Mark Haddock

For most of my childhood, there was only one grocery store in Big Piney. Burney & Company sat at the end of the only paved street in our town, at a curve in the road about a block from the high school, and when I was younger it was dark, with lightbulbs hanging from chains, and a single pot-bellied stove near the center where locals would gather to chew the fat. Thursdays we got produce, lettuce and tomatoes, which we eagerly awaited. Many townspeople charged their groceries for months at a time; the ranchers would come in before snowfall to buy supplies for the winter, and many wouldn't be seen again until spring if things got bad enough. As kids we'd run into Burneys during our school lunch hour and buy candy bars for a nickel and charge them to our parents' accounts.

Then one day, everything changed. The Haddock family moved to town, and decided to open a second grocery store at the other end of the street. There was a community contest to name the new store, and the winning entry became a fixture in our community--Haddock's Food Fair. The Haddocks were from Idaho originally as I recall, and moved into a house just a block down the street from ours toward Highway 189, the main route from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, the Tetons, and Yellowstone Park. It might as well have been a million miles from anywhere.

For a child growing up across the street from a power plant, barbed wire fences to keep cattle in and dogs and people out, and the occasional stray moose, there was no life except the constant subverted struggle between cattle and oil, the knowledge that the ranching dynasties of the community tolerated, but often resented, the presence of the more transient members of the community who came in by way of the petroleum industry, many of whom lived in subdivisions created by Belco Oil and El Paso Natural Gas for that purpose.

Because my father worked for a small, independent oil and gas company, we lived in town. We were among the fortunate few.

What I saw from that window was not just the sun rising over the Wind Rivers to the east, but the barbed wire fence across the street to the south, the alley way to the north where we burned garbage and played on propane tanks, and lots and lots of gravel roads, the occasional pine tree, and cottonwoods. Lots of cottonwoods.

For the winds of change to bring anyone else into that setting was something of a miracle. It wasn't just that there was competition in the grocery business. It was that change was coming. It was in the air, on the breeze floating like Forrest Gump's feather.

It was there.

Mark Haddock came on that breeze.

Mark was one of two children the Haddocks had with them when they came to town who were just older than I was, a young teenager at the time blossoming out into a world of possibilities. Mark wasn't a dime-a-dozen cowboy, or a roughneck's son, or a football jock. He was everything that world was not.

He was a drummer.

















He belonged to that other-world of the interesting and relevant and not at all mundane, people who thought, and cared about political causes, and listened to music other than KMER, and somehow touched that consciousness beyond small town Wyoming. It was the world that only beamed into my bedroom at night after sunset when we could finally get the radio waves from Oklahoma City--KOMA --bringing the Bee Gees, and Carole King, and Rod Stewart into my store of permanent memory. It was the world I watched on television late at night after the rest of my family had gone to sleep, inhabited by the Dick Cavett Show. Mark dared to have longer hair, and be a musician, and think, and read, and hang out with friends he chose. In another place, he might have been a victim of redneck ignorance, but Mark was very popular and extremely well liked. He played the drums in band and stageband, and was the best drummer I'd ever heard. Ludwig drums and Zildian cymbals. He'd practice for hours, sometimes at the Legion Hall across town, with other musician friends who eventually formed a band. One of the greatest escapes in my life was to listen to that. I could escape the small town, and the four walls around me, and be free.

Mark had a John Cusack wit, and a SNL sense of humor. I loved being around that. I hoped my sensibility was sponge enough to soak up some of it, whether in the back of a school bus coming back from a school trip, or hanging out with his sister, Karen, who became a friend.

To this day I remember a lot of conversations I had with Mark, and many situations involving him, flashes of memory tucked away. He had a beautiful Irish Setter named Major, as I recall--Major Danny Boy Fitzpatrick--who'd run down the road in front of our house. Mark also had a motorcycle, a blue Kawasaki. Larry Vickrey had a similar one, different color maybe. Mark ended up dating a girl from Pinedale, but married a local girl, a few years out of high school. He went on to study music, then acquired several advanced degrees in business. Eventually he settled in Colorado, where he has made his home for the last several years, drumsticks still firmly in hand.

















Mark became one of the founding members of the band Due West, and is now drummer for the Walker Williams Band.

Mark Haddock.

Mark was one of the most talented and interesting human beings I had the privilege of knowing, growing up in that small Wyoming town. I always knew he could do anything he wanted. And he did.

Barry Morgan

My memories of Barry Morgan are all somewhat blurry and run together. He will forgive me for that, I think.

I mostly remember him in high school, driving around in a copper-orange car. Playing a trombone, and well, in high school band and stage band. Playing electric guitar in a rock band. Pax. I must have been fifteen then. Sixteen maybe.

But mostly, I remember that he was Becky's boyfriend, one of several she had over our teenage years. Becky was my dad's youngest sister, who lived next door to me growing up. She dated Barry Morgan for a while, so the lens through which I viewed him was primarily, during that time, "Becky's boyfriend."

I think of those as Vietnam years. Guys I knew just a few years older than I was were getting drafted and sent to war. Several were hoping to avoid the draft one way or the other. No one was particularly happy about the war that we watched on our television sets every night around dinnertime. Barry was one of those people who was hoping to avoid it.

He had an older brother, Steve, and together they moved into an apartment on the main street of our little Wyoming town with some other guys, mostly musicians, including drummer Mark Haddock. I seem to remember that they had a black labrador. I want to say his name was 'Nig.' But really, as I said, it's all something of a blur.

Barry was enormously talented. Like so many of us who grew up in that small town in Wyoming, he moved out, and on.

Happily, he continued with his music, and now lives and writes on the Oregon Coast. After being told six years ago he had only eighteen months to live, he has written, collaborated on and recorded over three hundred musical offspring.

Barry Morgan.




Never did I dream that that blur of memories would translate so exactly to Barry's music. But it does.

Lynne Cheney

In fairness, Lynne Cheney and I have never met in person.

We are both Wyoming women, girls from the sagebrush of the windswept prairie and desert, whose lives have been significantly impacted by the oil and gas industry that competes for attention with the cattle ranchers of the Equality State.

But most importantly, we share a common ancestor, Ebenezer Peck of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, which makes us distant cousins. Our own respective Peck ancestors became Mormon pioneers and crossed the plains. Her favorite to cite is Fannie Peck; mine is Martin Horton Peck, who was part of the Nauvoo Brass Band in the glory days of the Mormon settlement, and later became the first blacksmith in the Salt Lake Valley.

Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney.

Lynne Ann Vincent was born in Casper, Wyoming, and attended college in Colorado. She is an author, historian, and from 1986 to 1993 served as Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is currently Second Lady of the United States, a position she has held since January 2001, and married to the Vice President of the United States,Vice President of the United States, another Wyoming native, Richard Bruce Cheney.

Marty Dread

Many years in the month of March my husband and I found ourselves on the beautiful island of Maui.

And many times, in those many Marches, we found ourselves at the Sacred Hearts School festival in Lahaina, supporting the local parish school with its annual fundraiser, where we went to eat local food, listen to local musicians, get chair massages, buy silliness and seriousness, and participate in the silent auction. It was always a good time.

Rows and rows of picnic tables lined up behind the church next to tends of food provided by local restaurants and merchants, island food, served island style, and accompanied by island music. We always met the most interesting people at those tables.

One year, we sat down in an empty space at a table across from a man in a crocheted cap, with two little girls. One was obviously his daughter, and the other, apparently was her friend. They were gracious, warm and friendly. We sat and visited about the school. The daughter attended there, with her friend, and the dad was along to support.

At some point in the conversation, it somehow seemed appropriate to ask him about himself, what he did for a living.

His daughter snickered. "What does he do?" she replied, giggling, as though I should know. "He's Marty Dread!"

He suddenly stood up and removed his cap. Dreadlocks cascaded to his shoulders, and he shook his head.

Marty Dread.

That was how we came to meet Marty Dread. He was performing at the fundraiser, with his band, later that evening, a very famous (although we didn't previously know it) Hawaiian reggae performer in the spirit of Bob Marley, and a Rastafarian who sent his daughter to Catholic school and supported the school and the local community.

We stayed to hear him sing, and he was glorious. We went out next day and bought his CDs so we could have his music with us when we returned to the mainland.

Now, when we return to Maui, we go to the Hard Rock Cafe on Front Street in Lahaina on Monday nights, where Marty Dread can be found performing with his band when he's not touring elsewhere. And we remember that great night so many years ago when we first met him over some mixed plate, with a couple of little giggling girls.

Anne Osborne

Shortly after college, I worked for two years in the early 1980's in the Department of Neurology at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where I met and worked with a number of fascinating people who had an impact on my life.

One of them was Annie Osborn.

A graduate of Stanford Medical School, Anne Osborn was a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah, and as such, had a lot of overlap with the Neurology Department. She was at the time a single woman in her mid-thirties and a rising star in her field, well respected by her colleagues and by the medical students who trained there. She had a memorable persona, and a singular laugh that would echo down the hallway. Although not particularly old by any means, one wondered if she was likely to marry, and simply thought of her as being single, and very much a professional. The fact that she was an LDS woman, a professional, and single, was at the time somewhat noteworthy, and she was included in LDS Church publications writing on the very subject of being single in 1977.

Anne went on to write the definitive textbook on the subject of neuroradiology, and became the first female president of the American Society of Neuroradiology.

Anne G. Osborn.

Annie Osborn, the well respected, dynamic, neuroradiologist later married a General Authority of the LDS Church, Ronald Poelman, after the death of his first wife, and went on to have a successful career as an author, not just of numerous medical texts, but of religous and autobiographical works as well. Her book, The Simeon Solution: One Woman's Spiritual Odyssey, is her own account of her life and journey.

She continues to be on the staff at the University of Utah, and is well respected as an educator and author.

Brett Parkinson

I was on an airplane coming back from who-knows-where in June 2002 when I picked up that day's copy of USA Today and saw a photo of Brett Parkinson directing volunteers in an organized search for missing Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart.

Brett Thomas Parkinson.

To his brothers, he was Tommy.

Everyone has that one indefinable person in their life; for me, that person was Brett Parkinson. I doubt his memory of our first meeting has faded any more than mine has. We were in Larry Best's Honors Freshman English class; I'd just read for the class my essay on Muffin Miller about my exploits as a 16-year-old cooking for a hay crew on a cattle ranch in southwestern Wyoming, and Brett, intrigued by the whole thing, pressed me to skip my next class, Poetry Writing, with Elouise Bell, to hang out with him in a booth in the Cougareat.

He was a bad influence. But lots of fun. I won't soon forget the first time he took me up to the Sundance Summer Theater in a VW he borrowed from his brother, and predictably ran out of gas. I won't forget doing laundry late at night with him and Thayne Larson. I won't forget our taking over Lorna Nielson's English class one day in her absence to read Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa" to the class.

Brett went off to Brazil by way of San Diego after our freshman year at BYU. I had the distinct privilege and great honor of seeing him off at the Salt Lake City Airport with extended family and friends and being his personal correspondent for the next two years. I won't forget that his aunt, Jackie Nokes, was "Miss Nancy" from Romper Room (I'd actually been a guest as a young child). I won't forget when he left. I won't forget when he returned, or the years that followed with a wider circle of ragtag friends at BYU. It's all fairly impressed in vivid memory.

Those were formative years.



The missives from Brazil were precious treasures--tales of Ipanema, and Copacabana, running on the beach, getting unauthorized tans, sipping much-too-bubbly guarana, waltzing on the edges of Carnival, noting the poverty of the Brasilian people perched on the mountainside in glaring contrast to the wealthy lower down, unfortunate and unexpected calamities, and of course, the colorful mission president who was a former Methodist minister, Helio da Rocha Camargo--sometimes accompanied by photos, or interesting cards, and the occasional highly entertaining and not easily forgettable audiotape, and all signed off in the same memorable signature. They contained much love for the father and mother he adored, a progressive, fit and well travelled physician father he greatly admired, and a strikingly beautiful and talented mother who reminded him of a young Marlene Dietrich.

I won't forget walking around the Joseph Smith building discussing the latest issue of Dialogue, singing Saturday's Warrior tunes, spending late nights at Perkins Cake and Steak, babysitting Aerie and Miel, or driving to Ogden to see our mutual friend Diana Sather. I won't forget him sitting outside the communal bathroom in our girls-only Heritage Halls apartment while I was soaking in the bathtub, which for BYU, seemed fairly provocative at the time. One of our first late night walks outside Deseret Towers mused on topics mixing the urbane and the theological in ways that were decidedly consciousness raising for a 17-year-old, and that typified many of our subsequent conversations. He was the face and sensibility of Ralph Fiennes atop a Trevor Southey mannekin, with equal parts of Ryan O'Neal from "What's Up, Doc?"

He was a runner, running from the desert palms of Indio and the Coachella Valley to the hills of Provo and the beaches of Rio and beyond. And he had an amazing facility for languages (as a freshman he came into BYU with the high score on the National Spanish Exam). He had a restless spirit, an inquisitive mind, and a generous heart, all gifts to those who knew him well.

Somewhere at the bottom of the Amazon is my copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" loaned to him, with copious notes in the margins.

Brett came back from his mission to Brazil not knowing whether to go into medicine (as his father and oldest brother had), or law (as another brother had). He eventually finished his degree in English at BYU, married well, violinist Kelly Clark, and went off to Tulane to medical school. I was working at the University of Utah Medical Center some years later when I saw her perform in concert on local television, with images of Brett in the audience and their newborn son.














Many years later I became friends, quite coincidentally, with one of his former missionary companions from Chicago; to identify that person with the "Elder West" in Brett's always colorful missives from Brazil was somewhat of a disconnect.

Dr. Brett Parkinson is now a radiologist practicing in Salt Lake City, Utah, and one of the leading authorities in the field of breast imaging. He recently led a medical mission to establish the first breast imaging and breast cancer clinic in the African nation of Tanzania.

Hight Proffit

The first southern gentleman I ever personally met was my Uncle Hight. He and Aunt Dorothy had a ranch just outside Evanston, Wyoming, on the way to the High Uintas. Uncle Hight was a transplant from the Carolinas whose ancestors were all very much on the south of that Mason-Dixon line, and listening to him as a child was the first taste I had of the realities of the Civil War, that there were actually people who'd been on the southern side of it. It was all so very real.

He was the first person to sit me down on a milking stool and teach me to milk a cow, the first to show me baby lambs, the first to put me on the back of a seasoned old mare.

I loved going to their ranch in the summertime, loved Aunt Dorothy's boiled raisin cookies with chocolate chips washed down with fresh milk (okay, the fresh milk took some getting used to), their horses, the interesting things in the ranch house and the barn. I loved all of it. They were radiant and loving as a great aunt and uncle, and he managed to fit into the wilds of Wyoming in spite of being a Carolina boy.

Hight Moore Proffit.

Hight Moore Proffit was not just a rancher, or a Dixie charmer. He was a servant of the people. He served eight years in the Wyoming State Senate and two years in the House of Representatives. His wife, Dorothy Ardell Marsh Proffit, succeeded him in the Senate when he was unable to complete his term due to ill health.

He died January 30, 2002, at the age of 90.