ‘God bless you, lovable, curious, hilarious Al’ appeared first on WyoFile .

When Al Simpson walked into the Wyoming State Capitol on Jan. 12, 1965 as a newly elected Park County representative, he began a political run that carried him into the halls of national power and the immortality of the history books.

On Thursday, he entered the statehouse for the final time. A six-soldier honor guard, sidestepping and shuffling with military precision, carried his flag-draped casket as they navigated the challenging right angles of the building’s north entrance. 

After Thursday morning’s ceremony attended by family, dignitaries and well wishers, Simpson’s casket was left to receive visitors under the Capitol’s rotunda. Though the casket remained closed, military ritual dictates that the stars of the American flag are draped over the senator’s left shoulder, meaning his visage, beneath the lid, faced upward at the ornate stained glass of the rotunda ceiling high above him. 

Keeping Simpson company through the night from their alcoves on the Capitol’s third floor were The Four Sisters, bronze allegories sculpted for the building’s renovation, completed in 2019. The four figures are named Courage, Hope, Truth and Justice. 

“It is fitting they should stand watch over Sen. Simpson,” Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice Kate Fox told mourners Thursday morning, “as he dedicated his life to those four virtues.” 

Truth, Justice and Courage are sculpted with faces pointed downward, gaze fixed toward his coffin. Truth held a lantern out over Simpson, and Courage raised her hand in greeting. Hope did not look down on the senator: She was sculpted with her face thrust upward. 

Simpson, who died March 14 at age 93, lay under mortal supervision as well. Throughout the roughly 30 hours he lay in state, from around 9 a.m. Thursday until his scheduled removal at 2 p.m. Friday, Simpson rested under the watch of the military honor guard, composed of representatives of different branches of the armed forces. Unmovable and unresponsive, a soldier stayed in a fixed position at Simpson’s head, rotating out every 15 minutes. 

Simpson is the first person to lie in state in the Capitol since 2012, when former Wyoming Secretary of State Joseph Meyer occupied the rotunda for a day that October. Before Meyer was Gov. Stanley Hathaway, in 2005. 

The state offered the honor to Sen. Mike Enzi’s family when he died following a bicycle accident in July 2021, but the family declined, Gov. Mark Gordon’s spokesperson Michael Pearlman told WyoFile.

Known for spunky good humor, affability and approachability, Simpson might have been taken aback by the stiff formality around his coffin. He would have been cheered, however, by his children and grandchildren, who drew the gathered mourners into a moment of familial intimacy when they gathered around the coffin during the ceremony and sang a few bars of the children’s song “The More We Get Together.”

The family sang the song at meals and gatherings, son Colin Simpson told reporters after the ceremony, and at his father’s bedside in his last days. 

He would have been glad, too, to see the slow trickle of visitors who paid their respects throughout the day.

Those visits included one from 85-year-old Foy Jolley, a military veteran and former police officer who guarded the statehouse when Simpson served in it and later remembered meeting his grandchildren as babies. 

“I gave him a salute,” Jolley said. “I put my hand on the casket and I said, ‘I’ll see you soon, Al.’” 

Then there was Gayle and Brett Baugh, who spent a quiet moment with the casket as the room cleared of politicians and state officials, both current and past. 

Approached by a few lingering reporters, Gayle Baugh, an elderly woman dressed in a distinguished purple coat, bent her head and held her husband’s hand as she took a long moment to compose her reason for paying homage to Simpson, who she had not known personally. 

“These days, positive public servants with the best interests of all in mind are rare,” she said finally, “and this man epitomized that.” 

She and her husband were also veterans, she said. “As we served in our careers, those were the people we tried to emulate.”

Outside the Capitol, the Wyoming flag hung at half mast, waiting for the Wyoming wind, respectfully subdued for the morning’s procession, to rise back up and wave it. The flag returns to full mast on Monday, after Simpson’s burial. 

After the ceremony, the senator was left with the honor guard and a few state employees serving as guides to the public.  

There was no great crush of people to pay homage to the politician during the time a WyoFile reporter spent in the rotunda.But Simpson was rarely without a visitor for long.  

There was a Cheyenne resident who declined to give her name but said she came to remember a man who impressed her in 1994, when she chaperoned a group of Bighorn Basin middle school students to the nation’s capital. Wyoming’s representative didn’t have time for the schoolchildren, she recalled, though they waited at her office for nearly an hour. 

The senator did. 

He met with them on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He warmed up the intimidated young Wyomingites by telling them his shoe size — a whopping size 14, she remembered.  He “made the kids feel at ease.” They all took a photograph together, she said.

At around 10:45 a.m., Wyoming columnist, political maverick and prodigious speaker outer Rod Miller slipped out of a stairwell to stand for a moment by the coffin with his cowboy hat in his hands. 

“I miss Al,” Miller told a reporter. “He was a funny son of a bitch.” 

Miller wrote a column for this publication honoring Simpson’s legacy. In it, he wrote that there will doubtlessly soon be a drive for statues and plaques and naming places after the political giant. 

But, Miller wrote, “if we could seek Al Simpson’s wise counsel one last time, he might tell us to forget all that fancy stuff. I think he’d tell us, very lovingly, to just be careful whom we choose to stand in the gap he left. He’d tell us to choose a good neighbor.”

Slowly, quietly, Simpson’s visitors came through. Staff from the governor’s and legislative service office took a moment to pause by the casket and read the citation accompanying the Presidential Medal of Freedom that lay on a table behind Simpson’s honor guard. President Joe Biden awarded Simpson for being “never afraid to stand up for what he felt was right” and searching for common ground even as the nation’s body politic slid into online acrimony and harsh partisanship. 

Snippets of conversation drifted out of an office room and across the rotunda. 

“He was a good guy…” 

“He always worked across the aisle…”

“He was just that kind of guy…” 

Ann and Amy Legg — a mother and daughter duo originally from Worland — got a visit from Simpson’s daughter Sue as they paid their respects. Did you know my father, she asked. Everybody in Wyoming kind of knew Simpson, Ann Legg answered. She recalled him attending a high school graduation on a “hot, horrible day” in Worland.

“He needed a hat, and my husband loaned him one,” she said. 

Later, a grandfather gathered his wife and two grandchildren for a photograph in front of the coffin, gently waving his young grandson out of a two-thumbs up pose and into something more befitting the occasion. 

James and Vicki Medina had brought their grandchildren up from Colorado Springs, where they now live, to visit with Simpson. Medina worked for Simpson, heading his field office in Rock Springs. He showed a reporter a picture on his phone of the senator with Medina’s two sons. They were just little boys at the time, as Medina’s grandchildren are today, and Simpson sat with one on each knee.

A decade ago, they received a letter from Simpson. He had seen their sons, all grown up, in the crowd at a UW basketball game, and the retired senator wrote to tell them about it. 

In the missive, Simpson was “just kicking himself for not going down and giving them a big hug,” Vicki Medina said. 

The Simpson family is hosting a celebration of life for the senator at the University of Wyoming’s Arena Auditorium at 11 a.m. Saturday. The event is open to the public.

The post In Sen. Al Simpson’s final visit to the Wyoming Capitol, mourners find their own ways to say goodbye appeared first on WyoFile .

The American climbers sent the bad news the fastest way they could. In this instance 62 years ago today, it was “carried by runner.”

From Everest’s basecamp, where the mountaineers were preparing to climb the world’s highest peak, a Nepali courier set off at a trot. He carried a message as he wended his way across the fractured detritus below the Khumbu Glacier. His calloused feet padded down the shadowed valley where gravity and time wear the mountain’s granite, gneiss and limestone.

He ran down trails worn smooth by a million soles, following the Lobuche Kosi and Imja Kosi rivers that mill boulders into flour. He jogged by mani stones, past rope bridges, loped by the storied Sherpa villages of Lobuche, Pheriche and Dingboche.

In about 15 miles, the messenger climbed out of the shadows to the hillside hamlet of Tengboche, a holy crossroads between Nepal’s capital Kathmandu and Qomolangma, Sagarmatha — Everest. As the courier arrived, Jackson Hole alpinist David Dornan was inhaling the clear Himalayan air, perhaps scented by a Sherpa’s yak-dung fire or incense drifting from the Tengboche Monastery.

Dornan was on an expedition to the Sherpa homeland, an expedition separate from the American climbers’. He was building a school and waterworks with Sir Edmund Hillary who, with Tenzing Norgay, had been the first to climb Everest 10 years earlier in 1953.

But seven of the 19 Americans who were just up-valley from Tengboche had worked professionally in Wyoming’s Teton Range. That was Jackson Hole native Dornan’s back yard, and Dornan knew and had worked with a bunch of them.

The messenger arrived apace at Tengboche, an ethereal world ornamented with Tibetan totems, a world almost touching the heavens. Here temple lions with the eyes of God guard the monastery entrance. A golden spire juts from a bedazzling white stupa. Dozens of prayer flags flutter in the breeze. Inside the lamasery, saffron-robed monks and devotees spin prayer wheels that hold scrolls of Tibetan-script mantras.

In this rare aura, Dornan scanned the top of the world.

“It was a clear, beautiful day, and I was just totally absorbed looking at the mountains and being where I was,” Dornan said. Then came the runner’s dispatch.

“An American had been killed.”

Which American?

But which American?

There were 19. Seven of them had climbed professionally in the Tetons, as had Dornan, a mountain guide with the Exum guide service.

Was it a Teton veteran? Was it Barry Corbet, the handsome Dartmouth dropout and skier; Willi Unsoeld, the gregarious Peace Corps volunteer who would sprout a national forest of a beard, or Jake Breitenbach, the tow-headed mountaineer who wore his alpine beanie at a rakish angle?

Could it be Dick Pownall, or David Dingman, two more of Dornan’s fellow Exum guides from the Tetons? It could be Richard Emerson, Grand Teton National Park’s chief climbing ranger. Or possibly Tom Hornbein, a Colorado climber, ranger and anesthesiologist who worked with search-and-rescue teams at Grand Teton one summer and had designed the expedition’s oxygen masks.

“I had a rare intuition,” Dornan said. “Jake did have some history of bad luck; he was never able to summit Mount Owen, for example. Once guiding the Grand Teton, he was hit by lightning, “actually knocked out,” Dornan said. “There were other stories where the mountain turned against him.”

“I instinctively knew,” Dornan said, “that it was Jake.”

John Edgar Breitenbach was only 27 when a tower of ice collapsed and entombed his body among the crevasses of the Khumbu Glacier on the first climbing day of the American’s 1963 expedition to Everest. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1935, he graduated from Oregon State College, as it was then known, majoring in mathematics.

Heaven in Jackson Hole

He moved to the climbing crucible of Jackson Hole in the mid 1950s and guided clients up the 13,775-foot high Grand Teton in the summer. There, he met and married Mary Louise McGraw, a transplant from the East Coast. She was Lou to those who knew her, Mary Louise McGraw Breitenbach, M.Ed., of Harvard, to the rest of the world.

“He was blonde and beautiful and adventuresome, and so [Lou] loved all those things about him,” said Joseph Piccoli, Lou Breitenbach’s second husband.

In the Jackson Hole winter, Breitenbach was one of a corps of young skiers and alpinists establishing a ski hub at the base of Snow King Mountain that they hoped would sustain a year-round life in the mountains. Corbet had built the A-frame Alphorn Lodge at the base of the “Town Hill” and ran it with his wife Muffy Moore. Lou Breitenbach ran a restaurant, the White Cupboard, next door. Jake Breitenbach bought and operated a ski shop nearby. “We were all pretty young and trying to find our way,” Moore said.

In a cowboy town, the alpinists with their sun glasses and ski sweaters stood out. “I was impressed with these guys,” said Rod Newcomb, who arrived in Jackson Hole around that time and eventually became a guide and co-owner of the Exum guide service. One of Breitenbach’s gang would walk around town in an overstuffed expedition jacket from a groundbreaking climb of Denali, Newcomb said, “and everybody knew who he was.”

Breitenbach himself “was humorous and inventive and had a gaiety of spirit,” said Corbet’s wife Moore. “He was just a delightful person to be around,” even as he fended off depression, something he did best by climbing a mountain.

The Jackson Hole cadre skied where nobody had skied, camped in the snow on extended alpine traverses and probed the corners of the Teton range in summer. “What a gift that was,” Moore said, “having your own personal paradise to spend the winter months in. “Jackson in those years really was just heaven. Young as we were, we even recognized that at the time.

“And then Everest came along,” she said, “and kind of ended it all.”

What Jake wanted

The American mountaineers regrouped on the Khumbu Glacier after Breitenbach died on March 23, 1963.

“These things happen instantaneously,” Corbet said in a taped message he made at the 18,000-foot base camp 10 days after Breitenbach’s death. “And while we were all stunned for a couple of days, we’ve all come back, and we’re doing battle with the mountain again.”

The team would forge on, “just as Jake would have wanted us to,” Corbet said.

Forge on they did, as plotted by expedition leader Norman Dyhrenfurth, a Swiss-American mountaineer who had assembled the team and its bankroll. Dyhrenfurth secured key National Geographic backing only after traveling to Jackson Hole to hand pick team members from the Tetons. At the time, the range was one of a handful of American climbing centers, a town with a mountaineering colony.

“There was a harmonic convergence between a Swiss-American climber [Dyhrenfurth], this sweet spot of climbing here [in the Tetons] and the possibility that America could actually head off to Everest,” said Brot Coburn, a Wilson resident, Nepal historian and author of “The Vast Unknown: America’s First Ascent of Everest.”

The peak had only been climbed once, perhaps twice before (a Chinese ascent was contested). Dyhrenfurth was bent on putting an American on top, whatever logistics it took.

“So Norman came to the Tetons and he saw the right stuff — Willi Unsoeld, Dick Pownall, Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach,” Coburn said, ticking off some of the Teton climbers who would join the team.

“These were scrappy, energetic, innovative climbers. They were more than ready and willing to take on challenges.”

Dyhrenfurth, however, knew where the butter was on his sliced American bread. Above all, he needed a photograph of an American on the top of the world, perhaps hoisting an ice axe with a flag, maybe even a National Geographic banner. That image was best secured by following Hillary and Tenzing’s 1953 line up Everest’s South Col route.

Although that route has little rock climbing, there’s a corniced ridge near the top and a stinger in the tail — the near vertical Hillary Step a snowball’s throw below the summit. Plus, it’s bitterly cold, there’s scant air to breathe and what oxygen is available rips past in the jet stream.

Towering Jim Whittaker, a Seattle volcano climber, was among the Dyhrenfurth contingent and with Sherpa Nawang Gombu became the leader’s choice for the first summit team. Despite the distinction an Everest ascent held, Teton climbers were decidedly unexcited about following Hillary and Norgay’s 10-year-old footsteps.

Beatnicks on belay

Here’s maybe why.

“The young Teton climbers were, perhaps as a function of their youth, their adventuresomeness and their audacity, also intrigued by some of the cultural changes that were just beginning to happen at that time,” Coburn said. “During that period, beatnik sensibilities and creativity was leading into anti-establishment types of thinking, and definitely, these Teton climbers had that.

“They knew that they were different from the rest of straight 1950s American culture,” Coburn said. “They knew they were outliers, almost outlaws in a way, and so they differed from the approach of the National Geographic and the volcanos climbers, rather fundamentally.”

The Teton group also had “mixed mountaineering” skills, Coburn said. They took on, professionally, steep rock bands and serrated ridges, snow gullies walled by granite faces, glaciers and their deadly crevasses. They handled rucksacks of gear — ropes, ice axes, carabiners, pitons, crampons.

Importantly, they hauled those loads to untrammeled places. “They were knocking off new routes like crazy,” Coburn said. They yearned to explore.

On the weeks-long hike into Everest’s base camp, rebellious chatter, especially among what Unsoeld called the Teton Tribe, began. As they approached Everest, one mountain feature looked strikingly familiar. Unsoeld saw the Grand Teton, Hornbein saw Colorado’s Longs Peak, albeit on a larger scale.

This rocky spine jutted above the expedition’s planned 21,350-foot-high advanced base camp. A combination of snowfields, ramps, a huge couloir and an unavoidable Yellow Band of rock — all unexplored mountain — rose 7,678 feet to the summit.

Unsoeld and Hornbein “just had this bug,” said Renny Jackson, Teton guidebook author and former Teton Park climbing ranger, “‘Let’s go check something else out.’”

“They were out for a new experience, and that’s definitely why they were up for the West Ridge,” former Exum owner Newcomb said. “It had never been climbed. It would be a first ascent.”

“We wanted to make America proud and [show we] were as good as the Europeans,” Dornan said of the expedition. “For the first time, they had to start respecting American climbers.”

The West Ridge was a plumb, albeit high on the tree. Nevermind that the climb would require trespassing into China during the heat of the Cold War. The Teton climbers were social bandits in any case. And who would be watching?

Wyoming’s outsized role

On May 1, the mismatched “big Jim and little Gombu,” made good on their Mutt-and-Jeff diversities and climbed Hillary and Tenzing’s South Col route to the 29,028-foot summit [Everest’s elevation is refined somewhat regularly]. Now the West Ridgers were able to claw supplies to their side of the mountain to support their audacious plot, an effort that had caused friction.

“They were denied the resources that they needed,” Dornan said, “not only in personnel, but supplies. It was nasty.”

They spent weeks ferrying loads to a high camp where two of them would climb the last of the West Ridge, meet a second American South Col team on the top, and descend that easier side of the mountain. It would be the first traverse of the peak.

Remarkably, the first ascent of Everest’s West Ridge would be an almost exclusive endeavor of climbers who had been Teton pros. Among those, Breitenbach was gone and Teton guide Pownall, “very beat up,” from the icefall collapse.

But Teton ranger Emerson hauled loads up the route. Exum guide Dingman was there, too, with Corbet, Unsoeld and Hornbein. Fifteen Sherpas lent heavy support. At Corbet’s insistence, Unsoeld and Hornbein would be the West Ridge summit team.

Corbet, perhaps the strongest of the lot, said later his hardest day in the mountains was when he humped a load up through the huge gash, later named the Hornbein Couloir, to Unsoeld and Hornbein’s high camp 5W at an elevation of 27,250 feet. The supply team left the tented summit pair to spend a night sleeping with oxygen.

On May 22, Unsoeld and Hornbein set off, abandoning their camp for a one-way journey. “The going was a wonderful pleasure,” Hornbein wrote in “Everest, The West Ridge,” “almost like a day in the Rockies.” They summited at 6:30 p.m. and found the footprints of Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad who had been there hours before. Lower down the South Col route, the four bivouacked for the night in the black void.

The groundbreaking effort cost. National Geographic photographer Bishop lost toes to frostbite. It’s said that Unsoeld also lost nine, but that’s inaccurate. After they came off, he preserved them in a jar and would show them off to his students.

Om mani padme hum

“When someone you know dies young, they remain frozen in time in your memory,” a climber with the social-media handle “rgold,”  wrote about Breitenbach on a climbing thread. “He remains forever a golden-haired boy with a smile that could light up the countryside.”

To the world, Breitenbach would always be as the camera caught him, tossing what Coburn called “a mischievous shock of Dennis the Menace blond hair,” drawing elegantly on a cigarette, dashing around a mountain town in Teton toggery behind the wheel of a new Volvo.

Those images stop on March 23, 1963, when Breitenbach’s partners cut his rope where the twisted nylon disappeared under tons of ice. It was the end of a star-crossed affair with the mountains. From that time, the Khumbu Glacier ground unsentimentally on. Seven years later, in 1970, the Khumbu disgorged Breitenbach’s remains.

“There wasn’t much to speak of,” Piccoli said. “They identified him from his clothing.”

Bishop went to Nepal and buried Breitenbach above Tengboche.

Meantime, Lou Breitenbach packed a box of memorabilia including Jake’s letters, condolence notes from around Wyoming and other things and shipped them to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. More recently, the family of Breitenbach’s friend, Frank Ewing, pulled a cache of about 500 Breitenbach slides from a closet and revived tales of the golden years.

Forty years after Breitenbach’s death, Piccoli convinced Lou Breitenbach to leave Jackson Hole and visit Tengboche. It wasn’t an easy trek. Lou, 66 at the time, battled dysentery, but soldiered on. She passed paddy and pagoda, even a trailside mystic who told her she would live to 83, to arrive at the Buddhist friary.

“She made it all the way to a puja ceremony performed by the monks at the monastery,” Piccoli said. There, she heard the drone of long Tibetan horns, the auspicious ring of Tingsha cymbals, the lamas deep-throated incantations.

“They were burning incense and setting up rice cakes and all kinds of stuff and reading from the scriptures,” Piccoli said. “It was an amazing little ceremony.”

Lou Breitenbach strived to live to her 84th birthday but died in Jackson Hole in 2020, two weeks shy of it. Just as the trailside soothsayer said. But she had managed to visit Jake’s grave, just above the monastery and look down on the site where Jake penned his last letter to her.

“Thyanboche, March 14, 1963,” he scrawled.

He described the carefree path of an adventurous young man in an exotic milieu that the world would soon wash over. A few days before, down the trail at Namche Bazaar, “it turned into quite a night for three of us who ended up eating wild goat and drinking chang in some Sherpa’s house … lots and lots of very good chang.”

Breitenbach looked toward the mountain, too.

“We’ve been divided into two groups now – one for the South Col and the other for an attempt on the West Ridge,” Breitenbach wrote. “Barry [Corbet] and I are both on the West Ridge and happy about it.

“The fact that we’re going to try the West Ridge is definite, but is still not to be public knowledge,” the letter reads. “Attempting this route reduces our chance of climbing the mountain at all and makes it most unlikely that any of us going on the West Ridge will see the summit. Nevertheless, the opportunity of trying a new route cannot be passed up.”

He closed after five pages as the Himalaya became moody.

“The afternoon clouds are coming up now,” Breitenbach wrote. “I probably won’t have another chance to write until base camp. I miss you very much – Love, Jake.”

A standard 4 by 9 1/2 inch envelope, addressed to Mrs. J.E. Breitenbach and marked with red, white and blue airmail slashes around its edges carried the letter to the United States. A line drawing of Mount Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse graces the envelope’s bottom, right corner. “American Mount Everest Expedition 1963” is printed on the envelope in three places. “Hotel Royal, Kathmandu, Nepal” is the return address.

Another inscription is stamped at an angle.

“CARRIED BY RUNNER”

Sources: American Alpine Journal; Jackson Hole News&Guide; The Breitenbach Collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; James Ramsey Ullman’s, “Americans on Everest,” and other historical material.

The caption in the photograph of the Teton alpinists and skiers has been corrected to identify John Harrington, not Neal Rafferty, next to Pete Sinclair. Also, there were no photograph of Breitenbach taken after March 23, 1963, not May 23 as originally published — Ed.

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From Cody boy scout to trouble-making UW college student and prominent U.S. Senator who met with world leaders, Alan Simpson led a storied life. The lawyer, Republican politician and army veteran spent 18 years working for Wyoming in Washington, D.C., during an era when the state enjoyed unprecedented political power. Often joined by his lifelong companion and wife, Ann, Simpson toured foreign countries, dined with heads of state and traveled Wyoming to hear from constituents, relishing the job of legislating. This photo essay chronicles just some of his many antics and accomplishments. 

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Al Simpson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on July 7, 2022.

It’s the highest civilian award of the United States and has been awarded to an average of fewer than 11 recipients annually since it was established in 1963.

“Al exemplifies our national ideals of responsible governance, civil discourse and public service,” President Joe Biden said in making the award. “He was one of the most decent, stand-up, genuine guys I’ve ever served with. At his core, Al always believed in the common good and what’s best for the nation.”

Three other major awards came Simpson’s way in July, August and September 2024.

On July 27, 2024, the Mineta-Simpson Institute was dedicated at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center near Cody. The 7,300-square-foot facility is designed to foster empathy, courage and cooperation in the next generation of leaders. Simpson and Norm Mineta met and became friends at Boy Scout meetings at the Heart Mountain Internment Center during World War II. As fate would have it, they later served together in Congress, Mineta in his role as congressman from California and Secretary of Transportation for two presidents.

A month later, on Aug. 22, 2024, Simpson and his wife, Ann, were feted in Laramie when the ribbon was cut on the newly named University of Wyoming College of Law Alan K. Simpson Center for Clinical and Experiential Learning. The Simpson Center at the law school houses a number of departments as well as offices for human rights and environmental law. Simpson was a 1958 graduate of the UW College of Law. 

And on Sept. 26, 2024, the couple was honored by the Ucross Foundation near Buffalo with the Raymond Plank Award for Visionary Leadership. Ucross President William Belcher said the Simpsons “have demonstrated a history of leadership,” citing Al’s service in the Wyoming House and U.S. Senate and Ann’s long advocacy for the arts and mental health.

But the “award” the Simpsons were most proud of came in June 2024 when they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary with an Ice Cream Social in Cody City Park.

“We always worked as a team,” Ann said at the time.

Daughter Sue Simpson Gallagher quoted her parents’ take on marriage: “Every day is a decision and a recommitment to the relationship.”

“I really believe that kind of pragmatism is what allowed them to keep their romance alive for 70 years,” Simpson Gallagher told the Cody Enterprise. “They presented as one to the public and in private.”

The post For Al and Ann Simpson, biggest award was 70-year marriage appeared first on WyoFile .

Alan Simpson, the towering second son of one of Wyoming’s most prominent political families known for his across-the-aisle work as a Republican U.S. Senator, spunky humor and larger-than-life personality, died Friday in hospice care in Cody, a family spokesperson confirmed. Simpson was 93.

The nationally recognized figure had roots in Cody, where he grew up, got his start in politics, raised a family and lived much of his life with his wife, Ann. Together they were major supporters of Wyoming institutions such as the University of Wyoming and Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Simpson never missed an opportunity to praise his wife of 70 years.

Simpson was at turns athlete, hooligan, lawyer, father and husband, though he is best known as a storied politician who served three terms as a U.S. Senator, including as the Republican whip from 1985 to 1995. In D.C., he proved himself a canny legislator who wasn’t afraid to take potshots at sacred cows like immigration policy and Social Security. Simpson laced his language with curse words, but usually with a twinkle in his eye. 

His attitude was shaped in large part by his mother’s adage, which he repeated often: “Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life.” 

He gained a reputation for non-partisan cooperation and was famously friends with left-leaning individuals such as Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. Mo Udall. Though a staunch and lifelong Republican, he held a unique set of ideals. He was pro-choice but strident about limiting government spending. 

He seemed to have a folksy bon mot for every situation and though he garnered positive press attention for his shenanigans, he also battled with reporters and got into trouble. Through it all, he had an endless fascination for the job of legislating. 

At 6 foot, 7 inches tall, he was a towering figure — both physically and metaphorically. 

“He is an incredible example of what leadership can do,” said Wyoming attorney Stan Cannon, who worked as Simpson’s press secretary from 1990-1994. Simpson represents a significant figure not only in Wyoming history, but the nation’s, Cannon said. 

He and Ann had an enormous network of friends that included everyone from bosom buddies George and Barbara Bush to Sandra Day and John Jay O’Connor. He toiled with indefatigable energy to represent Wyoming, won a Presidential Medal of Freedom and was known to answer every correspondence that came to him. And on a personal level, Simpson was an invaluable companion, his older brother Pete Simpson said.

“He was an uncommonly generous man,” Pete Simpson said. “And I mean generous in an absolutely unconditional way. Giving of his time, giving of his energy — and he did it in politics and he did it in the family, forever.” 

Simpson is survived by his wife Ann; brother Peter (Lynne); children William Simpson, Colin Simpson and Susan Simpson; grandchildren and many friends. He had been struggling with his health since breaking a hip in December, but spent his final days with family, according to a family spokesperson.

Early life

Wyoming, politics and law are enmeshed in the Simpson family roots, and colorful characters populate the family tree. Simpson’s maternal great-grandfather, the frontiersman Finn Burnett, came to the Wyoming Territory with a trading outfit and later worked as an agricultural manager on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Finn’s daughter, Maggie Burnett, taught Latin at St. Stephens Indian School on the reservation. 

There, she met Simpson’s grandfather, Billy, a free spirit who was called “Broken Ass Bill” because of his limp (he suffered from polio as a child). Shortly after passing the Wyoming bar, he and Maggie married. Billy proved a handful; he was a drinker and gambler who shot the ear off a banker after the man allegedly bounced his check on purpose. 

Maggie and Billy had three children, including Simpson’s father, Milward, who was a lawyer and politician. Milward went on to serve as a U.S. Senator and Wyoming governor. Simpson would say he inherited his “lyrical profanity” from his dad, along with his political courage. 

Milward married Lorna Kooi, who grew up in the coal-mining town bearing her last name. Lorna’s father was immensely successful in the energy trade, affording the family the opportunity for extensive international travel, a rare luxury. He also served in the Wyoming Senate. 

Though Cody residents, Milward and Lorna Kooi Simpson gave birth to Alan Kooi Simpson on Sept. 2, 1931 in Denver, a precaution because his older brother, Pete, was such a large baby. 

Life in Cody was heavily shaped by World War II, Simpson told WyoFile, as Cody lost many young men to fighting, spurring residents to involve themselves in the war effort. As a boy, Simpson met a young Japanese American boy named Norman Mineta, a fellow boy scout who was one of nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center outside of town, when Simpson’s troop went to the camp for a jamboree. It would prove to be an auspicious friendship. 

Simpson was a hellraiser in his teenage years; he and a gang of friends burned down structures and totaled cars. One of these outings landed him on federal probation for shooting a mailbox. Despite his black marks, he made it to the University of Wyoming in 1950, where he played football. At UW, he ran for student senate and met a girl named Ann Schroll from Greybull. 

He and Ann married in 1954 — but not before Simpson found himself in hot water after drunkenly punching a police officer in Laramie. Ann influenced him to cut down on his beer drinking, which was prodigious, and wed him despite his inability to dance. (She later taught him how.) 

Simpson joined the U.S. Army after college and served in Germany. After that, he and Ann returned to Wyoming, where he re-enrolled at the University of Wyoming and received a law degree in 1958. Simpson joined the Cody-based law firm owned by his father and Charles G. Kepler; he practiced law in Cody until 1976. 

His political career began in 1964 when he was elected to the Wyoming State Legislature as a representative of Park County. Simpson spent 13 years as a representative, serving as majority whip, majority floor leader and speaker pro tempore.  

Political prominence

In 1978, Simpson won a U.S. Senate seat. He was re-elected twice, serving for 18 years. His role as whip — combined with powerful positions held by cohorts like Dick Cheney and Malcolm Wallop — represented an unprecedented level of prominence for Wyoming that has since waned. In his leadership role, he often met with President Ronald Reagan and enjoyed a close friendship with George H.W. Bush.

Simpson was a tireless pol who worked late into the night and traveled on a maddash schedule as he split time between Washington, D.C., Wyoming and many speaking engagements. 

He appeared regularly at town hall events from Meeteetse to Pinedale, and responded to countless letters to the editor in the Casper Star-Tribune — even occasionally taking out full-page advertisements when the paper would not allot him the space he desired to retort. In D.C., he was identified early as an independent thinker. He kept exhaustive diaries throughout his career and found his work endlessly fascinating.

Among notable highlights of his time in federal office:

• Crafting the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1985 with Rep. Romano Mazzoli, D-Kentucky, which is considered a model for bipartisan problem solving. Simpson toiled for years on the controversial legislation, which required both tenacity and skilled political maneuvering to pass. After it passed, Simpson joked that it was like “giving dry birth to a porcupine,” according to “Shooting from the Lip,” a biography written by Donald Loren Hardy. 
• Co-sponsoring, with the state’s other Republican U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop, the Wyoming Wilderness Act of 1984. 
• Becoming a much-speculated-over vice presidential pick when Bush ran in 1988. (Simpson claimed he did not want the job, which went to Dan Quayle.) 
• Meeting with foreign leaders including former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, then-Prince Charles of Wales and Saddam Hussein.

Nothing personal 

Though a charismatic jokester, Simpson was a canny political gamesman who honed his skills as a lawyer. 

“Just because he was affable did not mean he wasn’t also ruthlessly strategic,” said Nadia White, who covered Simpson as a Casper Star-Tribune reporter and editor. “He knew exactly what he was doing in politics, especially when it came to kind of sustaining the Republican hegemony in Wyoming.”

As a legislator, Simpson understood that things get done through a process of concessions and negotiations, former press secretary Cannon said. While some lawmakers want the entire loaf of bread, or nothing at all, “Al saw value in half of a loaf,” Cannon said.  

He also proved unafraid to skewer sacred cows — he advocated for Social Security limits, fought against the establishment of a Veterans Affairs cabinet position and waded deep into immigration debates.

“It was clearly a time when I think Alan Simpson could carry the water for the nation on a variety of issues that were too hot to touch for lawmakers from other states,” White said. 

Simpson would also go to battle with anyone — be it fellow senator or press corps member — but could do so in a way that wasn’t personal, White said. “He had a remarkable ability to leave the fighting words in the chamber.

“What I appreciated about Sen. Simpson was that you could go stand toe to toe with him and really disagree,” White said. “But he would still answer the phone, he would still engage in the kind of relationship between the press, the people and the politicians.”

His approach to tough discussions, he told WyoFile, was never my-way-or-the-highway. 

“You gotta talk to each other,” Simpson said. “You got to hear each other. You can’t just be a rockbound Republican, a rockbound Democrat, you should put aside that and decide that you’re an American citizen for Christ’s sake.”

That ability to hear the other side was one of Simpson’s great assets, Cannon said. “Al was maybe one of the greatest listeners I’ve ever known.”

It went beyond listening, said Andrew Melnykovych, who had regular interactions with Simpson as a reporter for the Star-Tribune from 1982-1990. Simpson showed “a lot of empathy for a whole variety of different people,” he said. “He was just a decent human being, which is more than you can say about a lot of characters in D.C. these days.” 

In the four years Melnykovych led the newspaper’s Washington bureau, he and Simpson rarely agreed, he said, and Simpson rowed often and passionately with the newspaper. But the senator, who was frank, candid and accessible, earned the reporter’s respect. 

“He was one of my favorite politicians I’ve ever dealt with,” Melnykovych said. “He was pretty unvarnished in his opinions. If he had something to say, he didn’t mind being quoted on it.” 

Boy Scouts 

Decades after they kindled a friendship as boy scouts in a pup tent at the internment camp jamboree outside Cody, Simpson and Mineta reunited in Washington, D.C. Mineta, a Democrat, had won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

By that time, Simpson had reflected on what happened in Cody’s backyard during World War II.

As a child, he said, the internment camp was a scary place. But he remembered meeting Mineta and his family and realizing they were just normal, American people. He remembered thinking: “What are they here for?” 

He told WyoFile the answer decades later: “They are here because of a failed government, a government filled with war hysteria and racism.”

In Congress, Simpson and Mineta cooperated as they worked on controversial legislation. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 served as the federal government’s formal apology to those imprisoned during the war, paying them financial reparations. 

Mineta died in 2022 at age 90. The story of his friendship with Simpson will live on at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center; the facility recently constructed a new wing called the Mineta-Simpson Institute — meant to engender hard conversations. 

Post-politics 

Simpson retired from the Senate in 1997. He kept busy with posts such as directing the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He wrote a book, “Right in the Old Gazoo: A Lifetime of Scrapping with the Press.” 

He returned to Cody to continue practicing law, where he sat on the Buffalo Bill Center of the West board, worked to promote the Heart Mountain Institute and enjoyed hobnobbing around town with Ann. 

He often spoke on television news programs and lectured at the University of Wyoming. President Barack Obama in 2010 named Simpson co-chairman of a commission to shrink the federal deficit — but the commission’s final report failed to gain Congressional support. 

In July 2022, Simpson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his years of public service and statesmanship from President Joe Biden, who praised Simpson for being “one of the most decent, stand-up, genuine guys I’ve ever served with.”

Simpson liked to mention that while a Democratic president bestowed the medal on him, a Republican president gave it to his old friend Mineta. 

Lessons in civility

The sharp tongue that earned Simpson’s popularity also landed him in hot water. His aggressive badgering of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings is one such instance. He later said he was “a monster” in those interrogations. 

“I’ve made mistakes, a lot of mistakes,” Simpson told WyoFile. He always strove to own up to those mistakes, he said. “When I ran for public office … I knew that they’d find out that I was on federal probation for shooting mailboxes. And then I slugged a cop down in Laramie.”

So, he fessed up to the public.

“In my day, [Wyoming] was a place of second chances,” he said. “Nowadays, you make a mistake, and you’re crucified.” 

In his later years, he often lamented the erosion of civility and the deepening chasms between parties. Trust had vanished, he said, and political priorities had shifted.

Republicans, Simpson told WyoFile, “used to believe in less government, the right to be left alone, and the right of privacy.” 

As time went on, he said, far-right politicians grew more focused on social issues like abortion and the idea of talking to the other side became more taboo. “I’m the original RINO,” he said, chuckling. 

In Park County, Simpson even got heckled at a county party meeting in 2023 “from three guys in MAGA hats.” 

He snapped at them to shut them up, he said. Then after the meeting, he went to talk to the men; one refused to shake his hand. 

“I told him: ‘I’ve been in politics for a long time, and I’ve never had anyone fail to shake my hand,’” said Simpson, who experienced the confrontation at 92, when he’d grown quite skinny. The man, he said, responded “‘Well, stick it up your ass.’”

‘“And I said, ‘well that’d be difficult to do, because I have no butt,” He paused for effect — as he had done so many times in his life — as his joke landed. 

Reporter Katie Klingsporn interviewed Al and Ann Simpson at their home in August of 2023 and in follow-up phone interviews in 2024. This story also relied on “Shooting from the Lip,” a biography written by Donald Loren Hardy, for details on Simpson’s years in D.C.

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Growing up in the Bighorn Basin, Ismael Dominguez described himself as feeling distinct, as a Mexican-American in a majority white state, but also connected to a heritage of immigrant laborers who flowed to northern Wyoming to work its sugar beet fields and then built community.

Dominguez, who studied metalsmithing and sculpture at the University of Wyoming and today lives in Laramie, is honoring his roots — quite literally through his creation of a several foot high replica of a sugar beet — in a new art exhibit on display in the Laramie Plains Civic Center.

Called Migración: Betabeleros, the exhibit celebrates the migrant workers whose wearying work was the backbone of the sugar beet industry in the Bighorn River Basin. His artwork incorporates historic photographs, like the one atop this week’s Photo Friday, with textile sculptures of fields and the houses workers lived in — including the house Dominguez grew up in, he told a crowd that gathered in Laramie for the exhibit’s March 8 opening. 

“This work is an homage or offering to my ancestors and living family members who carried themselves and our lineage through the fields,” Dominguez wrote in a statement introducing the work. “So I could have the privilege of never having to know that kind of manual labor.” 

Dominguez was joined at the opening of his exhibit by two University of Wyoming linguistic scholars, Chelsea Escalante and Conxita Domènech. In 1927, the Powell Tribune ran a weekly publication called La Pagina Espanol. The Spanish language paper only operated for one year, publishing 23 editions inserted in the Tribune and sponsored by the Great Western Sugar Company. 

The newspaper documents the development of a community within a community in the Bighorn Basin, the two professors said, including clear segregation. The newspaper ran notices welcoming migrant workers to the local movie theater and to a Fourth of July celebration, Escalante said. But it also directed the betabeleros and their families to separate themselves.

“We want you to go to the movie theater, but please stay only on the western side, because that is your site,” Escalante said, characterizing the newspaper’s language. “You cannot sit on the eastern side. That’s for the white people. At the Fourth of July celebration, it was ‘come to the Fourth of July celebration’… But come at 4 p.m., after the Anglo celebration.”

The exhibit runs in the Gorgon Gallery, in room 332 of the Laramie Plains Civic Center, until April 30. Dominguez plans to show it in Powell and Cheyenne, though he said Friday he had not yet pinned down the dates. The exhibit includes testimony, both written and played aloud, from his relatives, recounting their time in the fields and the betabelero community. 

Dominguez is calling for more people to share memories about Wyoming’s sugar beet industry. Stories can be submitted online at lpccwy.or/gorgongallery or in an email to awallace@lpccwy.org.

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