A Nevada Divorce Ranch Memoir. True stories. 500 images.
RENO, 1947
The heyday of the Reno six-week divorce era. Divorce seekers (a term coined by the media) came running to Reno by the thousands for a six-week “quickie” divorce – the rich, the poor, the famous, and the working class.
If they had the money and wanted their privacy from the prying eyes of the press, they stayed on a divorce ranch (a media term for a dude ranch catering to divorce seekers) and the Flying M.E. (pronounced “em-ee” for Emmy Wood, the proprietor of the ranch), twenty miles south of Reno in Washoe Valley, was the most exclusive of them all.
From 1947 to 1949, Bill McGee was the head dude wrangler on the Flying M.E. He entertained wealthy Eastern socialites with names like Astor and du Pont, and Hollywood movie stars Ava Gardner and Clark Gable.
“At the age of twenty-one and the only man on the ranch, surrounded by all those beautiful and wealthy women, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Those were some of the best years of my life.” – Bill McGee
Bill and his co-author/wife, Sandra McGee, recapture those years in The Divorce Seekers – A Photo Memoir of a Nevada Dude Wrangler, a collection of true stories about the fascinating and changing cast of characters that came and went every six weeks on the Flying M.E. The 444-page hardcover coffee table book is richly illustrated with 500 b/w photographs, most never before published, and many from the scrapbooks of former Flying M.E. guests.
444 pp, 500 b/w photographs & illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index Hardcover 8.5″ x 11″
Delightful reading about bygone times and glamorous people … a valuable history of a unique epoch of the West.
The images – with their smoky, black-and-white, retro allure – are what brought the time and place alive for me so that I could bring my characters to life in my novel … This book is a treasure if only for the photos alone.
Best book yet about Nevada's famous dude-divorce ranch business.
This casual, heartfelt history of the Nevada divorce ranch era is a fascinating social document spangled with many of the period’s socialites and movie stars at their most vulnerable. With a handy Reno divorce glossary,
Bill McGee's stories are like an old Hollywood movie coming to life.
