Alvin Wiederspahn

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Alvin Laramie "Al" Wiederspahn (born January 18, 1949) is a prominent attorney in Cheyenne who served for ten years as a Democrat in the Wyoming House of Representatives (1979-1985) and the Wyoming State Senate (1985-1989). He is married to Cynthia Lummis (born 1954), a former Republican state treasurer and also, like her husband, a former member of both houses of the Wyoming legislature. She too represented Cheyenne, both the state capital and the seat of Laramie County, the most populous county in Wyoming.

Wiederspahn was born in Cheyenne to J. Arling Wiederspahn (1916-2007) and Edvina Wiederspahn (1921-2004). The senior Wiederspahn was originally from Grand Island, Nebraska, but he moved to Cheyenne in 1936. Arling Wiederspahn, who owned and operated the Wiederspahn Chapel of the Chimes funeral home from 1956-1987, was a pioneer mortician in Cheyenne. He served as the elected Democratic coroner of Laramie County from 1963-1979 and a member of the Laramie County Community College board of trustees from 1970-1985. Arling Wiederspahn served by appointment of Democratic Edward Herschler on the Wyoming Board of Embalming.

Young Wiederspahn graduated with honors from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, the seat of Albany County west of Cheyenne. He then procured his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Denver Law School in the Colorado capital.

Wiederspahn began courting the Republican Lummis while both served in the state House. They were both elected to the House in 1978 and married in 1983. Lummis was elected to the state Senate in 1982, when Wiederspahn won his third term in the House. She served in the Wyoming Senate for three terms through 1994, but Wiederspahn completed only one four-year term, having been defeated for reelection in 1988.

Lummis was elected treasurer in 1998 and reelected without opposition in 2002. She was term-limited from seeking a third election as treasurer in 2006. In 2007, shortly after the death of her father-in-law, she filed as a Republican candidate for the vacancy in the United States Senate created by the death of incumbent Craig L. Thomas. However, Democratic Governor Dave Freudenthal, with whom Lummis had previously quarreled, chose then state Senator John Barrasso to compete the first third of Thomas' Senate term.

Through his Wiederspahn and Reese firm in Cheyenne, Wiederspahn specializes in public utility law, municipal finance, estate planning, real property, health care, securities, and corporate law. Lummis is also a lawyer, a graduate of the University of Wyoming Law School. Wiederspahn is a director of First National Bank of Wyoming and was formerly on the board of the Rocky Mountain Bank.

Wiederspahn is actively involved in historic preservation. He was the developer in the renovation of the Plains Hotel, a Cheyenne landmark that dates to 1911. The Cheyenne Historic Preservation Board has on occasion honored Wiederspahn for his work in the area. He is also a Wyoming advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Wiederspahn served on the advisory committee of Cheyenne's Vision 2020 project. He is a founder and former chairman of the Cheyenne Downtown Development Authority. He is active on the board of the Homeless Shelter and is an elder of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Cheyenne. Wiederspahn is also active in the field of mental health and is president of the Laramie County Association for Retarded Citizens. He is a member of the board of the Cheyenne Symphony.

Wiederspahn has also served as a volunteer judge of the juvenile drug court for Cheyenne, which hears approximately twenty-five cases per week.

Wiederspahn and Lummis also own ranches in Wheatland and Lincoln County near Kemmerer in western Wyoming. The couple has one daughter, Annaliese Wiederspahn, a graduate of Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania.