John Kirk was principal cello of the Casper Symphony Orchestra from 1981 to 1983. His position was the first of conductor Curtis Peacock’s project to supply the orchestra with key “core musicians:” professional-caliber performers whose job was to provide leadership for their section.

John Stovall played bass in the Casper Civic Symphony while in high school. Traveling further, geographically and professionally, than any other Casper classical musician, he ended up in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he still plays in the bass section.

Four years after finishing his second term as governor of Wyoming, Mike Sullivan was named U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Sullivan arrived in Dublin in 1999, when the ink was barely dry on the Good Friday Agreement, bringing peace in Northern Ireland after three decades of disastrous bombings, murders and political stalemate.

In May 1950, Louise Spinner Graf served as foreman on the first Wyoming jury, with one minor exception, to include women since 1871. Born in Green River, Wyo., she attended university and worked in local banks. After marrying George Graf in 1930, she quit working to raise their daughter, and remained active in the community the rest of her life.

In 1905, Caroline Fuller came to Thermopolis, Wyo., and entered a field usually reserved for men—dentistry. How she came to take dental impressions and pull teeth for sheep barons and cowboys in remote parts of Wyoming is only one phase of her interesting life.

Frank Shepperson has ranched with his family northwest of Casper, Wyo., for many years. In this 2014 interview, Shepperson, a former national rodeo champion, talks at length about rodeo, ranching—and airplanes. He is a past president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and former chairman of the Natrona County School Board.

Oleta Thomas often visited the Heart Mountain relocation camp as a teenager during World War II, when her father had a job there. In this 2012 interview she remembers those times and later ones as a home ec teacher in 1950s Cody and a massage therapist in Casper since the 1980s.                    

Edna Garrett was born in Salt Creek, Wyo., in 1926, and grew up with her eight siblings in a house with no running water in a boomtown going bust, where her parents ran a secondhand store. This interview was conducted two years before her death in 2013. 

Former sheepherder, ranch foreman and schoolteacher Henry Jensen was past president of Wyoming’s historical and archeological societies. One day in the early 1990s he and Casper science teachers Dana Van Burgh and Terry Logue drove southwest from Casper to Devil’s Gate, noting all kinds of geology, archeology and history along the way. 

Charlotte Babcock, Casper College class of 1949, shares memories of her life—including stints as schoolteacher, flower-shop owner, book author and community-minded volunteer—with student interviewer Nichole Simoneaux in this March 2012 interview conducted at the college.