It was a Wednesday – chicken-fried steak day – at the Shoshoni Senior Center. Folks played pool, sipped coffee and chatted at long rectangular tables as they waited for lunch to be served.
Ken Cundall was posted up at the circular puzzle table, working on a 1,000-piece farm-themed puzzle with a big red barn and striped green hills.
“It’s way cheaper than cooking at home,” he said, nodding to the $4 price tag for the day’s signature dish. “And it's nourishing, so don't have to worry about that.”
Cundall served on the center’s board of directors for over a decade and comes for lunch pretty much every day. But he warned that things can get pretty rowdy around the puzzle nook.
“Sometimes Randy cusses when he can't find a piece,” he laughed.
Randy Christensen had a bushy white beard and was chugging away on the bottom four rows of the farm scene: a cryptic dirt road, with the occasional chicken.
“It's a booger. It's got a lot of rocks and different shades,” he said. “Makes it kind of hard, but we'll get 'er.”
Christensen’s another center regular and an accomplished woodworker. Across from him was a big open closet with puzzle boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling. He grabbed one of his favorites from the mix, shaking little intricately carved pieces out of a plastic bag.
“ When you look at the pieces, they aren't your standard puzzle pieces. They've got a starfish, that's a whale, there's a little shell over there,” he said. “But they're really cool to put together. Ken hates them.”
In addition to lunch and the daily puzzle, the Shoshoni Senior Center hosts a wide range of activities for the entire community: AA meetings, the food pantry, casting a ballot, weddings, memorials, and meet and greets with candidates. Most days, its full parking lot shows it’s the most happening place in the town of about 500 people.
A table over, 92-year-old Lois Herbst sat with her friend Ann Faulkner and gave a shout-out to Wayne Olsen, the chef behind today’s chicken-fried steak lunch.
“ He takes pleasure in his work. I think he's 86,” she said. “But he knows how food is to be prepared.”
Herbst is center royalty, with her own designated parking spot outside the building. She’s the first and only woman to be elected president of the state’s Stock Growers Association, back in 2005.
Herbst makes a point to come to the center every day she can.
“ It increases my mood to sit and visit with friends,” she said.
Last year, being able to keep sitting and visiting with friends wasn’t a given. Between proposed federal cuts to programs for seniors and worries about dwindling property tax revenue, the center was in uncertain financial waters.
But Congress ended up funding the Older Americans Act, and the state approved senior care dollars.
Since then, the center’s become even more enmeshed with other parts of Shoshoni.
Director Rykki Neale said the local kindergarten class started making a weekly flyer that goes out to the seniors.
“ They call it the ‘Weekly Smile,’ and it had jokes and stuff that they wanna share with the seniors, and pictures they drew, and that's been fun,” she said.
Assistant Director Jeannie Kronke laughed as she recited a few of the jokes off the most recent brightly-colored flyer.
“ What is a gust of wind's favorite color? Blue,” she said. “What letter can hurt you if it gets too close? The letter B.”
As of this winter, Kronke said the local Chamber of Commerce now hosts its monthly meetings at the center.
“They were struggling and needed help. So I went to the meeting to see how the Senior Center could help or what we could do to help the chamber,” Kronke said. “By the end of the meeting, I was the new president of the chamber.”
The Chamber’s got an updated logo, and Kronke designed a new brochure to let tourists know what’s going on in Shoshoni.
The center also inherited a bunch of old scrapbooks from the chamber, full of decades-old clippings and records of daily life in the town: marriage announcements, graduation lists and newspaper articles.
David Manchester is in the backroom where the chamber holds its meetings, surrounded by old scrapbooks from the now-defunct Shoshoni Alumni Association and the Shoshoni Homemakers.
“We're taking this one apart, if we can get the screw out,” he said, pointing to a particularly stubborn old maroon book.
It’s a labor of love: carefully removing each page and putting it into a clear document protector sleeve, then putting all of those into new scrapbooks. The goal is to make sure all that history doesn’t deteriorate when people page through the books.
Manchester pointed to an extra large old scrapbook, over two feet tall, at the bottom of a stack on the table.
“If you see this one down here, it's been taped,” he said. “The pages, if you touch them, so many of them, they wanna fall apart.”
It’s not a cheap undertaking, but Manchester said an anonymous donor has made it possible to get all the necessary materials for the project. But deconstructing each scrapbook can be smooth sailing or a total bear, depending on how it was put together.
"Believe me, I've cussed that person, whoever put some of these together,” he said. “They tape these on the inside of the cover. Even worse than that, and some of these I can tell by looking at it, they glued them.”
Manchester’s also been printing out articles written by more current authors and making neatly labeled white binders, chock-full of Wyoming stories. He estimates that he’s made more than 50 of the books.
“Jake Correll was a trapping legend in this area,” he said. “Timberjack Joe from Dubois. This one I didn't know, a Black rancher [named] Alonzo Steppe.”
When the project’s done, Manchester hopes all the binders and scrapbooks can live here, adding “history museum” to the long list of what’s going on at the Senior Center.
But even with so much happening, there’s still some financial uncertainty facing the community hub. Shoshoni’s one of a handful of towns in the state with a Senior Citizens Service District, which funnels local taxes into senior resources.
It’s on the ballot this year, and center director Neale said it makes up about a third of the center’s budget.
“ When we first got it, we used it more for big projects, unexpected expenses, that kind of thing. But as other funding has kind of gone down, we've relied more on it for regular operations,” she said.
Voters will decide whether to renew the service district measure in November. But today, the focus is on getting in line for Wayne Olsen’s famous chicken-fried steak.
“Very, very tender,” said Ann Faulkner, as she finished up her meal. “That really is the best.”
