Oral History Program Jeff Flitton and Wendi Flitton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 June 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jeff Flitton Wendy Flitton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 June 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Flitton, Jeff & Wendy, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 3 June 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Wendi & Jeff Flitton June 3, 2014 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jeff and Wendi Flitton. The interview was conducted on June 3, 2014, by Lorrie Rands, at Superior Grinding. Jeff and Wendi talk about the Bar T Down Rodeo. Woodrow Johnson is on camera. LR: So when and where were you born? WF: Well I, Wendi was born here in Salt Lake at the LDS hospital, April 2, 1962. My family lived here in Salt Lake. Grandfather’s place was just off of 33rd South, 35th South and 9th West where the new prison is now. That was where the house used to be in the land. So that’s where I was born. JF: I was born in the LDS temple also, May 1, 1959. WF: The LDS temple? JF: Did I say that? WF: You did. The LDS… LR: Hospital. JF: Same thing. So yeah, we were married actually today’s June the 3rd, we were married June 2, 1979. Yesterday was our 35th anniversary. LR: Oh congratulations, that’s awesome. So where did you grow up in Salt Lake Jeff? JF: About 4300 South and 7th East is where I spent most of my childhood. WF: And you went to Granger High School. JF: Granite. WF: Granite High School. JF: Granite High, yeah. 2 WF: I grew up actually in, spent most of my years in South Jordan. I went to West Jordan Junior High, and then I went to Bingham High School. LR: Really? WF: So I graduated from Bingham High School. LR: My mother graduated from Bingham High School. WF: Probably knew her. LR: She’s a little older. Anyway so we’re talking about the Bar T Down Rodeo and what is your association with it? WF: Our association with Bar T Down was my grandfather Swanny Kirby and my grandmother Verda Kirby started the rodeo company 70 something years ago in Moab, Utah. My grandfather loved livestock, worked for the BLM, rode and helped gather wild horses and his father was a jockey that traveled all over the U.S. to ride racehorses and he ran at the Kentucky Derby one year. So my grandfather he loved animals and he got into a deal where he gathered up wild horses and brought in some bulls and used to put on Wild West shows. That evolved into what rodeo is today. Started with the turtle association and then became the PRCA association. They had three children, my father Bud Kirby, and then he had two sisters and they was never involved in the rodeo. My father lived his life working with his father and then I was born and I spent my whole life, because my father worked with them, being involved. I packed flag and helped wash horses and stuff when I was little to help the family business. Then I met my husband, his parents were on a rodeo committee for, they worked on the committee for one of our rodeos. I 3 met him because of that and so then we got married and he’s helped my father and mother and grandparents. Now that grandpa and dad are both gone now we’re the people trying to keep the business going. JF: I kind of went to work first. Bud Swanny I guess and Verda about 15 years old and I’d go with my older cousin. He was a year older. We’d get on a labor list to help them at the rodeo. Calves or steers or stripping shoots, whatever was necessary. I couldn’t ever get it quite out of my blood and so I kind of stayed there all the time. Bout that, Swanny once told me that he married Verda because of two reasons, he said one was because she had the most beautiful dark curly hair and the other one was she was the only person he knew that could drive a car. He was born in 1917 in Moab and so that was a long time ago you know. You’ll probably regret saying this in a minute but you said when things pop up to your mind you know that can bring up a story. When Wendi was talking about the history of Swanny and that he was telling me about—this is a historical interview that you’re doing so if you’re serious about that I’m going to tell you a story. Nod, okay. Swanny was a young boy, a pre-teen all the older boys would go out and gather wild horses and they would use that money—they’d gather them in the summertime when they were out of school and they’d use that money to buy whatever they wanted. I don’t know what they did with it, but anyway he begged them and begged them to let him go with them and help. They refused for several years and finally they decided they’d let him go. They put him in a position where there was no way that those wild horses were going to come that 4 way. They told him, “If they come this way Swanny, what you do is you drive those horses towards that bluff over there. That’s where the corrals are at and then we’ll catch them.” He said looking back they really believed that those horses would never come that direction. That’s what he was up to that day. When he goes back and he prefaces it he tells us that a few years before that a man by the name of Charlie Glass, he said a few things about Charlie Glass, had ridden into town. Now remember he was born in 1917 so this was in the 20’s when Swanny was talking about this story. He said that Charlie Glass was the first black man he’d ever seen in his life. He rode into town riding the best thoroughbred horse he’d ever seen in his life and leading another thoroughbred horse right behind him. Said he had rubber boots, little rubber booties tied to the back of his saddle and before he’d get off into the dirt he’d slip these rubber boots over the top of his leather shoes and he wore a suit and tie every day and he wore pistols on his hips. He says _____ pistols on his hips. He said the best cowboy he had ever seen in his life. So Swanny gets out on his point where he’s supposed to be and he’s waiting and it’s getting late in the day and nothing’s happening. Pretty soon he can see some dust coming and the dusts coming closer and closer. Pretty soon he realizes that those wild horses are coming towards him and he needed to get up on his mare that his dad let him ride. The old mare and she was old and not fast enough for the job. So he got ready and they were coming and he had to turn them. He said, “I rode for all I was worth and they just kind of ran past me.” He said, “There was nothing I could do. It was a done deal.” He said, “I wasn’t 5 going to make it.” He said out of the corner of his eye he caught some movement so he looked off to the right and here come Charlie Glass. He said he was laying right down on that horse’s main and he says his spurs were back in that horse’s flank. He says whenever he got the chance he’d take his rivel which is the extra-long rein and he’d whoop that horse back there on its legs. He says he ran past him lying on his horse that way, got up there ahead of them horses, pulled out his pistol and shot the lead mare. She dropped dead, now they didn’t have a leader, didn’t know where to go. He hazed them off and they went the correct direction. He reined up, rode back to Swanny and he told Swanny, “Now son, the next time you come chasing wild horses the first thing you got to do is you got to get mounted.” Meaning he needed a better horse. He said, “The second thing you got to do is you got to set up on the head of your pecker and ride.” He said, “You need to ride much harder than that.” So the reason he told us that story is because me and another hired hand at the time we were getting ready to go out and gather some of the bucking horses that day and he said so boys I’ve got you mounted, I need you to sit up on the head of your peckers and ride. So that was why the story happened that day. So I’ve gotten us completely off track on all of that, but… LR: But it’s a great story though. JF: So anyway, I worked for them and then I got lucky and got to marry the boss’ daughter and I mean that in all sincerity. I did get lucky and get to marry the boss’ daughter. LR: That’s fantastic. 6 WF: Now Charlie Glass is in history books. There is books about it. JF: Charlie Glass was killed later on. I’ve read some history about that up Sego Canyon. He got into a dispute, he was working for the cattlemen and he got into a dispute with the sheep guys and winds up… WF: Getting shot. JF: Well he got off of that deal, but then he got into a mysterious accident when he was the only one injured in that truck accident into a tree up Sego Canyon or something to that effect. I may be off a little bit, but that’s kind of the gist of the story. WF: That was always one of our favorite stories that grandpa used to tell. LR: Yeah, I bet. It’s fantastic. So growing up with the rodeo is that all your grandfather and your father did? WF: Yes. LR: That was their whole livelihood? WF: Their whole life. JF: Bud had a little bit of trucking experience. WF: In the wintertime when they didn’t have rodeos dad had some trucks and he would take some trucking jobs and do some trucking. For the most part they would raise animals and go and put on rodeos. LR: Okay. So what exactly does the Bar T Down do for a rodeo? WF: Well it kind of starts out, you find an event where there’s a committee or a group of people that want to put on this event. They’ll either find you or you go find them and then you work together and come up with a negotiation, a prize to be 7 able to do the event for them. What we do is we furnish all the bucking horses, the bulls, and the timed event cattle. JF: Steers and calves. WF: Steers and calves. For the event… JF: Saddlehorses if necessary. WF: And saddlehorses for the event. We can do a lot of the putting it together, what order of the events. JF: Production. WF: The production part of it. So we handle the production part of it for the most part and the animals, for the event. JF: We can do rodeos anywhere from the full production of doing it start to finish including the arena and everything else, to just showing up and helping with some of it. So we can go anywhere between that. WF: So that’s what you do and then once it’s time for the event, like for example, Herriman is this weekend and this is how it was, this is how it’s always been, it hasn’t changed. We’ve got the Herriman rodeo this weekend. The only thing different is Jeff and I has to work at a machine shop and grandpa didn’t have to work at a machine shop. Right now on the ranch my son and our hired guys will go out and they’ll bring the whole horse herd in and they will sort through that herd on what animals we have picked to go to Herriman for this week and how many horses will we take up there for example. JF: Oh 35 or 40 head of horses and about 20 head of bulls. 8 WF: So they’ll go through this today and they’ll sort through and get those horses that are going to go to Herriman and they’ll sort through the bulls. They’ll put them in different pens that’ll make them easy to load. Then they can get grained and fed better getting ready for the rodeo. They’ll do the same with the roping calves and the bulldogging steers and the team roping steers. Then tomorrow morning we have three semi-trucks and they will load them on the semi-trucks and they will haul them to Herriman’s fairgrounds. We get them up there and you unload them and then you get out your water troughs and all your hoses and set up all the corrals, to make them comfortable and have food and water. We all live in camp trailers. You get your camp set up and then the next day you get up and first in the morning animals are grained and watered and checked and then we’ll eat a breakfast brunch. Then about 1:00 then they sort the animals that go for the rodeo that night and then we get cleaned up and then we start to do the rodeo. That’s kind of how a daily… JF: Our son Cody handles day to day work at the ranch and he’s got like Wendi said one or two hired people all the time with him. Handles all the logistics of getting livestock to and from and then as a group we concern ourselves with the feed, the livestock and how much they should be getting and those types of things. So that’s kind of the way that deal works. WF: Now that’s basically what grandpa and dad did. They do it, my son and the boys, they would go through and get take care of all that stuff. When you have, grandpa always said when you have that much livestock it’s kind of like you’re a doctor of a small village. You have a lot of people to take care of. You know right 9 now on the ranch there’s about 1,000 head of livestock all together. So with that many animals somebody’s going to be sick every day and need some medicine or some doctoring. So everyday there’s doctoring of the animals. Then, the animals are like people, some decide they don’t like the other one today so they want to fight and you have to separate them so that they don’t get injured. You know it’s an all-day project to take care of and maintain the animals. JF: The rodeo business is an interesting business. Most of us would like to believe that we’re in the agriculture business, but really at the end of the day we’re in entertainment business. Is really what it is. Some people perform some people thrive and perform better. Wendi’s grandfather was the master of the rodeo. With all the legends there ever were, to me growing up, you told me Gene Autry or Swanny Kirby which is the most famous one, I would’ve told you Swanny Kirby, it’s geographical I’m sure. He had that type of charisma and he had that type of personality. I think that my father-in-law, Wendi’s dad, didn’t have that type of personality. He lent himself more to the livestock and being able to identify that. We try to have a little bit more showmanship, my wife and I, but we really don’t have that showmanship. I think my son might have that. WF: I think he can develop it a little bit. JF: He’s got a little bit more of the show business in him. We’re more the business people and that. LR: When you say the charisma. Can you give me an example of what you mean by, well what would he do? 10 JF: Well instead like I told you that story. Instead of him just saying now you guys ride hard and really do well today, he’d take a minute and he’d tell you this story that was absolutely entertaining and made you try so hard. There was a little bit of a deal, but when he rode into the arena, I wish we had a picture of him here. You’ll have some in the deal, but when he rode or walked into the arena you didn’t have to say gall I wonder which guy is Swanny? I don’t know why some people have that, they just do. WF: He just had a… JF: Presence, the way he walked. The way he held himself you know. Those types of people. WF: He was highly… JF: You see John Wayne in a few movies? It didn’t matter which role he was playing he was still John Wayne. He was always the same guy. They just molded the thing. Sometimes a fighter pilot John Wayne, sometimes he was a cowboy John Wayne, sometimes a boxer John Wayne, but every time he walked the same way. Had the same swagger, he had the same everything. That was Swanny, it wouldn’t have mattered if he was a butcher. It wouldn’t matter what he did. He was a butcher for a while, he was a cowboy. He did a lot of things and he had that about him. I’m going to tell you one time Wendi and I were at the Moab rodeo. Afterwards when he said gall grandpa have you ever seen the Schafer trail? Have you ever been up out on the Schafer trail? He said, “That son of a bi,” he said Schafer, I had to show him where it was. That dumb sucker was going clear 11 out around it. He said Schafer trail you know like that. You know Musselman Arch same thing. He said, “I took Dr. Musselman out there to show him the dang thing. He wanted to know what he could go and look at.” He said, “I had to go show it to him.” So then he said it’s the Musselman Arch. WF: Yeah, there’s a lot of places down there that everyday grandpa he found them and then he would take his buddies out which ended up being Schafer and Musselman. Then they got the deals named after them and not after him. JF: 1927 you’re out there running around. They were the most famous person. WF: He was just a very interesting fellow and when you met him you didn’t forget him. LR: So where is the ranch, is the Bar T Ranch still in the same place it started? WF: No about 15 years ago… JF: So it starts in Moab. WF: It started in Moab is where it started. JF: Where he’d trail cattle. WF: He had a BLM permit where he would trail his cattle out along the Colorado River there down below Dead Horse Point. He’d have to go out so far that he would actually sleep out there under the Red rocks with the animals so that they could graze. Then as time evolved and he started his Wild West shows and everything, he started growing more into rodeo, he needed to travel more it was getting hard. He would have to trail his livestock from there in Moab because you don’t have trucks and trailers back then. So he would put them all in a group and he would trail them to Monticello or over to… JF: Grand Junction. 12 WF: Well what was the… JF: Thompson Springs. WF: Thompson Springs and put them on rail stations, the railroad cars. JF: Cars. WF: Then they would go into town and put on rodeos and then bring them home. As time went by he decided he needed to leave Moab and he wanted to come to Salt Lake because he was really starting to lend a lot of rodeos along this Wasatch Front. JF: It’s a great crossroads to rodeo from. Even when he moved up here because of the I-80, I-15. Interstate 80 you know I-70, I-80 it’s all right here close. So it’s a great place to crossroads take off and go from. So yeah he owned ten acres of ground here in Salt Lake and rented over where UTA is now. WF: All of that UTA ground. JF: Rented all that and then there was another company there that now… WF: Asarco. JF: Asarco was the company that owned it then. I don’t even know what they did, but they had—now there’s a car dealership sitting there. They ran the business from there. I can’t even remember what year that they moved out of town, but about the time that they built the prison. WF: My father was like in junior high school when they left Moab. So my father went to school there until about junior high school and they left Moab. When grandpa left Moab, his home is still there, but where the Moab City Park is was where his corrals and his place was. He made a deal with the city he gave them that land 13 that they put the park on and the deal was is to give them that land they had to build the rodeo arena that is built out there at the fairgrounds. That’s why there is now a fairgrounds out there is because when grandpa left he gave them the land. JF: And the Swanny City Park they call it Swanny City Park. WF: So now the park is called Swanny City Park, but it would have been my dad he was in junior high so that would’ve been in the—he died four years ago, he was 70. So… JF: I think it was in the ‘50s, in the early ‘50s. WF: It was in the ‘50s, early ‘50s or late ‘40s. JF: During that time to when they had the place in Salt Lake they also would travel through the wintertime they would I guess maybe slightly before. They would travel from Salt Lake where they had the place and they would also travel down to around I can’t remember the name of the town now north of Rio Rico, New Mexico. Where was it called? WF: Oh I can’t think of the name of it. JF: Anyway where they’d do a weekly rodeo down there. WF: Yeah, they would go down there and do a weekly rodeo in the winter months. Then travel back. JF: They worked hard. WF: Just down outside between Tucson and Nogalas. JF: Bud said he can remember loading that family piano in and out of a bobtail truck. He said he did it maybe 20 or 30 times and that’s not easy to do, load a piano. 14 WF: You know times are so different. Back then when my dad was in junior high he was considered a grown man. He had to drive the bobtail to Texas and take care of horse trading and bull trading for grandpa. He was probably 15 maybe 16 years old when he was doing stuff like that, we can’t get away with that nowadays. Back then that’s what they did, you had to do whatever you had to do. One year grandpa was told a story, they was putting on the strawberry days Pleasant Grove rodeo and I believe the weather was bad and the crowd didn’t show up. Grandpa did a lot of his rodeos on a gate cut. So he would get a percentage of the people that came to the rodeo. So the rodeo didn’t do well and they didn’t get paid and he had no way to get his family home and get out of there. So he had to take his livestock down to the local sell barn and sell everything to be able to pick up and get back home. Back during the depression times, things were very tough and they lived some hard, hard lives. Worked hard, really hard back then, and they kept it going. I don’t know how they did, but they kept it going. Horse trading and trucking and doing whatever they could to make ends meet, to keep it all going. Take care of his family. LR: You said something earlier that it’s in your blood, the rodeo, do you think that your grandfather felt that way and then your father even though he didn’t have the same charisma? WF: Dad was always the worker, he worked behind the scenes, and he took care of the livestock. When my grandfather was in his early 50s he had a major heart attack, 4 bypass. He never was able to work hard again, but nobody ever knew it because dad made sure he was out in front of everybody and dad was doing all 15 the work. Dad didn’t want to be out front, he always wanted his dad to be out front. He was the movie star and dad was the worker that kept the movie star going you know after that. It gets in your blood. It’s a hard thing to understand and it’s a curse, it’s a family curse. My grandpa always said I don’t want you kids to have to live what I’ve lived. My dad said I don’t want you kids to have to live what I’ve lived, it’s a hard life. When you get to a rodeo you meet a lot of people and… JF: Hell we like most of them better than we like our family. That’s just the way it is. WF: We call them the rodeo family and we’re closer to our rodeo family than most anybody. We’ve got three or four generations of rodeo family out there and you get there and there’s something about when you bring your animals in and you match them up to a cowboy. You have a crowd screaming, holler, it does something to you. JF: Having some little part of that is a big deal. When we got married first we didn’t participate much in the rodeo, in rodeo work. In was in the early 80s, 1979 we got married so in the early 80s the economy in Utah had gone kind of south and I was working construction. So Bud offered me a job to work for him fulltime. So I did that for a couple of years. It was actually the only job I ever got fired from to be quite honest. Swanny fired me one day. WF: Thank heavens for that. JF: So we went off and did other things for a little while, but it’s just nothing was ever quite the same you know. Wendi found me a job one day in the newspaper to be a firefighter. I applied and after sometime of applying and jumping through the 16 hoops and the maneuvers and everything, I got a job as a fulltime firefighter. I worked for West Valley City and that’s as close as I ever came to the same type of excitement and adrenaline, as you get in the livestock deal or in the rodeo business. To me it’s like doing live television. You get ready, you plan it the best you can and then you start. From that point you adapt and overcome. You’ve got the unpredictable mind of the animal which is why we ride horses anyway. The ability to be on the horses back and make it go forward, make it stop. You’re thinking for it and also deciding where your cows at or what’s going on, those are the things that make it all exciting. You do that with an animal that you’re going to maneuver to this shoot and this way at this time. He doesn’t want to go, you have to adapt, you overcome you make something else work. All of this in front of as many as 10,000 people sometimes. Hope that it all goes well. There’s nothing worse than having the big dead spot when you can’t make things keep going, so it’s the adrenaline that’s the excitement of it. Then like Wendi says out the front of the shoots, with all the chaos going back behind, out the front of the shoots you want to have a smooth seamless production that nobody notices that they just think that it was all scripted and choreographed perfectly. WF: It’s not at all you know. JF: It’s not. Sometimes it’s all bought. WF: It is. It gets in your blood. JF: It’s difficult to describe. You should come out and try it. WF: You should try it. The family started raising, it got to where you can’t just go and find a good…bucking horses and bulls have one of the most free spirits of 17 anything on this planet. They’re like an eagle or a bird. You can’t make them buck, you can’t make them do this. This is their personality, this is their fight, their will. It’s just amazing to be around them. It’s just amazing. We started raising our own animals in the early 80s and that ruined us all. Once we started raising those babies and deciding let’s put this stud on this mare and maybe we can get a little of her personality and we can get a little of his in it. It’s like creating your own little, your own little animal and then you’re so excited when they’re born. You watch them grow up and you just fall in love with them. It’s just so amazing and then if they go out there and they become a superstar there is nothing greater. Absolutely nothing greater, it’s awesome. It’s like having the Triple Crown. JF: I once heard Michael Jordan doing an interview and they said are you ever afraid of failing? He said, “I’m not afraid of it. I will fail, but I still want the ball.” It’s that attitude that he had. He still wanted the ball even though he knew that when he was going to shoot from the 3 point line he had a good probability of failing at that last shot. How many times did we see him make it? That’s the same personality I think that’s in that great bucking animal. He’s not concerned that he got rode last week, he still wants in the game. He still wants to play. WF: So many people don’t understand, and you have a lot of people that think well they’re making these animals do that. They put this stuff on them that make them do it. If they could see what these animals are really about it’s one of the most amazing things. Their spirit, it’s just unbelievable and they wouldn’t have a purpose. We couldn’t raise and get to experience these animals if we didn’t do these rodeos. Why would they have a purpose? You can’t just raise them and 18 turn them out and just let them try to run free in America nowadays. There’s no place for them. Nobody to feed them, nobody to take care of them so they wouldn’t exist. JF: One thing that we’ve learned over the years is about livestock and bucking animals and things like that is I think that horse race people would tell you the same thing that you can’t make them run or make them buck. You can make them not buck, you can make them not run. If you stay out of their way and let them, that’s in the genetics and if you, if they want to do it and you don’t deter them they will run or they will buck either whichever it is. I think that probably cutting horse guys would tell you the same thing. It’s got to be in them, you can’t put it in them. That’s kind of the deal there. WF: So that’s kind of the family curse. You fall in love with these animals, you fall in love with all the people out there that you work with. You fall in love with hearing that crowd scream and holler and then you’re doomed. That’s why we’re still trying to keep it going. When my father died his sisters told all of us kids you need to let Bar T die with your father, it needs to end now. I said, “How do I do that? I didn’t die. My son didn’t die. What do I do with all those animals that my dad raised and created? They didn’t die. How would it just die?” Well it can’t die as long as you have an animal to feed that’s still there. We got mares, we got a horse that is 35 years old that dad raised one of the first five that went to the national finals out of our breeding program. His name is High and Mighty. He now gets to train all the yearlings and the two year olds and he babysits them. Him and some of the other old horses. What do we do with them? You know they 19 did their job, they went to the national finals 5, 10, 15 years. They threw up all the big boys. They helped to make all the money. What do you do? Where do they go? You owe it to them, they did it for you and now you roll it back. So I guess that’s why we still do what we do, because we don’t know what to do with all the old boys or the up and comers. Who to give them to, who to send them to. None of us have the heart to load them on a truck and say goodbye. So we just keep working and keep trying to put on rodeos and keep the family heritage going because it’s in your blood. It’s as deep as it gets, it’s horrible. LR: Then you said your son is right there with you now. WF: He’s worked with my mom and dad since he was 14 years old. JF: He’s never done anything else. WF: Never done anything else. He now raises all the bucking horses and his dad and I raise all the bucking bulls. JF: We said he does all the logistics of getting us to the rodeo and he picks up. He’s the pickup man in some of them pictures there. Him picking up the bucking horses and stuff like that. WF: Then his wife and my daughter and my son-in-law come and help. Their timers and laborers. JF: We’ve got four grandkids and two of our grandkids now pack American Flag in the grand entries. That will be fifth generation. LR: Is it something that you want them to continue? WF: No! No! I don’t wish this on anybody. 20 JF: You know what we do. We want them to do it if it makes them happy. Cody may not ever know if he’s happy, our son may not ever know if he’s happy or not with it. He’s never done anything else and Bud was the same way. Maybe he didn’t know if he was happy or not because he didn’t really do anything else. He may have found that owning a machine shop was a lot less fun than owning a rodeo company, or being a butcher. Swanny decided it just wasn’t the deal, he wanted a rodeo company. He once told me he went to a rodeo, a Wild West show as Wendi pointed out. When all the other kids were coming out of the Wild West show and saying oh my goodness I want to be a bulldogger, I want to go ride on a bucking horse and stuff like that. Swanny said I want to be the guy that promoted the rodeo or promoted the event. So he knew that from right off the bat that it was his thought process. WF: The reason I say that is the reason my dad said that. Through all the love and emotion of it there’s so much emotion in it. There’s a lot of worry, the expenses. Ten years ago we could buy hay for 70 dollars a ton. Now they’re wanting us to buy hay for 200 dollars a ton. That big increase you can’t raise your rodeo tickets that increase, you can’t raise your committees for that. So you start eating all the expenses that going up, you’re eating that. So you’re making less and less money. Then every day the worry of are we going to find enough hay to feed these guys and if I can’t feed them what’s going to happen to them? It’s a big worry, it’s a really big worry, and then the rodeo business is changing. A lot of rich, rich people are coming into the rodeo business, they want to get out there 21 and have their animals seen and get their name in the lime light. They don’t have to make money at it like families like us. We’re kind of becoming the obsolete. JF: There’s very few rodeo families left in the business and in Utah right now we’re really fortunate in our area. The I-15 corridor and intermountain area whatever you want to call it. We figure there’s only about 17 weeks a year that we can be outside and do events. That pretty much covers the time when it’s not going to snow on us. So we are doing between 13 to 15 rodeos in that 17 week period. So we only have a couple of breaks in there. I think probably the farthest we travel from the house is about 300 miles. We go out to Elko, Nevada. So we have an outstanding run and I didn’t tell you that we don’t have to travel very far. Fuel is a great big expense so that’s enabled us to keep our costs a little bit lower than some other people because they may have to travel 500 miles this week, 1,000 miles next week to go from one rodeo to the other. We’ve been real fortunate that we didn’t do this. We’re standing on the shoulders of great guys and people who, as Bud used to say, killed all the snakes in front of us. Swanny had this thing all set up and pretty much had the Wasatch Front taken care of. So we don’t have those expenses and we don’t have to travel and everything. It’s a great deal for us and we get some envious other stock contractors from other parts of the country saying you guys, you’re so lucky that you’ve got all that. I don’t view it as luck. I think that the way it went is, the lucky part is, that our culture here in Utah is family oriented. Rodeo is a great family entertainment. Swanny once said that if the worse the economy gets the better rodeo is because if you can’t afford to take your family to Disneyland you can still afford to 22 go to the county fair. Ticket prices are very low for rodeo so it’s a very, like I say a very family oriented deal. I think that it’s not so much that there’s a lot of great rodeos in Utah that just sprung up. I think it was Swanny and Bud that made these be great rodeos. This is a good dollar value. You know what I’m trying to say. It’s a good bang for your buck to go out and go to the rodeo. If you were say maybe say in I don’t know, somewhere in the Midwest where maybe rodeo’s not as prevalent and maybe they haven’t had as good as stock contractors or something like that. Then you may not, it may not be as entertaining. They don’t have the strong rodeos because they haven’t had the entertainment value. So I believe that that’s probably the way that that worked out. LR: So how many rodeos? JF: 13 to 15 in our area. LR: Which ones have you been doing the longest? JF: Preston, Idaho, and Tremonton, Burley, Idaho. St. George, Utah Pleasant Grove, Utah. Those are probably our oldest spots. Oh Evanston, Wyoming those are probably our oldest six rodeos. WF: Evanston, Wyoming. JF: I’ll tell you our schedule is we start out. We do a few leases. We go to… WF: In the wintertime and fall. JF: In February we’re in Tucson, in March we go to Laughlin, Nevada right there along the river there. Then we start out run in Moab, then we go to Herriman, then we go to Delta, Utah. Then we go to Pleasant Grove, Oakley, Utah then we go out to Elko. From Elko we go to, where do we go from Elko? 23 WF: We have a week off. JF: Then what? WF: Then we go to Castledale and then we come back and we go to Preston. Then we go to Logan, then we go to Burley. Then we go to Tremonton then we go up to Cowboy Days Evanston. Then we come back and do the Utah State Fair then we go down to St. George and do the St. George Dixie roundup. Then we have… JF: Wilderness circuit in Ogden. WF: Kind of a type break and then we help with the wilderness circuit finals in Heber. JF: Oh yeah, it’s in Heber. WF: Then we go to the national finals the first of December. LR: That’s crazy. You don’t come back to the ranch every time do you? JF: Most of the time. WF: They trade stock. We don’t keep the stock on the road. We try to, the ones that go out this week we try to take them home, let them rest and then bring the next guys for the next week and rotate them. Everything gets tired when it’s got a job to do and you try, you try to make sure that you take care of them. One of the things to be a good cowboy is, dad and grandpa always said, is you got to learn to read the livestock. You got to watch them and you got to be able to say he’s tired and he wants to stay home or things like that. You have to help and watch them and think like that. So we give them rest and trade them around. LR: Do you have any questions? 24 WJ: I do. I’m curious how a family can go from racing horses to bucking horses? That’s a whole different mentality not only for the animal but for the person raising it. WF: Well grandpa didn’t ever raise racing horses. His father… JF: Was a jockey. WF: Was a jockey. He kind of abandoned his little family and went and was a jockey all over the United States and then he rode in the Kentucky Derby. So while he was off doing that my grandfather became a very good horseman and loved horses and worked for the BLM. He gathered wild horses and then got into the Wild West shows, and that’s where the bucking horse came in is nobody wants to see you. Everybody wants to see a human being get on a creature and have the creature throw them off or be the winner. It’s funny because being in the rodeo business we don’t want, we are rooting for the animal. We are not rooting for the cowboy. We like the animals to beat the cowboys, but occasionally one’s got to win or they won’t keep coming back. So we got to let them ride them. I think that’s where that came in. It was grandfather’s father that loved the race horses and then grandfather got into the bucking horses, but it’s I think the way its tied is the nature of the animal. You know a race horse is very special animal. JF: One of our foundation mares actually came off the racetrack, Sparrow. So that’s, it’s the same will. Like I said… WF: It’s the personality. JF: I mentioned Michael Jordan before. I’m sure he could’ve played baseball or he could’ve even played football. It didn’t matter what he played he was just, he’s 25 going to win. He’s going to do well. Those type of people are that type of people. Those type of animals are those type of animals. I think that they’re going to win. WF: You know a lot of our animals through the years, grandpa got many many awards for best livestock. Horse and bull of the year and when you stand up in front of your peers and your animal’s named that it’s an honor, it makes you feel proud for what you’ve accomplished. When we started raising the bulls for the family business our first batch of baby bulls, Jeff and I really we pampered them. They were our babies. One time I caught him out in the corral, it was winter and he had put a big bale of straw in there on the yearling. One day after we’d weaned them from their mamas, he was out there on his hands and knees in the straw playing putting heads with these baby bulls. I thought he’d lost his lid. I thought oh my gosh, this guy’s lost… JF: You make me sound like I’m nuts. I was waiting for the water trough to fill. It was dipping into near zero. I was sitting in this bale of hay waiting for this water trough to fill. I had my car hearts on and I was laying down in this bale of straw wondering to myself if I were a bull could I survive out here in this temperature tonight? Before I knew it I had these weaned baby bulls six or eight of them all around me. Smelling me they maybe thought I was dead I don’t know. When I got up and I moved around and I got up on my hands and knees and they didn’t run like I thought they would. Instead they come up and they were doing that, nudging and stuff like that. WF: He started playing with them. Butting heads with them. That first batch… JF: We were about the same weight. 26 WF: Anyway that first patch of bulls we were just tickled pink. When a bramer bull is born they’re born one color and then they change colors. Our bloodline, it goes back to a famous bull named Oscar which is a grey bull. So we got to watch these babies evolve and several of them became grey. There’s nothing prettier than a grey bramer. That first batch we had one bull named Iron Will that got picked when he was four years old to go to the national finals. This just, we couldn’t fathom this really happened, our first batch of baby bulls one got to go to national finals. Well we were down there at the national finals and it was one of the most exciting times of my life and I probably never will ever experience it again. I can’t imagine it ever happening again the way it did. Grandpa was home basically dying, it was 2005. We’re down there at the national finals with our first batch of baby bulls. Iron Will he’s four years old he was, there was only one guy left to ride. He was the 12 or 10? JF: 15. WF: So he was the 14th bull out and he comes out with a fellow named… JF: Bryan Richardson. WF: Bryan Richardson and Bryan Richardson oh Iron Will was bucking and bucking and I swear to God I was jumping out of my seat bucking with him. I wanted him to jump higher and higher and throw him off. I was just rooting for him. This kid Bryan Richardson he rode him. It was 93 points and the crowd just screaming and just going wild that whole stadium just roared. I was so proud I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t even breathe, I just couldn’t even breathe. Then I’m sitting there 27 and you have one more to come out. One more to see if they can beat him you know. This other one come out they rode and rode and… JF: Didn’t beat him. WF: He didn’t beat him. If your animal wins high score of the night and they win on him, you get a big ol’ trophy buckle that says this bull won this go around with this guy on it. Well my bull won and when I realized that my bull had won this I was ecstatic. I was hugging everybody and Jeff was, he was ecstatic and he took off running off the shoot. Following the bull down through the corrals back to the corrals to see if he was okay after bucking and all that. He was getting phone calls from some of our committee people in Delta. They were at the local bar out there and they were watching it on TV. They were rooting and saying we watched it, good job. They were screaming, our kids were all home. They started calling and they were saying oh my gosh, that was so cool. They were all screaming. JF: Wendi says to one telling this story one time. She says that’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to me in my life. I said and your kids being born right? Oh yeah! Yeah whatever. WF: Anyway, after the rodeo we all walked out to the pickup truck and there was a fellow from Texas that had become a friend of ours and he raises bulls. His name was Trent West. He was riding with us back and forth to the room and he got in the car and he said, Boy Wendi that bull bucked hard.” He said, “Would you sell me that bull? I’ll give you 40,000 dollars for him.” I looked at him and I says, “Are 28 you crazy!?” No I wasn’t going to sell that bull. That bull’s still sitting in my corral right next to my house and I love that bull. I thoroughly love that bull. JF: He has lots of offspring. WF: He’s had some really good offspring and he’s not going to live forever and I’m going to feel bad, but that bull gave me one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced in my life. JF: Right after the kids. LR: A close second. JF: A close second or maybe not. WF: So that there is why it gets in your blood and why it is a curse and why we’re still doing this family heritage for all of these years. Trying to carry on the tradition that my grandfather started all those years ago and my father spent his whole life working to keep it going. It’s a love for it. You absolutely get to loving it and hating it like you can’t believe. WJ: Can I ask about the brand? Why Bar T Down? JF: Swanny well actually Uncle Doug. Wendi’s uncle, I asked Uncle Doug one time why Swanny picked the Bar T Down and he says because he could make it with a running iron or a straight iron. He could make it with a straight iron. He made it with a straight iron and it didn’t look like a tree scratch. It’s almost impossible for an animal to be scratched in that configuration. I think the Bar T up was probably taken and so it was just the upside down t. For years everybody that called it was the Bar T Down and actually today it’s just Bar T Rodeo. I blame computers for that because they can’t put the t upside down. 29 WF: So that’s when it started being Bar T. You can’t make it go upside down. JF: So when you type this you can’t put it in your computer it’s very difficult to invert the t and so there we are. We like the bar t down better too. So it’s been a lot of years and a lot of great people, lot of great friends that we’ve met like I told you. I think that sometimes we like our rodeo family as much or more than our own family. We’re always excited to see each other every year and that’s probably why we have rodeos that we’ve had longer than Wendi and I have been alive. Wendi says it’s great and bad all at the same time and I guess I agree with her. I have more great than I have the bad. WF: He don’t have to pay the bills. JF: I don’t have to pay the bills. WF: It’s a difference. LR: So you’re talking about your heritage, I mean I can just hear the passion you have for what you do. How do you keep that going? I know you have a son who’s really excited about it, but how do you share that with someone like me who doesn’t know anything? WF: You know what, you come to a couple of the rodeos and you would see that. You come and we’ll walk around and we’ll show you, we’ll tell you this is round robin and this is whatever animal. We’ll introduce you to them and then when you go out there and watch them perform and throw off the cowboy, get to see the crowd and see what we do, it will explain it. I mean it gets everybody. I mean it’s just, a rodeo is a family sport. It’s one of the only sports where you take your whole family and go. It’s a campout and plus the sport, sharing time with all your family. 30 Everybody can do it, you don’t just have one kid that plays football or one kid that plays soccer and everybody else just watches them. JF: We have kids washing the saddlehorses and saddling horses for parades, older members then shoe horses and sort the livestock. You kind of start out working the smaller cattle, calf pens and stuff like that. Some friends of ours, stock contractors from Canada, said that. I can’t remember Mr. Kesler’s fire name but his boy was telling me that his dad once said that you start out in the calf pens when you’re a teenager and you’re about done with your rodeo career when they’ve got you back to the calf pens because you’re too old to do anything else. Then you’ve done everything else in between. There’s many families in the rodeo business that do the sound system. One of them announces, everybody drives truck. Everybody drives truck. Another stock contractor, stock contracting firm almost as old as this one, I said you know we’re really just truck drivers that haul our own livestock. That’s what we do. WF: If you start the kids out early when it was time for sorting livestock and that, grandpa… JF: I think they call that indoctrinating. WF: Yeah. Grandpa and dad would put us kids on horses and say come on and help us go gather up this or that. So you get on your horse and you’d follow dad and grandpa out there and you’d round up the steers or whatever you were rounding up and bringing them in. You share it, how many other jobs can you go to work with your dad or your grandpa at the same time? 31 JF: I’ve been lucky. I’ve laid brick in Salt Lake City. 108 feet above the street on scaffolding, it’s pretty exciting stuff. Fought fire, been inside of burning buildings and pulled people out at just exactly the right time and all those things, drove fire trucks, climbed up on ladders and did all those things, but there’s nothing that compares to having your feet fully embedded into the stirrups on your saddlehorse running across uneven terrain. Especially with ditches, chasing another set of horses as fast as you can go. There’s nothing that’s closer to life and nothing closer to death all at the same time. Nothing compares. WF: I think animals, grandpa always said and dad, that you can learn a lot from an animal. If you can learn how to treat an animal then you’re a far better person on this Earth. I read something on Facebook today that kind of reminded me of that. A little boy’s dog got sick and they took it to the vet and it was dying of cancer, it was an older dog. Vet didn’t know what to say because here’s this little boy and his family there crying over this dog. The dog passed away and the vet he said he was just, he went to console them and talk to them and the little boy said, “Don’t worry.” He said, “Everything’s going to be okay.” He said, “The reason why my dog had to die before I die and they don’t live as long is because when we people come to this Earth we have to learn to love and how to treat people. When dogs come to this Earth they already know that so they don’t have to stay as long.” I think not everybody feels that way about animals and it gives a lot of us a bad name. When you go out with your dad and a calf has been born and your dad picks that calf up because it’s cold or it’s hurt and packs to the barn, you make it warm and get it on a bottle and you make it so the next day it can get 32 back to its mama and get it going and that. You learn a lot. Those are traits that kids don’t nowadays learn. You can’t teach that by a video or stuff. These are instilled. JF: Life and death lessons that you don’t just pick up by having somebody tell you that this is how it feels. WF: I think that’s why ranchers, farmers and rodeo people are important because they maintain that in this world. That’s not being kept in this world. They’re good values. They teach good, moral family values and that’s what rodeo is all about, is good, moral family values. So it’s important just like we got to keep our crops so we have something to eat. We got to be able to raise beef and chickens and things so we can eat. That’s what we were intended for. We can’t just get rid of it all and can’t say something has to be your food. You have to take care of it. You have to learn those things and I think that’s why it gets engrained in you. It’s a family event and it’s fun to spend that much time with your family and your animals become your family. LR: So what do you think is the legacy of the Bar T Down? Is it the people, the animals, everything? WF: It’s the feeling. JF: I think it’s the people. It’s been Swanny’s, Bud’s and time will tell if we can keep going. It’s been the company’s legacy of entertaining the people along the Wasatch front. A high degree, a good quality entertainment, integrity and honesty and I think that’s the deal. I think that it’s… 33 WF: Letting kids today see what used it to be like in the Wild West days. When there used to be cowboy heroes and I think that it’s to be able to maintain if people like us quit this that’ll all go away. They’ll never, kids tomorrow will never see that. We have rodeos like St. George and the rodeo grounds are right in the center of town and we had an experience for just last year. Every year the schools go on a field trip and they walk by the fairgrounds where the rodeo stocks there and get to stop and see the animals. We go out and visit with them and tell them their names and everything. That makes them feel like they know something. So when they get to come to the rodeo, hey I seen that animal. I seen that’s his name and that. Well generation after generation this is to place. I was standing out there last year when this was going on and a fellow come up to me and he had his kids and his wife. He said do you know my grandpa? He used to bring me to do this and now I’m bringing my kids to do this. I mean that’s what it’s all about. It’s generation after generation sharing these things and building a heritage. You know grandpa brought us so now we bring our kids, they keep the traditions going. It’s a tradition. JF: The people in Preston, Idaho after they grow up and they go to BYU or Utah, wherever they go to school. They become a doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs. They move off and then they plan their family reunions during the rodeo time. That’s when they come back to town. So it’s a tradition. See Utah State fair… WF: I think traditions are important. I think we’re trying to get away from all that and I think those things are important, so this is a tradition. JF: They’re good cultural events. They’re things that people need to do. 34 WJ: What would you say is one of the main differences or rather a list of differences between raising rodeo livestock and ranching livestock? WF: The only difference that I can see is ranching livestock is feeding the world and rodeo livestock is entertaining the world. That’s the only different I can think of. JF: Or at least our area, entertain our area, yep. LR: So is there a difference between how you would raise a bucking horse and a saddlehorse or you just raise them all together? WF: They’re all raised together. JF: We raised ours together, but you’re looking for different traits. WF: A saddlehorse has a trait where it’s willing to give, it wants to please you. It’s willing to give. A bucking horse doesn’t have that trait. He’s that, “You’re not going to stop me. You’re not going to tell me what to do.” They’re different personalities totally. JF: They’re not all mean either. WF: No. JF: You know they just are not willing to bend. WF: We got bucking horses that come up and eat grain out of your hand and let you pet them and that. You sure wouldn’t want to climb on their back because they wouldn’t put up with it. LR: Do you guys have anything else you’d like to add? WF: Well as far as this heritage museum I would like to add that this is an honor for us. I wish so much my grandfather and father could be here because they started all this. Grandpa loved Utah and he loved building his rodeos and this would 35 mean a lot to him. I’m really thankful that there’s people like the heritage museum and you guys that document this. Put this down so that people can see it and that people can walk through that museum and have some reason to maybe hey who’s that? I’d like to read about him or what they’ve done, who they were and so it means a lot to the family that this stuff is preserved and taken care of. LR: Okay, well thank you so much. I appreciate you guys. I know you’re really busy right now and just the fact that you took some time to sit and talk with us. It has made my day. WF: Well I hoped we covered what you’re trying to cover. LR: Well yeah. I got to the point where I didn’t even write anything down. You guys were just awesome. JF: Can’t shut us up. That too. WF: Well there is a lot of stories and there’s a book called Canyonlands Cowboy. JF: It’s all about Swanny. WF: Tells my grandpa’s whole life story. JF: I don’t know where you get a copy of it. WF: I don’t know where you can get it either, but you look it up. Canyonlands Cowboy. JF: I don’t know if it ever got into the library system or not. LR: Probably Amazon, they sell everything. WF: Try it, but a lot stories. A lot of history stories and that of grandpa and the red rocks and all the different trails. Places down there and valley city, nobody will ever know about valley city because it’s gone. Right where you turn off I-70. 36 JF: Crescent Junction. WF: The Crescent Junction there that used to be a whole city with saloons and towns, jail houses and ranchers and it was a big ranching area and it was called Valley City. There was a reservoir up in there and my grandmother and her father and mother and family owned a lot of ground right there. That’s where grandpa met her. They were one of the first people to have a car and she was driving the car. That’s where he met her. They ranched and ran all that, it was a booming town. The reservoir broke and washed the town away and it’s gone. The only thing left is an old cellar which is my grandpa and grandma Bertick’s cellar. So there’s a lot of history and nobody’d even know about Valley City. You say that and what is Valley City? So history’s good. There’s a lot of things that I think people need to learn about their history. Where they come from. I’m who I am because of where I come from, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today if I hadn’t come from Swanny Kirby and Bud Kirby. They instilled a lot of things in me. JF: She tried to get me to change my last name, but it just wasn’t acceptable at the time. WF: Yeah, now he’s wishing he had, but he didn’t. JF: I’m alright with the way it went. WF: Yeah, you need to know where you come from and what got you here and how hard they worked to get you there. That’s important stuff. LR: Very true. JF: Cut!