Episode Details

EP 2-34 ALAN OHASHI

Wendy Corr:

Well, hey there folks. Welcome to The Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on interesting people in the Cowboy State. We've got one of the most interesting that we've had on this program this morning. I'm very excited to have everybody hear the stories that Alan Ohashi has to tell.

But first, I want to make sure that you all know about the "Business From the Basement" podcast. This is a podcast put on by the Wyoming Business Alliance, and it's meant to be a resource and a conversation about people who are involved in business and who have the resources to help you if you are a Wyoming business person.

So check out the Wyoming "Business From the Basement" podcast that is put on by the Wyoming Business Alliance. But you don't want to go there yet, because first we're going to have a conversation with Alan Ohashi.

Alan has such a great career as a filmmaker, as a journalist, but if you read last week's Cowboy State Daily guest column, he also kind of secretly wanted to be a carny, and so he gave that a try. He also got caught in the Big Thompson Flood, which was a big adventure.

Adventure, Alan, you've had a lot of adventures. Let's talk about how your adventures got started. You're a Wyoming guy from the beginning. And are you still, do you now live in Boulder? Is that right?

Alan O'Hashi:

Yeah, I live in Boulder. I lived in Wyoming probably for 25 years, half my half my career, and then I moved to Colorado in about 1993 after being born and raised in Cheyenne, and when I went to college in Hastings Nebraska, my parents moved on me to Laramie when I was a sophomore.

And that happens, I sat out the post Vietnam War recession and in grad school at the University of Wyoming, and then got my first job in Gillette, in the Gillette city government, and then moved to Lander to work for the Gillette or the Lander city government. And then did a good, a good period of time with the Northern Arapaho tribe before moving to Colorado.

Wendy Corr:

Wow. What did you do with the tribe?

Alan O'Hashi:

My title was the economic and community development director, and so I worked with tribal members to, you know, a lot of sort of entrepreneurial interest that tribal members had, mostly around agriculture, and myself and some colleagues in the tribe put together a 600 acre farm based on small plot.

Small allotments that tribal members had gained when the land was kind of divvied up among families, and then. So that's what I did, plus some big picture, tribal economic development issues around water and some stuff like that.

Wendy Corr:

Wow, my goodness - so how did you move from government then into journalism? Because you're a fantastic writer. I mean, you've got a gift for that and a gift for storytelling. How did you make the jump from government? Because I understand this. I went from city government to radio, so I get this.

Alan O'Hashi:

Well, I always was a writer. I had my first byline in the Cary Junior High School Tumbleweed newspaper when I was 13, and I had edited a column that was called the poets corner, where I went around to all the English classes in the junior high and picked out some poems and and curated a kind of a column about those.

And I started out as a poet, and then, just through general assignment, you know, covered sports and news and the junior high and became the school paper cartoonist, and continued on doing that through high school at the Thunderbolt newspaper, did some general assignment reporting, but mostly was the cartoonist for the paper.

Same thing when I