Author: Lily Landreth

“For a guy who started out like I did, America was the land of opportunity. I’ve come from shoeshine boy to Grammy Award winner and author,” says Dr. Charles Townsend. Born November 5, 1929, the Texas native attributes rodeo as the gateway to his life, and an abundant one at that. He announced rodeos 50 consecutive years and took his oratory skills to the college classroom as a history professor, while also writing “San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills”, published in 1976.
It began simply enough. Charles Buddy Townsend – named after musician Charles Buddy Rogers – had drawn a bull, Little Blue, at the rodeo in Ringold, Texas. It was Labor Day of 1946, and Bud’s older brother refused to let the 16 year old get on the bull. When the announcer didn’t appear, Bud, known for his rodeo announcing imitations, took up the microphone instead. “I took to that like a duck to water. I had a lot of fun, maybe more so than later because I wasn’t taking it seriously,” says Bud. “In those days, they brought an invalid in an old Sedan to the arena with his sound equipment inside. Sometimes the horses would hit the car or the calves would run behind it. We didn’t have electricity at the arena, so we ran a crystal microphone off the car. I would fold a handkerchief over it so it wouldn’t melt in the sun. Mine never did.”
Following his announcing debut, Bud got on one or two more bulls before leaving the chutes behind. “Announcing was my forte, and it gave me something to live for. My mother was widowed with seven children, and we were poor, which was nothing new in the Depression. I never dreamed I’d make ten dollars a day or that there would be any future – I had no reason to believe I’d ever be anything. I had a gang of friends around town, and we were into all kinds of mischief. Announcing opened a door in my life, and in a sense, I owe a debt to rodeo that I can never repay.”
Prior to living in the town of Nocona, Texas, Bud and his mother and siblings lived on his grandfather’s ranch, eight miles from town on the Chisholm Trail, and just four miles from where H.J. Justin started Justin Boots Company. “I lived in an era right between the frontier and modern America. We went to town with the team and wagon and brought groceries back. One of my granddad’s ranches was on the Red River, and he was rich when oil was three dollars a barrel. My Uncle Joe Hancock raised the great Hancock horses.” When Bud was in his early teens, his mother moved to Nocona and rented an old hotel for the family. “Main street was my front yard and the alley was my backyard. I was truly an alley rat. But when I started announcing, I became something of a businessman, and I had to give up my wild and wicked ways, because people won’t buy ads from a shady character,” he recalls with a laugh.
He announced horse races, baseball games, and sold ads, a long way from his ten cents a shoe shine. He returned to boots, however, in his late teens when Ruth Salmon (Roach) the lady bronc and trick rider, secured him the sales manager position at Olsen-Stelzer Boot and Saddlery Company in Henrietta, Texas. “She was a dear friend of my mother’s, and we lived on the ranch two and a half miles from Ruth and Dick Salmon. We were very close, and I also knew Tad Lucas because she’d stay on Ruth’s ranch. They never referred to rodeo as a sport – they looked on it as show business. To me, that was the greatest era of rodeo, when it was more of a show.”
Show business agreed with Bud, and he learned his craft announcing rodeos in towns such as Muenster and Gainesville, Texas. The 17 year old turned his attention to the RCA, and when Ruth put in good word to Bobby Estes, a rodeo producer, Bud was all but in with the association. “I announced for Bobby in Hamilton, near Stephenville, Texas, and he liked me. When I joined the RCA, their office was in Fort Worth in the Burnett Building. Earl Lindsey was the manager and they had a little 6×6 foot office with maybe one file cabinet and a desk. I asked Mr. Lindsey, ‘If I join the RCA, can I announce amateur?’ He said I’d be put on the blacklist, and I had to decide right then if I wanted to be amateur or pro. My original card number is 1249 – I was the 1,249th member in 1948.”
Two years later, Bud married Mary Smith, who was a book keeper for Olsen-Stelzer. Their first son, William, was born in 1951, and twins Mary Jane and Charles Jr. came several years later. Bud announced for Bobby Estes another five years, and the family always came along. “We wore out about three trailers – we couldn’t make any money if we stayed in hotels or ate out. Our first trailer was 17 feet and it wasn’t even self-contained.” Bud explains his biggest break in the rodeo business came when he quit working for Bobby Estes. “It freed me up to announce bigger rodeos – after I quit with him, I travelled all over. I went to the RCA convention and booked shows, from state fairs in California and North Carolina to rodeos in Mercedes, Texas, and Omak, Washington.” He also worked for rodeo producers including Homer Todd, Beutler Brothers, Cotton Rosser, Everett Colburn, and Walt Alsbaugh for 30 years.
“In the meantime, I became a Christian. My wife and her family are so Baptist, they go back to John the Baptist, and I decided I wanted become a preacher.” Bud continued to announce in the summers and work for Olsen-Stelzer and Nocona Boot Company while attending school. He graduated from Decatur Baptist College and went on to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. “The faculty got me a fellowship for Baylor University where I went for a year until I applied to University of Wisconsin. I’d gotten interested in history at Wichita Falls, and University of Wisconsin had a top history department, but I knew I wasn’t ready for the big league yet. I took a teaching job at Texas Tech University to really learn basic American history, and then went to Wisconsin for three years to get my PhD.”
He would go on to teach history at West Texas A&M University in Canyon for 27 years, where he is presently Professor Emeritus, while Mary taught first grade in Canyon for 24 years. Bud was one of the best lecturers the school had seen. “I attribute that to announcing rodeos,” he says. “I couldn’t announce a rodeo and use big words and be intellectual – you have to speak the people’s language. I lectured the same way in the classroom, and they could understand me.”
Bud also taught at Hardin Simmons, Texas Tech, and University of Wisconsin. While teaching at Texas Tech, he made extra money by interviewing rodeo people for Sylvan Dunn, an associate professor of Sociology. Bud made sure his interviews took him to Turkey, Texas, home of the King of Western Swing, Bob Wills. “When I was growing up on my granddad’s ranch, my dad was a big fan of Jimmy Rogers, whom he’d played guitar with. They both had TB, and Dad met Jimmy in a sanitarium in San Angelo. In full health, Dad worked in the oil fields, and he was a tinkerer. When I was five or six, he built a wind charger to charge the car battery so we could listen to the radio. We listened to three things – Bing Crosby, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches, and one noontime, we found Bob Wills. In the Depression, there wasn’t much to live for with war coming. But Bob Wills’ music was uplifting. Dad told me one time, ‘Stay with this Bob Wills, he’ll be big one of these days.’ And I never forgot it.”
Bud’s chance to meet his childhood idol came when he met Johnny Lee Wills, Bob’s brother, who produced a rodeo in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “He got me in with Bob Wills, and when I came back to the history department, they thought I was lying about meeting him. But my wife fell in love with his wife, and we became close friends.” Bud was asked to write an article on Bob Wills for the Dictionary of American Biography, but he felt a book was in order. For the music lover who signed up for clarinet in college and carried the reeds in his pocket, the 85 interviews with Bob Wills that followed were exhilarating. “It was about ten years in the making. I did all my writing in the morning. I knew I was writing to the world, and I’d sit there and get a high just working on it!” A scholarly work edited by Judith McCullough, “San Antonio Rose: The Music and Life of Bob Wills” was published in 1976 by University of Illinois Press in a series of books on music and American life.
In 1975, Bud accepted the Grammy Award for his album notes on “For the Last Time”, Bob Wills’ final album with The Texas Playboys. Bud was one out of 4,000 entrants and five nominees for the Grammy Awards. “One reason I think I won the award was because I interviewed so many musicians and asked about their influences. Bob’s was Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues in the ‘20s.”
Today, Bud and Mary continue to make their home in Canyon. Their son William is an optometrist, and Mary Jane is a medical advisor for one of largest blood distributing banks in the world, located in Scottsdale, Arizona, second only to the Red Cross. Their younger son, Charles Jr., passed away five years ago. “Regardless of what I’ve done, I’ve stayed with rodeo in the summers, and it was like paid vacation for 50 years,” says Bud, who’s been inducted into the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, and received the Lifetime Achievement and All-Around Cowboy awards through the American Cowboy Culture Awards in Lubbock, Texas, which he announces. His childhood hometown of Nocona even held a Bud Townsend Day in his honor. “I wouldn’t take anything in the world for those 50 years of announcing,” Bud finishes. “Rodeo introduced me to so many cultures and foods and people, and it freed me from poverty and gave me ambition. Everything I’ve done goes back to that, and I’m so proud I did it.”

Trick roper, trader, entrepreneur, Willis Hamm was born near the second half of The Great Depression, yet hard work and ingenuity were spurs on the heels of the somber era. With them, Willis started his own business, Cowboy Metal, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, grown on the values of the western lifestyle – and $187.11.
Born November 5, 1934, to Henry and Esther Hamm, Willis was the youngest of four children. His father was a horse and dairy cow trader, and owned a dairy farm near Hooker, Okla., a town in the 34 mile wide Oklahoma panhandle. Willis was at once initiated into a lifestyle of rising when the day was just four hours old – or at least arriving home in time for milking. “Leland Friesen was my best friend in high school, and we’d ride after church into the night – my dad just said to be home by milking,” Willis recalls. “He never let me use the truck, saying I had a saddle and a horse. He had an extremely good reputation as a trader for his integrity and honesty, and he taught me all of that. We learned how to work and to be honest, and that’s still very important to me today.”
Willis and his brother took to breaking horses, both for their dad and the public. “I was trick riding then and teaching our horses,” says Willis. “My dad would have me show somebody the tricks a horse could do, and it was sold. It was key to my dad’s trading, but it was a heartbreaker for me to say goodbye. I really learned how to detach myself from an animal until I got my own horse, Lady.” The mare lived to be 34, and became Willis’s trick riding mount after he met Dixie Lee and Virginia Mae Reger of Woodard, Okla. “I saw them trick ride at a rodeo in Guymon, Oklahoma, and I fell in love with it,” Willis recalls. “I went home and started doing the tricks I’d seen. I didn’t have a trick saddle at the time, but I messed up my dad’s favorite saddle standing on it. The death drag was one of my favorites – it’s daring and spectacular.”
Never one prone to thumb twiddling, Willis added trick roping to his repertoire in grade school. The three Gilbert brothers from his school were from a ranching family, and they shared their knowledge of trick roping with him. “They were real cowboys, and also my heroes from the standpoint of trick roping,” he says. “I learned to do whip work on my own, and riding standing up while spinning a rope was something I specialized in.” He also experimented with roman riding, known for taking any two horses his family had and making them go forward. “Frank Gilbert could roman ride two horses jumping over a convertible, and I asked my dad about using a neighbors junk car to jump, but he said no, so I made some jumping standards and put a blanket in between to create the same distance. I also trained one of my dad’s horses, Dolly, for trick riding. She loved to fall, and I learned to fall free of her. I’d take her to one of our plowed fields and take her down at a gallop, just like in the movies.”
Willis took his talent from the cow pasture that was his practice pen to rodeos in Kansas and Oklahoma. He grew up just 30 miles from the late legendary rodeo clown and competitor, Buddy Heaton, who eventually left the RCA to create his own rodeo circuit. It was there Willis found his lifelong love of mules and buffalo. “Buddy was my hero, and he did the unusual,” says Willis. “He bucked mules and buffalo as his roughstock. I clowned his buffalo rodeos and did some trick riding and whip work for him for several years.”
Change came when Willis quit school and refused to return for his senior year. “I didn’t get along with my teacher, and he said I was unteachable. My sister had gone to Meade Bible Academy two years before, and my parents asked if I’d go there. I told them only if my best friend, Leland Friesen, came along. He didn’t have a father and his family was very poor, and to this day I’m fairly sure my parents made it possible for him to go that school.” It was there Willis met his future wife, JoAnn Friesen (no relation to Leland), and they were married on December 29, 1953, when Willis was 19, fitting the wedding between milking chores.
The newlyweds moved to Denver, where Willis worked for two and a half years at a Presbyterian hospital as an alternative to the draft for the Korean War. To supplement his income, he mowed lawns, delivered The Denver Post, and drove horses for Glacier Barns’ hayrides several hours a night. In 1960, he started working for a company that built doorframes, but boredom struck, and Willis decided to make good on his pledge to be a trader like his dad. “I’d saved up $187.11, and I wanted to see what I could do with it,” he says. “The first thing I did was buy a machine I didn’t know anything about, which turned out to be worthless. I knew a guy in the machine tool business, so I told him my story and we traded for a little punch press. I started making things like ornamental leaves for fences for three cents apiece, and then a friend of mine in the ceiling business needed ceiling clips, which I built by the thousands.”
By 1968, Willis had three employees, unbeknownst to his own employer, whom he was still working for. “I went into my boss two years after I started Cowboy Metal and told him what I was doing,” says Willis. “I thought he’d either fire me or tell me to get rid of it, but he only asked if I was man enough to run two companies, and I worked for him another two years.” In 1970, Willis had saved $2,000 cash to quit his doorframe job and begin working full time at Cowboy Metal, but the day he resigned, he went out to lunch with his billfold and came home without it. It was found and returned with everything but the $2,000. “That’s the money we were going to live on for a while, but the man I’d sold ceiling clips to advanced me some money, and it didn’t take me long to pay it back. I’m a risk taker and a pretty good manager, and I ended up fulfilling my wish of being a trader.”
Willis went on to buy and sell everything from wagons and buggies, to horses, mules, and harnesses, staying just ahead of the curve of what was trending for 25 years. He sold harnesses internationally to Germany, Japan, and South America, while Cowboy Metal expanded its services to building horse trailers. Today, the custom metal fabrication shop, still located in Denver, specializes in press brake, shear, and welding services, along with repairing many types of trailers and selling trailer parts.
While his business grew, so did Willis’s family. He and JoAnn have two children, Verle Hamm and Melody Brandt, along with four grandchildren – Verle and Dawn’s daughters, Alyssa and Randi, and Melody and Bruce’s sons, Jason and Lance – and five great-grandchildren. “I’m honored to have him as my dad and experience the things we have together,” says Verle. He competed in the NLBRA in bareback and bull riding, and was the CSHSRA bull riding champion in 1974, along with the all-around reserve champion. Today, he competes in the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association (CMSA). He and Melody work at Cowboy Metal, while Willis ushered all of the grandchildren into the Denver National Western Stock Show, which he competed in with both horses and mules. “There’s been a second-class attitude about the mule industry, but at Cowboy Metal we always tried to raise the bar and be creative,” says Willis, who won every class at the Stock Show during his 30 years as a competitor.
Yet the creativity didn’t end there. In 1969, Willis had purchased a piece of property in Louisville, Colo., between Boulder and Denver, naming it Cowboy Meadows Farm, a division of Cowboy Metal. Complete with Western buildings, teepees, and stagecoaches, the farm hosted weddings, YMCA summer camps, company picnics, and other special events, until it was sold in 2010. Willis and Verle also drove rodeo dignitaries in their stagecoach for 18 years in the Greeley Stampede, including Leon Coffee and Bill Farr.
“It was fun growing up and having a dad who was a cowboy,” says Melody, “and all the fun we had at the National Western Stock Show will never be forgotten. He taught us a lot of things, and growing up with him as a dad was never dull. His faith and love of God and family is a wonderful heritage.” Today, Willis and JoAnn make their home in Lakewood, Colo., near Denver, where his garage is home to numerous mechanical dummies he creates and engineers to talk and make facial expressions. Though he sold his 14 buffalo – one of which, Harry, now hangs in Willis’s office – Willis still works with his mules. He sold two pairs of mules to a wrangler for the 2013 adaptation of The Lone Ranger, and his inventiveness also produced Little Spike in 2005, a train engine with ten passenger cars he and Verle take to special events such as Buffalo Bill Days in Golden, Colo., country clubs, farmers markets, parades, and Lakewood Cider Days. They have also taken their special events to Nashville, Tenn., Wichita and Liberal, Kan., Guymon, Okla., Tacoma, Wash., Las Vegas, Nev., Greeley, and The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., while also making appearances in and providing props for TV commercials.
“Life has been good, and I’m grateful for the talent and opportunities God has given me,” Willis concludes. “To quote my hero, Will Rogers, it takes a life to make a living, and it takes a lifetime to make a reputation.”