Episode Details

Bill Sniffin

Wendy Corr:

Well, hey there, folks, and welcome to The Roundup! We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, we focus on interesting people in the Cowboy State, and we've had so many wonderful conversations with people before we get started.

I want to make sure that everybody knows, though, about the Wyoming Business Alliance's podcast. It's called the "Business From the Basement" podcast, and you're going to find all sorts of great information there about the Wyoming Business Alliance, about what they can do for Wyoming business people. So if you are a Wyoming business person, check out the "Business From the Basement" podcast on Spotify or Audible, or anywhere that you listen - any place that you listen to us on The Roundup, in fact!

I want to take just a real quick moment here to say thank you to everybody who has tuned in to The Roundup. We've gotten such amazing feedback from the guests that we've had and from the people who have really enjoyed hearing more about the people that we have focused on here on The Roundup.

Today, our guest is someone who's very familiar to Cowboy State Daily readers. We have as our guest today, Bill Sniffin. Now if you don't know Bill as a columnist for Cowboy State Daily you absolutely know him from his columns that have appeared in Wyoming newspapers for years.

Bill Sniffin, welcome to The Roundup, for starters.

Bill Sniffin:

Hello, hello, great to be here. Wendy, looking forward to it.

Wendy Corr:

We're going to have a great time today. Bill, how long have your columns appeared in newspapers? Because they're syndicated all over Wyoming or or they were, for a long time, syndicated throughout Wyoming. Tell us about, tell us where your column has appeared.

Bill Sniffin:

Well, we've lived in Wyoming now for 54 years, and so I've always written a column. So starting with the Lander, Riverton, Fremont County area. We always had had a column, but starting in 2002 I started writing a statewide column. And I wrote it for, I wrote about 1000 columns over about a 21 year period that were in upwards of 30 to 35 papers around the state.

And I just did it because, when I ran for governor in 2002 which didn't go well, I started out an underdog and ended up an underdog. But as a result of that, the editor of the Cheyenne paper, Reed Eckert, contacted me and said, you know, you're a journalist and now a politician. Would you mind writing about the rest of the election campaign?

And so I did, and I had so much fun with it, and it went so well that pretty soon all these other newspapers wanted to run it. And so from then on, up until about last, I think maybe February or January of this year, and then, because Cowboy State daily has become so successful and so big, it was decided that I should, since I worked for Cowboy State Daily, then hat's the only place where my column appears, although I do reprint it on Facebook.

But I've been doing it for a long, long time, and as a little bit of historical trivia, was 61 years ago, about right now, when I wrote my first newspaper column for a tiny little newspaper called The Elgin Echo, northeast Iowa. So I've been doing this a long time, and I I like it. And I write about everything, and people, a lot of people like to read it, apparently. And I love that.

Wendy Corr:

We love it too. You have so many wonderful things to say and great observations about life in general, about the people that you've met over the years. Bill, what got you from tiny, little Elgin, Iowa, out here to Wyoming? Why is it that you decided that this is where, this is where we want to be?

Bill Sniffin:

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