Brit rebel trades comfort of success to champion American West

CARSON CITY, Nev. - C.J. Hadley greets a visitor with a nonstop monologue peppered with salty language as she rails against perceived demons of the American West.

"I'm horrified," she says. "Isn't anybody awake? Hello! Hel-LO newspapers in this nation!"

After a 10-minute dissertation, the editor of "Range" magazine pumps her fist and sniffs at her own fury.

"I'm hot today," she said. "Anyway, what did you want to ask me? With that opening?"

Call her what you will - provocative, fanatic, passionate, emotional, testy, stubborn, defiant, driven - this British-born renegade and champion of the West is anything but boring.

Caroline Joy Hadley was born March 12, 1941, in Birmingham, England, the youngest of three children. Her father worked in a steel mill. Her mother in a glass factory.

Her formal education came to an abrupt halt at 15, when the headmistress labeled her "uneducable" and asked her parents to remove her from school. Worried about their daughter's future, her mother took a night job making leather gloves so she could go to typing school and have a career.

But Hadley's fate would not be mundane.

Rebellious and gutsy, the next 40 years would prove a roller-coaster of experiences - from mucking slop at a pig farm in Iowa and cleaning shrimp boats in the Bahamas to racing a 1912 Mercedes Benz around the wine country in Germany and being among a select group of journalists invited to drive the lunar rover at Cape Canaveral.

"My father bought me a one-way ticket to Canada when I was 17 and told me to seek opportunity," she said.

From Canada, she hitchhiked to New York City and landed a job as a typist. Restless after a few months, she thumbed her way to Los Angeles.

She made her way up and down the West Coast before returning to England on the Queen Elizabeth in 1961 so she could return to the United States legally. She became a U.S. citizen in 1972.

Back in New York, she worked for a publishing house. Three years later, in 1966, she became a secretary to the publisher of Car and Driver magazine. She quit after four days out of boredom, then was rehired as an editorial assistant and eventually became managing editor, a position she held for six years.

When they wouldn't make her editor in 1972, she quit again.

"It was fun. But it was time to go," she said. "So I became a rodeo photographer.

"I knew nothing about rodeo. But I had my freedom back."

She eventually returned to the West and hooked up with a tuna outfit in Port Angeles, Wash. But the sea was not her calling.

"Twenty-one days at sea, 21 days of storm, 21 pounds I lost," she said. "In the end the captain had to bring me back to shore 'cause I had malnutrition, dehydration and was just about to croak I think.

"I wanted to work in any state without a coast line and I only had four bucks so I came to Nevada."

She was hired at Nevada Magazine as a photographer and soon became its editor. She stayed for 10 years - the longest she's been anywhere, except for "Range."

After Nevada magazine, she traveled the globe as a freelance writer for such publications as Sports Illustrated, Saturday Evening Post and Motorland.

"I was a fairly wealthy travel writer," she said. "Rode a camel across the Simpson Desert in Australia for SI. Fourteen days on a camel, only three days did we see water."

She's had other offers for high-paying jobs, but these days she's traded the comforts of success for a paltry paycheck to champion the cause of ranchers and others who make their living from the land.

"What keeps me going is hearing from one rancher who thinks - he's not right - but he thinks I'm going to make a difference to him," she said, her eyes welling with tears that belie her grit.

"I have enormous passion for people who have what I admire - work ethic, honesty, integrity. I haven't found one ranching family out there who doesn't have them all.

"And there isn't one ranch I leave in my pickup truck in a trail of dust where I'm not weeping for them and their problems," she said, her jaws clenched as the tears flowed freely.

"It's very tiring, trying to save the West."

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