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Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

On a recent afternoon, the Old Government Bridge 20 miles southwest of Casper stood as a landmark on the North Platte River for fishermen floating underneath.

But if those nuts, bolts and steel beams could speak, they would tell stories about the bootlegger arrested in the 1930s and teen runaways rescued on a bitter winter day in the 1940s.

Beyond decades of use that witnessed Model A Fords and little Chevy trucks to Buick Roadmasters and semis crossing its 300-foot span, the bridge resurfaced in national headlines tied to the abduction and murder of a young Montana woman.

“Lawmen recover body of woman,” The Billings Gazette reported on April 3, 1988. “The body was about a half-mile downstream from the old government bridge … evidence found on the bridge indicates that an incident took place there that may relate to the body.”

Today the bridge, accessible just south of Wyoming Highway 220 off Country Road 404, continues to serve as a place where cattle can cross above the swift North Platte. 

Spokespersons for Natrona County Road & Bridge, the Wyoming Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Land Management as well as the Bureau of Reclamation, all say they don’t own the bridge.

WYDOT spokesperson Jeff Goetz said his records show that in 1961 the then State Highway Department initiated efforts to abandon the structure and realign the highway.

“By September of that year we were working on the new route where the highway is now,” he said. “That involved the Bureau of Land Management and local landowners to get right-of-way. And then it was determined at that time that the bridge was used to move cattle.”

The department then decided to vacate the bridge but leave it standing for landowners to move their herds. Goetz said in 1967 it was officially vacated and turned over to “Miles Land and the BLM.”

A spokesperson for the BLM in Denver said the agency does not own the bridge but does administer the land.

Attempts to reach a Miles Land & Livestock Co. found online and based in Casper were not successful by publication time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Cottonseed Cake Stolen"}]

an Alcova rancher and former Natrona County commissioner, told the Casper Daily Tribune that his son been involved in an accident on the government bridge. He told the paper his son was driving a truck filled with bags of cottonseed cake and that an oncoming truck from a Sheridan brewing company collided with Miles on the bridge.

“In rounding a curve on the bridge approach, the Sheridan truck swerved past the center of the road,” the rancher reported.

While he was stranded overnight, thieves stole seven bags of cottonseed cake, Miles reported.

The bridge’s foundations trace back to 1923, when heavy rains sent water surging down the North Platte, taking out the previously sturdy wooden 1905 bridge upstream. That bridge was built to access the Pathfinder Dam area and allow for the wagons of material and men to complete its construction.

Within weeks, the State Highway Department had bids out for a replacement structure that would carry traffic between Casper, Alcova, Rawlins and beyond.

“Construction of a new steel bridge across the Platte River on the Alcova Road will be started immediately,” the Casper Daily Tribune reported on Aug. 9, 1923. “On a bid of $48,341 the contract was awarded by the state highway department to the Missouri Valley Bridge company. Natrona County is to pay $22,500, the state is taking care of the balance.”

Bridge plans called for two expansion trusses, two abutments and one pier. Its roadway was designed to be 18 feet wide.

During work on the bridge in 1924, a young Nebraska man named Alex Brown, who had just started his job the same day, fell into the river and was swept away on Saturday, May 11. His body would not be recovered until June 22. 

The current carried the body into Casper, where it was found lodged against bridge pylons.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The bridge opened later that year."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bootlegger Magnet"}]

The old government bridge site also seemed to be a popular place for bootleggers to ply their trade. In March 1924, Natrona County Sheriff’s deputies took a motorboat up the river to the bridge site and arrested a bootlegger named C. W. Wambaugh, who was running a still in a cabin nearby.

In 1927, law officers found a still house just east of the bridge that had 35 gallons of whiskey. They followed wagon tracks and found a 5-gallon and three 10-gallon kegs hidden among the sagebrush, the Casper Herald reported on Feb. 17, 1927.

In 1945, on a bitterly cold March 4, two teens, Charles Adamson, 19, and Patricia Wilson, 14, were found in a “precarious condition” by a passerby headed to Rawlins. He noticed them foundering in the snow near the bridge, and stopped to pick them up.

The boy had taken off his shoes and put them on the girl, who fainted in the car. The man drove them to a Casper hospital, where they were admitted.

The Casper Daily Tribune reported the pair had told their parents they were married. The girl’s mother threatened to have the marriage annulled, which might have triggered their efforts to start walking to Rawlins.

The bridge was designed to cross the North Platte at its narrowest location. Engineers put it at an angle to the highway, requiring cars to navigate a 45-degree turn from the highway to the bridge. 

The small cars and slow speeds in the 1920s and early 1930s posed few issues. But as more modern, bigger and faster machines came off assembly lines, drivers unfamiliar with the bridge sometimes crashed or worse.

A May 20, 1948, photo on the front page of the Casper Tribune-Herald showed the body of a 23-year-old Rawlins woman lying on the bridge outside her passenger car’s door. The photo cutline stated the vehicle swerved out of control, struck an abutment, and took her life. Her husband and a passenger were hospitalized.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Christmas Day Crash"}]

On Christmas Day 1955, a William Orchard, 19, of Baggs, was another fatality after his car hit the bridge.

Four days later the Casper Star-Tribune editorialized that Orchard was a Casper College student on his way home and that his body and car were found sprawled across the highway by a motorist after some time. The writer acknowledged that speed and fatigue were likely a factor in his death but also called for construction of a new bridge.

“Government bridge is a relic of horse-and-wagon-road building,” the editorial stated. “It is too narrow for assuredly safe passing under the best of circumstances. Its sharp approaches are potential death traps to anyone unfamiliar with the route and to others in whom familiarity breeds contempt.”

The newspaper called for attention to bridge safety and the possibility of a new bridge.

In 1962, the State Highway Department awarded a Casper contractor the job to replace the old bridge after his $163,000 price was the low bid.

The Casper Star-Tribune on May 20, 1962, reported that the new bridge would be built just downstream of the steel structure and was expected to be completed that November.

“The new bridge will be located a short distance downstream from the old structure and will result in eliminating two kinks in the approaches to the old bridge,” the newspaper reported. “These kinks have been blamed for many highway accidents in past years.”

The old bridge for several years became a quick glance from motorists speeding past over the highway bridge to the north and a landmark for river guides to mention.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Lil Miss' Murder"}]

Then, in 1988, the old government bridge resurfaced in headlines after an 18-year-old girl named Lisa Marie Kimmel of Billings, Montana, was reported missing along with her black 1988 Honda CRX Si with personalized plates that read “Lil Miss.” She had been traveling from her work in Denver to Billings and was due in Cody to pick up her boyfriend.

A Douglas police officer stopped her for speeding around 9 p.m. March 25. She wasn't seen again until her body was recovered from the North Platte about one-half mile downstream from the old government bridge on April 2 by two fishermen.

Natrona County Sheriff Ron Ketchum told the Casper Star-Tribune for its April 19, 1988, edition that Kimmel’s blood was found on the bridge and that he believed that is where she was thrown into the river.

The county coroner reported she had been stabbed to death. Later information stated that she had been sexually assaulted and struck in the head.

The case went unsolved until 2002, when police linked federal prisoner Dale Wayne Eaton’s DNA to the crime and recovered the Honda from Eaton’s property in Moneta. He was extradited in 2003 from a prison in Colorado. Eaton was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

That sentence was vacated by a federal judge in 2014 and converted to a life sentence in Wyoming’s Department of Corrections, where Eaton remains. 

Also in 2014, a Casper area member of Geocaching, a type of treasure hunt experience that includes a hidden container with a logbook, made the bridge a geocache site for players to search for and sign the book.

 the founder named it the “Lil Miss Memorial Cache.”

The person wrote that it was meant to “serve as a memorial for Lisa Marie Kimmel whose young life was taken away.”

Old Government Bridge Bridge 1 7 11 26

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

<title>Ghost Bridge: Nobody Claims Ownership Of Abandoned 122-Year-Old Bridge Over North Platte | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The Old Government Bridge spanning the North Platte 20 miles southwest of Casper is rusting, mostly abandoned and nobody claims ownership of it. But if those nuts, bolts and steel beams could speak, they would tell stories about bootleggers and murder.

Ghost Bridge: Nobody Claims Ownership Of Abandoned 122-Year-Old Bridge Over North Platte

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

Andrew Rossi

A one-of-a-kind dinosaur footprint site near Newcastle was vandalized by someone who would have gotten permission to do what they did — if they had asked.

Kristen Stauffer of the “Paleo Park” Zerbst Ranch discovered the vandalism this week. Someone poured a large amount of blue silicone into one of the many dinosaur tracks exposed on a 67-million-year-old slab of rock on the Zerbst Ranch.

“I was shell-shocked,” Stauffer told Cowboy State Daily. “Nobody was authorized to be out there. Whoever did it was trespassing.”

Setting aside the enormous scientific value of the fossil, Stauffer was “heartbroken” by the blatant disregard for her family’s history. The Zerbst Trackway was found by her father, Leonard, and has enormous personal significance to her and her family.

“These tracks are part of our family's story,” she said. “We have spent years protecting them because we believed people would love them as much as we do. We opened our gates because we wanted to share something truly rare, not because we wanted pieces of it taken away.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Not The First Time"}]

The Zerbst Trackway is one of the most extraordinary fossils of its type. It contains trace fossils from multiple dinosaurs and other animals that lived in Wyoming during the Late Cretaceous period.

Identified trace fossils include the footprints of the ostrich-like Struthiomimus, the tail swish of a crocodile, and one of the few known footprints from Tyrannosaurus.

The crown jewels of the Zerbst Trackway are the footprints of Saurexallopus zerbsti, a large bird-like caenagnathid or “oviraptor,” named in honor of the Zerbst family.

The vandalized footprint was left by a large hadrosaur. Stauffer had an idea why somebody might find it interesting.

“It definitely has impressions of the pads of the dinosaur’s foot, along with a toe drag,” she said. “All of the molding materials were around that print, and someone had poured blue molding material into it.”

Molding and casting are processes used to make replicas of fossils, preferably without damaging the original.

Whoever was responsible for the failed mold was covertly trying to get a copy of the hadrosaur footprint. Their intent was to leave the original there and make off with a replica, even if they had to trespass to get it.

They were also presumably hoping to find a way to reproduce and profit from a rare dinosaur fossil without sharing the proceeds with the Zerbst Family.

[{"type":"text","text":"That’s theft. "}]

Stauffer was, at least, relieved they didn’t try to chisel the footprint out of the rock. It would be extremely difficult to do, but that hasn’t stopped people.

“When we realized the Saurexallopus tracks were from two dinosaurs walking side by side, someone came and tried to take one of them out of the foot-thick rock,” she said. “They destroyed it. It was one of the only ones in the world, and they destroyed it.”

Stauffer isn’t sure who tried to make a mold of the hadrosaur track or when they attempted to do it. She said she believes it had to have been within the last month.

What’s truly baffling to Stauffer is that she wouldn’t be opposed to someone wanting to make a mold of the unique dinosaur footprint. If they’d asked, she probably would have said yes.

“If they had come to me and said they had a crazy idea to do a mold of it, I would have wanted to do it,” she said. “I like stuff like that. Let's do it together. Let’s make this work. But they decided to go the shady way.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Stealing Statues"}]

The 7,000-acre Zerbst Ranch has been in the family for five generations. Charles Zerbst homesteaded there in the 1890s, and it’s been their home ever since.

Stauffer has spent the last year working on a rebrand of “Paleo Park” to honor her family’s legacy while utilizing their ranch to its fullest potential.

“We're trying to diversify so dinosaurs aren’t the sole part of our ranch,” she said, “We’ve had different folks wanting to come out to do yoga and bird-watching retreats, and there’s a lot of interest coming in.”

That’s why the timing of this vandalism is especially discouraging. For Stauffer, it feels like a violation of trust after decades of readily welcoming people from all walks of life to enjoy her family’s legacy.

“It’s the audacity of doing something like that,” she said. “It’s like sneaking into somebody’s yard to make a copy of a statue you really liked. I would never in my life think that I could go into someone's private place to do something like this.”

The good news is that the rare hadrosaur footprint doesn’t seem to be permanently damaged, Stauffer said. She had already removed most of the blue silicone that had been abandoned there.

“If they had done a better job, I probably wouldn't even know that someone took molds of the tracks,” she said.

Leonard Zerbst eagerly invited people to enjoy his ranch and its treasures. Stauffer knows her father would be proud of how the family has kept his legacy alive by bringing school groups and excavation teams from across the country to have a life-changing moment.

[{"type":"text","text":"That makes this brazen act all the more upsetting."}]

“If you ever stood beside those tracks and felt that moment of wonder, we're asking people to understand what was lost here,” she said. “Trust was lost. A little bit of hope was lost. And a place we loved sharing with complete strangers suddenly doesn't feel as safe anymore.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Changed Before You Leave"}]

The Zerbsts have been doing two-hour tours of their ranch, including a visit to the Zerbst Trackway, for years. After discovering trespassing, vandalism, and attempted theft, Stauffer decided to close the trackway indefinitely and is questioning whether they should continue offering tours.

“The old saying is true: one bad apple really can ruin it for everyone,” she said. “We’re still going to ponder what to do, but we’re going to start implementing things to protect the tracks. They’re too precious.”

Meanwhile, the ranch is still open to curious minds with genuine intentions.

The Zerbst Ranch has produced some of the best Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils ever found. Those include one of the best-preserved Triceratops specimens ever, complete with large patches of skin, and two Edmontosaurus mummies from the newly discovered “mummy zone.”

“We want to go out and let others go out to do more prospecting,” Stauffer said. “The idea that there's another mummy out there somewhere, looking for some air, is exciting.”

Stauffer’s greatest delight is facilitating someone’s first experience with the prehistoric past, coupled with the legacy of her family’s Wyoming ranch. She described the exhilaration she felt when she helped a group of college kids from California find their first fossil, a stingray tooth.

“It's funny to sit back and watch the ranch do its magic to them,” she said. “Seeing that look on a kid's face when they find their first tooth or a fragment of a bone is what makes me happy.”

Despite the breach of trust, the ranch will remain open to people willing to explore with integrity. According to Stauffer, that’s exactly “where Mom and Dad really wanted (the ranch) to go.”

“I always (tell visitors) that the ranch will change your life before you leave,” she said. “You might not know it, you might not realize it, but it will change in a slight way before you leave. And then they’ll say something and realize that the ranch changed them.  

[{"type":"text","text":"\"That’s what we want to keep and preserve as best we can.”"}]

Dinosaur site vandalized IMG 8213 7 11 26

<title>Newcastle Family 'Shell-Shocked' By Vandalism Of Rare Dinosaur Footprints | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A trespasser trying illegally to make a copy of rare dinosaur footprints on the "Paleo Park" Zerbst Ranch near Newcastle ended up vandalizing the site. “I was shell-shocked. “We have spent years protecting them,” said the owner.

Newcastle Family 'Shell-Shocked' By Vandalism Of Rare Dinosaur Footprints

A Gillette mom believes this summer and early fall likely represents the last chance she’ll have to make memories with her daughter who is battling a life-ending condition.

Plans for road trips that would allow Londen Tabor and her daughter Autumn, 20, to drive the Badlands, camp in the Black Hills, go rock hounding across the state, and travel to North Carolina to see family in their 2000 Chevy Suburban are on hold because the SUV's transmission just died.

“I was driving along and thought, ‘Are you kidding me,'” Tabor said when the vehicle broke down. “The Suburban is completely out now, and it just feels like the world is against me.”

If the transmission hadn't failed, a short camping trip using the Suburban in May to an agate festival in Montana revealed that the heat, space, and mosquitos — coupled with her daughter being in the last stage of juvenile Huntington’s disease — meant taking the Suburban across the country was not going to work.

Tabor, 43, hasn’t given up on making that last road trip happen and is 

Autumn was diagnosed with the disease in 2018 at age 12, which also is the same year that her father, Justin Fender, died from the same condition at age 36. 

Tabor and Fender never married and had broken up in 2008, but Tabor said he moved to the Gillette area to be near their children, Autumn and her brother Logan. Her oldest son, Dakota, also considered him as his dad.

Tabor married her husband Chris in 2014, and he adopted Autumn.

Seeing the disease that took Fender now gripping her only daughter “breaks my heart,” Tabor said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Disease’s Impact"}]

The website for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America says the disease affects brain cells, resulting in changes in personality, coordination, behavior, speech, or the ability to learn, according to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Tabor has witnessed all of that in Autumn."}]

Tabor said her daughter went from being a cheerleader in her freshman and sophomore years of high school to a measured decline that has brought her to a place today where she is totally dependent on Tabor for care.

Young people with the disease typically decline five times faster than adults, she said.

“It’s crazy, because you go from 2018 and then 2019 and 2020, and there are these little changes,” she said. "Up until about 2021, she could still ride a bike.

"Then we got her a three-wheel bike, but it was only a year that she was able to ride it.”

 with Autumn that was meant to share their journey with the disease and educate others. Over the years, they’ve gathered 160,000 followers.

The mother and daughter in 2023 turned a journey that included a Huntington’s Disease Association event into a 6,280-mile trip from Wyoming to Arkansas, Tennessee, the Carolinas and a stop at the White House. 

They made the trip in Tabor’s small Kia Soul, stayed in hotels, and made a couple of media appearances.

But to use the Kia now would be much more difficult. 

Tabor needs to transfer Autumn in and out of the vehicle and put her wheelchair in it.

Tabor said sometimes it’s hard to look back on her TikTok posts because they show the rapid progression of Autumn’s disease. 

But the social media platform has also forged new relationships they never would have had before.

During their 2023 trip, Autumn and her mom visited and stayed with an Arkansas woman who they had connected with over the social media platform. They hope to visit her again this year.

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@londenandautumn/video/7580103755614489886" data-video-id="7580103755614489886" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@londenandautumn" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@londenandautumn?refer=embed">@londenandautumn</a> Trying to find the light through all the darkness. :broken_heart:  <a title="juvenilehuntingtonsdisease" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/juvenilehuntingtonsdisease?refer=embed">#JuvenileHuntingtonsDisease</a> <a title="huntingtonsdisease" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/huntingtonsdisease?refer=embed">#HuntingtonsDisease</a> <a title="jhdawareness" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/jhdawareness?refer=embed">#jhdawareness</a> <a title="jhdwarrior" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/jhdwarrior?refer=embed">#jhdwarrior</a> <a title="huntingtonsdiseaseawareness:blue_heart::purple_heart:" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/huntingtonsdiseaseawareness%F0%9F%92%99%F0%9F%92%9C?refer=embed">#huntingtonsdiseaseawareness:blue_heart::purple_heart:</a> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Light of the Soul - SANTANA J.L.M" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Light-of-the-Soul-7398942910102865937?refer=embed">♬ Light of the Soul - SANTANA J.L.M</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

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

Tabor’s initial plans were to go on a rockhounding trip across Wyoming on their way to Salt Lake City for the National Youth Alliance’s juvenile Huntington’s disease retreat later this month. 

She’s bought tickets for a Benson Boone concert in Casper in early September. Her daughter is a big fan.

Later in September, the plan called for a monthlong road trip to the East Coast to visit her sons and Autumn’s brothers in North Carolina, Tabor’s family in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a stop at the Omaha zoo in Nebraska, and the drive to Arkansas.

“This is like the last chance I have to do this with my daughter,” Tabor said. “I just want a couple of months with my daughter (where) I don’t have to worry and I have a climate-controlled vehicle that I could pull over and feed her.”

In the meantime, Autumn’s decline continues. Now, she's finding it harder to swallow.

to rent a camping van from late this month through October for the trips was difficult.

She did not want to have to ask for help from others, but it seemed like the only viable solution.

“I know what this disease does. I know how fast it progresses,” she said. “I know where we are at, and it’s not looking good.”

The trips are not about a “luxury vacation” on wheels, but an attempt to provide a safe environment and allow her daughter to “get out there and live life to the fullest while she still can,” Tabor wrote in her GoFundMe post.

She appreciates those who have already responded, which as of Saturday is at $3,327 of a $9,000 goal.

Tabor, who for a couple of years experienced her own health issues and had to leave a position taking care of finances at a dental clinic, stays home and looks after Autumn. 

Her daughter goes to a “day-hab” a few days a week with others who have disabilities, she said.

The hardest thing for Tabor remains thinking back to Autumn’s “normal years” before the diagnosis and having to watch her transformation under the disease.

“I don’t know what’s worse, just having something you have to face your whole life or to have this beautiful, amazing child, and then all of a sudden have her just start to be ripped away from you,” Tabor said. “To be ripped away slowly and slowly until there is nothing left and to know what she could have had.”

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Last trip Mother Daughter 7 11 26

<title>Last Road Trip For Gillette Mom And Dying Daughter Derailed By Broken-Down SUV | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Gillette woman's plans for one last summer road trip with her dying daughter have been derailed by a failed transmission in their 26-year-old SUV. But she's not giving up hope. “This is the last chance I have to do this with my daughter,” Londen Tabor said.

Last Road Trip For Gillette Mom And Dying Daughter Derailed By Broken-Down SUV

Employee kate meadows cropped

Kate Meadows

[{"type":"text","text":"It started with a selfie."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"That's the funny part of the story, said Bradlee Skinner."}]

The remarkable part came years earlier, when the former Wyoming high school English teacher was homeless, delivering pizzas and wondering how his life had unraveled.

Today, Skinner spends his weekends DJ'ing in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans for the Savannah Bananas, the wildly popular baseball entertainment phenomenon that has become one of the hottest tickets in sports.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It's been amazing,\" Skinner told Cowboy State Daily."}]

The job has taken him from Wyoming classrooms to iconic ballparks such as Coors Field in Denver and soon Wrigley Field in Chicago, where he rubs shoulders with performers and entertainers he once showed his students as examples of creative excellence.

It's a journey Skinner never could have imagined when life hit rock bottom more than a decade ago.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"From Rock Bottom To The Classroom"}]

In 2013, Skinner had lost nearly everything. 

He had quit a teaching job, saying, "I reached a point where if I didn't end it, it was going to end me." 

But he said his mental health was unstable then, and he found he could not land another job. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Soon, the money ran out."}]

"I had lost my job, lost my house, lost a lot of my self-identity," he said. "I was in a really, really dark place."

While delivering pizzas and doing anything he could to earn a buck, Skinner said he hadn't yet learned the importance of caring for his mental health as much as his physical health.

[{"type":"text","text":"The people around him carried him through."}]

"I could either be humiliated that I was dancing on a street corner, or I could be humbled that people cared enough to reach out," he told Cowboy State Daily.

A former student even offered him and his wife, Melissa, a place to live.  

[{"type":"text","text":"Those moments changed Skinner’s perspective."}]

Later, when he interviewed for a teaching position at Rock Springs High School, then principal Darrin Peppard recognized Skinner as someone who needed an opportunity.

"I was more than happy to give him that opportunity," Peppard said. "Almost immediately I noticed, once the school year began, he's just a kid magnet. Students are just drawn to him."

Skinner spent three years teaching in Rock Springs before moving to Green River High School, where over the next nine years he taught English while building the school's theater program.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Baseball Meets Broadway"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Outside the classroom, Skinner had another passion."}]

He DJ'ed weddings, school dances and corporate events with Melissa through their Wyoming entertainment company, Phony Stark Industries.

[{"type":"text","text":"The name came out of the blue, courtesy of one of his students."}]

One day in class, a student remarked that Skinner resembled Tony Stark from the 

Another student sitting in the back of the classroom immediately replied, "It's more like Phony Stark."

[{"type":"text","text":"The name stuck."}]

Melissa also played an unexpected role in launching Skinner's DJ career. While in college, he enrolled in a radio broadcasting class, he jokes, because "there was this really cute girl who ran the radio show."

[{"type":"text","text":"That girl was Melissa."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Discovering Banana Ball"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Skinner first heard about the Savannah Bananas in 2022."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I was like, 'This is weird',\" he said."}]

Founded by Jesse and Emily Cole, the Bananas were created with one goal: make baseball fun again.

The organization transformed the traditional game into "Banana Ball," a fast-paced version with a two-hour time limit, no bunts, no walks and fans catching foul balls for outs. Baseball is only part of the show.

Players, all in bright yellow uniforms, dance between innings. A senior-citizen dance troupe called the Banana Nanas performs alongside the Man-Nanas, a dad-bod cheerleading squad. Even the first-base coach breakdances. Team owner Jesse Cole famously wears a bright yellow tuxedo.

The result has become one of the biggest sensations in sports entertainment.

"I think it's easier to get tickets to see Taylor Swift than see the Bananas right now," Peppard said.

As someone with backgrounds in both theater and entertainment, Skinner was fascinated.

"The preshow, the postgame party – everything is a theatrical performance," he said.

In 2024, he brought a group of Green River High theater students to Salt Lake City to watch the Bananas play the Party Animals. By then, he was teaching English and building the theater program.

He said he wanted his students to see how theatrical skills translate far beyond the stage.

“Students see you can be involved in theatre and the skills you can learn don’t always have to be on the stage,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"One Selfie Changed Everything"}]

Green River's Bradlee Skinner was homeless, delivering pizzas and wondering how his life had unraveled. Now he performs before sold-out crowds with the Savannah Bananas, baseball's wildly popular entertainment phenomenon. And it all started with a selfie.

Kerstin Nichole Kern, 37