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<title>Today’s Cartoon: Tuesday, March 9, 2021 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Today’s Cartoon: Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Amber Steinmetz

Wyoming Life

After discovering an envelope postmarked in Marquette in her family’s belongings, Carole Thurmond Wills knew members of the family had once lived there and wanted to learn more.

So in 1997 she took a trip to the area. She stayed in Buffalo Bill State Park just west of Cody, selecting a random campground because she liked how it backed up to Sheep Mountain. Not long after arriving she discovered the site had much more significance. 

“I was camping here, and I heard the ranger saying, 'Get the water started on the Thurmond ditch', and I went, ‘What?’”

It was then she discovered her father and his three siblings were born on that very land, owned by her grandfather Charles Thurmond in the early 1900s. 

“I was astounded,” Wills said. “I feel as if I was ‘guided’ here. I love it here. My soul feels as if it is back home when I am in the North Fork area.” 

That first trip has led to an annual pilgrimage for a few months each year. And as she’s learned more about her family’s history, Wills has shared it with others. Most recently she’s working on the Thurmond Family History Walk, featuring historical signs to be displayed around the North Fork Campground on land once owned by her grandfather.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Coming To The Cody Area"}]

The family’s time in Wyoming began in Sheridan, but in 1895 Elias Thurmond and his children Henry, Annie, Charles and John decided to move farther west in search of greater opportunities. Their first homestead claims were filed in the Marquette area, with one near the South Fork River and the other on Poverty Flat (also on the South Fork).

Charles and his brother John later purchased adjacent 160-acre homesteads on the North Fork near Trout Creek. Wills said John filed his homestead claim in 1902 and was building a home by 1904. Her grandpa purchased an existing homestead claim in 1907.

“Someone else had homesteaded it, but there wasn't much there,” she said. “So he built the house and the barn.”

Charles built a large barn and a two-story log home in 1907 near the future road up the North Fork to Yellowstone National Park. They hauled logs from nearby forests and purchased roof planks from the sawmill in Marquette. They also dug a ditch from Trout Creek to irrigate their fields – the current location of the North Fork Campground at Buffalo Bill State Park.

In 1920, her grandparents moved the family to Hamilton, in Montana's Bitterroot Valley. Her grandmother was a former teacher in Shell and education was important to the family. Children could only attend school in Cody, which meant an hour by wagon both ways.  

“My grandparents did not want to separate the family during the week, so they found a ranch in Hamilton that was near a middle school and a high school,” Wills said. “My dad and three siblings went to those schools.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Another Amazing Discovery"}]

It wasn’t until six years after discovering her family’s former homestead that she learned of another amazing piece of family history. Her family was in possession of more than 350 glass-plate negatives that had been taken by her grandfather between 1899-1912.

The images show ranch life around the turn of the 20th century, but also capture trips to Yellowstone and the construction of the Shoshone Dam. Charles developed them using water hauled from creeks and an improvised darkroom with a specialized Kodak kerosene tin lamp used during the photo developing process.

It was Rick Thurmond, great-grandson of Charles and Wills’ cousin, who determined a way to scan the negatives in 2013. 

“They’re glass negatives, so they don't fit on a scanner,” she said. “So he built something to be able to scan them, and we were shocked to even know about them.”

The original negatives later burned in a forest fire that also destroyed Rick’s home in the mountains near Santa Rosa, California, but he managed to save the digital files stored on an external hard drive.

The scanned images needed to be cleaned up after the negatives had been damaged by age and exposure to the elements, so Wills took a Photoshop class and began the painstaking process of restoring them.

“They had been neglected for a long time, so it's really been meaningful to me to clean them up, because now they look the way they were originally,” she said.

The Thurmond family eventually donated the photos to the Park County Archives, with some of their memorabilia going to the Cody Heritage Museum as well as. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Idea Is Born"}]

Wills lives in California but comes back in May and June each year to camp in Buffalo Bill State Park.

“I have an RV and it’s 37 years old,” she said. “I love it here but for health reasons, I need to be near my doctor most of the time, so this gives me the pleasure of spending time here. Cody feels like a second home.”

Since discovering and restoring the photos, Wills has done four projects using them.

One of her first was creating a sign that sits in the North Fork Campground featuring photos from the ranch. It was when that sign was installed that Wills met park Superintendent Dan Marty and the idea for the history walk began. 

“She started this process with a different sign before I got here as superintendent,” Marty said. “She worked with past administrators for a history sign at the North Fork Campground, and that's where I got to meet her.”

Wills showed Marty more of the historical photographs. The two decided it would be interesting to have signs featuring some of them at the North Fork Campground sharing what life was like in the early 1900s. 

“It's part of the history of this area, and it coordinates with the construction of the original Buffalo Bill Dam from 1905 to 1910, which was the tallest concrete dam in the world at that time," Marty said.

Needing money for the project, Wills wrote a grant to the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund and it was approved in 2024. 

“When I wrote the grant one of the things I talked about is how much Cody puts emphasis on Buffalo Bill, which he deserves, but I asked ‘Where's the history of the other local people?’” 

She and Park County archivist Brian Beauvais then began working on drafts for the signs. There will be 13 in all, featuring photos and information about various aspects of early homesteading life, from a building home, to life in winter, to taking care of a farm. 

“I think today a lot of the people don't have any clue how hard it was back then,” Wills said. “We tried to pick things that showed what life was like to help people of all ages understand things that we take for granted today.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Interactive Experience"}]

Each sign will include a QR code that will direct participants to an interactive website. There will be photos of different artifacts from the family's ranch, as well as letters and diary entries from the family that can be read, and a detailed map showing the homesteads and surrounding area.

It also has a then-and-now section, where people can see what was happening more than 100 years ago, and then look at a photo of the site in the current day.

“This is a feature that I really am excited about,” she said. “Here's the original photo, and then you have a bar that you can move, and it'll show the same today.”

There will be a section about collodion photography, the technique used by her grandpa in which photographers coated glass or metal plates with a syrupy chemical mixture, sensitized them in silver nitrate and developed them while the plate was still wet.

“I didn't really know the technique, but the woman working on the website for this project down at Wyoming State Parks in Cheyenne has checked it out and showed me how you put the silver coating on a piece of glass,” Wills said. “It's fairly complicated, and then at the very end you have to wash it off. They didn't have any water, so they had to haul it.”

For younger viewers, there is an object scavenger hunt and word match, as well as some fun facts.

“I was able to get (local historian) Bob Richard to clarify some things,” she said. “Things I wouldn't have thought of like, ‘Why did my grandpa have a one-legged stool when he was milking?’ He said, ‘Cows often kick, so you want something that you could just grab fast and get out of the way'.” 

When it is completed the walk will cover the entire loop of the campground, a distance of about a mile. While all involved are hopeful the signs will be approved and in place by next summer, Marty said an exact timeframe hasn’t been established.

“We're still waiting for the signs to get approval, and I’m still waiting for the cultural clearance from the Bureau of Reclamation,” he said. “All that has to be in place before the signs are even ordered. Once the signs are ordered, we’ll see how long until we get them. When they're in place, then the trail construction will begin. So we have two unknowns right now.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Wills is excited to see it complete. "}]

“I’m thrilled to be able to share their story with these signs,” she said.

Glass negatives inset P21 11 23 now 7 12 26

<title>Glass-Plate Family Photos Help Tell Story Of Buffalo Bill State Park In Early 1900s | Cowboy State Daily</title>

While camping at Buffalo Bill State Park in 1997, Carole Thurmond Wills was stunned to learn her family once owned that land. Wills now is creating an interactive walk using photos taken by her grandfather on glass-plate negatives from 1899-1912.

Glass-Plate Family Photos Help Tell Story Of Buffalo Bill State Park In Early 1900s

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Around Wyoming

Mortar rounds were once code-named “Tootsie Rolls” during the Korean War. But no one was diving for cover at the National Museum of Military Vehicles when the Tootsie Rolls started falling in Dubois alongside big, fat raindrops.

Instead, there were children clapping hands and laughing, just before a squealing sprint for a spot under the black helicopter hovering just above one of the museum’s side parking lots, letting fall what looked a bit like rain itself. 

The helicopter drop was arranged by U.S. Army veteran Gene Humphrey, who was born and raised in Burns. Humphrey worked with museum staff and a friend, helicopter owner Steve Funk, to pull it off.

Marines of a certain age were smiling in spite of themselves as the children scrambled after the candies wrapped in special red-white-and-blue paper. They remembered a time and a frozen place when those gooey caramels meant the difference between life and death.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Code Word: Tootsie Roll"}]

The year was 1950 and the location was the Chosin Reservoir, American History Project Founder and The Chosin Few President Shayne Jarosz recalled during a recent lecture series at Dubois’ National Museum of Military Vehicles. The lecture is part of ongoing activities this year that celebrate America’s 250th.

“The men were surrounded by roughly 300,000 Chinese troops,” Jarosz said. “It is minus-40 degrees. They do not have the cold-weather gear that they need, and they are being attacked in force.”

To maintain a level of secrecy about their needs, the Marines had code words for everything important. 

“If you needed something, you didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, we’re almost out of bullets, send them',” Jarosz said. “Because the Chinese were listening. So the code word for mortar rounds was Tootsie Rolls.”

One day, the radio chatter suddenly became all about Tootsie Rolls, but not all the pilots were aware of all the code words.

“We are running low on Tootsie Rolls and we need them right now,’” Jarosz said the men were screaming. “And these great pilots who are flying all these sorties have no idea what in the world is going on. But they know that these men are in a desperate fight for their life and if it’s Tootsie Rolls they want, then it’s Tootsie Rolls they’ll get.”

This version of the story has been disputed by some historians, Jarosz acknowledged. But enough veterans have told him personally about this tale that he feels comfortable repeating it.

“So, along the entire evacuation route, they dropped Tootsie Rolls, and it ended up saving the lives of these men,” Jarosz said. “They had not eaten in days.”

The sudden arrival of the candy was like manna from heaven to these men, providing something simple but vital — sugar and calories in a package small enough to slip into frozen hands and pockets. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Just Food"}]

The Tootsie Rolls did more than just feed starving Marines. 

“Their fuel tanks had been shot and would not hold any fuel,” Jarosz said. “They could chew on that Tootsie Roll and melt it. Then they could put it in a bullet hole and, at 40 degrees below zero, it would expand and seal that gas tank.”

That allowed them to fuel enough trucks to evacuate their wounded. History records 18,000 casualties during the Chosin Reservoir battle, as well as thousands more who suffered frostbite. Those numbers could have been significantly higher but for the improvised repairs the candy made possible. 

Word of the Tootsie Roll story eventually made its way back to the candy makers. Since the 1950s, the Tootsie Roll Corporation has chosen to quietly honor the Marines of Chosin, sending them more than 150 pounds of their candy to all of their annual reunions. 

“You want to see a bunch of 90-year-old men acting like they’re 5 years old,” Jarosz said with a chuckle. “It’s really wonderful. And what’s even more wonderful about this is, Tootsie Roll is a family organization, and they never forget these guys.”

The candy company still ships the treats to reunions of men sometimes called The Frozen Chosin or The Chosin Few, so named because so few survived. They are a dwindling brotherhood of men who survived a freezing gantlet.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Freak Cold Snap"}]

For the men caught up in the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, the battle quickly became less about human enemies and more a fight against the Korean winter itself.

The weather, according to veteran accounts, had been relatively mild when Americans first landed in North Korea. 

Marines and soldiers who reached the Chosin area in early November 1950 were writing family members back home, saying the weather wasn’t “too bad.”

However, a Siberian cold front swept in, precipitously changing all that. Temperatures plunged to around 40 below, with wind chills far colder. Some estimates say it was down to minus-70 — among the harshest conditions ever recorded in that part of North Korea.

The freak cold snap caught the troops without proper cold-weather gear or equipment. Many of the Marines were still dressed for the mild coastal climate they’d left behind when they received their marching orders to head to the Chosin Reservoir. 

When the Chinese launched their massive night assault at about 1 a.m., only half the Marines were on alert. The rest had their boots off, socks draped around their necks, in an attempt to dry them before the next day.

They had no time to put their boots back on. They dove into foxholes shoeless, and sometimes sockless, too.

Enemy fire came in human waves of roughly a thousand men at a time moving in V-shaped, three-man formations to help minimize casualties from machine guns and artillery. The successive waves felt relentless and endless, and were a strategy Jarosz said was aimed at trying to melt down machine gun barrels through sheer numbers. 

But there was also a psychological aspect, too. Every wave, the Chinese were crashing cymbals and blowing horns as they charged to unnerve the Marines.

“The Marines are like, ‘Oh, what in the world is going on?’ ” Jarosz said. “You talk to the veterans today about this stuff, and they said it was the biggest nightmare they ever had.”

Frostbite, meanwhile, ravaged the ranks, and many men later required amputations.

More than 8,000 Americans suffered frostbite at Chosin. 

It wasn’t just Americans suffering from the cold, Jarosz said.

The Chinese soldiers, too, had come dressed in lighter clothing than the moment required. They were wearing thin, cotton-quilted uniforms and shoes Jarosz likened to old “Chuck Taylor” Converse sneakers.

“Their feet would swell so much that their shoelaces would literally pop,” he said. “And at first the Marines didn’t know what in the world that noise was. It was the Chinese shoelaces exploding. So I mean, these guys were really, really miserable, because they had been out there much longer than the Marines had been out there.”

Among the Chinese, Jarosz said 30,000 men are estimated to have died from cold alone, while 40,000 died in combat. 

The Chinese army had been moving toward Chosin Reservoir in stealth mode, tying themselves to trees by day to sleep, and traveling at night so their movements would not be noticed.

“A man who is out during the day would be seen by any kind of spot or airplane and would be shot on sight,” Jarosz said. “So this was a very, very well-disciplined military.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Battle For Fox Hill"}]

Among the most desperate of the Chosin Reservoir fights unfolded on Fox Hill, a rocky ridgeline commanding the Toktong Pass. The narrow mountain defile controlled the way to Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri and was the 1st Marine Division’s only escape route. 

There, about 220 Marines of Fox Company were giving their all to hold the 2- to 3-mile-long mountain pass against an assault by 1,400 Chinese troops. 

In places, it was a line stretched so thin as to be more gap than men. Still, the men held their own, thanks to Marines like Hector Cafferata, who fought barefoot for three days, batting grenades back at the enemy with his rifle and shooting so many dead that the men who wrote his application for a Congressional Medal of Honor feared to list the true number, lest commanders think they had lied.

“When they wrote his citation up for his Medal of Honor, they purposely said that when the fighting had stopped on Fox Hill, they found more than 15 dead Chinese bodies around Hector’s fighting position,” Jarosz said. “There’s an annotation on that citation that says, ‘We actually counted 100 bodies that he had single-handedly killed, but we knew that nobody back at Headquarters would believe it'.”

Many of those Chinese soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat, Jarosz said. 

On the eastern side of the reservoir, things weren’t going quite as well. Soldiers with the Regimental Combat Team 31 — roughly 4,500 undertrained GIs — had been overwhelmed. As their column tried to withdraw under heavy attack, wounded men loaded in the backs of trucks were slaughtered when Chinese forces overran the convoy. 

Survivors, many badly wounded and half frozen, wriggled out from under wrecked vehicles. Too weak to walk, they were forced to crawl across the surface of the frozen Chosin Reservoir. 

Jeeps from the Marine base camp at Hagaru-ri, which sits at the southern tip of the Chosin Reservoir, were sent to pick up the stragglers. It was a grim, slow rescue that took place under the cover of subzero darkness.

Jarosz recalls the story of Col. Warren Wiedhahn. The young Marine machine gunner, a private at the time, was shot across the forehead in the battlefield chaos.

He was mistakenly tossed into a pile of bodies when his blood froze over his face and medics thought his skull was gone. 

Thirty minutes later, he woke up and stumbled into a warming tent, shocking everyone.

“With the limited medical care they could give him, they stitched his forehead back together,” Jarosz said. “They bandaged his forehead and gave him four aspirin. Then they said, ‘Get back on the line'.”

Years later, every time schools in his home state of Virginia would call school off for a snow day, he would call Jarosz to marvel — half joking, half bitter — that kids stayed home for a dusting of snow when he’d once been “shot in the head and had to go back to work.”

Many of the men who fought so valiantly at Chosin Reservoir did so despite knowing their families already believed them dead.

Early media reports, even in newspapers back home, were reporting that the First Marine Division had been lost. 

But the Marines did what Marines are trained to do. They started fighting back in reverse, step by bloody step, evacuating their wounded as they went.

Leaders such as Major General Oliver P. Smith, the legendary Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller, and First Lieutenant Kurt Chew-Een Lee, the first Asian-American officer in the Marine Corps, kept pushing their men forward, doing everything they could to evacuate as many as possible.

Chew-Een Lee had been shot in November, a bullet shattering the bone in his arm. It was still in a sling at the time. But he didn’t let that stop him.

To make sure his men could see him on this fighting rescue mission despite the blinding snow, he wrapped himself in fluorescent aviation tape.   

He was a glowing silhouette on a land where everything else was white drifts and black sky. Men trudged behind him in snow up to their knees, following him toward the embattled company on the Fox Hill ridge.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Blowing The Bridge"}]

Step by step, the men fought their way off Fox Hill and back onto the narrow road that snaked south toward the sea, no longer trying to win ground. They were just trying to stay alive long enough to get out of the mountains.

The road funneled everything — wounded men, frozen trucks, tanks held together thanks to Tootsie Rolls and hope — toward Funchilin Pass. 

The Chinese had already blown up the concrete bridge that had been there, leaving a toothless chasm with no way to cross.

It was a problem others were working on, with a crazy-sounding plan like some writer would dream up for a movie. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But this was real life."}]

Air Force C-119 “Flying Boxcars” would each carry a single steel bridge section — a chunk of portable treadway about the size and weight of a small railcar and push it out the back, over the mountain.

Each section would float down under giant cargo chutes onto a flat patch of ground near the blown span at Funchilin Pass. The Marines would then bolt the pieces in place to hold them.

On paper, the plan sounded simple enough. Bridge sections would drop from the sky, Marine engineers would stretch them across the gap and bolt them into place, and then everybody would quickly get across. Once everyone was across, the span would be blown up, keeping the Chinese from following.

Two bridge sections dropped too fast and were too badly mangled to use. 

“They … were able to jerry-rig this thing to where they were able to get these men out of there,” Jarosz said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"How Legends Are Made"}]

All along that frozen gantlet — from Chosin Reservoir to Funchilin Pass — the soldiers found Tootsie Rolls that helped sustain them as well as to plug bullet holes to keep trucks fueled up and running. 

Regardless of which legend one believes, Jarosz said, there’s no disputing that the Tootsie Rolls were in the nick of time to save them all at a critical moment. 

They have become part of an enduring legend of American courage and ingenuity. 

It didn’t take long for the children to scoop up every last Tootsie Roll from the gravel at the National Museum of Military Vehicles after Jarosz’s lecture. They were excited about their sugary haul, even as they were largely unaware of the larger significance behind the moment.

But there were those in the crowd who understood. 

For them, it was enough to see Tootsie Rolls falling from the sky in honor of all the sacrifices made. This time, it was in a country that is at peace, in a Wyoming town a world away from the Frozen Chosin. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"And they wouldn’t have it any other way."}]

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<title>Dubois Tootsie Roll Drop Remembers How Candy Saved ‘Frozen Chosin’ Marines In Korea | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A candy drop at the National Museum of Military Vehicles in Dubois was more than just fun for kids. It honored the "Frozen Chosin" Marines who depended on Tootsie Rolls for calories, field repairs and sheer survival on minus-40 degree days in the Korean War.

Dubois Tootsie Roll Drop Remembers How Candy Saved ‘Frozen Chosin’ Marines In Korea

Larry Morgan was born in Superior, Wyoming, in the 1940s, the son of a coal miner. Eventually, he landed in Jackson Hole, well enough off that he could build his dream mountain home.

His friends call him “The Closer.” He’s a corporate dealmaker, high-stakes sales producer and, lately, a self-described best-selling author on Amazon with a book revealing how he made his fortune.  

Despite all that, Morgan doesn’t think of his story as a true rags-to-riches tale — though he’ll acknowledge it’s an arc that’s hard to ignore. 

“I never really saw myself as being poor, although my family was very poor,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “My father owned a tiny little cafe in Iowa, and we barely made a living. He always said, ‘We don’t make any money, but we eat good'.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Dusty Old Chevy"}]

Superior today is a semi-ghost town in Sweetwater County. His family didn’t stay there long.  

“My father was a coal miner during the war,” he said. “It was a strategic occupation.”

Two cave-ins later, though, and he was rethinking that strategy. The family packed up and moved to Charlton, Iowa, where he started a cafe. 

“I always liked to work,” Morgan said. “So, when I was probably 12,  he hired me to be the dishwasher. I had to stand on a pop crate to reach the sink and wash the dishes. But he paid me 35 cents an hour, which was the going wage for an adult.”

It didn’t take Morgan long to realize if he wanted to achieve his dream of owning a car when he turned 16, he needed a better-paying job. So, he kept washing dishes but also took a job at the nearby bowling alley. 

“I made real good money in the bowling alley,” he recalled with a chuckle. “I got paid for every line. This was back before automatic pinsetters, so you had to set each one by hand.”

At the end of the night, he could usually count on some fairly large tips, but it was a grueling schedule.

“I went to work at 5 in the morning in the cafe and worked until 8 a.m.,” he said. “Then I went to school and worked at the bowling alley until midnight.”

Before too long, Morgan had saved the $80 he needed to buy a dusty old Chevy — his first car.

Morgan loved living in Iowa. He was in a small rural town he describes as just a few blocks apart, stitched together with the wonderful smell of freshly mowed hay. 

It was a great place to grow up. It was a great place to “be from.” 

But, if he wanted to make the kind of living that would afford a life, he realized it was not a great place to “be.”

For that, he decided he needed to attend college. Which meant he needed an even better-paying job than dishwashing and tips from the bowling alley.

That led him to become what he says was probably the “world’s youngest” encyclopedia salesman.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"No, not Britannica, the top seller. "}]

It was a smaller, lesser-known company called World Book. 

“Most of the encyclopedia salesmen worked in cities,” Morgan said. “The doors are close together … but the trouble was most of those people didn’t have money or didn’t read books.”

Traditional salesman advice says that to get to a “yes” you have to listen to a lot of “nos.” But Morgan didn’t want to indiscriminately knock on doors. 

Every “no” felt too much like a bullet to his heart. He needed a better system. 

“The World Book was designed for children,” Morgan said. “So I started cruising around my little hometown, and if I saw a bunch of bicycles in the yard, I knew I had a buyer because they had kids.”

But, he realized, that wasn’t enough to ensure a yes. He also needed to make sure the family could afford an encyclopedia.

That started him looking for not just bikes but Buicks as well. A family with a Buick in the driveway had money. And a family with both a bike and a Buick had a child on which that money could be spent. 

Morgan also styled his approach so that he was practically closing the deal at the beginning of the sale rather than the end.

“I’d just walk up, knock on the door, and introduce myself,” he said. “And my opening line was, ‘Would you be interested in something that would help your children in school?’ Well, boom, what mother’s not interested in something that will help her children in school?”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Multiplier Effect"}]

Once the sale had been made, Morgan then did something else that ratcheted up his success. He would always ask the woman if she knew any other mothers who might also want their children to have the “World Book advantage.”

That usually produced a nice list of likely prospects, where he had a better than average shot at making more sales.

In no time, this thoughtfully targeted approach made him the company’s top salesman and he became, in his own words, the “richest kid in town.” 

This job didn’t just take him to college. It took him there in style. He had plenty of money to trade in his old Chevy for a shiny new Oldsmobile convertible.

He didn’t know it yet, but he’d learned everything he was ever going to need to succeed in sales beyond his wildest dreams. Later, he’d use those same principles to close multi-million-dollar deals.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"First, though, came a few wrong turns."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Learning The Wyoming Way"}]

Navigating past those wrong turns is something Wyoming helped Morgan with. 

“The most influential character in my life was my uncle, Ken Shelton,” Morgan said. “He lived in Rock Springs and was a real cowboy.”

When Morgan was 13, he ran away to Rock Springs to spend a summer and part of another year with his uncle. They’d go up to White Mountain to catch wild horses, fish and tell jokes.

Shelton was one of the best storytellers Morgan has ever known. 

“For Uncle Ken, his stories didn’t have to end up the way they actually did,” Morgan said. “But they always ended up the way they should have. And that’s the way he viewed life.”

Morgan’s favorite Uncle Ken yarn is about the time he was roping wild horses on White Mountain a bit too long. He caught a wild mustang just as the sun set, was bucked off in the dark, and ended up tangled in his own rope as a storm rolled in.

He saw a nearby cave for shelter, but what he couldn’t see inside that cave was the mountain lion living there.

“Before he manages to finally strangle the mountain lion to death it bites off three of his fingers,” Morgan said. “Now, even the casual observer is aware that my uncle has all of his fingers. But when I brought that up, he says, ‘Yes, and that’s another amazing story, but I’m trying to finish this one!’ ”

Morgan sums up the wonderful lessons he learned from his story-telling uncle in a chapter he called “Never Sell Your Saddle” in his bestselling Amazon book, “The Closer: An Inside Look at the World of High-Powered Sales, Big Money and Big Egos.” 

“The chapter ends up being a warning to people who are about to merge with a larger corporation and, for a few dollars, sell their life’s work,” he said. “They find themselves with nothing to do … In other words, don’t be quick to sell your saddle. Life’s a long, long ride.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Professor"}]

A long ride is often filled with a few wrong turns. For Morgan, his first wrong turn took him to Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville.

“I was really captivated by academia,” Morgan said. “And I’d always wanted to be a college professor. To do that, you pretty much had to have a Ph.D.”

Knowing that, he took an extra-heavy class load, determined to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s at the same time. 

“But the Vietnam War was going on,” he said. “And I had a very low lottery number.”

This all but guaranteed he’d get drafted into the Army. So, he took control of his own destiny by pre-emptively enlisting in the Marines. 

Like many who served in Vietnam, Morgan doesn’t talk about it much. 

“We’re all still conflicted over the Vietnam War, and so am I,” Morgan said.

After the war, he returned to his education, earning his Ph.D. at St. Louis University in child psychology — a notable accomplishment in and of itself, particularly given he was the first person in his family to even graduate from high school.

But it didn’t take long for him to realize his dreams of being a professor had been something of a fantasy. He taught for a year at the University of Wyoming, and was bored.

Born in a near ghost-town in Wyoming, Larry Morgan’s life is a rags to riches story that begins and ends in Wyoming. Yet he insists the real story isn’t about money so much as freedom — and he's got a best-selling book on Amazon that tells his tale.

Today’s Cartoon: Tuesday, March 9, 2021

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