Named for my great-uncle Reed Smoot of the neighboring state of Utah, first Mormon senator and member of the Senate's postal service committee, the town in Wyoming promised to take his name if he'd get them a post office. Except for the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that spread America's Great Depression world-wide, his name has not endured in history.
But the town stands just as it did during our family road trip to Yellowstone in the summer of 1967. My dad Tom Smoot arranged for his dad Dewey Smoot and his mom Harriet Radcliffe Smoot to come east from San Francisco to meet us. We posed pictures in front of that post office, which doubles as Walton's Store, the only business in town. My little brother Todd and I stand with our grandfather Dewey Smoot in one, and then with our sister Kim Ann Smoot, later Kim Carter.
Fifty years later, Nancy Calhoun visited the town on a tour of the West during the first summer of her retirement. With her late husband Ed, an avid photographer, she put together a mini-Michelin guide. "The four city blocks of downtown Smoot contain approximately 100 hardy souls," she wrote, "but Greater Metropolitan Smoot proudly claims almost 300 residents." Many photos follow in her guidebook, including pictures of the two churches, the cemetery, horses, and the one I used for my virtual visit.
I hope you'll check out posts of related interest. These are people and memories that I love.- I delivered a tribute to Nancy Calhoun, founder of the Walker School's Middle School, on the occasion of her retirement.
- One of Ed Calhoun's most striking photographs features in Framing Memories of Ed Calhoun.
- My childhood memories of our car trip blend with appreciation for James Agee's universal evocation of childhood memories, and of Samuel Barber's musical setting of Agee's words, in my post Summer, Knoxville, 1915 and Wyoming, in a car, 1967.
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