“It was 100 miles in any direction to anything,” said Lopezian Bill Brimmer of Rawlins, Wyo., the little western town where he was born in 1940. “When I was old enough to have a job, my dad farmed me out to all of the sheep men so I dutifully earned my three dollars a day until I graduated high school in 1958. Each outfit might have 15 to 30 bands of sheep of 2,000 head each. Long before I had a driver’s license, I was visiting each camp three times a week, taking the mail and groceries, filling water kegs, and moving the sheep wagon from place to place on open range—the desert in winter and summer in the mountains.”  Involved in every phase of sheep raising—lambing, docking, branding and shearing—Brimmer said, “It was okay.”

Brimmer’s father, one of five sons in a fatherless family, came west from Massachusetts as a young attorney to establish his practice and help raise money to educate the next brother in line. Several of these men were soon ensconced in Rawlins where Brimmer’s father met his mother, the daughter of a local cigar store merchant. When Brimmer’s dad was single, he and other young people rode horseback forty miles to a Saturday night barn dance and returned in time to open business on Monday morning.

During difficult Wyoming winters, ranchers occasionally turned their horses loose on the range. “Sometimes you could catch them, sometimes you couldn’t. That made it fun for the rodeo. We didn’t have livestock providers so we would just round up a few wild horses.”  Brimmer added that some of those animals’ offspring are probably the source of the wild horse problem making today’s news.

“My parents insisted I go east to college so they sent me off to Dartmouth. It was great fun. I did a lot of skiing and rock climbing and then took a break and entered the Army where I was stationed in Alaska and did more skiing and rock climbing,” said Brimmer, who was a cold weather and mountain warfare instructor with the former training cadre of the 10th Mountain Division, an exceptional group that has historical roots in Italy during World War II and is now on duty in Afghanistan.

Continuing his education at the University of Colorado, Brimmer majored in physical geography with specialties of cartography and aerial photography, and taught skiing. While at a ski clinic another instructor, Norma Schillo, fell at his feet. “Oh yeah, I picked her up,” said Brimmer. The couple has four children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

Brimmer worked on his PhD at the University of Florida with a major in geography. He has a minor in tropical agriculture, a study of questionable value on Lopez, he admits with a laugh. Norma worked as a dental assistant while Brimmer completed his studies.

As a community college instructor in Casper, Wyo., Brimmer taught twelve different subjects. “When computers came along in the early 80s, we didn’t have anything that was at all like the computer systems available now,” he said. “Our college bought the hardware but they were afraid to risk copyright hazards with purchased software, so we had to do all of our own programming.” He took early retirement after twenty-five years of teaching.

The Brimmers honeymooned and vacationed in the northwest and as retirement neared, looked seriously at different communities where they might live. “When we drove off the ferry and came over the crest of the hill, Lopez just felt like the right spot.”

Having remodeled homes for resale, Brimmer built a guest house on Lopez property they bought in 1983. “We started our ‘real’ house when we became full-time residents in 1988.”

While Brimmer worked on the house, his wife volunteered at the Lopez Thrift Shop when volunteers were still working out of Jean Boushey’s basement. “We have been volunteering ever since,” he said. “It’s self preservation. I have to keep the brain cells turning over. I volunteer at the library, at hospice and on the Thrift Shop board.”

With Brimmer’s leadership the Thrift Shop board changed federal tax status, found a new location, and erected a building. “I’ve always thought I could do two things at once but not more than two.”

Brimmer’s Thrift Shop board term is coming to a close and he hopes the summer will be a time to resurrect old hobbies. With typical low-key humor, he said, “I’ve raised my personal level of technology up to the early bronze age. I can throw pots, spin, weave, cast bronze, and grow my own food. I think one of the greatest losses to American society occurred when they did away with orange crates. When I was a kid, whatever we needed, we built out of an orange crate. When you learn to do something like that, it sticks with you. Sadly, young people don’t have that opportunity today.”