Sun Valley resident and U.S. Consul General of Nepal Bill Cassell got a knock on his door some years ago. He opened it to find a young American woman standing beside a Nepalese man. "Are you the consul general of Nepal?" she asked. "Yes," Cassell replied. "Then will you marry us?" she asked.
Cassell learned that the young lady had fallen in love with her trekking guide while traveling in the mountain kingdom of Nepal. Unsure of how long her crush would last, Cassell asked her to return after he got the necessary paperwork together.
"I strung it out for seven months," he says. By the time Cassell got around to conducting one of his more obscure official duties, the woman had fallen out of love with her guide. A box came to Cassell's door some time later.
"It was from the young lady's father—a case of fine whiskey and a letter of thanks."
In addition to his duties as official liaison for Nepal, Cassell also serves as commander of American Legion Post 115 in Ketchum. He and his wife, Jeanne Cassell, came to the Wood River Valley 14 years ago and quickly became involved in local civic duties. Jeanne was named chamber of commerce Citizen of the Year three years ago. She is president of the board of the Croy Canyon Ranch Foundation, which is raising funds to build an assisted-living facility near Hailey. Bill has served on the board of KART (which became Mountain Rides Transportation Authority), the local Minnesota Public Radio board, and as junior warden of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Sun Valley during a period of expansion several years ago.
"We believe that if you are going to be in a community, you should do your part," Cassell says. "There's an old saying—'There isn't much to see in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.'"
No doubt William Cassell, Ph.D., has made contributions of his own to the lore of Sun Valley. An able raconteur who seems to know and be liked by everyone, he also has a knack for making things happen. He is a former college president who spent his professional career sharing academic and management expertise with developing nations.
Cassell helped to establish a college campus in Japan, developed a faculty exchange program with Tianjin University in China and worked as an educational consultant with the Ford Foundation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Mariana Islands and elsewhere.
He once found a position for an English professor in Indonesia.
"The guy we sent was from West Virginia, so for years I was waiting for that country to elect a president who had a West Virginia drawl."
Cassell's father was in the U.S. Navy, so the family traveled. On Dec. 7, 1941, Bill was in third grade at the U.S Navy base in Pearl Harbor. While walking to church that morning with one of his sisters, he looked up to see Japanese aircraft roaring over the bay, the "red meatball" of the Japanese military clearly visible under their wings.
"I saw smoke coming up and people came running up to us and said, 'Go back, go back, this is war!'"
Cassell's father was at sea at the time on a Navy destroyer, on a mission to find the Japanese navy.
"He was gone for the next two weeks and we didn't know if he was dead or alive."
Cassell remembers the day his father returned and was reunited with his mother on the dock.
"It was the most emotional I ever saw my parents. They just collapsed together."
Six months later, the Cassell family sailed on a troop ship to San Francisco. While in graduate school at Claremont College many years later, Cassell befriended a young Nepalese student named Bhekh Thapa. Thapa would study at the United Nations before being appointed as ambassador to the United States from the Royal Kingdom of Nepal.
Thapa remembered his old friend Bill Cassell and arranged for him to be appointed honorary Nepalese consul general by the king of Nepal in 1983. He is one of four consuls for Nepal in the United States. One of the others is Dick Blum, the husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Cassell is friends with Lady June Hillary, the New Zealand consul general for Nepal, and widow of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest.
"Right now we are working on a child adoption program between the United States and Nepal, as well as a plan to build hydropower projects that could sell electricity to India," says Cassell.
Cassell's quasi-diplomatic position also calls for the promotion of tourism in Nepal, an increasingly difficult prospect in recent years. In 2001, several of Cassell's friends in the Nepalese royal family were killed when Crown Prince Dipendra allegedly shot and killed several members of his family, including King Birendra and Queen Aiswarya. A decade-long Maoist revolution and weeks of street protests eventually led to the downfall of the monarchy.
The first president of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Ram Baran Yadav, was sworn in on July 23, 2008. Chaos has ensued in recent weeks as factions fight over the form of a new constitution for the country.
"We like to say that things were simpler before because there was only one person to please—the king," says Cassell, who thought he would get a letter terminating his position following the end of the monarchy. "I guess I have friends on both sides over there."
“There isn’t much to see in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.”
Bill Cassell
