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Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, by Lynne Cheney
PDF Ebook Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, by Lynne Cheney
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In Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, Lynne Cheney re-creates the years after World War II in a small town on the high plains of the West. Portraying an era that started with the Ink Spots on the Zenith Radio in her family's living room and ended with Elvis on the jukebox at the local canteen, she tells of coming of age in a time when the country seemed in control of its destiny and individual Americans in charge of theirs. She describes Casper, Wyoming, where she met a young man named Dick Cheney, and remembers her hometown as a place where the future seemed as bright as the blue sky and life's possibilities as boundless as the prairie. It was also a place where a pioneer heritage prevailed, and Cheney traces the paths of forebears who journeyed westward, strengthened against adversity by a bedrock belief that they would find a better life. An uplifting exploration of a special time and place in American history, Blue Skies, No Fences is also a heartfelt tribute to those optimistic souls who, in Lynne Cheney s words, "pinned their hopes on America and kept heading west".
- Sales Rank: #1986973 in Books
- Published on: 2007-10-09
- Released on: 2007-10-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.13" w x 5.50" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
Cheney's memoir of her childhood in Casper, Wyoming, is a captivating amalgam of genealogy and gems of 1950s memorabilia that will bring smiles of recognition to readers of her generation. -- Booklist
About the Author
Lynne Cheney's most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, We the People: The Story of Our Constitution, illustrated by Greg Harlin. She is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers America: A Patriotic Primer, A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women, When Washington Crossed the Delaware: A Wintertime Story for Young Patriots, A Time for Freedom: What Happened When in America, and Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America, and has written a memoir, Blue Skies, No Fences. Mrs. Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Vice President Richard B. Cheney.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
I am wrapped up, lying on a bed near a window where white curtains stir. A small boy comes into the room and picks me up. And he drops me.
I have been told that I cannot possibly remember this, but if it happened, and I believe it did, it occurred in a duplex apartment at 630 West 11th in Casper, Wyoming, where my parents brought me after I was born. My mother, the most vigilant of souls, would never under normal circumstances have left me where a child might pick me up, but about the time I turned two months old, my father, a surveyor, had a terrible accident, and I can imagine her being distracted. He fell into the canyon below Seminoe Dam, and although he caught himself on the canyon wall about twenty feet down, he was still badly injured. Rescuers lowered him with ropes and carried him two miles on a makeshift litter to an ambulance. When he arrived in Casper, doctors determined he had broken a leg, both ankles, and every bone in his right foot. My twenty-one-year-old mother was told that my twenty-five-year-old father would be "a cripple for life."
She brought him home from the hospital, took care of him as well as me, and one unseasonably warm winter day pushed his wheelchair out onto the stoop in front of our apartment, where someone took his picture. I've looked at this photograph for years, noting patches of snow on the ground and my father in his shirtsleeves squinting into the sun, and then one day not long ago, I discovered my mother, bare- armed, hiding behind his wheelchair. Apparently not wanting her picture taken, she has tried to crouch out of sight. And where am I? Could this be the moment when my contemplation of the white curtains was rudely interrupted?
The date on the photograph is December 1941. The Germans have taken most of Europe, and the Japanese may at this moment be winging their way to Pearl Harbor. A great conflagration is sweeping the world, and in Casper, Wyoming, a small boy drops an even smaller baby on the floor. He is my half-brother, Leon, who is not yet two.
My father's first wife, Tracy Schryer, died giving birth to Leon on March 6, 1940. My father's Mormon mother, Anna Vincent, a beautiful, red-haired woman of legendary will, was so determined that Tracy's Catholic relatives not raise Leon that as soon as the funeral was over, she boarded a train with him and headed for La Junta, Colorado, where she and my grandfather lived. My father, blaming Catholic teaching for Tracy's death, fully supported Anna's leaving with his son. Tracy had hemorrhaged while giving birth, and my father was convinced that her Catholic doctor, believing her soul was safe, had neglected her to focus on the baby, who had to survive and be baptized to avoid eternity in Limbo. Grieving and bitter, my father wanted every bit as much as my grandmother to keep Leon away from the Catholic church.
The trip to La Junta was long and caring for a newborn hard. I imagine Anna holding him close against the spring chill, trying to persuade him to nurse from a bottle, trying to keep the bottle and the baby clean. The milk supply on the train was unreliable and once ran out entirely, whereupon my indomitable grandmother bullied the conductor into wiring ahead so that milk would be waiting at the next stop. By the time she had cared for the baby for five days on the train, she loved him as though he were her own.
My mother and father must have met not long after Tracy Schryer died, because they were married ten months later. Photographs show my mother pretty and stylish, her hair rolled back from her face. My father, with a head of black curls, looks as if he knows how to enjoy himself, and, according to those who knew him then, he did. He loved pool halls and poker games, and he was good at starting fights. Although not a big man, five foot ten perhaps, he had a large temper, and when he felt offended, he would go after the offender, never pausing to consider the other person's size or how many friends he might bring to a fight. In a memorable dance-hall brawl in Cheyenne, Vince, as his friends called him, took on a half-dozen soldiers from Fort Warren and ended up with his jaw so swollen he couldn't eat for days.
In a photograph dated 1940, my father has on a wool overcoat, belted at the waist. In another photo taken at the same time, he has his coat off, revealing a double-breasted pinstripe suit. My mother is the photographer, it's a bright winter day, and you can see her shadow on the snow. And you can understand why she fell for him. As he stands by his new Oldsmobile coupe, hands in his pockets, he looks positively dashing.
I suspect that this picture was taken on December 28, the day my parents eloped to Harrison, Nebraska. I would be born on August 14, 1941, seven and a half months later, so they no doubt suspected I was on the way. But my father may have had another reason for wanting to marry quickly, and that was to create a home for Leon. There were trips between Colorado and Wyoming, with my parents going there and Anna bringing Leon to Casper, and it may have been on a visit to see his father, newly home from the hospital, that the little boy succumbed to the temptation to pick up the baby he found lying on the bed. His effort to carry me was no more successful than my father's attempts to convince Anna that Leon should live with him. She was determined to raise the little boy she had cared for since his birth, the little boy who by this time was calling her Momma. When he was three years old, my grandmother and grandfather officially adopted him.
One might have expected Tracy's family to be up in arms, but sorrow piled upon sorrow for them, leaving little room for indignation. Tracy's father, Paul, died in 1943, and her mother, Theresa, in 1944, at age fi fty. According to her obituary, Theresa died of a heart attack, but I remember visiting the house she lived in on David Street and seeing her, rosary in her hands, weeping for her husband, lost so soon after her daughter, and I wonder, did she die of a broken heart? Six months later, there was another death. Tracy's brother, Technical Sergeant Russell Schryer, who had survived thirty months of service in the China-Burma-India theater, was killed when a cargo plane he was aboard crashed into a hangar at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
At war's end, when Betty Schryer, Tracy's sister, got married, she healed whatever rifts there were by inviting the Vincents to her wedding and even asking me to preside over the guest book. In a photo in our family album, I'm standing solemnly in front of the dark-haired bridegroom, wearing a long dress with puffed sleeves. Betty, beautiful in white satin, smiles from the center of the picture -- beams, really, as does her sister Doris, the maid of honor, a lovely brunette in taffeta, holding a bouquet of carnations. They have lost parents, a sister, and a brother, but there is still happiness in the world, and in this moment, they have found it.
Copyright © 2007 by Lynne V. Cheney
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Courage and Candor
By Jennie L. Brown
I didn't know Lynne Vincent or Dick Cheney when I grew up in Casper,Wyoming. I did know, at one time or another, many people mentioned in Lynne Cheney's memoir. She has portrayed them accurately, from the stern Dean of Women at the high school to John and Shirley Gray who operated the best after-hours joint in town.
In my experience, as both a writer and memoir workshop leader, if a memoir isn't honest, candid, and courageous, it's just fiction. Cheney's book is definitely not fiction; it's what a memoir should be - candid, honest, and true. I know. I went to the same high school, walked the same streets, played in the same parks, shopped in the same stores, people watched with my parents on the same corner (2nd and Center), and cruised the same drive-ins. While that may seem to impart an obvious bias, I read Blue Skies, No Fences with a critical eye. The book did not disappoint me.
Casper wasn't, and still isn't, like anywhere else I've ever lived or visited. Isolated on the high plains, at the foot of a mountain range, Casper developed a unique character - half-Western, half-cosmopolitan. A boom town (and occasionally a bust town), it had an influx of energy, money, and culture that created a "can-do and it's your own fault if you don't" mentality.
Self-reliance was admired; success was encouraged. Individuals were judged on their own merit. If people harbored a prejudice, and I remember very few who did, it took second place to respect for an individual's character and efforts. Harsh winters and the omnipresent wind bred hardy people who approached life with a certain stoicism laced with humor. Cheney has deftly captured both the mood and the impetus of Casper in the middle of the 20th century.
With courage and candor, Cheney has opened the closets and introduced us to the skeletons. And, those skeletons have emerged as real people, with all their gifts and virtues, vices and shortcomings revealed.
I believe there are three basic approaches to memoirs: some write it like it really was; some write it like they wish it had been; some write it the way they think readers want it to be. Lynne Cheney wrote it like it really was at that time and in that place, neither glorifying nor exaggerating her hometown.
A carefully written, well-researched memoir enhances our collective history. It's this history that enables us, and future generations, to understand - indeed to vicariously experience - the spirit of a place or time different from the present. Cheney has written a true account that transcends nostalgia and provides another piece to the puzzle that is our American heritage.
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent view from the fence line
By T. Zeller
Lynne Cheney's self proclaimed "Valentine" to her home town of Casper, Wyoming is truly a captivating, inspiring and heart warming read.
For those of us in Generation X it is a detailed view of our parents' childhood - a time when the world encompassed your neighborhood and being respectful to others - despite race, creed or color - was modeled by all. At times the books demonstrates how far we have come as a society - the treatment of an unwed mother in the 50's versus the lessened social stigmas associated today - and how much we have lost since the glory post World War II days. Television was not the favored tool for rearing children in the 50's, it was the tool to bring families together to observe national events and celebrations.
Mrs. Cheney's writing is entertaining and at times quite humerous. It truly shows the 50's were a time that boys and girls could become whatever they set their minds and hearts too. It is an emotional story where we can all feel loss for those who are no longer with us.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A handful of black-and-white photographs dot this nostalgic and loving tribute to Lynne's family
By Midwest Book Review
Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family captures the reminiscences of Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and blends them with true tales of American dreams. Offering a spotlight on the small Wyoming prairie town of Casper, Blue Skies, No Fences tells of exuberant young girls, boys who hunted and fished, and strong-willed family women. Of especial interest is the glimpse through the lens of time of a young daredevil of the Alcova Dam spillway/impromptu water slide who would grow up to be the man Lynne married. A handful of black-and-white photographs dot this nostalgic and loving tribute to Lynne's family, the havens of small town life, and the America of yesteryear.
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