Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

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Jen Kocher

Jimmy orr

Jimmy Orr

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Greg Johnson

Around Wyoming

 in Hot Springs County that was becoming a ghost town by the time World War II broke out. 

Beginning in 1932, the once busy mines were being closed permanently and families were moving away, with only a few remaining to work in smaller private mines. Then World War II called away the young men of Gebo to serve as soldiers, many of them still teenagers.

and his friends formed the Junior Marines and

re just as dedicated as any who were serving abroad.

“We all tried to be good soldiers, and whenever any of us got out of line, you sure heard about it from the rest of the group,” Bolich, 93, told Cowboy State Daily. “I think the added discipline was good for all of us.”

Bolich said that whenever they heard of a soldier coming home on furlough, the Junior Marines would gather at the schoolhouse and march to the soldier's home to sing the Marines' Hymn.

“When the family would come outside to see what was going on, we would salute the soldier and then march back to the school,” Bolich said. “We never gave any thought to the fact that they might have been in the Army, Air Force or Navy.”

Bolich chuckled at his youthful ignorance and said that when he was older he learned the soldiers and their parents got a kick out of watching the Junior Marines perform, especially if the soldier being serenaded was not an actual Marine.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Teenage Soldiers"}]

The Junior Marines were inspired by two Gebo teenagers who had both enlisted on the same day. 

Stanley "Dutch" Wedlock, 18, had graduated from Thermopolis High School and volunteered in the Marines. His younger brother, Lee, also volunteered to the Marines although he was only 16.

“Lee lied about his age so he could volunteer,” Bolich wrote in his memoirs, “Gebo, Living in a Coal Camp”. “At that time, there was such a demand for manpower that the War Department did not take the time to examine everyone's birth certificate. In fact, many of the soldiers could not produce a birth certificate, so if you looked 18, you were accepted.”

After their boot camp, Dutch and Lee were assigned to different Marine divisions. They were not to see each other for the next three years.

A miraculous story about the two young soldiers was broadcast to the world by the Denver Radio Station KOA and picked up by The Associated Press in July 1944.

“A story of Gebo boys comes out of Saipan, Marianas Islands,” Staff Sgt. Hy Hurwitz, a Marine Corps staff correspondent, reported. “Two brothers from Gebo, Wyo., met here by accident today just as Marines were about to start a push over one of the heavily fortified Jap-held hills.”

Marine Cpl. Stanley Wedlock had run out of ammunition and turned for help from another ‘Leatherneck’ who was unloading supplies on the beach.

[{"type":"text","text":"“Got any ammunition?” Wedlock asked."}]

When the Marine unloading ammunition turned around, Wedlock discovered it was his younger brother, Pvt. Leland R. Wedlock, whom he had not seen since they enlisted together in August, 1941.

Hurwitz, one of the official correspondents for the 18th Marines

, wrote dozens of human-interest stories from Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, and later campaigns. 

He was so impressed with this chance encounter that Hurwitz sent a press release and the story 

 the world, including as the first presented on a new Marine program airing on KOA radio in Denver the following Monday.

“It was a rare experience that two Marines from a little town in Wyoming should meet during a battle on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” Bolich said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Young Marines"}]

Their youngest brother, Bob Wedlock, 12, was instrumental in forming the Junior Marines, according to Bolich.

“As patriotic youngsters, we all decided that we would join this group,” Bolich said. “All of the boys in the camp wanted to join.”

Bolich was one of the youngest at age 10 and the other boys who joined he named as Jack Toth, Fritz Jurovich, Joe Bandich, Pete Cavalli, Kenny Halbert, Jack Bretthauer, Buddy Cammock, Jim Hughes, Ken Bolich and Jim Isbell.

“In order to be sworn in, you had to be able to sing the Marines' Hymn,” Bolich said. “Once you did your performance, they would allow you to be a Junior Marine.”

found Navy officer caps in a catalog for about a dollar. The boys all saved money so they would have their ‘uniform dress.’

“They weren’t Marine hats but were Navy officer hats, but we got them and wore them,” Bolich said. “Boy, we were something. We felt like we were helping because people we knew were in the war.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Rubber Gun Rifle"}]

Once accepted as a Junior Marine, the boys were required to build a rubber gun rifle they would hold against their shoulders as they marched.

The boys would draw the outline of a rifle on boards they salvaged from the houses being torn down in Gebo. Sig Nelson, the grocer in Kirby, was also recruited into their wartime efforts. He would bring them wooden boxes from his store specifically for their guns.

“We would take a small axe and chop away a lot of the wood,” Bolich said. “When that was done, we moved on to using a knife to make a nicer finish.”

When the rifle was smooth, the boys would nail a heavy piece of string to the end of the "barrel" of the rifle. Four notches 

carved on the top of part of the barrel. Their ammunitions was from old inner tubes from the inside of car tires. The Junior Marines would then cut pieces out of the rubber about an inch wide.

“One tube gave us enough ammunition for our whole squad,” Bolich said.

To fire their guns, they would place one end of the rubber across the front of the barrel, stretch it backward, and place the band into one of the notches over the string. They could pull up on the string, which released the stretched inner tube.

They used the rubber gun rifles when they played war, and if you were hit by the rubber tube piece, you were out of the fight.

“We drilled regularly in the flat area just north of the town, on the old football field, which was used by the high school before the high school was closed,” Bolich said.

They would pick teams, then head up into the hills behind Gebo Hill for their wars.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Scrap Metal Effort"}]

“Our job was to help the war situation,” Bolich said. “We were really busy.”

Aside from singing the Marines’ Hymn to returning soldiers, waging their own wars in the Gebo hills and playing basketball, the Junior Marines were salvaging iron.

“The county was directing a scrap iron drive for the war, so we, as Junior Marines, worked hard to do whatever we could to help,” Bolich said. “We always got together, and our job was to help the war effort. We went up to the mine in Gebo and started hauling stuff away.”

They got spikes out of the railroad, and would haul a rail over to the vacant lot where the old basketball gym used to be to pile up the scrap metal. Once a month, a big truck would come to Gebo to gather it all.

“Since Gebo was being dismantled as a coal mining town, there were lots of items left that people did not take with them,” Bolich said. “We went into abandoned houses, collected whatever metal was left there.”

[{"type":"text","text":"They also got the privilege of legally breaking windows."}]

“We were always aware of any house that was being torn down and obtained permission to get rocks and throw them to break windows,” Bolich said. “We would line up like baseball pitchers do and see who had the most accurate arm.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Bolich said Pete Cavalli had the best pitching arm of the Junior Marines."}]

“Since the mine was no longer working, we were very efficient in picking up pieces of metal there,” Bolich said.  

[{"type":"text","text":"They would all pitch in to carry a rail and made it a military endeavor."}]

“When we all were in position, someone would call out, ‘lift' and we would lift the rail altogether and then wait for the 'forward march, hut, hut, hut' orders,” Bolich said. “We would all march in step to take the rail to the metal stockpile. I often wonder if some Gebo people saw us and just laughed.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Proud To Be Junior Marine"}]

Bolich recalled trying to get the wheel off an ore car and being chased off by a worker who was on the tipple.

"You get the hell out of there — we use those wheels," the worker yelled. “Leave that alone!”

Bolich said he took his wagon and hurried home with what little scrap he was able to salvag

His time as a Junior Marine soon came to an end, despite the war still being fought. Bolich’s own family moved into Thermopolis when he was in the fifth grade. Despite no longer being in the Junior Marines, Bolich said their wartime efforts continued.

“When we left Gebo, my brother got a job because so many men were in the Army, Navy or Marines,” Bolich said. “Ken started washing dishes at the Manhattan Café and I shined shoes for Steve Ely because it was hard to buy shoes.

“Leather went to the military, so Steve would repair the shoes, and I would shine them up. I got a dollar a day.”

As Bolich looked back at his childhood war efforts, he said that he was proud to be a Junior Marine. He would still sing the Marines' Hymn, no matter which branch the soldier

Gebo and young marines inset 7 26 26

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

<title>Wyoming History: How Gebo’s Gung-Ho Junior Marines Served During World War II | Cowboy State Daily</title>

In the dying coal town of Gebo during World War II, the patriotic Junior Marines were gung-ho in their wartime efforts of gathering scrap iron, marching and singing. They were inspired by the Wedlock brothers, two teens who left Gebo to fight the war.

Wyoming History: How Gebo’s Gung-Ho Junior Marines Served During World War II

Guest Column

Guest Columnists

Ask most folks what built the Powder River Basin, and they'll tell you it was hard work and good coal. 

Both are true, but the trigger was federal policy. When President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and created the EPA, the new sulfur limits sent power companies hunting for low-sulfur coal —Northeastern Wyoming was sitting on Great Plains of it. 

The 1990 amendments tightened the screws further. The Powder River Basin went from producing 4.6 million tons of coal with 448 workers in 1969 to 184 million tons and more than 4,600 workers by 1990, according to the Wyoming Mining Association. 

In 1984 we passed West Virginia to become the number one coal state in the nation.

Sit with that for a second: coal didn't boom despite Washington. It boomed because of Washington. A rule written to clean the nation's air happened to require exactly what Wyoming had in the ground.

Now look at nuclear, which is the same story told backwards. For half a century, federal regulation didn't lift the nuclear industry — it smothered it. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission built a culture so risk-averse that it effectively stopped licensing new reactors altogether, holding the industry to radiation standards stricter than the natural background you're sitting in right now. 

In the half-century since the NRC's creation in 1974, it has licensed two reactors from start to finish — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and that pair took fourteen years and ballooned from a $14 billion budget to over $30 billion. 

Not due to safety hazards, but due to regulation and oversight from the federal government; something Wyoming coal is no stranger to.

Then the door opened. In 2024, Congress passed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act to speed reactor licensing. 

In May 2025, four executive orders by the Trump administration ordered the NRC reorganized around a new mandate — to 

 nuclear, not just police it — complete with fixed 18-month licensing deadlines and a national goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. 

The same machinery that once made coal king is being retooled to build more reactors. The only question is whether Wyoming walks through this door the way our grandparents walked through the last one.

What Washington gives, Washington can take. The regulatory state that built our coal boom later turned on it-- a federal land plan would end all new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin by 2041. 

Wyoming is now tangled in more than fifty lawsuits defending its fossil fuels and has stood up a dedicated "Coal Litigation Fund" to pay for the fight. Nuclear isn't a betrayal of that history. It's the hedge and the next hand.

One county sits at the heart of both energy revolutions. 

More than 97% of Wyoming's coal comes from eleven mines in Campbell County, home to eight of the eleven largest coal operations in America. And now BWX Technologies wants to build a $500 million TRISO nuclear fuel fabrication plant east of Gillette, the first such facility built in the United States in decades. The State has already committed $100 million toward it.

 In Kemmerer, TerraPower broke ground this spring on its Natrium reactor — the first commercial advanced reactor the NRC ever permitted. 

And the uranium that feeds all of it sits in our soil. The same county that powered the last century is positioned to power the next one.

Before anyone's imagination runs to mushroom clouds, understand what this plant is. 

It takes enriched uranium delivered by truck and fabricates it into TRISO fuel — uranium kernels the size of a poppyseed, each sealed in carbon and ceramic that the Department of Energy calls one of the toughest fuels on earth.  

For the fear that still lingers: the coal we've lived beside for generations is itself mildly radioactive. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study found a coal plant releases roughly 100 times more radiation into its surroundings than a nuclear plant producing the same power. We have handled energy responsibly, at scale, for a half century. This is more of the same.

Now picture the other path. Two years ago, a company called Radiant wanted to build its advanced reactors near Casper — then packed up and took its jobs to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, amid regulatory uncertainty and a cold local welcome. 

Tennessee had a nuclear fund ready and caught exactly what we dropped. Meanwhile our anchor industry keeps shrinking: Wyoming coal production has fallen by roughly half since its 2008 peak, 2024 was the worst year on record since the coal boom in the 1970s and forecasters expect output to keep sliding. 

Chase off the successor industry too, and Gillette is left with a contracting mine economy, a hollowing tax base in a state with no income tax, and a generation of young people who leave because the future moved somewhere else. That isn't caution. That's surrender in an installment plan.

Wyoming holds the nation's largest known uranium reserves; we already pull the raw material out of our own ground. The prize now is to own the entire chain, cradle to grave and back to cradle. 

The industry has three great unsolved problems: America can't enrich enough fuel domestically to feed its own reactors, it has nowhere permanent to put spent fuel, and it doesn't reprocess the fuel it could reuse. 

Those aren't reasons to run — they're the most valuable unclaimed ground in American energy. The country aims to quadruple its nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050; private investment in advanced nuclear has jumped more than thirteenfold since 2023, part of a digital-infrastructure-and-power buildout Goldman Sachs pegs near $5 trillion.

Imagine Wyoming as the state that enriches the fuel, fabricates it, and solves storage and reprocessing on its own terms — not the place the waste gets dumped on, but the place that master’s the cycle and gets paid for it outright, with no royalty owed to anyone.

 It would take hard conversations and changes to our laws. We are the right people for it: a state that knows hard energy work, owns the resource, and has never once been shy about a fight.

That fight is the whole point. Wyoming has sued the federal government more than fifty times and bankrolled a Coal Litigation Fund to defend an industry that is, by every honest measure, declining. Imagine pointing that same muscle forward — not to slow the inevitable, but to pave the way for an industry that can bolster the economic base brought in by coal. We fought like hell to keep what we had. We ought to fight twice as hard for what we could become.

Wanting the industry isn't the same as being ready for it. Roughly 80% of the jobs at the BWXT plant will be operator roles, and the people who pour its foundation and weld its steel are tradesmen, not PhDs. 

The smartest investment Wyoming can make right now is in the welders, pipefitters, electricians, concrete crews and technicians who will build and run this thing. 

The state has already shown it knows how — putting nearly $2 million into Western Wyoming Community College to launch a nuclear science associate's degree. We should do the same right here, at Gillette College. 

The University of Wyoming doesn't offer a full nuclear engineering degree. It rolled out nuclear certificates in 2025, but a certificate you bolt onto another major is not a degree, and the worst outcome is for this industry to fire up here and then import all its talent from somewhere else. Build the degrees and fill it with Wyoming kids.

To be a regressionist now is a sure-fire way to let people who don't have your best interests at heart make your decisions for you. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and if we don't force our seat at the table, we don’t eat. 

Out-of-state interests will gladly make those decisions for us. Look at who's already walking out the door: more than 60% of people born in Wyoming leave before they turn 30 — the highest rate of any state in the nation, according to U.S. Census data — and roughly two-thirds of University of Wyoming graduates pull up stakes after they finish their degrees, carrying the Wyoming values this state raised and educated off to Denver, Fort Collins, Salt Lake and Dallas. 

The young people filling in behind them are increasingly newcomers from out of state, who arrive with their own ideas about what this place ought to become. A state that exports its children and imports its decision-makers will always negotiate from weakness; that weakness only hardens as our talent and our money drain away.

Show up to the meetings, and back the initiatives that put our young people on a path into building a future for Wyoming. Every dollar we invest in our students today is a down payment on a generation that can stay. Build the degree. Invest in these kids now, and we don't just win a plant. We give Wyoming children a reason to raise their families in Wyoming.

Thomas Lubnau III was born in Gillette. Graduated from West Point in 2022 with a BS in Nuclear Engineering, currently serving as an infantry officer at Fort Drum, NY.

Lubnau kid 7 26 26

<title>Guest Column: Coal And Nuclear In Wyoming | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Guest columnist Thomas Lubnau III writes, "Every dollar we invest in our students today is a down payment on a generation that can stay. Build the degree. Invest in these kids now, and we don't just win a plant. We give Wyoming children a reason to raise their families in Wyoming."

Guest Column: Coal And Nuclear In Wyoming

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

Renée Jean

LANDER — People who want to play the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” trivia game have a surprising way they can boost their personal score to a mere two degrees. All it takes is a simple coffee run to the Lander Bake Shop anytime the owner happens to be taking orders or chatting with customers.

Brian Harms recently bought the Lander Bake Shop, a classic small-town hangout where locals trade gossip over lattes and hikers fuel up on croissants. 

It’s a town better known for trailheads than red carpets, but Harms’ resume reads like a Hollywood highlight reel. He spent decades in television and film, including stints as art director and production designer, with a front-row seat to making some of America’s most-watched shows. 

Now he’s pouring all that experience into coffee, croissants and building community back home in Lander.

That’s high-caliber, creative talent returning home to invest in Main Street, but you won’t see any sign of the Hollywood plot twist as Harms cheerfully takes your order or asks you how your food was. He is low-key about his Hollywood years. 

You’d have no clue he once worked directly with Kevin Bacon for three weeks on the television series “The Closer” while he was its art director. 

Or that he spent more than a decade shaping the entire look and set of “Grey’s Anatomy,” America’s longest-running primetime medical drama, which recently clinched its 23rd season.

Other movie credits Harms can claim during a 20-plus-year career include the independent film “Life of the Party,” television movie “Protect and Serve,” NBC drama “Las Vegas,” and TNT crime drama “Leverage.”

Harms is not a Hollywood transplant, however. He’s a native son, born and raised in Lander. 

He grew up doing music, football, basketball, and track when he was in school, and skied at Jackson Hole any chance he got.

“We would mow lawns all summer to afford the season pass in Jackson,” Harms told Cowboy State Daily. “And then we’d drive to Jackson to ski.”

Coming out of high school, Harms figured his best bet was to shoot for a job with Wyoming Game and Fish.

“I wanted to be outdoors,” he said. “I wanted to be active. So I majored in biology resource management.”

But he also happened to earn a music scholarship from Central Wyoming College in Riverton, which put his feet on an entirely different path.

“I was a biology major doing all these music classes and groups to fulfill the scholarship requirements,” he said with a chuckle. “I was in the concert band, the jazz band, and the jazz choir. And then working in the recording studio and doing sound for the theater.”

Once the theater program found out his dad was the woodworking teacher for shop classes in Lander, Harms was drafted for set building. 

That’s when he began to realize where his true interests might lay. 

“I had almost enough credits to graduate biology, but more than enough to graduate music,” Harms said “So I got my degree in whatever that was, general arts and sciences with the music concentration.”

That summer, he worked for the Idaho Repertory Theater and then went to Missoula, where he built a set for the Montana Repertory Theatre.

Still, it’s a long way from the Idaho or Montana Repertory Theater and television shows like "Grey’s Anatomy."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Grit Than Glamor"}]

There were no great leaps to fame or fortune for Harms. Instead, it was a series of small, incremental steps — more grit than glamor. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It also took a huge leap of faith. "}]

After his first summer gigs went so well, Harms kept chasing opportunities to stretch his skills and widen his world.

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Missoula with a focus on scenic design, then packed up his portfolio for a major job fair in Chicago.

It was run like a science fair. Harms set up a display of his work, then left the room. It was a cattle call where you only met anyone if they chose your table. 

Harms was nervous the entire time this was going on. But he ultimately got a call back for 13 different grad schools.

The one he picked, though, wasn’t the one who wooed him the strongest. It was the woman who made him explain all his decisions and talk about his process.

“It wasn’t like interrogative,” Harms said. “It was inquisitive. So it was a really great conversation.”

Finally she told Harms that she would allow him to come to her school only on one condition. He had to come visit it first.

That spring break, Harms did just that. He drove all the way to Pennsylvania from Montana — and broke down partway there.

“I had to rent a car in Kansas City to finish the trip,” he said with a chuckle. “So I went to Penn State, and it was fantastic, It was just the best program. I just won an alumni award last year where they flew me and my wife out for a big, big award.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Naive Leap Of Faith"}]

After grad school, Harms did regional theaters in Illinois and New York. Then he returned to Montana, where he met his wife. 

By now, the itch to try Hollywood was too strong to ignore. The couple saved $4,000 then loaded up their car and moved to California.

“It’s funny looking back just how naive and hopeful we were,” Harms said. “That $4,000 barely got us into an apartment there. By the time you paid the deposit — they want first month’s, last month’s rent and that was about all in just to get into the apartment.”

Hollywood, meanwhile, did not roll out any sort of red carpet for Harms. He started out with jobs that don’t make any headlines. He drafted for other designers, did some model building, and took as much non-union television work as he could get.

All of the jobs were long on hours and short on certainty. 

“I would do three days of drafting for this show,” he said. “They would do like two weeks of model building.”

His first big break was a show filming under the title “Glory Days,” as an independent film.

“I wasn’t in the union, so I wasn’t eligible to work on union shows,” he said. “But that small film started non-union and I was on it for more than 30 days before they flipped.”

It was a common industry tactic to start non-union to save money, Harms learned, then flip once filming began to avoid picketing. 

And it finally gave Harms his ticket into the union. All he had to do was pay six weeks of his salary for his initiation fee. That was a tough leap considering Harms’ work to date had been mostly odd jobs. 

“But all the guidance was when you get the opportunity, you better take it, even if it’s going to be a big financial hit, because it’s going to pay off,” he said. “And coincidentally, that movie starred Ellen Pompeo.”

The movie was one of the last things she did before taking a role with "Grey’s Anatomy."

“From that point on, I was eligible to apply for all of these jobs,” Harms said. “And my first union TV job was what we call blue-collar TV, like with Jeff Foxworthy.”

The Kevin Bacon connection came a little later on the set of the “The Closer.” Harms had been brought on as an art director in 2006, which stars Kyra Sedgwick, who is married to Kevin Bacon.

As a result of that, he met Bacon many times. But he also worked with him closely for three weeks when Bacon directed one of the episodes. 

“It was a fun one,” Harms said. “Because the episode had like a kind of car chase scene. It wasn’t like a high-speed car chase, but it was just one car cutting off the other car. So we were trying to work through all the logistics of the scene and the camera angles.”

Harms built out the entire set first using Matchbox-size cars, which had him calling it Matchbox Theater from that point on.

Being the art director meant Bacon wasn’t just a name in a party game. He was someone Harms worked with every day on the complex production puzzles they were trying to solve day by day. Sets had to be built, dressed, and redressed and locations transformed into believable backdrops for tense interrogations and high-stakes chases.

Working on the set of “The Closer” helped establish Harms in Hollywood, but has also created a fun piece of trivia that few people can match. He’s just one degree from Kevin Bacon. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Shot In The Dark"}]

The COVID-19 pandemic put Harms out of work — like a lot of others in the film industry. 

“I went back to my portfolio and put together a mailer — a little mini portfolio with a DVD of some of the stuff I’d done,” he said. “And I spent quite a bit of money to put all this together and to send them out to try and get some new introductions and get a job.”

Harms waited weeks and weeks, but nothing seemed to come of it at all. 

“Eventually, I got back to some work,” he said. “Then, one day, I get a phone call from this gentleman who said he’d been holding on to this thing for a while.”

Harms hadn’t sent the portfolio to this individual originally, but someone else had shared it with him. 

The man turned out to be with "Grey’s Anatomy," and he invited Harms to consider joining the production design team.

“They were replacing their art director,” Harms said. “And they had just finished season five, so I came in and had the interview and had a second interview with their producers and then got hired. So I started season six as the art director.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Domino Days"}]

As “Grey’s Anatomy” Art Director, Harms worked on roughly 150 episodes before stepping into a larger role heading up Production Design, where he did at least another 150 episodes before deciding it was time to return home to Lander to help care for his aging parents.

The schedule for the show was relentless. A typical episode was shot in about 10 days, but a new shoot started every eight days. 

“So you’d have a crossover of double days where you’d have two film crews and sometimes more,” he said. “So you might have one crew out on location, one crew on this stage, or this crew’s on this stage, and their next set’s being finalized here.”

With seven sound stages, that gave Harms just enough room to stay ahead of an ambitious shooting schedule set up like a series of dominos. Tip one over, and they’d all fall down.

“These were massive, massive spaces with  multiple sets on stage,” he said. “So the moving pieces — it’s enormous.”

Bacon’s not the only ultra famous star Harms worked with during his long-running Hollywood career. 

“You never knew who might walk onto the set,” Harms said. “So one day, I walk in and there’s Lenny Kravitz sitting in the director’s chair.”

Kravitz is a Grammy-award winning American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and actor.

Harms couldn’t resist saying, “Hey, you’re Lenny Kravitz!”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Kravitz said simply, “I know.”"}]

Another person he saw frequently was Debbie Allen’s sister, Phylicia Rashad, best known for her iconic role as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

“The only other person I’d say was as famous or more famous than Kevin Bacon was Denzel Washington,” Harms said. “He directed an episode of 'Grey’s,' so I got to spend weeks with Denzel.”

Working with Washington was an amazing experience, Harms said.

“He’s a storyteller to his core,” he said. “Like he would — because again, I spent like full days with just hours and hours with him — and we’d like walk through a set and we’d be waiting for Debbie to finish filming something. So we’d just be hanging out.”

While they were waiting, Washington would often tell stories to pass the time.

“He’d talk about an uncle of his, but you’d see, as he’s telling the story, he just transforms,” Harms said. “It’s just natural to him. So I would just be transfixed.”

Bacon, in contrast, was higher energy, “just a positive fun guy.”

Brian Harms is a Lander native who spent 13 years designing the look of TV's hugely popular "Grey's Anatomy." Harms, who recently bought the Lander Bake Shop, has dozens of other film and TV credits to his name in his 20-plus-year Hollywood career.

CSD Staff

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