Natrona County native Judy Olson says goodbye to fairgrounds

by Carol Crump
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 9:21 AM MDT

Judy Olson is leaving the Natrona County Fairgrounds in fine shape.

By the time she retires as marketing and events coordinator on July 31, the county’s ranching and agriculture venue will have some “grand improvements.”

This year the fairgrounds will complete new horse stalls, and a deluxe swine barn with a concrete floor is ready. There’s a new electronic, computerized message board to advertise events.

More than 400 new trees and lilac bushes along 13th Street are part of a state-of-the-art waste management system that turns the fairgrounds into a filtration area rather than a threat to the North Platte River.

Olson was born and raised in Natrona County, and her heart is rooted in ranching. She was raised at Alcova, during the time her father, who worked for the Bureau of Reclamation, was helping to build Alcova Dam.

The Clark family lived at Alcova, Pathfinder and Kordes Dams, and her parents homesteaded on Bates Creek. Her aunt and uncle had the stage stop at Clark’s Corner for years.

After her marriage in 1961, Olson traveled the state as her husband worked on road building and construction. Back in Casper by 1964 and living at her aunt’s place in Bessemer Bend, she was active in Cow Belles and the Stockgrowers’ conventions.

Visits to her husband’s relatives in Nebraska often meant requests to bring back cheaper grain from the state. When she was spending most of her time after a trip delivering grain, she decided to become a sales representative for Ranchway Feeds.

“I loved the ranch and the people,” she said of her time as a grain salesman.

Divorced, with sons ages 7 and 11 to raise on her own, Olson went back to school to finish her degree. She also took on a full-time job with engineering firm, Worthington Lenhart & Carpenter.

Olson’s friend, Don Boston, worked for the firm and his wife Nancy suggested that if she could read blueprints, they’d put her to work. When the firm was too busy to give Olson the two weeks of training that had been promised, she was on her own. Her first assignment was the prints for Eastgate III.

After two or three years with WLC, Olson moved to the Murane and Bostwick law firm, and attorney Joe Vlastos as a licensed private investigator. All of the partners had a different idea of what an investigator was supposed to do, so she ended up doing the work of a paralegal, drafting answers to interrogatories.

Olson finished her degree at Casper College in administrative justice in 1985 after she already had worked in the position for five years.

“My dad was in school at the University of Wyoming during the Depression,” Olson said. “He couldn’t finish. I decided I would be the only one in the family to complete a degree as a gift to my dad.”

At the time, the fairgrounds was advertising for an assistant manager.

“I bugged them for several months and finally got hired,” for a job that fit with her life interests as a woman who had been riding horses since she was six, Olson said.

Her first summer job as a teenager was breaking horses, and there only have been six years in her life when she didn’t have a horse to take care of.

The fairgrounds job turned out to be different than what Olson thought it would be and she ended up doing marketing and promotion.

“I never had a job I was trained to do,” she said. “That’s how the job evolved.”

Watching the fairgrounds grow

Olson has seen changes in her 24 years on the job. The fairgrounds has moved from a facility with leftover Quonset huts and horse stalls made from barracks from the former Casper Air Base to a “neater” place with new buildings. The indoor arena was built in 1999, after what Olson said were 10 years of budget requests.

“We didn’t build the arena for the CNFR, even though that was the first event,” she said, adding that there are lots of rodeos at the fairgrounds and the building’s schedule is completely full all year.

The Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo has the biggest carnival in the state on the state’s biggest fairgrounds lot. The carnival is now the biggest revenue provider for the facility.

Horse racing has been gone since 1999, a controversial financial move that Olson said was necessary, even though she had a racing horse of her own.

“It’s called the sport of kings for a reason,” she said, and the number of people who could afford to keep and enter the quarter horses that raced was dwindling.

A more popular move was the location of Casper’s first church onto the fairgrounds property. The original plan was that the church would be refurbished and moved to Fort Caspar, but the fair board decided to use it if they were going to invest the money to fix it up.

A group of women suggested using the church for weddings, and what has become Olson’s favorite place on the fairgrounds property has weddings or events every month of the year.

“I’m either going to get married again or buried in the church, probably buried,” Olson joked.

Making retirement plans

The 69-year-old Olson chose to retire while she is still able to do the big list of things she wants to accomplish. Her first priority is to finish a horse barn she started on her six-acre home on the North Platte River.

Olson bought herself a retirement present of a new camera with a telephoto lens to build on her interest in photography.

She also plans to spend time preserving some Wyoming history. Her parents bought the Alcova home of Boney Earnest and Aunt Mattie, friends of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Earnest’s pocket notebooks and hundreds of pictures with identification written on the back were found in the house. Olson plans to match the pictures to the diaries and scan them into a computer file to preserve that history for her children.

The eventual resting place for the collection will be with her sons and at Casper College.

“I’ll go home and start another chapter,” Olson said. “Life is like a book; who knows what’s out there? Even total disaster is a point of time. There’s no such thing as a stumbling block; if you turn it over, it makes a step.”

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