Saratoga, and how to practice the art

Everyone wants answers to make solid decisions. 

The art is to recognize the right ones when you spot them.

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Newspaper publishing is really the combined, life-long study of small-town philosophy, leadership and group dynamics as it relates to ethics and resource allocation. As such, I often ask others how to practice the art.

And I get answers — but I’m never really sure that they are the right ones.
“I wonder if we are all strung together by a universal ethic or model,” says my former football coach, Carl Rice, who lived and coached in Akron, Colo, and Wyoming.
“I think one can recognize right and wrong, especially in each other. I have been blessed to do what I do. I realize I have touched a lot of people. Think how many you touch with your decisions. I realize that much of the time we concentrate on the monster, which is the far removed machine. The truth is — the struggle rages in the individual. Ethics doesn’t just happen, it is a practice.”
But in a small town, is there an abundance or shortage of practitioners, and is change the agent? I’ll relay an answer from someone I have never met before, but feel connection to. Coy Hobbs edited the Saratoga Sun, in Saratoga, Wyo. When I contacted him a few years ago, he was editor of the same small-town newspaper I managed more than 20 years prior.
“There are frequent business startups (and closings) in town as the test for any local business remains ‘Can they make it through the winter?’” according to Hobbs.
“Saratoga's population is down to less than 1,700. The LP (Louisiana Pacific) sawmill closed a year ago, the coalmines at Hanna have closed, and the school district is leading the state in enrollment declines. We don't have problems here, just challenges and opportunities to see if we are as good as we think we are.
“Despite the changes, Saratoga is still one of the truly neat places in the world. Some say it will be the next Jackson Hole, to which most reply ‘Over my dead body.’ We're trying to reach a compromise between the two positions. I am still amazed by the wealth of talent and experience the residents of this quaint, little mountain village possess. It makes you want to believe that just about anything is possible here – and I'm just the cynical newspaper editor, not the chamber of commerce exec.”
Good publishers and editors have a knack of finding and printing what people want to read.
Jerry Elijah Brown, in the forward of the biography, “High Adventure” about noted Alabama Newspaper publisher Porter Harvey (written by his son, Sam) pays tribute to that effort.
“He published what readers need and want,” Brown said of Porter Harvey. “Not only what the cops, courts, and councils of governments were doing, but also how much rain was falling in different hamlets, where a column of ants in a bank parking lot was going, how the coin laundry was finally getting a restroom and which hymn and stanza a man was singing when he dropped dead at a church service. Porter knew how to excite by understatement — a rare talent that involves skill at both writing and display.”
But as we noted before, everyone wants answers to make solid decisions. The art is to recognize the right ones when you spot them.

 

I think about Saratoga, after many years away from there, And I remember the characters of the place, like Ralph Bartholomew, Joe and Mike Glode, Doug and Kathy Campbell, Dick Perue, Chuck Box, Stuart McCelland, Connie Patterson and of course, Candy Moulton. 

 

Though we never worked together, I ran into stories  of C.J. (Chuck) Box . He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including the Joe Pickett series. 

After graduating from college, unable to find work in Denver, Box returned to Wyoming, where the publisher of the Saratoga Sun invited him for an interview on a fishing boat on the Platte River.

“For five hours, we floated and fished and drank beer. By the end of it, I would have paid him for the job,” says Box.

At the Saratoga Sun, Box became the sports editor and “features guy.” He also married Laurie Meese, whom he’d met in college, and began writing fiction.

 I also recall the following article that explained Old Baldy to me, when I was there, that appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

Jet-setters Change Remote 

Old Baldy Into A Shangri-la

June 16, 1987|By James Coates, Chicago Tribune

The nearest McDonald`s from this stunningly beautiful mountain country hamlet is 40 miles away in Rawlins, Wyo. The closest Burger King is 70 miles in the opposite direction, in Laramie.``Where the Fish Jump in Main Street`` boasts the sign on the bridge over the trout-filled North Platte River on the edge of Saratoga, a picture-pretty town with frontier-style, log false-front buildings lining Main Street.

Many of the very rich and the very lucky in America are making this town in Wyoming`s remote and tranquil Platte River Valley their new summertime Shangri-La.

There was a time when these very rich and very lucky Americans roosted each summer in the Colorado mountain hamlet of Aspen. Titans of industry, giants of Hollywood and lions of literature jealously guarded the secret of that Colorado hideaway before the hoi polloi followed their footsteps.

But today, tourists in loud clothing jam the waiting lines at McDonald`s and Burger King on Aspen`s main drag, and the jet set is winging this way instead.

Here Bob Hope and Mitzi Gaynor rub shoulders with Oral Roberts, Neil Armstrong, Gerald Ford, Frank Borman and aviation tycoon Frank Lorenzo on the impossibly well-manicured greens of one of the world`s least-known, yet most elegant, golf courses.

Armed guards man the gate house at the Valley`s Old Baldy Club to assure that newspaper reporters and curious locals don`t interfere with the membership`s putting, fly casting and other sundry pursuits of leisure.

Down the road is the ultraexclusive A Bar A Ranch, a 5,000-acre pied-a-terre owned by Denver`s fabulously wealthy Gates family, where a group of the country`s top aerospace and defense contractors gather for meetings of a club they call Conquistadors del Cielo, Spanish for ``conquerors of the sky.``

Each Labor Day weekend the Conquistadors assemble for a legendary round of high jinks that features dressing up in antique Spanish armor for a torchlight procession up a nearby mountain, men dressing in female finery and chasing one another on horseback, knife-throwing contests and high-stakes poker games.

Even the pilots who ferry the titans of industry, movie moguls and cultural shakers from America`s power centers to Saratoga`s Shively Field can`t enter either the Old Baldy Club or the A Bar A.
" The pilots and the (members`) wives stay in town playing gin rummy when things start hopping at A Bar A,`` said one knowledgeable and well-heeled local resident, who recalled that when he asked the management at the Old Baldy Club how much it cost to join he was told, ``If you have to ask, you can`t afford it.``

Like several other locals, he asked not to be named.

Founding lights of the club included Charles Gates, chief of the multinational Gates Rubber Co., and members of the Lear family, as in Lear Jet.

Native Saratogans are a friendly lot. They`ll tell you where to go to find just the right trout fishing conditions. They`ll fix you a glass of iced tea and lend you a fishing pole, but they`d just as soon not gossip about Old Baldy or the Conquistadors.

Established in the early 1970s by George Storer, the late tycoon who made a fortune pioneering cable television through his Storer Broadcasting Corp., Old Baldy is probably the biggest source of revenue in the Platte Valley, where farmers, ranchers, loggers and miners all are fighting depressed economic conditions.

Nobody wants to irritate the captains of industry who so value their high-priced solitude on the edge of Wyoming`s stunning Snowy Range in the shade of Kennedy Peak, named Old Baldy by natives because it has no trees on top.
"When the millionaires and the billionaires fly in, we`re the third busiest airport in Wyoming," boasted Dick Perue, former publisher of the town newspaper, the Saratoga Sun, and now a local businessman. 

"Sometimes in the deepest part of the night everybody in town wakes up when one of the big jets take off," said Carol Sherrod of the local Chamber of Commerce, who recalled the night two years ago when a large number of Pan American World Airways executives made a panic departure after one of their jets was hijacked in the Middle East.

Perue's brother works at the Old Baldy Club along with many other townsfolk, and Perue, an unabashed civic booster, gave a reporter a ride along the prohibited perimeter in his trusty, if dented, three-quarter-ton Chevy pick-up.

Pointing to a ridge covered with perhaps a dozen houses that would qualify as mansions in most of the nation`s plush neighborhoods, Perue said with a smile: "Those are the places where each member stays when they come here. They call them `cottages."' 

Asked how the fishing was in the North Platte River as it passes through the stunning green fairways, Perue said, "They stock the river from their own fish hatchery."

He added, "Anything that they can't catch goes down the river, where we peons get a chance to catch them."

From Legacy Library:

In the crisp Wyoming air of 1908, a stagecoach rumbled along the rugged route between Saratoga and Encampment for the final time. Captured in a somber black-and-white photograph, this was more than just a farewell to a mode of travel—it marked the end of an era. The completion of the Saratoga & Encampment Railroad meant swifter journeys and modern efficiency, but for the passengers aboard that last stage, it felt like a loss of something personal and irreplaceable.

The image tells a quiet story: stoic faces, bundled in dusters and shawls, some trying to smile for the camera. To lighten the mood, the photographer reportedly cracked a joke—perhaps something about this being a historic moment. But the driver, reins in hand and heart heavy, wasn’t having it. His reply became legend: “Hell, boy, this is a funeral.” It was a fitting eulogy for the stage line that had carried people, freight, and stories through storms and solitude.

For years, the Saratoga & Encampment stage was a lifeline across Wyoming's raw and rolling landscapes. It connected mining camps, ranches, and remote settlements, weaving threads of civilization into the frontier. With the train came progress, but also silence—replacing the creak of leather and jingle of harness with the whistle of iron and steam. The old driver knew: a way of life had just taken its last ride.