No rodeo festival dashes Wyoming city's hopes amid COVID-19
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — The Just Dandy women's clothing store in downtown Cheyenne has endured fire, flooding, recessions and so far the coronavirus pandemic, but will this year's cancellation of the city's famous cowboy-and-rodeo festival, Cheyenne Frontier Days, be the daddy-of-'em-all disaster?
“I think everybody went into mourning,” store owner Virginia Brinkerhoff said. “It was a hard choice to make. But I hope we can all survive it, the financial impact it’s going to cause.”
Downtown in Wyoming's capital city looks like a doleful country song these days, with many landmark businesses — such as The Albany, a bar and restaurant known for its steak sandwiches — shut down amid easing but still strict health orders to contain the coronavirus.
Traffic has lessened to the point of days long ago. On a weekday afternoon, you can stand in the middle of Capitol Avenue, take a carefully framed photo of the Wyoming Capitol at one end of the thoroughfare and more of the historic Union Pacific train depot in the opposite direction, before having to step aside for traffic.
Frontier Days — called the “Daddy of 'Em All” and billed as the world's largest outdoor rodeo — offered hope to many locals that at least some of the 140,000 people who visit this plains city of 64,000 for the late July rodeo and associated carnival, parades, huge public pancake breakfasts and standing-room-only drinking would be back this year to perk things up.
Those hopes ended Wednesday, when Gov. Mark Gordon and Frontier Days leaders announced that the event couldn't safely take place for the first time in its 124-year history.
Not even when hard times prompted an all-volunteer force to take charge of Frontier Days during the Great Depression, or when a pilot and two bulls were killed in a U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds jet crash at...
