CASPER — Anyone looking to Congress, the Wyoming Legislature or their local city councils to solve the ever-growing problems of society are looking in the wrong places.
They need to be at the morning coffee talk bull sessions of Casper’s old-timers at the Townsend Building, where they spend a couple hours every day identifying — then solving — what’s wrong with their town, state and America.
Climate change? That’s an easy fix, doesn’t exist.
Then there's those pesky Casper racoons.
And what’s wrong with kids today? Plenty.
These are among the fundamental problems with Casper, Wyoming and America that are identified and theoretically solved every week by Casper’s unofficial Old Guy’s Club.
The Usual Suspects
They arrive at 10 a.m. Tuesdays at the Townsend Building conference room coffee cups in hand — and bottles of more potent liquids to add to the coffee.
There are gray heads, bald heads, capped heads and at the end of the table sits Jim Brown, a geologist who worked for Conoco for many years. With him this last Tuesday is Tom Broumley, a former Casper pharmacist and his son John, who was visiting from Texas.
Soon Ed Mueller, a mining engineer for 44 years, Stacey Scott, Bill McDowell, Brent Blair, Scott Shields and Bob Phillips arrive.
It’s time to solve the world’s problems, share their not-so-subtle opinions and chew over the news of the day.
Blair is 61 and the baby of the group. He said the gatherings began in the late 1990s at the former Java Gourmet coffee shop, transitioned to Wind City Books after the coffee shop closed, and up to Brown’s office on the second floor of the Townsend Building when the pandemic hit.
The conversation runs the gamut from a bit of national politics, political gaffes on TV, finance and the oil industry, aviation, local happenings and whatever else rises up on the non-existent unofficial agenda.
“We talk a lot about finance,” Brown said, pointing to Phillips as the expert who keeps everyone apprised of the markets and oil and gas futures.
The top topic this day is President Biden’s pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid targeting oil terminals or nuclear sites.
“Oil is down $4,” Phillips said.
“Trump says he is going to cut the price of oil in half,” McDowell chimes in, and someone remarks how that will impact investments in the oil industry.
The talk turns to what Russia is doing with its oil and the sale of that oil to India and China.
Carbon Sequestration And Raccoons
Then Brown injects information from a Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality presentation he recently heard on carbon sequestration.
It’s no surprise he and the rest of the Old Guy’s Club aren’t a fan of carbon sequestration. It’s not a popular topic around much of Wyoming.
“This is all expense and no revenue,” he said. “It’s a major industry now and it’s all expense and no revenue unless you sell it for tertiary oil recovery, which defeats the whole purpose. You produce more oil and you burn it and (create) more CO2. But it’s all a house of cards, it’s all carbon credits.”
He shared how an oil and gas journal reported that big companies are pulling back from the carbon industry due to “the uncertainty of how many (benefits) they are going to get.”
“One of these days we will have a shortage of CO2 and the plants will start dying,” Broumley quipped.
Then the conversation took a sharp hard-right turn.
To all the raccoons in the news and on the loose in Washington state and Casper and how local animal control officers and Wyoming Game and Fish officers don’t respond to raccoon nuisance calls.
The group is asked if they talk about politics much.
“We do talk about politics,” Brown said.
But sometimes they have to take a break from discussing politics. It can get a little testy.
“We haven’t talked about politics since two guys got into a shooting match in here,” McDowell said. “We all got underneath the table.”
Brown points out out McDowell is an ex-county commissioner.
“We recognize the state in which we live,” McDowell said. “There aren’t many of us who are not going to vote for Trump.”
Voter’s Choice
The topic moves off politics until former Natrona County commissioner and current Casper Planning and Zoning Board member Terry Wingerter arrives and mentions he voted early — and told someone how he voted.
He said he debated within his own mind who would get his official mark — Trump or Kamala Harris.
“I kept putting my pencil up here and then I went down there,” he said. “I told someone the other day and they asked who I voted for and chewed my butt out.”
“Now we know who he voted for,” someone interjected.
“If we know who he was talking to, then we would have a better idea of who he voted for,” McDowell added.
Wingerter, who ran again for county commissioner this year but failed to make the November ballot, shared he spent 20 years on the county commission and eight years on the city council.
Brown asks him if he will run again.
“We’ll see in a couple of years,” Wingerter said.
“That’s a yes,” Brown replied.
“Let’s put it this way, I saved my signs,” Wingerter said.
Blair shared how his wife was originally from Long Island, New York, and how in the past they would get in some “pretty spirited discussions” about political issues.
“It is interesting how far she has come from the left to the right when she started owning her own businesses,” he said. “But one of the things we miss with the newspaper around this time of year is you would get a section of the newspaper with every person running for office and kind of what their views were.
“Everyone had the same set of questions, and it helped us kind of look at what these people value.”
Brown suggested Blair go to League of Women Voters Vote411.org website for information about who would be on his ballot.
School Security
Security at area schools and the difference from their own school days was also raised as Mueller brought up a recent visit to Natrona County High School and finding every entrance locked except one.
“It was like going through security at the airport. They checked me in and looked at my driver’s license, the thing was on lockdown, it was incredible,” he said.
McDowell said the change from his time in school “amazes me.”
Those around the table talked about days when they left their guns in their pickups in school parking lots and how school buildings were central to the community.
“Back when I was growing up schools were open on the weekends,” McDowell said. “It was where you played basketball, it was a neighborhood event. It was a local community center. Now, it’s entirely the opposite.”
Work Ethic
Also added to the agenda this day was talk about the younger generations, their work ethic how cellphones influence that ethic.
Blair shared how a local coffee shop owner has lamented that employees get trained and then don’t show up for work or take time off without asking for it. He said the owner has decided to stop hiring.
“The baristas are always on their phones,” Brown said, adding that a recent school district candidate forum, candidates talked about endorsing the idea to keep cellphones out of the hands of kids at school.
“That was one piece of unanimity at the candidate forum,” Brown said. “They may actually take them out of the schools.”
Mueller, the mining engineer, said that while helping with crater research near Douglas one day he and a partner were crashing through the brush with a tape measure and compass, and he looked up to see students in a field geology course sitting on rocks and looking at their cellphones.
“Field geology,” he said.
The broadest question posed to the group received the biggest non-answer.
“What’s wrong with the world?” they were asked.
Tom Broumley was optimistic, kind of.
“In my opinion there is nothing wrong with the world,” he said. “I’ve got my blinders on.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
