Columnist Susan Snyder: Dude, divorce is made easy

Monday, May 10, 2004 | 8:18 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

Bill and Sandra McGee say their book about a Northern Nevada divorce ranch is mostly about people from back East.

Nevada's wide-open spaces offered the affluent a ticket to marital freedom, as long as one of the spouses seeking divorce could establish "residency" by living here for six uninterrupted weeks.

East Coast socialites and West Coast movie stars earned it by enjoying the rugged luxury of dude ranches such as the Flying ME, which is in Franktown about 20 miles south of Reno along old U.S. 395.

Bill McGee, 78, was a 22-year-old cowboy in 1947 when he became head wrangler of the Flying ME. His memories of the place and a motherlode of photographs chronicle the quirky slice of history in the couple's recently released book, "The Divorce Seekers: A Photo Memoir of a Nevada Dude Wrangler."

"It was a cast of characters," McGee said in a telephone interview Friday from the couple's California home. "After four years in the South Pacific, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

Las Vegas was a blip on the map in the late 1930s when Reno was established as the place to get a divorce. And the Flying ME was considered to be the most exclusive of the dude ranches that enabled people to fulfill the residence requirement, Sandra McGee said.

The people who worked or were divorced there during the early days are well into their 80s or dead, she said. But the idea was fresh.

What started as a simple memoir with 50 snapshots blossomed into a coffee table book with hundreds of images of East Coast blue bloods and California movie stars peppered by personal accounts McGee gathered in his journals while working there.

His job was to keep the ranch's 25 horses shod, fed and watered, take guests on whatever kinds of horseback riding adventures they wanted and accompany them on excursions into Carson City or Reno.

That last task often proved the most difficult, as most of the "dudes" staying at the ranch were women. They more often had the flexibility to pull up stakes for six weeks than the men who had jobs back home.

"There was a policy. If you left for town with six, you came home with six. And that wasn't easy, because the locals were always hitting on the gals -- and some of these guys were pretty big," McGee said.

Stories proved easier to find than photos. Sandra McGee spent hours online locating former ranch guests or their children. She discovered a large number of the Easterners fell in love with the West and never went back home.

Valerie Vondermuhll, an editor for Life magazine and accomplished photographer, went home with more than 200 photos she snapped during a 1947 divorce stay and a 1948 vacation. Sandra McGee located them through Vondermuhll's 92-year-old brother.

The pictures show East meeting West in a way most people don't envision, but in a manner that documents a chapter in how the modern migration West actually happened.

"It's not about Nevada," McGee said.

The book is due to be available in local bookstores by early summer. For more information or to purchase a copy now, go to www.bmcpublications.com or call (800) 431-1579.