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Bill Skavdahl has gotten plenty of adrenaline rushes in his life. Some of them were ones he planned on, like when he rode bulls and bulldogged, and some were unpleasant ones, like when his helicopter was shot down while serving in the Army Air Corps in Vietnam in 1968.
The northwestern Nebraska man was born near Harrison in 1946 to Harold and Ellen (Howard) Skavdahl. His parents were ranchers and had never rodeoed, but Bill loved to ride the milk cow, much to his mother’s consternation. He was a hand with a horse; ranch work at the Skavdahls was done on horseback.
As a freshman at Harrison High School in 1961, he competed at the state finals, held in Harrison. There were no regular season rodeos; anyone who wanted to could compete at the finals, and the top three in each event went on to the National High School Finals. He rode bareback horses and bulls, mostly because the equipment was easy to come by. An old bareback rider bequeathed him a riggin’, and bull ropes were cheaper than horses.
At the state finals, he won second place in the bull riding. At that time, if a contestant qualified in one event for Nationals, they could add two more events in which to compete. So Bill added bareback riding.
Nationals were in Douglas, Wyo., and he caught a ride to them with a friend. He made a qualified bull ride in round one, then made it to the finals, ending up tying for third with Denny Wall from Montana.

Third place was a pair of spurs, nice ones, and fourth place was a certificate for a 20X Resistol hat. Bill loved the spurs but needed the hat. “I’d never had a felt hat,” he said, “and I wanted one, so I told (Denny) I didn’t need to flip (for third place prize), I’d just take the hat. I had that hat for a long time.”
As a high school junior, he won second at state in the bull riding again. This time, Nationals were in Tarkio, Missouri, and he chose bareback and saddle bronc riding as his additional events. He rode one of his bulls and both of his saddle broncs, missing the short round by two places in the saddle broncs. He rode one of his bareback horses, but missed out the second horse.
In 1964, four high school regular season rodeos were held in Nebraska, and Bill competed at two of them. At Thedford, he won the steer wrestling and bull riding, finished second in the barebacks, and won the all-around. In Crawford, he won the steer wrestling, bull riding and the all-around again. “I was on a roll for state,” he said.
But in Crawford, he broke his ankle. He was in the chute on a Hollenbeck bull, one that hadn’t been ridden. “The bull threw a fit,” Bill said. He made a qualified ride in spite of the break.
State finals were the next week, and he had a plan. He had won a pair of spurs in Thedford, and he modified one of them for his cast. “I took one of them out to the shop, took a blow torch, heated her up, and fitted it around that cast. I got me some plaster of Paris and baling wire and got that thing fastened on there pretty good.”
The spur worked. He covered his first two bulls, but in the short round, the bull spun to the left. “I had a broken right ankle and that didn’t work out too good,” he remembered. He finished fourth in the state, one hole out of qualifying for Nationals.
After high school graduation, Bill worked on the ranch for his dad. Times were tough, so he decided to go to California. He had an aunt there, and he found a job working for a paving company, making $150 a week. It was a good job, considering it would take a month at home to make that same amount. While in California, he competed at a few rodeos.
He was there for a year when a letter came from his dad. A draft notice had arrived addressed to him in Nebraska, and Bill needed to take care of business. He got a physical in California, and passed it. The draft board told him he’d have to go back home to be inducted.
So Bill went home and talked to a recruiter, asking what his options were. His test scores were good enough that he could choose several things. He wanted to be a pilot.
Basic training was in Louisiana then he was on to flight training at Ft. Wolters in Mineral Wells, Texas and advanced flight training at Ft. Rucker, in Dothan, Alabama.
The Army was short on helicopter pilots, so he volunteered. After more training in Ft. Benning, Georgia, he was one of 52 pilots in the 235th Aviation Co., an attack helicopter company formed by the Pentagon, and on October 10, 1967, he was sent to Vietnam.
The attack helicopter’s main job was to escort the helicopters carrying troops into a landing area and to drive the enemy from the landing site till the men were unloaded. They also provided support fire for ground troops.
Within a month, he was the aircraft commander and the fire team leader. Pilots spent about forty hours a week in the air, and Bill flew 805 missions, over 1,050 hours.
The helicopters rarely went unscathed. At the end of every mission, the bullet holes in the sides were counted and recorded. Bill’s record was 29 holes in one mission.
His helicopter was shot down on April 14, 1968. He and his crew were providing air support as a medivac unit worked to evacuate crews from two downed helicopters. Enemy fire knocked out the tail motor gear box on Bill’s helicopter, and he and his crew knew what was coming.
“The feeling you experience is like that of having a horse fall with you,” he said. “It happens so fast you don’t get scared, you just try to get away.”
The enemy was all over the area, but Bill’s helicopter had hit the ground farther away from the actual fighting. It wasn’t long till another crew was there to rescue them. It was only after he was on the rescue flight that he realized a piece of the helicopter had been driven through his leg. During his time in Vietnam he broke his back, and he received a Purple Heart for being wounded while serving his country. He also was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross twice, for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight.”
A year to the day that he went to Vietnam, he was sent home. It was October 10, 1968.
He spent another year in the Army, this time at Ft. Carson, Colo., where he and fellow soldiers filled in for the National Guard unit in Kansas City, Mo., as replacements, as the guard members were sent to Vietnam.
While in Colorado, he rode bulls at Canon City and Pikes Peak or Bust, where he got to rub shoulders with bull riding greats like Freckles Brown and Larry Mahan.
He was discharged in 1970, and headed back to the ranch.
By this time, his dad had bought a second ranch, and Bill took over management of it. He married and had three sons: Josh, Jud and Joe, and a daughter, Tomi Jain.

He rodeoed a bit, riding bulls at regional rodeos in Nebraska, but he had a family, ranching obligations, and aches and pains from Vietnam. “You borrow a lot of money from the bank (to ranch),” he said, “and you can’t afford to get hurt.”
But there was one more bull ride for him. At the age of 45, in 1991, he got on a bull at the senior pro rodeo in Crawford. He didn’t make the buzzer, but it “felt pretty good. I wanted to get on again. There’s a rush, you know.”
His children didn’t compete in high school rodeo, but Jud, the middle son, rode saddle broncs at county fairs and was on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln rodeo team in the mid 1990s. He continued to rodeo in the Nebraska State Rodeo Association, making the finals several times. But, like his dad, he had a family to support and a ranch to run, so he career wound down, and, again like his dad, he rode his last saddle bronc at age 45, at the senior pro rodeo in Crawford last summer.
All three boys attended the University of Nebraska, and help with the ranch. All three boys live close to each other and ranch and work together, even though their operations are separate. Joe is also a veterinarian at the Torrington (Wyo.) sale barn. Daughter Tomi Kirkland lives in Riverton, Wyo., and is an English teacher. Bill has ten grandchildren.
Last summer, Bill went through another ordeal. He contracted a rare virus called campylobacter fetus, the “human” form of brucellosis in cattle. The bacteria can cause sepsis and localized infections in the brain, lungs, joints, and the pericardial sac around the heart. The virus got him down. He was in Rock Springs, Wyo., to watch a grandson compete at the National High School Finals and felt so poorly he couldn’t get out of the vehicle.
He went misdiagnosed for two months and after a spinal tap, it was a doctor in Casper, Wyo., who diagnosed him. He made a full recovery and is back to feeding cattle and doing nearly everything he used to do.
He, son Jud, and grandson Jack, a saddle bronc rider, all wore the same chaps as they competed. Bill purchased the “Jim Shoulders” brand out of a catalog in 1963 for $44, which “was a lot of money then,” he said.
And one of his fondest memories was from the 1961 National High School Finals. He was the last bull rider for the evening, and the crowd roared when he made the buzzer. “I can remember the crowd was thunderous,” he said. The ride “was a crowd pleaser.”
His mother gave her sons advice when they were growing up. There were two things they were not allowed to do: ride bulls and join the service. Bill did both, and loved it.
Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, Bill’s life has been full and happy. He has served his country, has four children, kept a ranch going into the next generation, and rodeoed. The patriarch of the family is well-loved and is doing what he loves: ranching, working, and enjoying his kids and grandkids.

Bob Click was never a threat to any big-name cowboys, but he loved to compete. “Jim Shoulders never lost any sleep over me,” Bob quipped, “although I knew him personally and liked him.”
Born the son of O.B. and Thelma Click, on the family farm near Warren, Oregon, just south of St. Helens, Bob rode calves and cows at junior rodeos, helped feed the polled Herefords on the farm, and was derisively nicknamed “Cowboy Bob” by his classmates at school.
He and a buddy, both farm kids, were members of 4-H and FFA and “we were taunted at school,” Bob remembers. “They thought you were a clod and a hick” if a person did 4-H and FFA.
But rodeo remained a constant throughout Bob’s life.
In junior rodeos, he competed in every event, but in high school, it was narrowed to bareback horses and very few bulls, “mostly to please my mother, because she didn’t want me getting on bulls,” Bob remembered. He qualified for the Oregon amateur finals (now the Northwest Pro Rodeo Association) in the bareback riding, and added bull riding to his repertoire.
In 1954, at the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He saw guys, during their leave, who would buy a bottle, sneak it into the movie theater, finish off the bottle and sleep it off, then head back to the boat after leave. That was not for him. “I saw enough of that that I wanted no part of it,” he said. One day, in the paper, he saw a rodeo being advertised in Santa Anna, Calif., so he got a Greyhound bus ticket, headed to Santa Anna, and watched the rodeo.

The bucking bulls didn’t look any tougher than what he’d ridden back at home. “I looked at the stock, and it didn’t look any worse than what I was getting on at amateur rodeos,” Bob said.
At the time, the Rodeo Cowboys Association, the predecessor to the PRCA, was allowing those serving in the military to compete without having a card, so Bob went for it.
And any time he had “liberty,” or leave, he was at a rodeo. “I had a 72 hour pass every weekend,” he said. Stationed at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in Vallejo, Calif., northern California was full of rodeos in the summertime. “I was at a rodeo every weekend, sometimes two a weekend.”
In 1957, before Bob left the Navy, he bought his RCA card. Stationed in an active submarine, he made port in Japan, and mailed his membership fees to Denver, so he could compete at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Calif.
After the Navy, he got a job at the phone company and continued to ride bulls. He wasn’t the best bull rider around, but that didn’t bother him. “I was getting bucked off bulls all the time, but I didn’t care,” he said. “I loved being there, being part of it.”
He’d come to work with the typical bull riding injuries, and be put on “light duty.” After a six month probation, workers couldn’t be fired, so he knew that wasn’t an issue. But one day, his supervisor pulled him aside. “You’re a hard worker,” he told Bob, “when you can work, and we love your rodeo stories. But you can’t make a career out of light duty.” Bob told him he’d take his words under advisement.
Not long after that, in 1963, Bob was in a bad car wreck, breaking vertebrae, and his bull riding days were over.
After he healed, he did some scuba instructing. He had learned to scuba dive in the Navy for submarine escape training and took instruction on shooting a camera underwater. His parents had given him a Brownie Kodak camera for eighth grade graduation, and he enjoyed taking pictures. This knowledge would come in handy down the road.
Married to his first wife Beverly in 1958, she loved rodeo as much as he did, and even after he got hurt, they would attend rodeos. But it was hard to buy a ticket and sit in the grandstand when he was used to being behind the chutes.
One year, the county fair was happening in Vancouver, Wash., and Bob noticed there was a bull-a-rama. He bought a ticket, grabbed his camera, and took a few pictures.

The next week, at a rodeo in Longview, Wash., he took his developed pictures from the prior week and went behind the chutes. Ron Hall, a bull rider whose dad, Tom Hall, had been one of Bob’s rodeo peers, grabbed his buddies and said, “come look at this guy’s pictures,” Bob said. “I had printed eight by tens, and they bought them all immediately. I was hooked then,” he remembered.
Bob also helped his friend, Jim Smith, a tie-down roper, with a roping jackpot he produced near Molalla. Bob was the chute boss, but he brought his camera along and took pictures. The cowboys “loved having pictures of themselves,” he remembered.
His underwater photography learning came in handy. “I learned the basics of photography from my underwater photography,” Bob said. “That helped more than anything.” The use of a strobe light in dark settings, like underwater, was similar to the use of a strobe shooting rodeo pictures after the sun went down.

His hobby grew. It was the early 1990s and he was still working for the phone company, and taking rodeo pictures in the evenings and weekends. At the time, there were six rodeos in the Portland area that he could work and still be home every night.
Being adept at photography and understanding rodeo didn’t necessarily mean that rodeo photography was easy, he said. “I had a lot of rodeo experience and a lot of photo experience but I did not have rodeo photography experience,” he said. “I had to learn it.”
One of the people who helped him was Fred Nyulassy, also a rodeo photographer. “I was very fortunate to meet a nice guy,” Bob said. The two were Navy veterans, and they hit it off. “He is one of the best.”
Bob also worked for three different news services, providing rodeo photos for them. The East Oregonian (Pendleton, Ore.), the Bend (Ore.) Bulletin, and the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review used his photos and loved them.
Before he retired from the phone company, Bob worked as many as twenty rodeos a year, including the National Finals Rodeo, which he photographed for eighteen years.
He retired from the phone company in 2003, and by this time, he had remarried. Jean, his second wife, had helped care for his three kids while Bob was on the road doing construction for the phone company. They became close, and married in 1963.
In 2013, while he was shooting the National Finals, he got a call as he traveled home. Jean had died in her sleep. He had adopted her daughter, Michelle, who is handicapped and lives with Bob. The next year was his last one to work the National Finals; he couldn’t be gone from Michelle, who needs him at home.
Now retired, he takes photos at about a dozen rodeos a year: Red Bluff and Redding Calif.; Sisters, St. Paul, Hermiston, Canby and Pendleton, Ore.; and Bremerton and Ellensburg, Wash.

Rodeo photography has changed since he started snapping pictures at the bull-a-rama in Washington. The technology has advanced, Bob said. “When I started, everyone shot film. It has improved so much, and it’s so much easier to do than when I started.” One of his photographer heroes is Devere Helfrich, who shot rodeo pictures from the 1940s through the 70s. “I didn’t realize, when I was riding, how good Devere was. He didn’t have the great cameras they have now, and all the support, like Photoshop. Photography has changed dramatically in a twenty-five year period. Frankly, it’s not that hard to do anymore.”
And it will require fewer skills to be a photographer in the future, Bob believes. Cell phone cameras have improved, and he foresees the day when high quality still shots can be pulled out of video.
When he was riding bulls, he dreamed of the day his picture might be in the Western Horseman. He did have pictures in the magazine, but they were taken by him, not of him.
Bob is the 2010 PRCA Media Award for Excellence in Rodeo Photography winner.
But it’s not the awards and honors that satisfy him. It’s the friends he’s made.
“It’s like you’re all one family,” he said. “We’re not blood related but we’re still family to each other.”
Rodeo is one of the best parts of his life, he said. “All the unhappiness you see,” in the world, is forgotten when a person attends a rodeo. “With rodeo, for the most part, you get away from it. Rodeo people care about each other.”

Whether it was with wild horses, barrel horses or movie horses, Sammy Thurman Brackenbury lived her life with spirit, a sense of adventure, and a shot of adrenaline. By the age of seven she was breaking mustangs with her dad and selling them.
At the age of 27, she ran barrels at her first of what would be eleven consecutive National Finals Rodeos, and five years later, she was the world champion barrel racer.
She even doubled famous movie stars in the industry, doing horse riding and other stunts for them.
She was born in 1933 on a ranch in the Big Sandy, near Wickieup, Ariz., the daughter of Sam and Mamie Fancher. Her mother had three children from a previous marriage, but they were grown and out of the house. Named after her dad, he wanted a boy and treated her like one. “I did everything a boy would do,” she said.
Her father ran a ranch in Arizona, and when she was five years old, he quit his job to rodeo. The family moved to California to be closer to rodeos, since there weren’t a lot in Nevada at the time. After Sammy’s dad’s horse was injured, the family packed up again, this time moving near Imlay, Nevada, to work on another ranch. Her dad had bought interest in the ranch and rodeoed again to help pay the bills, and the mustangs Sammy broke were sold as kids’ ponies, which brought in a bit more income for the family.

She attended rodeos with her dad, but few of them included women’s barrel racing. Barrel racing hadn’t found its way to California yet; it was more common in Oklahoma and Texas. She match raced, riding her dad’s horses, and rode calves, and read all she could about the Girls Rodeo Association, the forerunner to the Women’s Pro Rodeo Association.
By this time, the family was living near Las Vegas, Nev., and Sammy was sixteen. Every horse her dad had she turned into a barrel horse. One fall, she and her cousin tried to convince the organizers of a small rodeo in Las Vegas to add barrel racing. They talked them into it, and the first year, with forty entries, Sammy won first and her cousin won second.
By about 1950, a California rodeo advertised it was adding barrel racing, and Sammy went there, excited to run. But when she got there, there was no barrels; it was poles. She rode her barrel horse, having to “rein him through” the pattern. The girl who promoted the pole bending won the event. Sammy got even; on the second run, she got her dad’s rope horse: “you could do anything on him,” she said, “and he smoked the poles and I won the second round.”

Sammy’s life was full of training horses, running barrels, and roping with her dad. Her first time competing with him at an RCA rodeo came about by accident. His partner didn’t show up, so she took his place. She hadn’t dally roped much, and her dad “was as nervous as a whore in church,” she laughed, about his daughter. “I got out perfect, laid it on (the steer),” Sammy said, “and when I roped him, my dad was looking at me to see if I was getting my dally, and went right on past the steer.”
Her daddy spoiled her, she said. One time, at a rodeo in Delano, Calif., she ran her rope horse in the barrels. When it was announced she’d have to run again because they missed her time, she told her dad she was going to ride Punkin, an exceptional palomino that her father used for the hazing, bulldogging, heading, heeling and calf roping. “No, you’re not,” he told her, and she replied, hide and watch! “I was a brat,” she laughed.
At the time, women were not allowed to compete in RCA rodeos, but Sammy and her dad were friends with Bill Linderman, RCA secretary and former president.
Linderman helped Sammy out several times, paving the way for her to rope with her dad. Bill told her, “when you want to enter, you tell them I said you could enter. If they give you grief, have them call me. So I started roping with my dad,” she said.

Because she did so well in the barrel racing, the Utah and Idaho rodeos often barred her from entering. She’d call on her friend Linderman again, and he’d say, “you tell them if they won’t let you enter, they can’t have barrels at the rodeo,” she remembered.
By then, barrel racing was becoming more common and more rodeos were including it. It helped, Sammy said, that world champion Wanda Bush and Florence Youree came to California to promote the event.
In 1960, she qualified for her first National Finals Rodeo. Living in Nevada, she competed in her home state and across California, Utah and Idaho. She and her dad made all the horses she rode, including what she considers her best horse, a bay mare named Ugh “because she was ugly,” Sammy remembers. The first time she had a chance to buy the mare, who wasn’t papered, the cost was $350. Her husband at the time, Anson Thurman, wouldn’t let her buy the horse. By the time she got her, the price was $850. But Ugh was worth it. “She was an outstanding barrel horse. You could do anything on her.”
Sammy qualified for the NFR every year from 1960-1970, winning the world in 1965. That year, she rode Ugh for most of the season but due to injury, the horse was out for the NFR. She rode a borrowed horse, Roanie and still finished third in the average. Sammy didn’t often rodeo back east; it was too far. But when she did, she borrowed horses, to cut down on the expense of driving a horse trailer and because the rodeos didn’t pay well enough to haul a horse.
One of the more innovative things she did for the sport was switching hands between the first and second barrel. Her dad taught her that. While most barrel racers ran with one hand, leading to the neck rein making horses stiff in the turn, Sammy changed hands between the first and second barrels. “Left hand, left turn, right hand, right turn,” she would chant to the students she later taught at clinics.
Sammy won rodeos all over: Rodeo Salinas (Calif.) several times; the Grand National at the Cow Palace in San Francisco; Phoenix; Red Bluff; Oakdale; Redding; Tucson; Denver; and Caldwell, among others.

In the mid 1960s, she began hosting barrel racing clinics. The concept was relatively new; Wanda Bush and Florence and Dale Youree had done some, and so had horse trainer Monte Forman, after whose she patterned hers. Barrel racing was so new that many of her students had only seen the event on TV.
They were three days in length, with the first day for observation. “I’d give (the students) a paper to fill out, a brief story on them and their horse. Then I’d watch them all make a run and analyze their runs,” she said. On day two, Sammy worked with each girl on any problems they might have, and the third day was competition, for students to put into practice what they had learned. She did the clinics for ten years.Another part of her life was doing stunt work in Hollywood. When she was eighteen, she had a part in the movie In Cold Blood. Then movie work was put on the back burner to rodeo, but after she married husband Bill Burton, a team roper, steer wrestler, bull rider, and stuntman, she became involved in movies again. In addition to horse riding, she did whatever stunts were needed, including swimming, even though she couldn’t swim. In the 1993 movie Another Stakeout, she had to jump off the dock into the Fraser River in Vancouver. “I told them I couldn’t swim,” she said, “and they had security guys all over to keep me safe.” After jumping in and coming up, she swam for the ladder. The safety man said, “I thought she can’t swim,’ and she told him, “I can sure swim when I need to,” she laughed.
She doubled for well-known actresses like Kathy Bates, Linda Evans, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton. She was a charter member of the United Stuntwomen’s Association.
She also held positions in the GRA, serving as west coast director in the early 1970s and director at large. In 1975, she was voted president of the GRA, but didn’t stay in that role for long. Her new marriage to Burton and her work with the picture business kept her busy.

Sammy ran at her last pro rodeo in 1990, the same year she married her seventh husband, Jesse Brackenbury, a reined cow horse trainer, “possibly the best horse trainer I know,” Sammy said. She had her first daughter, Patti Parker, “before I was born,” she quips, joking about her age. She has two other daughters, Jodi Branco and Syd Thurman. Two of Jodi’s children, Stan Branco and Roy Branco, have continued the rodeo tradition. Stan, a steer wrestler, competed at the 2013 NFR and Roy has qualified for the California Circuit Finals in the tie-down roping. Her step-children include Billy Burton, Jr., David Burton, and Heather Gibson-Burton, along with six grandkids and four great-grandkids.
Thurman was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in August of 2019 and is a member of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Rodeo Hall of Fame. She has also been honored with the 2013 WPRA California Circuit True Grit award and the WPRA California Circuit Pioneer Cowgirl award in 2016.
The best part of her life, she says, started “when I was one year old and it’s still happening. I love my life, I love everything that’s happened in my life. I worked the picture business, I rodeoed, I loved it all and I still do.”