Ol’ Ed pulled the wool over their eyes

by Doug Crowe
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:59 PM MDT

Wyoming has had 31 governors since statehood. I have known the five who most recently occupied this chair n Stan Hathaway, Ed Herschler, Mike Sullivan, Jim Geringer and Dave Freudenthal. Ed Herschler was the one I knew best.

Ol' Ed is dead now, and if you didn't know him, you really missed something. He occupied the office for 12 years, from January of 1975 to January of 1987, longer than any other governor of this state.

He was a big, ol' tall buggar with a James Earl Jones voice and a Lincolnesque visage (that is to say, he was homely as a mud fence). He loved Wyoming and despised self-serving politicians.

He was an enthusiastic consumer of alcoholic beverages and, should the occasion call for it, could swear like a stevedore. He had a bit of a temper, but in my experience never took himself too seriously.

Finally, he had a wicked and irreverent sense of humor, and it was this that most endeared him to me.

I began working in Cheyenne shortly after Herschler was elected to his initial term. For the first few years I knew him, our relationship was purely professional.

Then one night, he called me at home. He had not previously done such a thing, but I recognized his voice immediately. He went straight to the point.

"Crowe," he said, "do you know where I can get a coyote?"

It is not every day that a governor of one of these United States calls with such a query; I was dumbfounded. He broke the silence with yet another query, "Are you there, boy?"

Fighting to regain my composure, I replied that I was indeed there and given time could probably capture one of the beasts.

"Dammit, son, I don't want a live one. I need a mounted specimen. Do you know where you can come up with one or not?"

As luck would have it, I did know where I could come up with such an item and told him so. He asked me to fetch it and meet him at his office at 8 p.m. I did so.

When I walked into the capitol, Big Ed's office was the only room in the building with a light on. As I entered, the man sauntered out from behind his desk, his hand extended and his eyes fixed on the glassy-eyed coyote under my arm.

We shook hands, and I followed him out into the hall. He stopped in front of the big glass display case there, pointed, and said something to the effect that some people had a hellava lot of nerve to change the display therein without consulting him about it.

I took a look. The new display consisted of two mounted domestic sheep and a mannequin clothed as a sheepherder with a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low over his face and an ankle-length drover's coat.

"That damn guy looks like one of those perverts that goes around flashing people in bus stations," the governor said.

He had a point … and I immediately knew his intentions. The two of us opened the panel at the back of the display case and inserted the coyote.

The gov backed off to survey the result and proclaimed our coyote to be exactly the piece de resistance the scene needed.

He began to snicker and before long, we were both cackling like a couple of school kids.

As it turned out, quite a few members of the Wyoming Woolgrower's Association and even a number of legislators did not see the humor in this revised tableau.

The governor, ever the politician, vowed there would be hell to pay if he discovered the identity of the culprit or culprits who perpetrated this heinous act but, as luck would have it, he never did!

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