I met Horace Bixby Weybech III on Wednesday, July 20, 1991, a month and a day before his 142nd birthday.

One-hundred-and-forty-second birthday. That's not a typo.

I was news director at KMER radio--K-95--in Kemmerer, Wyoming, at the time. Kemmerer is a coal-mining town, population about 2,000 last time I looked, and shrinking like every other small town in Wyoming (small towns are the only kind in Wyoming, population about 460,000), but K-95 is a 5000-watt radio station, among the first built in Wyoming Way Back When, so we had some regional presence.

Our broadcast signal reached all the towns in southwestern Wyoming, so as news director, I covered events from Evanston to Wamsutter in the south along I-80, and up to Pinedale and even Bondurant, a few miles south of Jackson, in the north. That's a lot of sagebrush and dirt, with a lot of jackrabbits and antelope and a lot of small towns, but a lot happened in those towns. Oh, nothing important, like you'd find in big cities. We saw no murders, riots, or terrorists, but to the people who lived there, what happened was important. If it was news to them, we covered it.

The station management--they owned a station up in Jackson too, and one in Cody--took local news coverage seriously. Maybe it was because of their cosmopolitan Boston roots, but they felt obliged to pay a fulltime news director at each of their stations. Prestige. Besides, a small town like Kemmerer didn't generate enough advertising revenue by itself. We had to cater to all those little bitty towns our signal reached to make ends meet.

So if something happened in Evanston, I had to cover it, never mind that I might, on any particular day, also have a town council meeting in LaBarge at the same time I also had to cover a school board meeting in Afton.

Every other radio news director in Wyoming had problems just like mine, and there were no more than two dozen of us at the best of times in the whole state doing serious radio news, so we all pretty much got along okay.

The way we covered two events at once is that we shared. For instance, I'd call Rob Pack at KLDI in Laramie and ask him for tape on something that involved a Green River man attending the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and I'd return the favor for him when occasion warranted. We swapped tape and tips. Everybody did it.

That's how I met the 141-year-old man.

I'd just finished taping my 4:55 p.m. newscast, the last of the day. It was about 2 p.m., and I was getting ready to go home early for once--I'd been up since 4:30 a.m. There were no meetings scheduled that evening anywhere. I often had three or four evening meetings a week, so I felt lucky and I wasn't tired so I was looking forward to getting a few pages done on my novel.

But before I got out the door, the phone in my studio rang. (I called it a studio. It was more like a converted coat closet.) It was Rob at KLDI.

"I got one for you," he said.

"Shoot." I hit the tape recorder. Tape everything. Who knows what you can use?

And Rob told me about this 141-year-old man a source in the Albany County Sheriff's Office tipped him about.