The DIVORCE SEEKERS

 

True Stories of the Reno Divorce Ranch Era

500 images

“Best book yet about Nevada’s famous dude-divorce ranch business.”
– Eric Moody, Nevada Historical Society, Reno

“Bill’s stories are like an old Hollywood movie coming to life.”
– Sandra V. McGee, co-author of The Divorce Seekers 

 

The year was 1947. The place, Reno, Nevada.

It was 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 “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.… and the Flying M.E. (pronounced em-ee for the proprietor Emmy Wood) was the most exclusive of them all.

From 1947 to 1949, Bill McGee was the head dude wrangler on the Flying M.E., located twenty miles south of Reno. 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.” – Bill McGee

Bill McGee 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 hardcover coffee table book is richly illustrated with 500 b/w images, most never before published and from the scrapbooks of former Flying M.E. guests.

“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.”
– Deb Caletti, bestselling author of the Reno divorce ranch novel, The Secrets She Keeps

Book Trailer

Table of Contents 
444 pp, 500 b/w photos & illustrations
Notes, appendices, bibliography, index
Hardcover, 8.5″ x 11″, $35.00 (cover price $49.95)
BMC Publications (2004)

Meet Bill McGee

Next up: Once Upon A Time In RENO