Life in a Small Town

Lynne Cheney remembers an idyllic Wyoming childhood.

Lynne Cheney in her first baton-twirling costume (Courtesy Of The Author/publisher)

BLUE SKIES, NO FENCES

A Memoir of Childhood and Family

By Lynne Cheney

Threshold. 305 pp. $26

Lynne Cheney's credentials are, as far as I can tell, unprecedented among vice-presidents' wives: a doctorate in English, author of numerous books, Lockheed Martin Corp. director, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, she is known for her combative conservatism, yet there is almost nothing about partisan politics in this nostalgic memoir. On the other hand, there is a great deal about achievement.

At first, the lightning-rod Lynne Cheney of today seems light years away from the champion baton twirler whose early life in Wyoming she describes. Indeed, many of her small-town experiences during the 1940s and '50s sound pretty similar to mine, nearly 2,000 miles away in Brooklyn: "Your Hit Parade" and Elvis, playing jacks and fearing polio, Girl Scouts and girdles, Sputnik and sororities. Who realized how generic those coming-of-age years were?

The daughter of a hot-tempered father who worked for the federal Bureau of Reclamation and an accommodating mother who worked as a soda jerk, Lynne Vincent grew up not way out on the prairie but in Casper, then as now an oil boom-and-bust town. The Wild West? Cowgirl outfits were reserved for county fairs and rodeos. Indians? There was a reservation 150 miles from Casper, but "it might as well have been a thousand miles, for all I knew of their lives." Her ancestors were pioneers, some of German heritage who started out in Pennsylvania, others who came west with the Mormons, a religion that her father later rejected. Cheney's account of her family history and her husband's Puritan forebears is full of archetypal American sagas. Still, the book grows more engaging once she gets more personal.

What is striking is her unconventional side. Picture Lynne Cheney hiding a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses from her parents when she wasn't skimming it "looking for the good parts." Imagine her bored with "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," preferring Brooklyn's own Ralph and Alice Kramden. (Jackie Gleason reminded her of her dad.) One key childhood idol was -- hold on to your Bella Abzug hats, ladies -- Wonder Woman. She read every Wonder Woman comic she could get her hands on, knew the back story, deflected bullets with imaginary magic bracelets. She writes: "In 1972 when [Gloria] Steinem and [Letty] Pogrebin put Wonder Woman on the cover of the first issue of Ms. magazine, I had a moment of complete empathy with the feminist movement."

Okay, so it might have been the first, last and only such moment, but Cheney's actions speak for themselves. (Her famously suppressed novel about strong women, Sisters, came later.) This memoir is forthright about double standards of the '50s. Although the rules were "no drugs, no sex, and plenty of kissing," a quote she attributes to a friend, some classmates did wind up pregnant. Cheney is outraged that these young women were pressured to drop out of high school. And, however "good" most of the rules were, she notes, they were "hard on . . . kids who were gay."

Nevertheless, in these "enlightened times," Cheney admits she had a conformist side, too. She is "embarrassed to acknowledge that being high school homecoming queen was fun, but it was, all of it" -- including being crowned with a rhinestone tiara by Dick Cheney, the football team co-captain.

One anecdote illuminates both their quintessentially '50s romance and Lynne's steely determination. She and Dick were going steady -- she wore his gold football ornament on her necklace. Then one day Dick suggested that it was time to "play the field."

"I did not respond positively," Lynne Cheney writes. She hurled the gold football at him. Accepting a ride from a great-looking guy who drove the most glamorous gold Pontiac Catalina convertible in town, she showed off her new catch on a cruise to the local drive-in. She went to the senior dance in a black sheath with another guy. Carol Lynley, the blond Seventeen magazine cover girl who was another of Lynne's role models, could not have played the scene better. By the time the dance ended, a chastened Dick drove her home. Their split had lasted 11 days.

That's about as dishy as Blue Skies, No Fences gets. It ends as Lynne and Dick, not yet engaged, head for separate colleges. There are few clues about how the cute tow-headed tyke pictured on the dust jacket grew into the formidable female half of a premier Washington power couple.

Cheney emphasizes that she "needed to see the elephant," as westward travelers used to say, to "explore possibilities" far beyond Wyoming. In the eighth grade, she wanted so much to be named Outstanding Girl of the Year, an American Legion prize, that she wrote "OGY" all over her notebooks and "even on the soles of my shoes." She got the prize. In the '50s, girls were not typically encouraged to express aspirations beyond home, hearth and helpmate. Young Lynne Vincent did. I am intrigued enough to hope for a sequel that reveals more about her blond ambition. *

Grace Lichtenstein covered the Rocky Mountain states for the New York Times as its Denver Bureau chief.