Garfield Street, Laramie, Wyoming, 1982-83

Based primarily on a challenge by a Kansas colleague, in late winter 1982 I took an interview at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, accepted an offer for a visiting position for 1982-83, started teaching there in the fall and left in mid-May 1983. This odd-looking apartment building was my home for nine months; I lived in the basement flat on the left side of the building. My bedroom had no window and it was barely large enough for my bed. I parked my car in a garage off the alley in the back.

Don Nichols, my Kansas colleague, with an office in my suite in Summerfield Hall, had accepted the position of chair of the accounting department at UWyo. When he asked me if I'd be interested in considering a visiting teaching position, my first reaction was 'no, why would I want to go to Wyoming?'. Then he asked, "Have you ever been to Wyoming?" and I had to again say 'no' and I had to agree -- I had no good reason to reject Wyoming and nothing firm to tie me to Kansas.

The interview was a hoot, unforgettable. The one-day visit ended with dinner followed a trip to a topless bar at a desolate crossroads a few miles north of town. My hosts said they could not typically justify going, but with a guest they had an excuse. I got back to my small hotel room very late, woke a few hours later and flew back to Lawrence. If memory serves me right, I taught two classes back in Lawrence that day then caught a Braniff flight to Dallas for another quick interview with InterFirst, a juggernaut bank looking for help in their organizational development function. They put me up at the luxurious Adolphus Hotel, but again my time there was very brief -- arrive about ten p.m., leave by 7:00 the next morning. It meant one of my rare uses of room service. The interview was short and a bit awkward and I was en route to to the Dallas airport by 1:00 p.m., home in Lawrence by early that evening. I think that it was a Friday.

In any case, UWyo loved me, made me a nice offer, provided a better salary and benefits, and intimated that this could be something permanent. Not likely, but possibly. In fact, at the end of my stay I applied for the position of director of their small business center, to no avail.

My connection to Nichols was not done. He convinced me to help him to relocate a battered pick up he had inherited from a deceased relative in Dallas. So on a subsequent trip in June to visit the folks in Longview, I stopped in Dallas on the way back to Kansas, got off and picked up the truck for the ten-hour drive to Lawrence. Then, in the summer, Nichols convinced me to drive the truck to Laramie. I agreed, and on a very hot July day I headed out from Lawrence. The pickup was something like a 1956 Ford. No radio. No air conditioning. No power steering. No automatic transmission. I drove dressed in gym shorts and a t-shirt with the windows down all the way. I tried to pick up radio stations across the Kansas prairie that flattened out west of Topeka. I stopped for the night in the last 'city' in Kansas -- Goodland -- checked into another very cheap hotel, walked down the country road/street to a greasy spoon for dinner, made it back and to bed by 10:00 and was up around 3:00 and get a jump on beating the morning traffic around Denver. I was in Laramie my early afternoon, took a quick eight-mile run (the altitude stories about Laramie's 7200 feet above sea level had no effect), and then I'm not sure if I checked into another hotel or if I had my place on Garfield already booked. I do know that Garfield lacked a table and chairs, and I had to buy a heavy set in Fort Collins a week or so later.

I taught two large (120 students each) sections of basic management, Tuesday and Thursday, late morning and early afternoon. It was a lonely existence. I did conduct some experiments that I ate published; I used computer-based Othello to test rewards and goal setting, along with intrinsic motivation. I agreed to take on a third course in the spring, a needed course in supervision that met Wednesday nights. I did write a teachers manual for a book for BPI and even worked with colleague Jon Jackson on a management text; we signed a contract in the spring with Addison-Wesley bt nothing ever came of it. The year ended with an invite to participate in a branding weekend in Fort Laramie, about a two-hour drive northeast of Laramie.

The Garfield apartment was about three blocks from my office. A short drive in the other direction took me to Albertson's for groceries. There was a movie theater and a bar a few blocks up the street from the apartment. I had a few dates with an older, divorced accounting professor in the fall and a few with a divorced former airline flight attendant in the spring. They were pleasant, short-lived distractions with no sustainability.

The most remarkable thing about my time in Laramie was the hundreds of miles I ran, usually about forty miles a week, across the flat downtown of Laramie and up into the nearby hills. It was cold but dry. Snow came in heavy bursts that did not often hinder running as the roads were kept clear and the sun was out 300 or more days a year.

I traded in my skittish Maxda RX-7 with its rotary engine after frustrating experiences with snow and chains for a Honda Accord. I did not own a tv. The only radio station I could pick up usually went silent other than for the music. I probably went to the movies a lot. I drank some beers with Joe Paolillo, who later tried to get me to accept an endowed chair at the University of Mississippi in 1988, after he moved there. I had the offer but turned it down. Joe, Jon and I published an article. Joe and I had the "more bang for the buck" piece in the Journal of Marketing, and my lab experiments with Othello led to at least some regional peers/presentations.