By Phil Roberts, 9-30-25
On this day, Sept. 30, it was a momentous time in our publication history. David’s Medicine Bow Post and later, our 7th edition of Wyoming Almanac, came out on this day. (Many years earlier, “hired” to write the history of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, 1971).
On the original post, I should have said the first issue came out on this date–he had been organizing the Post and making preparations for the publishing for many months before…. Anniversary of first publication would have been a more correct way of putting it.
David wrote: ‘Thanks, Phil. I haven’t seen that photo in a long time and I forgot that the wall was covered with newspaper awards. In the photo, I was typing, probably on the IBM Selectric Composer typewriter that was sort of a “smart” typewriter that had a memory capability and at a push of a button, could “justify” (meaning make the columns even on the right side) my typed article. It was better than a normal typewriter, but still not like later machines or computers. Wow, how nice and easier it would have been to do the entire layout with text and photos on a computer! But we made it work with what we had at the time. The location of that office was in a basement apartment of the Bob Burnett Apartments Complex and I lived in another apartment upstairs. That was the second location of three newspaper office locations for me in town (and two more when UW operated the newspaper for five years). As you probably remember, I traveled with you to see Medicine Bow for the first newspaper “scouting” trip, and we met residents Neva Yaple and Barbara Weiser (later one of my staff members) in an art gallery on the top floor of the Virginian Hotel. They provided lots of information and were encouraging. I was impressed with the newspaper possibility there in my home state of Wyoming and didn’t travel on to see the two other considered sites for a new newspaper: Midwest and Meeteetse.”
I responded: “Yes. Remember meeting Neva and Barbara at the gallery. Years later, I remember making a rare trip with you to Wheatland for the printing. (You made the trip every week, regardless of weather). It had been ok going over that morning, but it snowed the entire afternoon on the Wheatland cut-off road. The road was closed behind us as we got to the canyon. We couldn’t see a thing. I remember thinking how far down the Sybille was along the road. It was there–somewhere. Wow, was I happy to see Steve’s car at the Bosler turn-off. He’d come to meet us, knowing how bad the weather was. All in that era before cellphones.”.