Becoming Western: Stories of Culture and Identity in the Cowboy State

3. The West of Work and Play

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 66 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First Page] [66], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [66], (1) The West of Work and Play On the afternoon of May 7, 1937, a group of New York’s social elite gathered in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria.1 Their host had instructed them to dress western, and encouraged them to don colored handkerchiefs and their “best ranch duds.” “The more color and atmosphere the better,” he had noted in his invitations, imploring, “If there’s any special doings going on in your locality that date, like a country club party or a horse race, skip ’em and call it a horse holiday.” And he promised old songs like “Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tail” and “Strawberry Roan” to complete the western theme. It would be a day, he noted, of “Moving the West East.”2 Irving H. Larom (known as “Larry” east of the Mississippi) acted as host to these socialites attired in boots, colored scarves, and buckskin chaps. By 1937, Larom had become the “western” liaison of choice for the New York social set. In celebrating the West, his guests extolled a common past, certainly, and no doubt also a bit of pure Americana. But to Larom’s guests the West was also a novelty, a fun idea. Larom continued the tradition of imagining a Wyoming that articulated “American” culture and values, codified in cowboys and western landscapes. He marketed his BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 67 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas The West of Work and Play | 67 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [67], (2) Lines: 17 to 21 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [67], (2) West not by chronicling its disappearing vestiges, but by selling the meaning that his guests read into it. Larom sold Wyoming as a nostalgic script that people of a certain class could seasonally access, and act out, on demand. In the early twentieth century, the dude ranch became a source of amusement and recreation to upper-class easterners—another sanctioned component in the customary sphere of the social register set. This Dude Ranch West, of which Larom became such a vital part, marketed a version of the West that was clearly informed by popular culture. Dudes came west to experience something distinctly un-eastern, and when they got there they expected to see all the requisite western characters that stories and movies about the West had told them they should see. This gave cowboys , Indians, and other forms of “local color” a privileged status in Larom’s Dude Ranch West. The more a person or an event was considered authentically western, the more in demand it was among easterners on the lookout for western specimens to complete their western vacation experience. As such, Larom’s West was a weirdly democratized place. On the one hand, it provided significant status for both working-class icons like cowboys and the work they performed. In a Depression era that saluted the cultural importance of working Americans, dude ranches lauded physical work as the key to personal happiness, even for socialites, and Larom consistently promoted the dude ranch as a celebration of manual labor. 3 On the other hand, dude ranches represented exclusivity of the most extreme sort, for only people of means could play at working hard. Larry Larom was the ultimate host, an interpreter extraordinaire, for the people who could afford his version of the working West. Larry Larom was born in New York City in June 1889. His father was a partner in the leather goods retailer Mark Cross, and Larry grew up at the prestigious address of 277 Park Avenue. Larom explained years later that his father’s employment gave his family an entrée into the social register crowd, “the money crowd.”4 He attended private schools until he entered Princeton in 1909. It was during his years at Princeton that Larom made the acquaintance of another young man of impressive background, [3.133...