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| BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020
L
SUSAN ANDERSON
Blue skies meant
NO LIMITS for Lynne Cheney
Lynn Cheney speaking to the Casper republican Women at the Holiday Inn 3.28.99. CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE COLLECTION, CASPER COLLEGE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER
ynne Cheney may not have imagined that she would become one of Wyoming’s most successful writers back in high school in Casper. But the encouragement she got from teacher Margaret Shilder was so important to her that she still remembered lines in a story the teacher praised 60 years later, while promoting her latest nationally successful book, “The Virginia Dynasty.” Bestselling historian Walter Isaacson may have called her 2020 book “wonderfully readable,” but the encouragement Cheney still treasures came from a teacher at Natrona County High School in the 1950s. The value of history and education mattered to Cheney throughout her life as she published six bestsellers about American history for children and six respected nonfiction history books, including “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered” and “Kings of the Hill” about speakers of the U.S. House with her husband, Dick Cheney. Three books written while Dick Cheney was Vice President and she was “Second Lady” are still popular with young people. “A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women” and “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America” were written with Robin Preiss Glasser; “We the People: The Story of Our Constitution” became a New York Times bestselling illustrated history of how the Constitution was created. In her memoir of a Wyoming childhood, “Blue Skies, No Fences,” Cheney describes how the Wyoming setting gave her a sense of “no fences” on what can be accomplished. “You’re not feeling limitations. There was the prairie you could run over and the world you could run into,” she said recently. One world she plunged into was national baton twirling competition. In her youth, sports weren’t an option for ambitious young girls, so performing as a baton twirler was one way to excel in physical skill. Cheney describes her approach to baton twirling competition as “intense,” including tossing milk bottles in her home that collided and exploded all over the living room. But by 1953 she was accomplished enough to become Junior State
