After my seismic career
By Andrew Selsky

It was winter in 1984 in Jackson Hole, where I was living and trying to keep my career in journalism alive. I was a freelance correspondent for the Casper Star-Tribune, Wyoming's biggest-circulation daily.

Unlike work for seismic oil exploration crews, which I had done off and on for the past two years in Wyoming, Montana and Texas, freelance journalism in Jackson didn't pay much.

I sometimes had to supplement my income by getting minimum-wage day jobs through the Wyoming Employment Commission. One day I was hired to chip ice from the parking lot of a small shopping center on North Cache Street. I was given a long-handled implement with a blade on the end to break up the inch-think ice and crusted snow on the parking lot. I was working in front of a shop when I saw Gary Rossington walk from the parking lot, heading for the shop. He came right past me.

I had read in a one-paragraph entry in Rolling Stone magazine that Gary was living in Wyoming with his new wife and "chopping wood," I guess a reference to him being some kind of mountain man. I think I had learned by the time Gary came walking past me that he was living in Jackson Hole.

As he came walking past I introduced myself as a correspondent for the Star-Tribune, and asked if I could interview him.

"Sure," he said. He didn't blink an eye that some guy with an ice-breaking tool standing in front of a shop was claiming to be a reporter. He said I could come by his house on the Elk Refuge, just outside town.

I called my editor in Casper, and asked if he'd be interested in a story. I was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan from way back. I distinctly remember driving from Virginia Tech to Washington one autumn morning with my girlfriend when a DJ on the radio said the band's plane had crashed the previous evening, and played Skynyrd music as a tribute.

My editor said he doubted Gary would consent to an interview.

"These stars, they don't want to be bothered and want to be left alone," he said.

I told him that Gary had already agreed.

I was pretty broke back then and didn't even have a car. A friend gave me a ride to Gary's log cabin on the Elk Refuge. Gary and his wife Dale were extremely gracious. This was the first famous person I had interviewed, except for Texas Gov. Bill Clements back when I was a reporter for the Cleburne Times-Review, near Fort Worth.

After the interview, I took a photograph of Gary, Dale and their baby daughter in front of their cabin. Being Jackson in winter it, of course, was a cold day. They put on their coats and a hooded one on their cute daughter Mary.

I didn't have a way to get back to town, so Gary said he'd be happy to drive me. We climbed into his pickup truck and the tires went crunching over snow as we drove into Jackson. He and Dale are genuinely nice people.

The story and picture wound up on the front page of the Star-Tribune's Wyoming section in the Sunday edition. You can see it here:

http://www.geocities.com/aceserve2001/Rossington.pdf

It's got one mistake. The plane crash happened in Mississippi, not Louisiana (their destination was Baton Rouge, La.). But I wrote my story in the pre-Internet age, back in the stone ages, when information was not readily available. Certainly the Teton County Library didn't have anything on the plane crash.

Gary was willing to talk about almost anything...his rock 'n' roll life, living in Wyoming, but not the crash. It was still too painful to discuss. He lost some good friends that day in 1977, and this was just six-and-a-half years later.