Wireless In Wyoming -- Lusk, Darling Of Microsoft, Isn't Quite `Wired' Yet

LUSK, Wyo. - Hordes of oil workers no longer flock into town with enough to buy new work clothes instead of washing their old ones. There aren't nearly enough ranch hands around to sustain a 10-room bordello as fine as the Yellow Hotel, which entertained its last patron in 1978.

While 10,000 people used to live in Niobrara County, serving an oil field that was the nation's fourth-largest, there are now only 2,500 or so. Some 1,500 live in Lusk.

As the Microsoft TV commercial says: "Cows outnumber people here a hundred to one."

The Redmond software giant's ad campaign has given this fading, wind-scoured, one-light town a national reputation as a homey hamlet with an Information Age twist: It's looking to technology to help teach its kids, run its businesses, in short, save it from extinction.

"The thing that isn't apparent about Lusk," the announcer intones over images of golden-lit children and passing fields, "is it's wired."

Sort of.

High-speed fiber-optic and coaxial cable girds the town. But it stops at the end of a 100-foot coil sitting - unconnected - in an alley behind the U.S. West switching station.

"Lying here and hoping to get hooked up to the outside world," said Dick Claycomb, a former school superintendent working on the town's technological development.

"It's a nice running path for the squirrels - that's what it's used for," said Dan Hanson, whose son Dan Henry is featured in the Microsoft ads.

Which is not to say Microsoft has spent millions to extol a fiction. The main Lusk ad - one of five shown over the past five months - mentions a variety of non-Internet Microsoft products that townspeople do indeed use. It also says, however subtly, that the town wired itself "for the future of Internet."

But it is in keeping with the runaway optimism bubbling around the Internet. Such glee is fueling an unprecedented Wall Street boom in vaporish dot-com stocks. It has Gov. Gary Locke seeking millions of dollars in training and telecommunications infrastructure to help rural communities. And while Microsoft and several national media outlets have portrayed this town as wired and happy, it is only a little more wired than the millions of American households that get on the Net with a local phone call.

Sometimes less. Newly arrived rural residents can wait years for a phone number on the Lusk exchange.

Moreover, the town has struggled to use the Internet as an economic tool.

It's one thing to start building an Internet pipeline. It's another to finish it. It's yet another to make it the boon you want it to be.

Leslie Kee, a high-school English teacher and local community-development coordinator, thinks back to 1995, when the town's attempt to wire itself had captured the eye of CBS' "Sunday Morning." She remembers hearing John Battelle, then-executive managing editor of WIRED magazine, tell CBS how technology, "intelligently applied," just might make a small town economically viable again.

"This town needed a dream," she said while sitting in a nearly empty bleacher to watch her son play in a junior-varsity basketball game. "The town needed a goal, it needed a vision. That's what this has been for us. But `intelligently applied' is where we've really had to work at it."

`THINGS DWINDLED'

It's a big world that's stretched across the 4-foot-tall globe in the Niobrara County High School library.

But there on the eastern plains of Wyoming, where the shellac and paper have been worn through from years of pointing, one can read the name "Lusk."

"Lusk might have really counted for something at the time this globe was made," said Jan Hytrek, assistant librarian.

"There used to be two of everything in Lusk," said Twila Barnette, head of the Niobrara Chamber of Commerce. "There used to be two refineries, two dry cleaners, two movie houses. There used to be a dance hall. Things dwindled and dwindled."

In 1940, nearly 6,000 Niobrara County residents were tallied by the U.S. Census, not counting the transient oil workers, cowboys and workers on the Chicago & North Western Railway. Then the flow from the Lance Creek oil field slowed to a trickle. Livestock, a mainstay of the region since cattle were first driven north on the nearby Texas Trail, required fewer and fewer hands as ranches mechanized and consolidated.

Now, the county has fewer than 2,500 people, a 16 percent poverty rate, and the title of least populated county in the Lower 48's least populated state.

The desolate expanse of antelope-grazed grasslands and sandstone outcroppings outside Lusk has grown accordingly. It's 57 miles to the nearest movie theater. The locals gripe that the Casper news stations don't even refer to Lusk by name anymore, just a place "102 miles east of Casper."

In the late '80s, Don Whiteaker, a former Stetson salesman, clothier and the town's $400-a-month mayor, read in John Naisbitt's "Megatrends" about the rising importance of information technology.

"I decided what the heck, rural America is going downhill, I might as well get with it," he drawled. "If we were going to survive, we better be modern and get ready for that technology."

Armed in the early '90s with "enough buzz words that I was pretty dangerous," he started his wiring project with a state grant of $295,000 for telecommunications equipment to monitor power demands on the town-owned electric utility. He approached "the goo-roos" at U.S. West, who agreed to invest $2.4 million to bring state-of-the-art fiber-optic cable from the I-25 corridor 47 miles to the west. With $300,000 more in city money, he ran fiber and coaxial cable, the type used to connect television sets, past the town's 600 homes and businesses.

But the town's 17 miles of fiber and cable never got run the last few feet to the U.S. West switch, making it a high-tech onramp to nowhere.

"We have a national reputation of being wired," said Claycomb, the former school superintendent, "and we're not quite wired yet."

In 1996, shortly after the last of the cable was strung, Whiteaker was voted out of office and replaced by Donald Wilson. A former oil man, he had little interest in the Internet.

"He had no clue," said Rick Luchsinger, school superintendent.

More importantly, there wasn't any more money to invest in the system.

And while Whiteaker had long said the wiring effort had the support of most of the town, there wasn't enough support to keep it moving.

"Our community doesn't get out in the street and riot about things," said Mark Lohr, the current mayor, "but this was a controversial project. I think a lot of people questioned why this ever happened and whether there was any real reason to do this."

ON THE NET, BUT NOT WIRED

A funny thing happened while the city of Lusk was waiting to get on the Internet. The people of Lusk got on the Internet.

Using a state government line for locally based agencies, the two schools went on line in 1995. A few months later, the first of 200 households and businesses signed up with an Internet service provider for connections over their phone lines.

The schools' 475 students, with 320 computers among them, now use the Internet to sell horses, research recipes for their cooking classes, write term papers and download images of "South Park" characters for papier-mache pinatas. Judy Moreno, a high-school art and Spanish teacher, uses it to look up aerobic dance routines for the class she teaches at the Elks Hall and for a cultural unit on the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Earlier this month, after students were caught sending pornographic and harassing messages via hotmail.com, Microsoft's free e-mail site, the school banned all e-mail.

"The kids are having a fit this morning," said Hytrek, the librarian. "We have some kids that use it too much. Everyone is racing at noon to see what's in their e-mail."

From local homes and ranches, people are putting e-mail, the World Wide Web and chat rooms to use in ways unimagined when Whiteaker started talking about technology a decade earlier.

The first time Melvin and Lola ZumBrunnen saw their grandson was over the Internet, just hours after he was born in Austin, Texas.

Dan Henry Hanson, a tall-drink-of-water 14-year-old with size 11 1/2 boots, used the Internet to research dung beetles for a 4-H project. His mother is online three or four times a day with relatives 200 miles away in Kaycee.

"I'm usually trying to look up grass-management techniques. That's my thing. I like grass," said Dan Henry's father, Dan Hanson. "And Dan's on this for every reason."

The ZumBrunnens and Hansons were featured prominently in the Microsoft ads. Dan Henry Hanson even made an impression on actor Jack Nicholson, who paraphrased his line - "If you have the job you have fun doing, do that for life" - at last month's Golden Globe awards.

But both the ZumBrunnens and Hansons connect to the Internet through plain old telephone lines, not over the high-speed lines that were part of the town's high-tech vision.

And babies and dung beetles aside, local phone lines are not enough to court new businesses that need to move large volumes of data.

Dave Linn, owner of a printing shop that makes the instructional labels on hotel telephones, sees as much as he tries to download logos and images from customers spread around the country.

"I've seen them go for 15 minutes, which is ridiculous," he said. "It shouldn't take that long. It's just the limitations of the system."

Linn and more than a dozen local people are trying to get the town's system connected with the help of the Center for Excellence in Rural America, a project of the Western Governors Association. The group wants to get an estimate of what it would cost to make the final connection and develop a business plan that would use the technology to retain local businesses and recruit new ones, possibly with a technology park or business incubator to help local start-ups on their way.

By most standards, their plans are humble: bring in three, four, maybe five businesses, and maybe turn the town into its own cable-television provider.

"The overall dream is to be able to live in a place like Lusk, where it's a nice quiet community, where kids still trick-or-treat and there's still 4-H, yet develop the lifestyle that other people take advantage of," said Linn, who moved here from Chicago a year and a half ago. "If you're a stockbroker in Denver, why not work in Lusk? When the stoplights aren't working, we walk across the street. There is no drive time."

Like so many rural towns eager to get wired, Lusk will need a delicate balance of leadership, consensus and momentum to succeed, said Delore Zimmerman, a community sociologist from South Dakota who helps towns use telecomputing in their development. Even then, he said, the wire is useless without the talent to exploit it. That can be hard to come by in a small town.

"Everybody assumes that if you get the connections, that solves your problem," he said. "If you don't have people that understand the development and use of applications and the development of content, so what? If you stumbled onto a spaceship from another planet and didn't know how to run it, so what? It would be a nice big chair."

Lusk faces an added, potentially ironic wrinkle. The local cable company, CommuniComm Services, is preparing to string its own high-speed Internet service by this fall.

CommuniComm has already offered to buy the town's system for $225,000, less than it would cost to string new wire, said Dan Shoemaker, chief financial officer. If the town continues to balk at the offer, CommuniComm could end up building a second, parallel network of fiber-optic and coaxial cable, Shoemaker said.

In the process, CommuniCom could be the first to truly wire Lusk.

BUT HEY, THE PUBLICITY HELPS

Even if Lusk's high-tech wiring never goes on line, people like Mark Lohr still figure it's been good for the town. After all, it's brought publicity from Forbes, CBS, USA Today, the Denver Post magazine, YAHOO! Internet Life and, most recently, Microsoft.

"It gets us known," he said. "It makes people pick up the phone and ask about the possibility of moving here and working here and going to school here."

Margy Brown, a rancher whose Beeswax Handcream is mentioned in one ad, saw her sales go up more than 50 percent after the ads started running last fall. Corral West, an account she had been trying to get for years, placed a $10,000 order. Her three employees - all ranchers' wives - got raises.

"Every time I get a boost, they get a raise," she said. "They got three of them in a month."

But the fact that much of the publicity was based on the suspect premise of a wired town has Greg Coffey, owner of a Casper-based Internet service provider serving Lusk, scratching his head.

"You wonder who checked it out," he said, "because it's been obvious to us and obvious probably to the local community for some time that it really hasn't provided a tangible benefit. It's kind of a joke, but it just keeps popping its head up and people keep giving the town kudos for it. It's the story that won't die."

Eric Koivisto, Microsoft's director of advertising, insists that, given the town's positive attitude toward the Internet, the premise of the ads is still sound.

"There's a lot more they can do," he said. "But they're well situated for a connected future."

As the ad says, "Technology is a tool. Software is a tool. These are the dreams it's made for."

Eric Sorensen's phone message number is 206-464-8253. His e-mail address is: esorensen@seattletimes.com

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. SAMPLE OF TOWNS THAT ARE WIRED .

. LUSK, WYO., WAS AMONG THE SMALLEST TOWNS CHOSEN BY YAHOO! INTERNET LIFE MAGAZINE LAST YEAR WHEN IT PICKED ONE WIRED COMMUNITY FROM EACH STATE. THE LIST - WHICH HEAVILY FAVORS TOWNS WITH COLLEGES, COMPANIES, RESEARCH LABORATORIES - WAS MEANT TO BE REPRESENTATIVE, NOT EXHAUSTIVE.

. TOWN, STATE POPULATION . Auburn, Ala. 33,830 . Soldotna, Alaska 3,482 . Oracle, Ariz. 3,043 . Arkadelphia, Ark. 10,014 . Mill Valley, Calif. 13,038 . Aspen, Colo. 13,038 . Storrs, Conn. 12,198 . Newark, Del. 25,098 . Celebration, Fla. 1,500 . Alpharetta, Ga. 13,002 . Kihei, Hawaii 11,107 . Coeur D'Alene, Idaho 24,563 . Park Forest, Ill. 24,656 . West Lafayette, Ind. 25,907 . West Des Moines, Iowa 31,702 . Ulysses, Kansas 5,474 . Glasgow, Ky. 12,351 . Hammond, La. 15,871 . Waterville, Maine 17,173 . Kensington, Md. 1,713 . Westborough, Mass. 3,917 . Rochester, Mich. 7,130 . Eden Prairie, Minn. 39,311 . Nevada, Mo. 8,597 . Fulton, Miss. 3,387 . Bozeman, Mont. 22,660 . Wayne, Neb. 5,142 . Incline Village, Nev. 7,119 . Hanover, N.H. 6,538 . Princeton, N.J. 12,016 . Los Alamos, N.M. 11,455 . Clinton, N.Y. 2,238 . Cullowhee, N.C. 4,029 . Dickinson, N.D. 16,097 . Sylvania, Ohio 17,301 . Stillwater, Okla. 36,676 . Pendleton, Ore. 15,126 . Blue Bell, Penn. 6,091 . Middletown, R.I. 19,460 . Clemson, S.C. 11,096 . Madison, S.D. 6,257 . Oak Ridge, Tenn. 27,310 . Commerce, Texas 6,825 . Cedar City, Utah 13,443 . Middlebury, Vt. 6,007 . Blacksburg, Va. 34,590 . Liberty Lake, Wash. 2,015 . Shepherdstown, W.V. 1,287 . Pewaukee, Wisc. 4,941 . Lusk, Wyo. 1,504 .