Oral History Program Brent Kelly Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 12 June 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Brent Kelly Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 12 June 2018 Copyright © 2018 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: Kelly, Brent, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 12 June 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Brent Kelly Circa 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Brent Kelly, conducted on June 12, 2018, via telephone by Lorrie Rands. Brent discusses his life and his experiences as a rodeo announcer. Michael Ballif, the audio technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is June 12, 2018. We are doing a phone interview with Brent Kelly for the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Michael Ballif is with me. Thanks again for your time, so let's go ahead and get started with when and where were you born, Brent? BK: I was born in 1949 in Heber City, Utah, April the 17th LR: Were you raised in Heber? BK: Yes, I was raised in Midway, a small town just west of Heber, and I have lived there all of my life. In fact, I moved about a block and a half from the original house. LR: Oh, so you have lived there all your life. BK: Yes, I have lived there all my life. Midway was just a small town of 880 people when I was growing up there. Now it has grown to over 10,000, so it's grown a lot in the last fifty or sixty years. LR: When you were growing up, did your parents own a farm? Talk about your childhood a little bit. 2 BK: Yes, we had a small dairy farm. There were many, many small dairy farms in Midway. Our family had maybe eighteen to twenty-five head of cows, and every morning it was my job to take the cows from our home over to the pasture, which was about five blocks away. Then my job was to go get them in the afternoon and bring them home for the milking. That was my job from the time I was about four years old until I was about ten. LR: When you say that you would take them to the pasture, would you do that on foot, or would you be on a horse? BK: We would take them horseback. I had a little horse called Dice, and we would saddle her up every morning, and we would take cows to the pasture. Then at noon, because sometimes there was not any water in the pasture, we would have to round them up and take them to a canal and give them water and then take them back, and then go back in the afternoon. So it was kind of a full time job for a little boy. LR: Yeah, it sounds like it. When did you have time to go to school? BK: Well, that was in the summertime. I started school when I was five, but my friends were always a year older than me, so I would catch my horse and play with them at recess before I was five, and when I was six I got to go to school and be with them. My Aunt Joy lived right across the street from the school, so I'd ride my horse to the school and turn my horse into her pasture, and then after I'd just ride home, but I only lived about two or three blocks from the school. So it was not a big deal. 3 LR: Okay. I’m envisioning this little boy hopping on a horse every day to go to school, and it’s an odd picture in my head. BK: It is an odd picture, and then in the winter time I would just walk to school. LR: Why wouldn’t you ride in the wintertime? BK: It was too cold to take the horse, so I'd just bundle up and walk to school. LR: Okay. I don’t quite understand this term of catching the horse. BK: Well I had to go out in the pasture or in the corral and catch it, bridle it, and saddle it. That's the term of catching the horse. LR: Okay, I’m not familiar with this, this cowboy way of life, so I’m going to ask a lot of questions because my understanding is limited. BK: You bet. LR: Even though I've been doing these for a while now, I feel I learn something new every time I interview a cowboy. Where did you go to school? BK: I went to Midway Elementary, which was small, and we would have two grades in one classroom. It was from grades one through six. Then we would to go Junior High in Heber City, so I would catch the bus in Midway and ride the bus to Heber in my seventh and eighth grade year, then High School was nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, and we would ride the bus to Heber as well. The high school was all in the same building. LR: Okay. So as you were growing up, how many siblings did you have? 4 BK: I had two older brothers. One was ten years older than me and the other brother was six years older than me. LR: So you were the baby. BK: I was the baby of the family, yes. LR: This is kind of a strange question, but was it always in your blood to do this rodeo lifestyle? BK: You know, when I was in high school I played football and baseball, and in the wintertime I skied, and then when I got in college, my first year in college, I started to rodeo. I had always ridden horses, in fact we owned a riding stable and rented horses my junior and senior year of high school, and then when I came home from my mission we ran the horses for a couple of more years. I had always been interested in riding and roping, and I started roping calves and competing in rodeo when I was a freshman in college. I was on the BYU rodeo team for three years. We competed in the Rocky Mountain Rodeo region, which consisted of several colleges, and that was where I really got my start in rodeo. I started roping calves, and then in the summertime, we'd rope a lot of calves and go to rodeos, and I was personally never that good, so I never did make any significant money in the rodeo scene as a contestant. Because of my love of rodeo I said to myself, "If l'm going to a rodeo, I want to make some money. How can I do that? Number one, I can either be a clown," I was too slow to be a clown. "Number two, I can be an announcer," so I started announcing. That made it so I was able to go to rodeos and every time I'd 5 drive into a rodeo, I knew I was going to get a check for my services. It was natural for me, and I started auctioneering, and my brother and I bought an auction barn in Spanish Fork, and we ran the auction barn for thirty-one years down there. I sold the business in 2008, but the Western way of life has always been a very important part of my life, in all the things that I've done. For my regular full time job, I taught school for six years as an elementary school teacher, and then I went to work as a seminary teacher for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I taught school for thirty-one years, which worked hand in hand with the rodeo season, because you were off in the summertime, so you could go and do your rodeo thing, and then in the wintertime I was able to teach school. LR: Okay, so you talked about joining the BYU rodeo team, how did you become part of that? BK: Yes, it was on the basis of tryouts. We had tryouts for the rodeo team, and different people did different events, and my event in College Rodeo was calf roping and steer wrestling. I rode bareback horses for one year, but it was hard because I was always hurt, so I just stayed roping calves and steer wrestling. You had to carry two or three events to be on the team, and that was the reason I had those two events. LR: You talked about wanting to have the paycheck and going into announcing, but how did that become a reality? I don't imagine you just walked into a rodeo and said, "Let me announce." 6 BK: No. I had experience, like I said, as an auctioneer. The high school came to me and said, "Would you be interested in announcing the high school rodeo?" I said, "Sure," and I started loving it then. Then I started working for different stock contractors during the year, like the Western States Rodeo Company, and Rocky Mountain Professional Rodeo companies with Ben Gunnan and Broken Heart Rodeo, and Circle J Rodeo, with Jim and John Mascero. I got in with these two companies, and they were always needing announcers. I went to Zeb Bell's Announcing School in Twin Falls, Idaho, when I first started my career, and that really helped me launch my career; just by doing that, and word of mouth got me a lot of jobs. I had the opportunity to do the American Quarter Horse World Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, one year, and then the National High School Rodeo Association contacted me and asked me if I'd be interested in announcing the cutting. I've been announcing the cutting for the last twenty-eight years for the National High School Rodeo Association. LR: Okay. It sounds like your work with the auction house that you had in Spanish Fork was a natural segue into announcing? BK: It was definitely, and both of them complemented each other in the things we were able to accomplish. The sale was every Saturday, so that worked in well with my school teaching, and we had a trucking business as well. We would truck the cattle from Heber Valley down to Spanish Fork to sell them, like dairy cows. When we started the auction there were twenty-four dairies in Heber Valley. When we closed the auction there were three dairies in Heber Valley. So Heber Valley has changed immensely, in the fact that there is currently two dairies there 7 now. Heber Valley is not an agricultural valley anymore. It's a bedroom community for Salt Lake and Provo. LR: And Provo? BK: Provo's only twenty-two miles away from Heber Valley, so there's a lot of people who commute to Provo. LR: Alright. With the auction house that you had, was it just cows, and cattle that came through? BK: No, we had goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, and we also sold tack. Tack is the supplies for horses like saddles, bridles, and blankets. We would start our sale at ten o'clock with the tack until eleven thirty, then horses from about eleven thirty to one o'clock. Then we sold sheep, goats, and pigs, and then cattle came last. LR: Okay. Forgive my ignorance on this, but was it just word of mouth that said, "Take your livestock to this auction house, and it's a good way to get it sold?" BK: Well, we were established for many, many years, even before. There were two sale barns in Spanish Fork. One was on Wednesday, one was on Saturday. We didn't have to advertise that much, because the farmers in Emery County, Utah County, and Salt Lake County, all knew there was a sale every Saturday in Spanish Fork. So it was mostly word of mouth, but it was a very good business, and it was one that we enjoyed totally. LR: Okay. I think I already asked this question, but did those skills at the auction house kind of go hand in hand with your... 8 BK: Yeah, but I started announcing before we bought the auction, so it was a natural segue. My dad was a horse and livestock dealer all of his life, so it was a natural thing for me and my brothers to go with him to the auction, and he went to two or three auctions a week. So it was natural for us to be there, and we started challenging each other to auctioneer. One summer I was spraying weeds for the county, and it was so boring spraying those weeds that I started selling those weeds. I'd go down the highway and say, "On twenty, five take a step to twenty five, up to thirty dollars," and try to sing that little song and go along with it. My brother said, "I bet you don't dare sell a sale." We were good friends with some people in Ogden and they said, "Would you be interested in selling the tack?" My brother said, "Sure, I bet my brother will do it." So on a dare I got up and did it, and that was the first time I auctioneered. Then Neil Scott, who owned the sale barn in Spanish Fork said, "Why don't you come and work for me," so I did for about a year and a half, and then we bought the sale barn from him. That's the way it all started. LR: Wow. I realize that your brothers were quite a bit older than you, but it sounds to me like you guys were a pretty close knit family. BK: We were very close. They got married when they were fairly young, and so I was raised basically as an only child from the time I was in the sixth grade. My brother lives right next door to me right now. He taught school and coached at Wasatch High School all the time, and he built his home on the family farm, and I built my home on the family farm. So we were close-knit brothers, and our older brother lived over in Heber City. All three of us, even today, are very, very close. 9 LR: What would you consider an important lesson that you feel your parents taught you that you can look back on and say, "Yeah, this was important?" BK: They taught us the meaning of work. We were up every morning and we were out, either milking cows when we were young, or horse trading, or up at Kelly Stables the horse rental place. They taught us the value of work. We tried to pass that on to our own children. I have five children of my own, and to this day they can't tell you what Saturday morning cartoons are, because every Saturday we were up at six o'clock and picking up cattle at different dairies and taking them down to the auction. When they became eight and nine and ten years old, they started working down there. They started either in the pig barn, tagging pigs, or tagging sheep, so they learned the value of work also. That's what my parents taught me, and that's what I tried to instill in my siblings and my children. Each one of them now are very successful. My oldest daughter works three jobs, my oldest son is an announcer, and he also works at Capital Lumber; he was the number one salesman last year. My other son was a rodeo clown, his name was Van, and he started a business and because his business grew so fast he had to quit clowning, and now he is a very successful builder in the Park City area. My other son, Todd, is very successful and he has Total Cowboy Company, which sells paraphernalia to rodeo people and he also is the head custodian at Midway Elementary. My last daughter received her Master’s Degree a couple of years ago, and has been teaching third grade for the past eight years, and she and her new husband are very successful. I attribute that to not seeing Saturday morning cartoons, but having to go out and work; they had to be 10 in the truck with their Dad. Maybe I was hard on them as a parent, but I think it's paid off. My wife has been just wonderful to support me in what I've done, and she was one of the big parts of the auction, because she ran the whole office. She is now the producer of Heber Valley Cowboy Poetry and has done that for the last twenty years, and she's very successful at that. I don't know if you've heard of Heber Valley Cowboy Poetry, but it's probably one of the biggest festivals in the state. LR: Michael is sitting here nodding his head, so he's heard of it. So let's talk about your family. Did you go to BYU first or did you serve a mission first? BK: I went to BYU for one year, and then I served an LDS Mission. LR: Where did you go on your mission? BK: My mission was the West Central States Mission. Headquarters was in Billings, Montana. It covered North and South Dakota, Wyoming, a little bit of Nebraska, and Idaho. It was a huge mission. LR: Sounds like. Wow, that is huge. BK: But that was back in the day when missions were big. LR: Right. So when you came home, you went back to BYU? BK: Yes. When I came home, that summer I worked at the stables, renting horses, and then I went back to BYU and the next three years I was on the BYU rodeo team. LR: Now when in all this did you meet your wife? 11 BK: I met my wife in 1970. She was a freshman at BYU, I had just got home from my mission. She was from Heber, I was from Heber Valley, but I didn't really know her. She was standing on the stairs of the Richard Building, and I came up and she asked me for a ride home so she could have a date with another boy. So I gave her a ride home, and we talked all the way home, and I just fell in love with her from that time. The next day I said, "Why don't you come over and soap saddles with me?" She said she would, and we started dating and the rest is history. LR: When did you get married? BK: We got married in 1972. LR: Okay. So a courtship of two years. BK: Approximately a year and a half, yeah. LR: Okay. So after you got married, I know you didn’t really move beyond that valley, but did you just build a home and just start… BK: When we first got married we lived across the street from my parents, and then my Dad gave me a lot down by my brother, and we moved in a little Boise- Cascade home, split level, and that's where we've lived ever since. LR: You said your wife was instrumental with the auction house, she helped with that business? BK: She did all of the office work. She did all of the checks, and worked with the IRS and the packers and stockyards, and she just had a great big responsibility, and 12 she was there every Saturday with me. The first twenty years that we had the auction barn, I was in business with my brother. So my brother's wife and my wife, those two ran the office, and then I bought my brother out, and we ran the auction ourselves for six years. LR: Okay. Was it nice being able to share that with your wife, or was it something that you really had to work at? BK: You know, it was a fun time. We never did have an argument over the place, she did her job, I did my job, and we just meshed. We mixed and matched very, very well. LR: That's just cool. You don't see that very often where a husband and wife make a business together and make it work so I find that very reassuring. BK: It was unusual, but it was fun. LR: Okay. Let’s go back to your announcing, what do you think is a skill that is important for an announcer to have? BK: Well, I think not only do you have to have the voice, but you also have to have the excitement, and you also have to have the knowledge of the thing you’re announcing. You have to have a knowledge of the cowboys, what they've done, where they've been, you've got to have the knowledge of explaining the sport, the different events in rodeo, the excitement of bringing the crowd to its feet, and announcing a really, really high score that will get everyone excited. The key point of an announcer is to have the ability to bring the audience really, really 13 high and then take them down, and then bring them high again, and then take them down in the emotional sense of the rodeo. LR: That sounds like by the time you’re done, you’ve been on an emotional roller coaster, so is it exhausting? BK: Last week, we just finished the high school State finals, and we had two rodeos a day, one at ten o'clock in the morning and one at six o'clock at night. By the end of the night, you are emotionally and physically drained, and you sleep very well. LR: Wow, that's just blowing my mind a little bit. You talk about needing to know the cowboys, but when you're announcing high school rodeos isn't it like a new cowboy? BK: Yes. It's a new cowboy experience, but a lot of times, you've announced some of the club rodeos, so you know who the kids are and what they've done, and you can build them up and be positive with them because you have announced them a couple of times. In the final performance Saturday night, I had all of the kids fill out what was called a bio sheet, so you could tell the audience a little bit about the cowboy, who their parents were, what they had done in rodeo, what their nickname was, and give the audience a little more personalized ability to know each one of these young people. Because sometimes this is the only national finals or the only finals that they'll go to, and it's important for them. It's important for them to understand that they're important in what they have done, and the accomplishments that they've made as a rodeo contestant; not only as a rodeo contestant, but some of them have a 3.9 GPA average, or valedictorian of their 14 school, so people need to know a little bit more about these young people and what they've done, and the accomplishments that they've had. LR: I'm kind of in awe at the moment. That just seems like a lot to convey in a short amount of time. It's not like they're riding for very long, so you're building them up. BK: No, you have about thirty seconds to tell about them. LR: From what I'm gathering, you’re able to do that and make them the most important cowboy in the moment. BK: The focus is right on them. LR: Okay. I’m speechless at the moment. Is there any time that you were announcing that was a special moment for you, or that was very poignant for you? BK: One of my favorite things in announcing is paying tribute to people that have gone on and have done a great job, like the other night. We had the opportunity to tell a little bit about Casey Mascaro. Now Casey Mascaro had bladder cancer a couple of years ago, but he thought everything was okay. Last March they found a couple of spots on his lung. So the cancer came back. Saturday night, we stopped the rodeo for about forty minutes, and had a benefit auction for Casey Mascaro. I had the opportunity to read or to tell a little bit about Casey and the importance that he's had in rodeo; he's one of the stock contractors. His company is Circle J Rodeo Company, and the influence that he's had on these young people. When the forty minutes was over, the crowd had raised over thirty- 15 five thousand dollars for him. That was an emotional time, and that was very special for me. Val Leavitt was one of the great announcers in the area, and he passed away, so I had the opportunity, years ago, to read a tribute to him as they rode a horse with an empty saddle around the arena. So there are emotional times like that that just tear your heart out, but as an announcer you have to be really be emotionally uninvolved to tell the story. Now it's alright to look down and see other people crying, but you yourself have to keep composure. Sometimes my voice has cracked a little bit, and last week I had an emotional time when my granddaughter won the state of Utah Rodeo Queen. So she gets to go back to the National High School Rodeo with me, because I announce the Queen contest back there and also the cutting. I've done that for twenty-eight years. That was an emotional time for me, I mean I couldn't say, "This is my granddaughter and she just won the rodeo queen for the state of Utah." I had to be very professional about it. I said, "The winner is McCartey Kelly. She'll be our 2018 High School Rodeo Queen for the state of Utah," but inside I was saying wow, this is going to be cool. LR: Wow, as a parent I know how proud I would be if one of my children accomplished that, but I don’t’ know how you kept your composure and didn’t just scream, “That’s my granddaughter.” BK: Well, I did look at my wife, and she was bawling, and I didn't want to do that, so I just kept focused on what I was doing. 16 LR: It seems like a full circle happening there, being able to have your granddaughter win that, and then go with her to nationals, that's exciting. BK: It is very exciting. We are so excited to do that. LR: As you've raised your family, what is your most proud moment as a father or grandfather? BK: That was one of them, last week, when she became the rodeo queen. You know what, I have had so many, my children have done so well, and l 'm just proud of each and every one of them. They are wonderful and each one is in a different category. My son has been named announcer of the year for the RMPRA for two or three years, my other son was barrel man of the year for three years in a row as a rodeo clown. My other son is an auctioneer, and does a great job, and my daughter, Haley, with her accomplishing and getting her Master’s Degree when she was young, and teaching for eight years, and then my oldest daughter buying this business, and it's a very successful business, it's called Cafe Galleria in Midway. It's a pizza restaurant that everyone likes to go to, and she's doing a great job. So I couldn't say one particular thing, but it's a culmination of my kids that make me proud. LR: Okay, unless you have any other stories you'd like to share, I'm going to ask a final question. BK: No, I think you've covered just about all of my life. LR: Alright. So, let me just ask you this, and I know it's not a fair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What do you hope that your legacy is? 17 BK: I hope that my legacy is one that people can look and say he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish and he did what he wanted to do, and he was very successful. The legacy is, I want my children to be proud of their Dad, and I want my children to always do what they want to do in their heart, and always stay true to themselves. LR: Well. I remember now why I enjoy interviewing for this so much. I appreciate your candor and I feel like a better person for having spent an hour talking to you. I'm so grateful for your time this morning.