Bio: Kitchen Help, mid 1960’s; winter resident, 1968. Descriptor: Wonderful staff stories, the ranch’s 50th anniversary celebration and winter at White Grass.
Karin’s Story: My sister, Betsy (Gottlieb), and I came to White Grass from college in the summer of 1963 to wait tables AND wash dishes. I was there many times in one function or another after that, but this is the summer that stands out in my mind as the most fun. The Main Cabin was unrenovated at that time and was just a wonderful old log cabin. The dining room was in the end of the cabin facing the barn, the big fireplace room was a cozy living room; a small library was next (with a ping-pong table jammed in) and a little game room with its own fireplace was the last room on the north end. The girls – Betsy and me, Clair Kettler (Evenson), Janet Diss and Carol White (Herbel) had a little two-room cabin with no bathroom. We hiked up the road to the boiler-room/laundry building to shower and use the toilet. Some of us liked to stay up later than others, and it occurred to us that we would like a sitting room. So we designated one as the sitting room (with the stove) and crammed five beds into the other little room. Fortunately, some of them stacked, so we had two sets of bunks and one single. It worked out pretty well. We could gather around the stove, a little sheet metal one with a butterfly air intake in the front. The bedroom was always freezing, and as the summer progressed that was harder to deal with. Get nice and warm and run to bed. One evening Betsy cuddled quite close to the stove. “Aaaah,” she said, “this is wonderful” and about then her (borrowed) sweater started smoldering and emblazoned a butterfly-shaped pattern on the back. Janet Diss brought her Springer spaniel, Jumper. Jumper went out early in the morning to romp with coyotes. Nobody quite understood this, but it seemed to work. The coyotes at the time seemed quite congenial. I watched Gene Rausch head for the north pasture on foot one morning with what appeared to be a dog heeling along. Gene didn’t have a dog. This was a curious coyote and it lagged back just enough that it didn’t get his attention. Janet and Claire were the cabin girls and if we all wanted to go riding and they had one more thing to do, Betsy and I would sometimes give them a hand. It was a point of contention that the cabin girls were expected to change the beds in BQ (Bachelor Quarters). So all four of us descended on an unoccupied BQ one afternoon to do this job in a wonderfully imaginatively way. The beds were Army cots with folding legs. We folded the legs just slightly so the bed stayed up – just. We short-sheeted the beds and tucked in some pine cones. And then, ingeniously, we took a spool of black thread and created a massive web, from floor to ceiling. Thus, when a fellow came in, he had to fight his way through the thread. Sinking gratefully on his bed, he would collapse to the floor. Picking all that up and climbing in bed, he would be short-sheeted. We girls were beside ourselves with anticipation. Next morning, the boys drove us to distraction by failing to mention a thing. Breakfast went as usual. That night, although it was early in the season, the girls in the cabin could hear elk bugling. Shortly thereafter, there was bumping at the window. When the curtains were opened, the girls saw an “elk” bumping his head against the cabin. But it was clearly stuffed and if this was the best the boys could do, the girls still felt they reigned supreme. (In other summers they waxed more imaginative and put all our furniture on the roof while we were at dinner, wrangled pigs, etc.) The cook was Ellen, a gruff ginger-haired older woman who churned out wonderful meals, but – to Frank and Inge’s dismay – would not touch a roast of lamb because she maintained it still had tinges of wool. And despite her bad feet and obvious fatigue, she would sometimes come into the tiny wash room where Betsy and I were hand-washing dishes and say, “I’ll give ya five minutes of my time.” And in those five minutes, she doubled our output. Gene, man of all odd jobs, swabbed down the kitchen with a mop after lunch. As I belatedly continued washing dishes on my side of the wall, I would shout the plot lines of most of Shakespeare’s plays to him as entertainment. Cabin boy Chris Pennock drove the kitchen trash to what was then an open dump and often reported sighting bears. Several of us rode down with him one morning (in the famous red pick-up, which Frank later made into a septic tank) to take a look, but nobody was there. As we returned, we could see a crowd around the kitchen – and that’s where the bear was. We gave the small beast plenty of room to explore, but hung around to stare. He did pretty much as he wished until he headed for the open door of the girls’ cabin at which point one of us yelled, “Oh, no, you don’t!” and ran at him. He departed quickly. There were wonderful evening singalongs, with Dave Wendt on guitar. I remember Curt Windsor leading a rousing chorus of “Blood on the Saddle”. One evening, an attempt was made to surf the irrigation ditches on an ironing board. The ranch celebrated its 50th anniversary that summer with a huge cookout, to which the Galeys invited most of the residents of Jackson Hole. It was enormous. We made tossed salads in new garbage cans bought for the occasion, put on a lid and had the boys shake it. Inge’s German niece slaved over a cake, carefully translating, changing liters and kilos to cups and quarts and tablespoons, measuring and weighing everything out with care, but failing to take into account the altitude. I like a heavy cake, but she was quite disappointed. What a night. Bazillions of people down by the (now drained) Lake Ingeborg. Entire beasts on spits. Fireworks. Captain running away with Carol on his back, riding it out (he was, years later, her wedding present from Frank). The Milky Way brilliant. A Mr. Green visited the ranch from Arizona, bringing wonderful Navajo rugs direct from the weavers. The staff gave Betsy and me saddle blankets for our August birthdays. Mr. Green is probably the source of a great many of the wonderful weavings all around the ranch. At the end of the summer, Betsy, Claire and I bought a ’55 Ford from Ray Weeks and drove ourselves East,, visiting Janet in Denver at Colorado Women’s College, the Grand Canyon, Mark Twain’s Hannibal, MO and Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield, IL residence. We had made lifetime friends in those brief months at White Grass. 47 years later, I am still in contact with many, many of the people I met that summer and in subsequent summers. It was a magical time. Unlike others, I spent two winters at the ranch. The first one, 1968, my then-husband and I were alone at the ranch with Dudie and Amber (yellow labs), Madame and Dexter (horses) and a few ducks. The road wasn’t plowed any closer than the Moose-Wilson road and we used a snowmobile to get in and out. The snow got so deep we lost visibility out of all windows on the eave sides of the roof. We drove over the kitchen roof on a snowmobile just because it was possible. We shoveled all the roofs save for the barn, which shed snow well. The ducks hiked down to Lake Ingeborg all by themselves in the spring, overjoyed to see water. There was square dancing at the park rec building every week and a chess club with park employees. AND I messed up the season’s reservations by confusing “to the 31st” with “through the 31st”. It took Nona a week to sort it out. Karin Gottlieb.