British expatriate trades success to champion American cowboys

Sandra Chereb

Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999 | 9:24 a.m.

CARSON CITY, Nev. - Life's been a wild ride for C.J. Hadley. Deemed "uneducable" at 15, this British-born renegade who traveled the globe and tasted success now finds herself a struggling magazine editor and defender of a tradition in the American West.

But the Range magazine editor - whose previous assignments included test driving the lunar rover at Cape Canaveral, Fla., as an editor at Car and Driver magazine - wouldn't have it any other way.

Hadley, 58, greets a visitor with a 10-minute monologue peppered with salty language as she rails against perceived threats to ranchers in the West: endangered species, government regulation, wilderness designations.

"I'm hot today," she said, sniffing at her own fury. "Anyway, what did you want to ask me?"

Range: The Cowboy Spirit on America's Outback touts itself as "the leading forum for divergent viewpoints in the search for solutions that will halt the depletion of a national resource - the American cowboy."

The magazine evolved from a brochure prepared for members of Congress in 1991 to show that ranchers are not the "bad guys" others portray them to be in public land disputes, Hadley said.

The glossy pages extoll the romance of the open range and lighthearted features relate the humor of people who ride in the saddle and have gained longevity despite a lifetime of eating beef.

But there's an often irreverent tone directed at federal bureaucracy, "enviros" and "greens." One issue likened a Nature Conservancy executive to a "cutworm on a green tomato." Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, a frequent Range target, appears in headlines as "Bah Bah Babbitt" or "Babbitt in Wonderland."

"I find that stuff unnecessary," said Courtney White, executive director of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Quivira Coalition, which brings together ranchers, environmentalists, public lands managers and others to find ways for cattle and sheep to coexist with a healthy environment. "We don't need to fight anymore. There's enough middle ground ... that both preserves the ranching culture and the environment."

Caroline Joy Hadley was born in Birmingham, England, the youngest of three children. Her father worked in a steel mill, her mother in a glass factory.

Her formal education came to an abrupt halt at age 15, when the headmistress labeled her "uneducable" and asked her parents to remove her from school.

Her fate, however, would not be mundane.

"My father bought me a one-way ticket to Canada when I was 17 and told me to seek opportunity," she said.

She hitchhiked to New York City, thumbed her way to Los Angeles and made her way up and down the West Coast before heading back to England in 1961 so she could return to the United States legally.

Back in New York, she became a secretary to the publisher of Car and Driver magazine. She quit from boredom after four days, was rehired as an editorial assistant and eventually became managing editor, a position she held for six years. When the bosses refused to make her editor in 1972, the same year she became a U.S. citizen and registered Democrat, she quit again.

"It was fun. But it was time to go," she said. "So I became a rodeo photographer. I knew nothing about rodeo. But I had my freedom back."

She eventually returned to the West and hooked up with a tuna outfit in Port Angeles, Wash. "Twenty-one days at sea, 21 days of storm, 21 pounds I lost," she said.

The sea was definitely not her calling.

"I wanted to work in any state without a coast line and I only had four bucks so I came to Nevada."

She was hired as a photographer at Nevada Magazine and soon became its editor. She stayed for 10 years - the longest she's been anywhere, except for Range.

The magazine, now available at select newsstands in all 50 states, France, Italy and Austria, has a quarterly circulation of 150,000.

Some who take exception to its provocative tone support its mission - sharing views on how ranchers can make a living while protecting the environment.

"C.J. is filling a niche that I don't know anyone else is filling," said Dan Dagget, a Flagstaff, Ariz., environmentalist.

These days Hadley has traded the comforts of success for a paltry paycheck to champion her cause.

"What keeps me going is hearing from one rancher who thinks - he's not right - but he thinks I'm going to make a difference to him," she said, her eyes welling with tears that belie her grit.

"And there isn't one ranch I leave in my pickup truck in a trail of dust where I'm not weeping for them and their problems."

Through clenched jaws while the tears flowed freely, she added, "It's very tiring, trying to save the West."