Daily Darwin

We don't know if this guy is a Darwin or if he's just having bad luck. But, then again, we really don't care....

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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Darwin: Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Darwin: Thursday, February 15, 2024

 We don't know if this guy is a Darwin or if he's just having bad luck. But, then again, we really don't care....

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

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

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.

To solve that problem, he tried an administrative position in Southern California — and that was even worse.

Somehow, in spite of his best intentions, he had not landed in the right profession at all. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A New Door Opens"}]

The solution came from a little problem known as San Diego traffic.

He was stuck in a sea of cars for 10 miles. 

So, he turned on the radio and became a captive audience as a booming voice emerged from his speakers offering him a free trip to Lake Tahoe. All he had to do was look at a recreational land development.

“Free is a powerful word,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “So I went home and called the 800 number and then my wife and I decided to take the trip. We got the free trip to Tahoe, and that was the first time in my life I ever met a professional, hard-close salesman.”

The project, Tahoe Donner, was being developed by a larger-than-life entrepreneur named Justin Dart.

“He started Rexall Drugs and Tupperware and Vanda cosmetics,” Morgan said. “It was all pretty exciting.”

The property was rustic elegance of the kind that whispered wealth and success. It was electrifying.

In the beginning, the sales pitches were all low-key. But soon, pushier salesmen took turns convincing Morgan and his wife to buy. 

“You accepted our free trip,” one of them said. “You said you could afford the price, and you agreed that if everything we told you lived up to what you saw, you would make a decision to buy before returning to San Diego. Isn’t that true?”

Morgan was reaching for his checkbook when his wife, Connie, interrupted.

“We didn’t say we’d make a decision to buy,’” she told the salesman. “We said we’d make ‘a decision.’”

The property was great, she added, but just too far away.

On the way back, one of the salesmen, named Cal Hackett, offered Morgan a new deal.

“I’ll give you $250 for every lead you give me that buys,” Morgan recalled. “I was making $1,000 a month at the college. Four leads is a thousand dollars.”

Morgan had a cushy, safe job so he wasn’t sure about taking that offer. But he was also bored.

Once home, he noticed an ad in the Sunday paper that talked about selling real estate in Lake Tahoe for $50,000 a year.

“I thought to myself, this can’t be a coincidence,” Morgan said. “This must be the project that I just visited. And $50,000 a year is a lot more than $1,000 a month.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Morgan decided to answer the ad."}]

“When I called, they said, ‘Are you interested in selling some real estate in Lake Tahoe?’” Morgan recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, actually, I’ve just been up there. I just visited a project at Tahoe Donner.”

The recruiter wondered if Morgan had purchased a lot. When Morgan said, “no,” the recruiter seemed delighted. 

“They thought that I meant I understood the project, but wouldn’t have to be talked out of my own lot,” Morgan said. “They figured I wanted to send them leads.”

“I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to send you leads. I want to sell it myself. I want to be the guy doing what that salesman was doing,’” he said.

At first, the recruiter was interested by that idea. Until he found out Morgan didn’t have a real-estate license.

“His welcoming demeanor quickly evaporated,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “So I went off and got a real-estate license and then I started selling recreational land.”

That development has since turned into one of the largest homeowners associations in the United States, Morgan said.

“And I very quickly became the top salesman,” he added. “I was making probably six, seven grand a month and you could buy a new car for $5,000 back then. So that’s what really got me hooked.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Becoming A Ski Bum"}]

The real pivot in Morgan’s life didn’t come from a commission check, though. It came from a paperback book he picked up at random because the title intrigued him. It was called “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World,” written by Harry Browne.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Morgan came away with one main point. "}]

“Having a lot of money won’t make you free,” Morgan said. “But being free gives you the opportunity to make a lot of money.”

Within six months of reading the book, Morgan quit his job, divorced his wife, and hit the road to see the world.

“I became what I jokingly call a ski bum with money,” he said. “I skied all over the world. I traveled. I did whatever I wanted to do.”

Larry Morgan The view at Larry Morgans mountain home in Jackson Hole 7 12 26

<title>From Wyoming Coal Miner’s Son To Closer: How Larry Morgan Achieved The American Dream | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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.

From Wyoming Coal Miner’s Son To Closer: How Larry Morgan Achieved The American Dream

It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s worth more than that at the Bone Daddy Outlaw Bar and Grill in Dubois, which has undergone a dramatic transformation since it was purchased last year by Ben Barto and his wife, Sherry.

Hanging in one corner of the bar is a picture that says it all, even if few might guess at all the layers of meaning it holds for its owner.

It is a photo of motorcycle handlebars looking out at a scenic vista. The words say simply, “Life Behind Bars.”

“I was in junior high when I had my first motorcycle,” Barto told Cowboy State Daily. “And I had a neighbor with a faster motorcycle. He always used to brag about how he would outrun the cops when he was speeding.”

The brag turned out to be just that — as Barto soon discovered.

“We were riding together one time and we decided we were going to take off and see who was faster,” he said. “No sooner did we get started than there was a highway patrolman coming at us.”

The patrolman flipped his lights on, and the neighbor who loved to brag about outrunning the law meekly pulled over to the side. 

Barto, who’d never made such a claim, kept right on going.

“So the cop chased me for a while, and I couldn’t take a corner very well,” he recalled. “I had to lay the bike over and he caught up to me.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"'He Was A Friend Of Mine'"}]

Barto knew this was bad in every possible way, but he didn’t know just how bad until he got a look at the officer’s face.

“He was a friend of mine,” Barto admitted.

It was a friend who was shocked to see just who he’d been chasing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It grew worse as the night went on."}]

“My uncle, who also happened to be a policeman and lived right across the street from me, was at the jailhouse that night,” Barto said. “And my folks were on vacation.”

While his uncle was disappointed in Barto, he decided not to throw the youth in jail, saying he knew his dad too well. He knew what would happen to Barto when his father found out his son had been arrested.

“He did issue me a ticket,” Barto said.

When Barto’s dad did come home, it didn’t take him long to hear through the grapevine what his son had been up to while he was away. 

“He took me to the jail and had my uncle take me downstairs to the jail,” Barto said. “He had me put in the jail and shut the door.”

For a moment, all was silent but for the echoing clang of the heavy door closing.

Then his uncle said words Barto has never forgotten.

“The way you’re going, you’re going to spend a lot of time behind bars,” he told him. 

And then he left Barto there to think it over for a while.

Barto decided then the only bars he ever wanted to live behind were the right kind — his motorcycle bars or, in this case, the bar he’s purchased in Dubois and is restoring. 

The photo is his reminder every day that he chooses the life he wants to live. That includes staying away from the wrong kinds of bars. 

“I haven’t outrun any cops since then,” Barto said with a chuckle.

Decades after that lesson in “life behind bars,” Barto has traded the threat of steel jail doors for steel blades married to custom-carved antler bone handles — a business he calls Bone Daddy Knives. 

The business has quietly been putting Dubois on the map for almost three decades, starting with a contract he picked up after a Montana gift rep died, leaving a shopkeeper with a demand and no knives.

Today, 2 miles inside the Wind River Indian Reservation, Barto buys about 25,000 pounds of antlers a year from local “shed heads,” or antler hunters. The best of the pieces become Bone Daddy knife handles, while the rest become part of the booming antler dog-chew trade.

He and his small crew turn out a couple thousand knives a year, each one a custom job, which sell well across the West.

Barto also at one time carved ornaments from bone antlers, as well as hat pins and figurines, which were sold at gift shops in Yellowstone National Park, Gardiner, West Yellowstone, Sturgis, as well as to larger chains such as Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shops.

Barto jokes, like a lot of craftsmen, that making knives was something he once liked — back when it was still a hobby.

“Now it’s a business,” he said with a chuckle. “But when you’ve got a business that provides you the funds necessary to keep going in whatever adventure you want to go off into, I guess you still have to keep doing it.”

It’s all about the kind of bars Barto wants to live behind.

The knife business is bankrolling his transformation of the Outlaw Bar from a dive — where 

 in Cowboy State Daily noted people might be concerned for their safety — to an establishment where the opposite is true.

When he and Sherry bought the bar it was, to say the least, not exactly turnkey.

“This was just a dump when we bought it,” Barto said. “But they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Barto could immediately see the potential. His wife took a little more sweet-talking.

“She was going crazy,” Barto admitted. “She’s like, ‘At your age, you want to start another project?!’”

Barto took it slow. He’d take his wife to the bar now and again for drinks. And just about every time the occasion presented just the right moment to say something like, “Oh look dear, you know what we could do with this part of the building?” Or, “Could you imagine if we did this in this room?”

Barto held up the mirror often enough that his wife finally gave in and said, “Yeah, let’s go ahead and do it.”

The bar’s biggest potential, he realized, wasn’t just what he could do with an artist’s eye and aesthetic inside. It was its position on a main highway to Yellowstone and the Tetons, a high-traffic strip where lots of tourists, sportsmen and bikers are roaring through town looking for their next adventure.

Its other big advantage is a deep lot, stretching far enough behind the bar to create a parking lot. 

“There is no parking anywhere else in town,” Barto said. “All of the Outlaw’s customers have been complaining about it for years.”

So Barto started his work in the back of the bar, carving out what he hopes will become a signature beer garden and games yard, with expanded parking, turf, fencing and, eventually, a raised stage for large outdoor events.

“We still have room to go back another 100 feet and still have a space for a possible stage up on top for a big venue,” he said. 

Inside, the transformation is further along, and personal. 

He’s hung up some of his and his wife’s work, tracing the arc of their lives from the early Bartolo Collectibles days to the present Bone Daddy Knife days, as well as wildlife mounts from hunting trips and, of course, the poster that captures his life’s motto to live his life behind only the bars he chooses.

There is still much dirt yet to move and asphalt to pour, but Barto is already thinking big for this bar, five to 10 years down the road.

“We want to be the best cowboy biker sportsman bar in Wyoming,” he said. “And from what we’ve been hearing from all of the locals lately, this new makeover has created a vibe all its own. That’s what they’re calling it. They say this place has vibe now.”

The “vibe” was on full display during the Fourth of July weekend, Barto added, when the bar hosted the band Second Ride. 

“I have never seen the bar that busy in my entire life,” he said. “It was standing-room-only Friday night.”

During Dubois’ famous tank parade, announcers even gave Barto a shoutout for cleaning up and reinventing the bar.

Barto is clear that, aside from aesthetics, he’s also made it a priority to clear out questionable clientele.

On his first night as an owner, he spotted a drug dealer working the room and said he “86’d” her on the spot. 

“My main focus, other than cleaning that bar up, was cleaning up the reputation,” he said. “If there was somebody in there who was always raising hell, we 86’d them.”

Signs at every entrance now warn potential troublemakers that a new sheriff owns the bar. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bone Daddy Needed A Bar"}]

If Bone Daddy Knives is the financial engine behind the bar, the Bone Daddy persona is its soul.

It was developed over a 20-some year period, when Barto served as mascot for the Beartooth Rally’s Iron Horse Rodeo in Red Lodge, Montana.

At first, his costume was simple: The widest brim black cowboy hat he could find and a mask. The next year he added an air-brushed skeleton T-shirt and pants. 

Of course, then, cool costume and all, Bone Daddy needed a more appropriate ride.

The $65,000 custom bike he built includes his own screaming Bone Daddy moon logo as well as other artwork. 

“That was quite the undertaking,” he admitted. “But it is a masterpiece of artwork.”

When Barto retired from the Ironhorse Circuit after a couple of decades, he brought his Bone Daddy logo with him. The rearing motorcycle with its cowboy skeletal rider happened to be an almost-perfect match for the rearing horse logo at the Outlaw, a similarity that wasn’t lost on Barto.

“So I just added Bone Daddy to the back of the horse,” he said. “That’s all I did to change their logo.”

Barto, in addition to all the other hats he wears, is also president of the Professional Biker Rodeo Association, which he plans to start revving up next year as he’s completing renovations.

“Bone Daddy had to have a bar,” he said with a chuckle. “Now the trick is to make it the kind of place people remember for the right reasons.”

Bone Daddy Outlaw Saloon 7 12 26

<title>Longtime Knifemaker Transforming Dubois' Outlaw Bar From Dive Into Destination | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Dubois craftsman Ben Barto owns Bone Daddy Knives, a hobby turned big business that’s now bankrolling a transformation of Dubois' Outlaw Bar and giving the once-seedy watering hole a new vibe. “This was just a dump when we bought it,” Barto said.

Longtime Knifemaker Transforming Dubois' Outlaw Bar From Dive Into Destination

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Entertainment

Howard Winchel “Hawk” Koch is a Hollywood legend. His credits include everything from “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man” to both of the “Wayne’s World" films.

Koch was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America, and 

 Robert Redford and Edward Norton among his close friends.

Those were among the stories and self-reflections he shared, for one night only, at the Shell Bar.

Koch was invited to entertain Shell residents with an evening presentation on what he’s learned after decades working behind the scenes in the film industry. The small but engaged crowd hung onto every word of wisdom and anecdote, many of which he included in his 2019 memoir: “Magic Time: My Life in Hollywood.”

[{"type":"text","text":"“I can’t get you an Oscar, but I can get you my book,” he said."}]

Koch had been to Wyoming several times, but it was his first visit to Shell. He said he was amazed by the scenery and immediately felt at home among the ranchers and strangers in the audience.

“The people have been so lovely, and I can’t get enough of the views,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I’ve made so many movies (in California), but also in New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. To me, we’re all cowboys.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"First Time In The Saddle"}]

Koch started his Shell presentation by sharing his first experience on a movie set. It was in Durango, Colorado, when he was 

“My dad was making a movie up there,” he said. “I was a shy little kid who used to take my mother's dress and put it around my face so nobody would see me. After a 20-minute drive, I saw teepees. I saw cowboys and Indians, and this shy kid started running through the set.”

He didn’t know he was on the set of “Across the Wide Missouri,” released in 1951. 

A “Native American” approached the young Koch, put him on his lap, and told him “stories of many moons.” He was actually being entertained by Ricardo Montalbán.

Then, a cowboy rode up and asked Koch if he’d ever been on a horse. He hadn’t, so the cowboy set Koch in front of him and took him for a ride around the movie set.

Later that night, Koch’s father, Howard Winchel Koch, got to tell his wife their son had gotten his first horse ride with Clark Gable.

From that day, Koch loved the movies. As a result, he’s never worked a day in his life.

“It’s magical,” he said. “I love movies, and hopefully some of you do, too. I loved being on any movie set and in any movie theater. It’s magical for me.”

That was the partial inspiration for the title of Koch’s memoir, “Magic Time.” The other source was a direct quote from the legendary Jack Lemmon.

Hawk Koch, a Hollywood producer and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stopped by the Shell Bar last week to talk about his work on movies such as "Chinatown," "Marathon Man," and "Wayne's World" and his encounters with legendary actors.

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