A Nevada Divorce Ranch Memoir. True stories. 180 Vintage Images.
RENO, 1947. Imagine you’ve had enough of your cheating spouse. You’re ready to leave. But it’s 1947. And that means unless your spouse “gives” you a divorce, you’re stuck.
Or you could go to Reno!
Divorce seekers by the thousands were running to "The Biggest Little City in the World” for a six-week, no-fault divorce. If they had the money and the need for privacy, they stayed on one of the dude ranches around town. Someone called those dude ranches divorce ranches and the name stuck.
From 1947-1949, Montana cowboy Bill McGee was the dude wrangler on the famous Flying M E divorce ranch, an exclusive hideout for the wealthy. He entertained Eastern socialites with names like Astor and du Pont, and Hollywood movie stars Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.
Bill and his co-author/wife, Sandra, recapture Reno's era as "Divorce Capital of the World" in true stories and 180 images, most from the private collections of former Flying M E guests or their offspring.
“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
184 pp, 180 photographs & illustrations. 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,
The only memoir written by a former Nevada divorce ranch wrangler.
Bill McGee's stories are like an old Hollywood movie coming to life.
