Club President John Starnes called the meeting to order at 12:26 welcoming all Rotarians and guests to Rotary.

 

Hal Hutchinson and Krista Beale were our greeters and Hal introduced guests:

Mark Owens introduced Fred Feth;

Bill DeGraeve introduced Erin Essary;

Tim Monroe introduced Lane Klungness;

Dennis Jack introduced Daniel White;

Mary Koernig introduced Amanda Yonker;

Dennis Lower introduced Brett Johnson;

Red Nickerson introduced Micel Skaff;

Bret Ladenburger introduced Nicole Tholson;

Martha Rakestraw introduced The Principal from Midwest, Chris Tobin and teacher Wendolyn McGreagor, her for our SOM;

Hal introduced visiting Rotarians, Lynn Lockhart and Helen Bishop along with our exchange student Elise;

 

Dennis Lower treated us to a good chuckle and then Gary Pehrson had us in singing “Cowboy Joe” in celebration of the UW win. 

 

 

Jim Allison announced that Bill Pierce’s wife is suffering from Stage 4 Cancer and Bill will need a replacement volunteer for the Rotary Cares committee; if you are interested in chairing this committee, please let us know. Please keep Bill and his wife in your thoughts and prayers.

 

Tara Short nominated Dick Wimbish for his nice check he donated to help the Cole Creek fire victims.

Dusty Johnson nominated a few people that he missed last week for helping with the Kids Against Hunger project; Glenn Januska, Al Metz, Anthony Martinez, Charlie Shopp, Tony Valdez, Rick Diamond, Steve Loftin, Dennis Jack and Dick Jay.

Larry King nominated Dave True for receiving the Golden Spur award Saturday night in Lubbock Texas.

Liz Becher nominated Wayne Heili, president of the Five Trails Club for the great article he wrote in yesterday’s newspaper, a great perspective on Rotary and our role with Polio.

President John Starnes asked all of those who went to Pizza Ranch last Wednesday to support the Polio campaign to please stand, he then nominated all of them as Rotarians of the week.

 

 

Our Student of the month today was from Midwest, Mariah Fauber. She did a great job and we are sure she will go far in the future.

 

Joe Nickerson told us about himself today; he started by thanking Cori Cosner-Burton for being his sponsor. He was born and raised in Missouri in a small town then went to Bible College with the plan to go into the ministry. While in college he met his wife. He worked at a boarding home for troubled youth with the plan to continue on into the ministry. While working there he became very interested in law enforcement as he interacted with the law enforcement officers who would be called to the boarding school. His father decided to get certified as a police officer and volunteer to help the Sheriff’s office in the small community. His father talked him into going with him to be a trained cop and his CEO at work even gave him a scholarship to train so that they would have a trained officer there to handle situations that warranted it as they were quite a ways out from the town and it took a while for officers to arrive when needed. He ended up loving it and graduated the top of his class (of 13 people) and ended up loving it and that is when he decided that is what he wanted to do. He got hired as an officer in Casper, where they had friends already. He has worked in several different capacities as an officer since starting here. He enjoyed the variety and he likes that there is a lot of opportunity to do different things in the force. He was asked to be the Crime Prevention Officer, which he wasn’t sure about but his boss talked him into it and he really enjoyed working with the community. He has since moved to other things and has now gone back to being a patrol officer by choice so that he can get experience with direct supervision in order to continue to move up. He has three children, two girls and a boy; he loves to hunt and loves being outdoors. He plays the bass guitar and plays at church and other places when he can. He is working on his Master’s degree so that keeps him busy. He really enjoys the Rotary Club and all of the service that we do, and is proud to be a part of the club.

 

Jim Ruble introduced our speaker today, Bill Sniffin, the author of the Wyoming Trilogy books. This is the second time we have had Bill here to speak with us, and really enjoys our Club. This is his third book; he spoke to us last time about his first book which has sold over 16,000 copies so far. He put all three books on each table for us to take a look at so that we can enjoy them while he is speaking. While he was promoting his two books at the Governor’s forum he was approached by the Governor and some others who asked him to do a book in honor of Wyoming’s 125^th anniversary. So he agreed to do it starting on December 15^th and June 18^th he turned it in to the printer, he said he has never worked so hard in his life. His books have beautiful color pictures of Wyoming and while doing his new book he was looking at 52 iconic Wyoming historical pictures that were in black and white and were fuzzy but he wanted to include them in the book. He saw a special on TV of black and white picture that had been colorized so he contacted the lab in Michigan that did those and talked them into colorizing these 52 iconic Wyoming photos. The next step was to talk the curators of the museums that had the photos into allowing this to be done. As a compromise he also put the black and white pictures in the back of the book as a comparison. He brought blown up prints of five of the photos with him to show us and speak about them; fabulous historical photos. He will be selling the books today and any sold he will make a donation to our club for a percentage of the sales. He created a very nice gift box for the collection which they are selling for $125 for all three in the gift box. The folks that asked him to do the book felt that the book should cover the 125 year history since Wyoming became a State. He thought about this and realized that Wyoming has offered up more Dinosaur bones than any other State and there were many great things that happened here before we became a State so he decided to start the book from 180 million years ago to the present day. This allowed him to do a part on super volcanos and dinosaurs just to name a few of the neat things he included. He is treating the three books as a trilogy on the State of Wyoming. He then started showing us the photos he brought with him, starting with the Photo of our Wyoming National Guardsmen who in 1941 were sent to patrol the west coast on horseback. They all got together beforehand and took a photo, what a great picture of our soldiers; especially sharpened and colorized. The next photo was of a 1923 head on collision of two Union Pacific Trains in downtown Rawlins. The next photo he showed us of was a 1924 photo of 99 coal miners in Kemmerer who were killed in a mining accident, all laid out under sheets waiting to be identified by family members. The next photo was of the recently restored statue of Abe Lincoln taken back when it was first installed in 1959. One of the most interesting stories in Wyoming was the World War II invasion of Poland by Germany and Hitler turning a part of it into a hunting reserve and then sending his men around the world to collect animals to put in the hunting reserve. The next picture was of Charlie Belden, a Wyoming Rancher who raised antelope, and his friend loading a couple of small antelope onto the Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1936 to be taken back to this reserve created by Hitler. Bill said that he really worked hard on this book but he also had a lot of fun learning all of this history of Wyoming. He said that he got some of the historical data from wyohistory.org and said that there is a lot of great Wyoming history there. He said that his website where you can buy the books is WyomingWonders.com.

 

 

President John Starnes adjourned the meeting at 1:29 with the ring of the bell, reminding us that next week we are back at the Parkway and will hear about Nicaragua.