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Show And his 60 year Love Affair with the American West "Let me show you something." Herb Ringer paused a moment; then pushed his chair slowly away from the table and stood up. He turned and walked down the darkened hallway to the bedroom of his trailer, the same travel trailer he has lived in since 1954. On November 21st of that year, the local Reno, Nevada newspaper reported: paper and held together with yellowed Scotch tape. I opened the binding to the first page. In block letters it read: GIANT TRAILER HOME SOLD HERE. Sale of what is believed to be the largest trailer home ever sold in Reno was announced today Hall of the Old Orchard Trailer Court on Smith Virginia St. Mr. by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Ringer and son Herbert will make their home in the new giant 45 foot " Smoker " trailer at the Old Orchard...The giant trailer will be on display to the puHic starting "This was my father's journal, Herb explained. "I gave the blank book to him a couple of years after I moved my mother and him out here to Nevada from New Jersey. He kept it going until just a few months before his death in 1963. Now my eyes are so bad I can't even read from it any more. -- Would you read a few of the entries for me?" Friday. It was quite an event. Herb saved the dipping, now faded and yellow, and tucked it away with a few thousand other tokens and artifacts of memories that document his life, an adventure now almost 85 yean long. Each of those tokens is a story and all one has to do is wave the memento beneath Herb's nose and everything comes back, in extraordinary detail He looks at a photo and he remembers the date it was taken, the place and the people who were there. But he also remembers the smell of if, the angle of the light, the warmth of the breeze...the feeling of that moment He wraps himself in the memory and the glow of it warms us both. His mind is as dear and crisp as the Rocky Mountain streams he spent summers by in yean past But his body is failing him. As I watched Herb disappear into his darkened bed room, I knew he was making his way there by memory as well His eyesight has deteriorated to the point where he can't even see the vast collection of photographs he took of his favorite places over the last half a century. But he can still enjoy them "Herb," I'll ask, "Here's a picture of you on horseback and in five next picture there's a about?" girl on her hands and knees under her horse. What's that all His worn out eyes sparkle. "Yes!" he smiles, "That's Sldppy. That was in the High Sierras in about 1942. She loved her hone and the hone would do anything for her. She bet me she could sit right under it and I didn't believe her. So she dimbed down and crawled right under the horse's front legs. So, I took a picture." I could hear Herb moving things about in his closet and a few moments later he manila-covere- d album held tenderly in his hands. He emerged from the bed room, a short trip, and then placed the large book in returned to his chair, a bit winded from the album but was covered with brown wrapping my lap. It was the size and shape of a photo 1944 RENO, NEVADA STARTED ON XMAS EVE GIVEN TO ME AS A GIFT THIS BOOK BY MY SON HERBERT. I carefully thumbai through the hundreds of handwritten pages; Herb's father carefully recorded the events of their lives with a fountain pen and supplemented the text from time to time with old black and white photographs, newspaper dippings and telegrams. "Well Herb," I said, "Why don't I start at the beginning?" Here's your father's first entry... Christmas Day Dec. 25th 1944 We are in Reno, Nevada and it is our second Xmas here. We lived at 988 Watts Street and I have been working at the Washoe Market with Herb. Herb took us on a trip this day .We left Xmas Eve and got home tonight as we had two days off from the store. We left at 7 am. for Winnemucca and got there at 3 pm. We took a hotel overnight so we walked around town and after supper went to the movies. We had a swell time. nodded. "I remember that day so well That was such a long time ago." He looked at me and strained to see the outline of my face and he smiled again. "It's even been "Yes," Herb a long time since we met, hasn't it?" I nodded. "Where have the years gone, Herb?" I met Herb Ringer in the early autumn of 1981 when I was a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park. In the evenings we used to walk the Devils Garden Campground to collect fees and to say hello. I found fee collection to be a tedious task most of the time, but the opportunity to occasionally meet someone special while making the rounds kept me hopeful. It was like that with Herb. From the first evening, I found myself fascinated by his stories of the West and the passion with which he told them. After a several days we traded a few details of our personal lives. I was enduring the aftermath of a divorce that summer and when he asked continued on next pag- ema RTELN ,.K |
