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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>🚧 Daily Smile: Friday, September 6, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Smile: Friday, September 6, 2024

 When you wake up from a nap and don't know what year it is.....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Government & Politics

Legislature

A local Casper political activist has set his sights on the Wyoming House seat currently held by longtime House District 37 Rep. Steve Harshman, a Republican and former House speaker.

Ross Schriftman, 73, announced his candidacy on Thursday and said he is seeking the Republican nomination for the seat.

“I’m running to be a watchdog for hard-working taxpayers,” he said.

Schriftman, a longtime Philadelphia-area resident, moved to Wyoming in 2021. He was a 2024 candidate for the Casper City Council Ward 2 seat and lost. 

 in Casper city and school board meetings, offering his ideas and opinions during public comment opportunities.

The long-time Philadelphia-area insurance agent also has been a frequent speaker before various state legislature committees. Health insurance concerns at the state level are partly fueling his decision to become a candidate, he said.

“I thought I could help especially in health care and health insurance because that has been my focus for 50 years,” Schriftman said. “For about 30 years I have been working on health care reform both at the national level and with the states.”

He thinks the state should send a resolution to the Trump administration as well as the congressional delegation encouraging the repeal of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare.

Schriftman said he would advocate for people to be able to set up a health savings account no matter what type of insurance they have so they can cover “their regular expenses and buy policies that would cover their more expensive health care needs.”

Other ideas he hopes to be able to bring to the legislature are in the governmental tax and spending categories. He said he has been tracking those issues locally and at the state level as well and has ideas on ways to raise more revenue for the state while helping residents struggling with their property taxes.

Schriftman is under no illusion that if Harshman runs again, he has a big hurdle to overcome. Harshman, a retired teacher and longtime Natrona County High School football coach has been in office since 2003.

“He’s known as a winning football coach and when he speaks it's about the history of Wyoming which is very interesting,” Schriftman said. “I think we have some differences especially on the growth of government.”

Schriftman said he thinks the state needs to work at growing the private sector by reducing regulations and “government involvement” while ensuring there is infrastructure to help Wyoming-based businesses grow.

Harshman said he will not make a decision on whether he’s going to run for his 13th term until around mid-April. He wants to get through the upcoming Wyoming legislature budget session and is focusing on issues there. He said he’s had opponents in the primary for nine of his 12 previous races and thinks having a challenger is positive.

“I think it’s good. You get to get out there and talk about the issues,” he said. “You talk about Wyoming’s future and leaving it better than you found it.”

A big issue for Harshman continues to be demographics with the outflow of people under 25 leaving the state for careers. Affordable housing, recruitment of industries and businesses, and solving those issues surrounding the loss of the younger generation to other states remains a priority that needs to be addressed, he said.

“I think the biggest group of people now moving into  Wyoming are like Mr. Schriftman,” he said. “They are 60 years or older, so we have to keep working on that.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Seeking Head Start"}]

Schriftman said the reason he is announcing early is so that he can start raising money for his candidacy. He said he has conversations with several people prior to announcing for the seat and received encouragement to do it.

He plans to limit any contributions to his campaign to $250 from either individuals or political action committees.

During his time on the East Coast, the insurance agent ran for the Pennsylvania State House two times and lost in the 1970s as a Democrat and also was an unsuccessful candidate for Montgomery County Controller in 1979.

His switch to the Republican Party involved disagreements with Hillary Clinton’s policies and Barak Obama’s administration going after conservative groups using the IRS.

Schriftman has said that his move to Casper followed the pandemic when he perceived people in Philadelphia had become isolated and scared. His search for a low-tax environment and conservative state drew him to central Wyoming.

Characterizing himself as a “limited government, constitutional Republican," he said his focus if elected will be on “common sense reform and private sector growth.”

Schriftman, the current president of the Natrona County Chapter of Wyoming Right to Life, said other goals and priorities would be to protect human life from “conception to natural death” defend and advocate for parental rights and raise expectations for academic results in public education.

He is a political science graduate of American University in Washington, D.C. and has authored a book “My Million Dollar Mom” chronicling the life of his mom, Shirley, and wrote and produced a short award-winning film of the same name.

In addition to his political races, Schriftman has competed in more than 200 marathons and is a member of the local Casper running club, the Windy City Striders.

Schriftman 1 16 26

<title>🚧 Casper Political Activist Announces Bid For Wyoming State House District 37 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Local Casper political activist Ross Schriftman has announced his candidacy for the Wyoming State House District 37 seat, currently held by Rep. Steve Harshman. Harshman, who has been in office since 2003, has not yet decided whether to seek a 13th term.

Casper Political Activist Announces Bid For Wyoming State House District 37

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Inga Arvad was the fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar in 1946 when she met a cowboy-turned-movie star from Wyoming, Tim McCoy. 

After a whirlwind romance, the two surprised Hollywood and their friends with a secret marriage, and Arvad settled down out of the limelight in Nogales, Arizona, to raise their two sons, Ronald and Terrence. 

As Arvad volunteered at the public library and chauffeured her sons to school, not many knew her adventurous past until she was gone, taken by cancer at the early age of 60. She left behind her notes for a memoir and the letters from her one true love, John F. Kennedy. 

While others had cashed in on any affiliation with the Kennedys, Arvad considered her romance with the young Naval officer who would ultimately become president too precious to flaunt. It was only after her death that the story came to light. 

Born into Copenhagen, Denmark, high society in 1913, Arvad had led an intriguing life that caught the eye of then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover’s agents had amassed a huge file on her containing thousands of reports, as his agents spied on the young socialite with illegal wiretaps and bugs. 

What Hoover caught instead of a spy was nothing more than a woman in love. 

[{"type":"text","text":"The Danish Beauty Queen"}]

Inga Arvad, christened as Inga Marie Arvad Peterson, was raised in an influent household in Denmark with a widowed mother who wanted her daughter to be self-reliant and well-educated.

At 17, while training to be a professional pianist, Arvad entered a beauty contest that changed the course of her life. She became Miss Denmark, met European royalty and a certain wealthy Egyptian, Kamal Abdel Nabi, who became her first husband after a short two-month courtship.  

Arvad fully expected to be an equal in their marriage, but found life in Egypt restricting, according to the letters she sent home to her mother. Two years later, she escaped Egypt and returned to Denmark to secure a divorce. 

It was then that she started pursuing a journalism career while also acting in a comedy for a director who had a flair for stretching the truth. 

As famous director Paul Fejos wooed the much younger starlet, 22-year-old Arvad was getting ready to embark on a coup that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

[{"type":"text","text":"Hitler’s Nordic Beauty"}]

It was now 1935 and Nazi Germany was the biggest story in the world. Arvad decided that was where she needed to go to start establishing a career as a writer. 

Without any formal training, she convinced a woman’s magazine to give her press credentials as its Berlin correspondent. Her goal was to interview Adolf Hitler and prove to the world that she was a serious journalist.  

With her beauty and warmth, Arvad moved in the upper circles of Berlin easily, writing human interest stories about the people around her. Her charm caught the eye of the highest officials in the Nazi party, including Hitler himself. Years later, she wrote of her budding journalism career in her handwritten memoirs. 

“I don’t want a political interview,” she had told German officials. “I don’t know anything about international relations, I just want (to know) little things about the Fuhrer.” 

It took Arvad six months of begging to arrange the interview and she ended up speaking with the dictator for an hour and a half in an unprecedented private meeting. She wrote that it was more of a conversation than an interview as she sought to write a profile on him as a man, not as a political figure. 

Afterward, Hitler remarked that Arvad was “the most perfect example of Nordic beauty” that he had ever seen. It was a compliment that would come back to haunt her.

On Nov. 1, 1935, the article headlined “An Hour with Adolf Hitler” ran in the Berlin paper Berlingske Tidende. Pleased with her article, Hitler invited Arvad back as a special guest at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The resulting second article was published that same year on the front page of the London’s Sunday Dispatch.

The editor wrote that it was “one of the most unusual interviews ever given to a newspaper by the head of a nation. In it, the Fuhrer freely reveals his inner thoughts and his dreams, tells of his aspirations for his people, discloses some of the plans – made in his youth – which are now being carried out, and gives a hint of ambitions he had had to suppress.” 

“One likes him immediately,” Arvad wrote about her private interview. “He seems lonely. The eyes, which are tender hearted, look directly at you. They radiate power.”

However, any warm feelings for Hitler were eventually replaced as she began to see the cruelty that had been hidden in the shadows from the upper class. 

At a party in 1936, the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, approached the young woman. According to her own written admission, the Gestapo hinted strongly that she should become their spy. Terrified, Arvad fled Berlin that night, quickly finding her way back to Denmark. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Trailed By The FBI"}]

Between the interviews of Hitler, Arvad married the film director Fejos and, after being recruited as a spy, Arvad followed her husband on an exotic trip to film documentaries among the headhunters of Malaysia. 

It was supposed to be a two-year trip, but Fejos ended up sending her away for “her safety.” Fuming, Arvad found herself spending most of her married life away from her husband. 

In 1940, she left Europe alone and eventually relocated to Washington, D.C., as a syndicated columnist with the Washington Times-Herald. Here, one of her co-workers was none other than Kathleen Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s younger sister.   

Arvad and Kathleen Kennedy became very close friends. Both were unaware that a photo of Arvad with Hitler was about to come to light. The photograph was taken at the 1936 Olympics, and Arvad claimed she had never seen it before. Another small newspaper clipping was discovered that proclaimed Inga Arvad as “chief of Nazi publicity in Denmark” and had been published in papers all over Europe, though never in America. 

It was Arvad herself, she later wrote, who marched the photo over to the FBI and demanded, in her naivety, to clear her name of being a spy. Her plan backfired, and soon even President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asking questions about the Danish columnist and her Nazi connections. 

Ignorant of the attention of the FBI, Arvad was busy interviewing the elite of Washington, D.C., and developing a romance with a then-unknown ensign, John F. Kennedy. 

As Hoover’s FBI agents spied on Arvad, they only took a passing interest in the young Navy officer who was frequenting her apartment. Hoover bugged her phone and even went as far as bugging her mattress, never knowing or caring about Kennedy as they were more interested in Arvad than the man she was dating. 

[{"type":"text","text":"JFK’s Greatest Love"}]

The 24-year-old naval ensign was infatuated by Arvad, who was five years his senior and had seen more of the world than he had. 

Kennedy later noted in his own letters to Arvad, who he called Inga Binga, that she knew him better than most of his own family and longtime friends. It was to Arvad that he first confessed his political ambitions, and it was she who encouraged him to tell his father. 

In this way, she advised, he could best pursue the White House. This advice proved to be their undoing. 

Following Arvad’s advice, Kennedy finally told his father his political ambitions. In 1942, Kennedy received an ultimatum from his father, the powerful former ambassador Joseph Kennedy. His father would help him, but he had to give up Arvad. 

Believing their relationship to be nothing more than a fling, Joseph Kennedy had at first allowed it to continue. However, once the elder Kennedy received intel that the FBI suspected Arvad as a Nazi spy, he insisted it had to end.

When this threat didn’t work, “Big Joe,” as he was known to his family, pulled strings and had his son sent to the Pacific. This resulted in JFK nearly being killed and returning home a war hero. Throughout it all, Kennedy and Arvad kept in contact, and only to her did he confide his horrific wartime experiences. 

Their last time together was when Kennedy was running for Congress. After their final goodbye, Arvad wrote that they both knew he could not achieve his political dreams with her at his side. Instead, Arvad turned her attention to a cowboy from Wyoming and Hollywood movie star, Tim McCoy.

Even though the FBI, the U.S. Navy, “Big Joe” Kennedy and a world war could not break their relationship, it was Kennedy’s own political ambition that ultimately separated them. He went on to win his first major political race and Arvad became the mother she always wanted to be.

Throughout the years, Kennedy and Arvad continued to ask after each other, even up to JFK’s assassination. Devastated by the news, Arvad received a note of condolence from their mutual friend, Arthur Krock. 

“I think I told you before that every time I saw President Kennedy,” New York Times columnist Krock wrote Arvad, “he would say to me with a twinkle in his eye, ‘How’s Inger?’”

According to her memoirs, Arvad knew that if it hadn’t been for her past interviews with Hitler, it might have been her in that limousine that fateful day in Texas instead of Jackie Kennedy, when Arvad’s beloved Jack Kennedy was assassinated.  

[{"type":"text","text":"The Cowboy’s Bride"}]

Tim McCoy described his wife in his 1977 biography “Tim McCoy Remembers The West” as “Danish and lyrical.” 

In 1946, when McCoy was 55 and Arvad was 32, the two married and seven months later, Inga gave birth to a son, Ronald. 

It wasn’t until Ronald was in college, according to his own account, that his mother shared a startling revelation. She had long suspected that McCoy might not be the father of her oldest son, but instead had suspicions that Kennedy was the true father. 

Arvad, the younger McCoy recalled, told him her secret because of his interest in politics and she wondered if it was because of this possible lineage. 

Shocked, he shared the news with his younger brother, Terrance, and Arvad was furious. She didn’t want the information bandied about and her sons no longer spoke of it. It wasn’t until after her death that her connection to the president was revealed, much to the McCoy family’s embarrassment, and shared in a memoir about John F. Kennedy.

Inga Arvad had no funeral, so the memoir “Inga” written by Scott Farris using Arvad’s own writings, became her eulogy. 

Arvad, Farris wrote, should not be forgotten. She had influenced American politics — even if it was by simply encouraging a young Kennedy to follow his dreams — then finally found motherhood with a Wyoming Western movie star.

Inga Arvad composite 8 18 24

<title>🚧 How Hitler’s “Nordic Beauty” And JFK's Love Became The Wife Of A Wyoming Movie Star | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Inga Arvad had been adored by Adolf Hitler, loved by President John F. Kennedy and pursued by the FBI. She ended up marrying a Western movie star from Wyoming.

Daily Smile: Friday, September 6, 2024

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