CHEYENNE – Shane Smith first came to Cheyenne out of curiosity.
He was a horticulture student at Colorado State University in the mid-1970s when he heard Community Action of Laramie County was planning on building the nation’s largest passively solar-heated greenhouse off Whitney Road, and he just wanted to be involved in the building process.
But after the greenhouse was completed in 1977, Community Action still needed someone who knew how to grow things in it.
Smith said he’d do it.
“They hired me for very little,” he said in an interview Thursday. “But I was glad to have a real job.”
It wasn’t easy. He spent the first year living in a carpenter’s Airstream to save up money for a converted garage in south Cheyenne. And money was so tight that he once cut his already-meager salary in half to buy seeds and keep operating.
But it was a lot of fun, too. He got to run his own large greenhouse right out of college, and the place was soon supplying a popular farmer’s market, attracting droves of volunteers, especially seniors, and had started a program working with disadvantaged youth.
Claus Johnson said in an interview Thursday that when he came for the assistant director job in 1986, he was underwhelmed by the small facility, but impressed by how much Smith and Tom Throgmorton, who he was replacing, had accomplished.
“They had a solid volunteer base,” he said. “And there was definitely a long-range plan.”
It took some savvy politicking to make that plan reality.
By 1985, Smith had secured nearly $400,000 in Community Development Block Grant money to build the first building of what’s now the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens in Lions Park.
But before he could take the big step, he ran into trouble with his original benefactor. He had been lobbying hard for the city to absorb the garden into the Parks and Recreation Department and provide sustainable funding, but he said Community Action wanted to run the facility on contract.
He said he was eventually fired.
“But that only let me lobby full-time,” he said.
And shortly after the City Council voted to take in the Gardens, Parks Director David Romero hired him back.
Johnson said that was pretty standard for Smith.
“When you plant a seed in his head that you probably can’t do it, he just takes that as a challenge. It’s all the more reason to do it.”
And three decades later, what was once an interesting challenge for a Colorado college kid has become a legacy.
Smith concedes there were offers of bigger opportunities through the years. But when he was younger, they were all staff jobs in big cities, and he liked being a director in Cheyenne. And when he grew older and better offers came in, they were mostly on the East Coast, a non-starter for a Westerner. Plus, Cheyenne was a good place to raise his two boys.
And in an interview conducted throughout the recently completed Grand Conservatory, the capstone of a $16 million sixth-penny sales tax revenue effort passed in 2012, Smith said he was glad he stayed. He radiated pride at what he, his team and hundreds of volunteers have accomplished.
He recalled the time in the 1980s when the city was thinking about reducing funding for his efforts, and one of his volunteers tearfully told her hairdresser about it. Her stylist just so happened to be married to the City Council president, Smith said, and on the night of the vote, the council decided to keep the funding coming.
He remembered the woman who used to come in every six months to slap her checkbook down on the front desk and ask for the attendant to make out a donation for $10.
And he made an oft-quoted point that Cheyenne is a pretty tough place to have a garden: high winds, big hail and the worst snow cover on the Front Range made this the only place without any Native American settlement in the area, he explains.
“I tell people, ‘You’d have to be an idiot to (grow things here), and I’m the idiot,” he said.
But on March 2, he will no longer be that idiot, at least not full-time. He will retire then, handing off the reins to interim director Tina Worthman.
He’ll still be involved as the director of the nonprofit Friends of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, where he said he’ll be working to grow the foundation’s endowment.
But he said he’s also looking forward to updating his book, “Greenhouse Gardener’s Companion,” finishing another one titled “Ruthless Gardener,” playing mandolin and tending to his own plants.
Still, he’ll be missed.
“Shane’s an institution here,” Wortham said.
“The man has been dedicated to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens to a fault,” remarked Jack Speight, who with his wife donated the water feature in the conservatory.
But Smith said he was leaving the new place in great hands.
“I’m sure it’ll turn out great,” he said. “We’ve got the best team we’ve ever had.”
And he was sure the community would take care of the gardens, too.
“Cheyenne should be proud of this place,” he said. “They voted for it; they believed in it.
“I remember one woman coming into the old (building) before this one and saying, ‘I’m so proud of what we’ve done.’ That ownership is the secret sauce of this place.”
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