Don’t Mess with Thyra
By Leslie Waggener
Thyra Thomson served as Wyoming’s Secretary of State for 24 years, from 1962 to 1987, the longest tenure in the state’s history. Most Wyomingites knew her as gracious, soft-spoken, and warm. A deputy who worked alongside her offered a more complete picture: “Your mother’s amazing. She can tell someone to go to hell, and they don’t even know the train has left the station.”
Her son Bruce, recalling these stories in oral history interviews recorded at the American Heritage Center between 2022 and 2026, described what that looked like in practice.
A businessman came to Thyra’s office seeking approval to register a security for sale in Wyoming. She told him her office had reviewed it and couldn’t approve it. He suggested they might come to an arrangement, one that would make the approval worth her while.
Thyra paused. She pressed her intercom. “Linda, could you come in here for a moment?” Her deputy, Linda Mosley, appeared. “I’d like you to meet my deputy, Linda Mosley,” Thyra said pleasantly. Then: “Would you kindly repeat your offer to me again?”
The man said he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“I think our business is finished,” Thyra said.
She would have pursued it had he repeated himself. But the point was made. “Mom was tough,” Bruce said. “She didn’t play around with people.”
In her role as Secretary of State, Thyra represented Wyoming before New York financial agencies that rated the state’s securities offerings. On one occasion, the agency was reluctant to grant Wyoming’s bonds the highest triple-A rating. Their manner, Bruce recalled, was patronizing, as though they needed to explain to the little lady from Wyoming how the system worked.
Thyra listened. Then she said: “Listen, fellas, it’s your decision, but if these securities don’t receive the highest triple-A rating, I’ll make certain your firm will never do business in the state of Wyoming again.”
They promptly agreed to the triple-A rating.
Thyra served on Wyoming’s Prison and Pardon and Parole Board. At one hearing, a young prisoner began explaining why he deserved parole. “My family’s poor—” Thyra cut him off. “We don’t put people in prison because they’re poor.”
He tried again. “I lost my job—” She stopped him again. “We don’t put people in prison because they’re unemployed.”
Fearing his chances were gone, he blurted out the truth: “I wrote bad checks.”
“Don’t write any more bad checks,” Thyra said, “and you won’t have to come back here.” He was granted parole.
Thyra applied the same deliberate hand at home. When Bruce was a teenager, he was stopped for speeding in Fort Collins and, because he was a minor out of state, was taken into custody and put in a holding cell. In a panic, he called his mother at work.
“I'll make sure someone comes to get you out,” she told him.
An hour passed. Then two. Then three. After six hours, a Fort Collins attorney Thyra knew came in and signed for Bruce’s release.
When Bruce got home, he demanded to know why he’d had to sit in jail all afternoon. Thyra was unmoved. “What you think of an emergency for you,” she said, “is not necessarily an emergency for me.”
She had called her friend, Bruce realized later, and simply asked him to wait until the end of the day. “She was giving a lesson in responsibility,” he said. “And she was a great mom.”
The iron was always there. What changed was whether it was needed.
The oral history interviews with Bruce Thomson are held in the collections of the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, in Laramie. An interview with Thyra Thomson conducted by Mark Junge in 1993 is available at WyoHistory.org.