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“There’s just something about getting on one of those horses and having them do the best he can, and you yourself do well.”

Good horses, whether they are saddle broncs, roping horses or cutters, are what make Don Lee Smith’s world go round.
The Texas native spent the first part of his life on the back of a bucking horse, then his mid-years in the roping arena, and now he’s in the cutting circle.
Born in 1937 in Aspermont, Texas, his dad, a banker-rancher-cowboy combo, leased a ranch in Ft. Pierre, S.D. The family spent their summers there and the school years in Aspermont.
Don Lee was the elder of two sons born to Wayman and Vista (Mays) Smith and had a younger brother, Jeff.
During the summers, he and Jeff would rodeo in the South Dakota Rodeo Association, but come school-time, they’d head back south to Texas. They were nearly always at the top of the standings in their events, but their leads would slip as they left South Dakota. Don Lee competed in nearly every event, but saddle bronc riding was his favorite
After graduating high school in 1955, he went to college, mostly to please his parents. He attended Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas and competed collegiately, in his main event,
Money was tight in college, and for a year, he roomed in the athletic dorm with the football, basketball and baseball players. He talked the baseball players into giving him half of his entry fees. “They’d come up with $100 and I’d enter at least three events, maybe four,” he remembers. “Then when I got home, I’d have to give them half of my winnings.” After a year, Don Lee finally got enough capital ahead he could have quit, but the guys kept paying half his fees.
In those days, only two teams from each of the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association’s regions went to the College National Finals. For all four of Don Lee’s college career, Sul Ross finished as first in their region and headed to the CNFR, with Don on the team.
In those days, once a guy had qualified for the CNFR, he could compete there in whatever event he chose, not just the event he qualified in. So at the CNFR his four years, 1956-59, Don Lee roped calves once and bulldogged once, rode bulls and barebacks, and, of course, rode saddle broncs.
In 1957, he won the NIRA’s Southwest Region bull riding, and a year later, at the College National Finals, he won both the average and the year-end titles in the saddle broncs, making him the NIRA world champion.
His rodeo role in college included administration: he was part of the group that helped form the NIRA. In 1957, he served as a director, and the next year, was president.
It wasn’t easy, being president of a fledgling organization. Money was tight, and there was no guideline for what the student board should do. Don Lee remembers going to a payphone to make calls, and he recalls renting an airplane (“I don’t know how I paid for it”) and flying to Lamar, Colo., to visit with Hoss Inman, who was one of the adults helping with the NIRA.
Don Lee is proud of the things he accomplished while involved with the NIRA. He suggested a rule where before a person could be NIRA president, they had to serve a term as a director. At Sul Ross, where the administration looked down their noses at rodeo as a college sport, he got rules changed so that participation in the rodeo club was considered physical education, like participation in the other college sports was.
He lettered in rodeo all four years and got the leather jacket to prove it. He graduated with a degree in animal science in 1959 and hit the pro rodeo road. He had purchased his Rodeo Cowboys Association (forerunner to the Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association) card two years prior.
But it was while at an airport, headed west to Oregon, that his pro rodeo days came to an end.
“I was sitting in an airport with my (bronc) saddle, and a little girl was playing on it. I told myself, ‘crap, you have one of those (little girls) at home, you’d better get your butt home.’ I loaded up my saddle, got another airplane ticket, went home, never went to another rodeo, and savored my little girl who is now taking care of me.” Roxanne, his oldest daughter, was about two years old at the time.
Don Lee’s attention turned to the ranch in South Dakota, which he and his brother Jeff leased. They had 40,000 acres, half deeded, half-leased and ran 1,000 mother cows with another 1,000 yearlings.
While he ranched, he and Jeff team roped. They had practice steers and competed at the South Dakota Rodeo Association rodeos and jackpots. Don Lee also judged SDRA rodeos as well.
He retired from ranching in 1999, and that year, was at a cutting in South Dakota when a good friend let him ride one of their cutting horses.
His new passion was ignited. “That was the last of my fortune,” daughter Roxanne laughed.
In 2000, he and his wife Lorren traveled the nation competing in the National Cutting Horse Association. That year, he finished as reserve world champion in the $50,000 Amateur and $20,000 Novice Non-Pro. “He is such a competitor,” Roxie said. “I think, let’s just go ride and turn some cattle back. But he doesn’t want to do that. That’s not his thrill. He wants to go and win. He works pretty hard at it.”
He considers cutting a true ranching sport. “The competition is to see whose horses are the best. It’s the way a rancher can take his horse, ride really quiet into a herd of cows, and pick out a particular one that might be sick, that we want to doctor, or one that we want to sell, and quietly move that cow out of and away from the herd, and hold her there, so she doesn’t get back in. That’s what the cutting competition is all about.”
Roxie remembers her dad’s philosophy when they worked cattle on the ranch. “Dad always stressed, don’t rouse them around.” That’s exactly what cutting is, Don Lee said. “Easy, with no disturbance of the herd. I enjoy getting a good cow cut out.”
He has four reserve world champ buckles, “great big things,” he said. “Somebody said, what are you going to do with these? And I said, I’m going to use them as hubcaps on my Freightliner trucks.”
College rodeo opened up the world for people like him, his classmates, and even kids today, he thinks.
“I think, in my day, those kids on the rodeo team were all smart kids who did well in college. But they went to college not to be educated, but to rodeo. I honestly don’t think some people would have gone to college without rodeo.” Some of his college rodeo classmates became teachers, architects, airline pilots, and more. “The point being, (college) took them out of their little bitty schools, and the NIRA rodeo did a world of good for them.”
Rodeo, team roping and cutting all three satisfy something deep in him.
“I don’t think it was the buckles or the fanfare,” he said, of his rodeo career. “It’s hard to explain. There’s just something about getting on one of those horses and having them do the best he can, and you yourself do well. It’s a challenge to get on one and ride them.”
The same goes for the cutting. “It’s not the buckles or the notoriety. Cutting is a real cowboy event, and it’s about getting a cow out easy with no disturbance of the herd.”
Don Lee had three kids: Roxanne, born in 1959, Judy, born two years later, and Lee, born in 1963. He married his second wife, Lorren, in 1970; she passed away in March of 2022.
Now it’s his grandchildren that bring him joy. Roxanne is married to Chris Harrison; Judy is married to Robert Fisher, and Lee isn’t married. He has six grandkids and seven great-grandkids.
“I didn’t get to enjoy my children like I have my grandchildren,” he said. “I love having them on the ranch, and watching them do the things they do.
“And I became a Christian thirty years ago, and that has been a big thing in my life.” He knows where he’s headed after life on this earth. “Besides the buckles and the mementos hanging in my office, it’s having the security” of heaven.
The best part of life has been its fullness. “I’ve gotten to do everything I wanted to do,” he said.

Because of her grandfather, Dallas Hunt George began a lifelong love of horses, rodeo and rodeo queening.
Born in Lincoln, Neb. in 1938, the now-Arizona resident served as the first Miss Rodeo Nebraska in 1956 and then as the 1957 Miss Rodeo America, at age eighteen.
But eight years prior, she could be found crying as she walked back to the family farm, after having been thrown off her half-Shetland/half-Tennessee Walker pony.
Her great-grandfather owned the first livery stable in Lincoln, and his son, Guy Hunt, her “Gramp,” loved horses.
When she showed an interest at age three, they became inseparable, “attached at the hip,” she remembers.
He would take her to horse sales over the weekend, and he’d bring home a horse. She rode for him, everything from Arabs to Tennessee Walkers to horses off the track. And when he got her the pony, he told her when she learned to ride it, he’d get her a better horse.
He did. At age sixteen, she got an “upgrade” to the quarter horse Wyoming Badger, a son of the AQHA Hall of Fame horse Grey Badger II. Dallas showed Badger at the American Royal and Denver’s National Western Stock Show, earning an AQHA championship in 1958.
She also competed in high school and regional rodeos, barrel racing and pole bending, and in 1955, was crowned Miss Burwell (Neb.) Rodeo, the Nebraska High School Rodeo Queen and the National High School Rodeo Queen.
The next year, 1956, she was to go back to Harrison, Neb., as the reigning state high school and national high school queen, but Gramp had a different idea.
He and Dallas went to Burwell, Neb., for the first ever Miss Rodeo Nebraska pageant, which she won.
Gramp had even bigger plans for his horse-crazy granddaughter. There was to be a fledgling Miss Rodeo America pageant in Chicago, with cowgirls qualifying by winning their district. (This was the days prior to the present MRA organization.) Cowgirls didn’t have to be state queens to run; but they had to win their district contest to advance. Dallas’ district pageant was held at Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha, which she won.
Ak-Sar-Ben’s district contest was similar in some ways to today’s pageant, but had its differences. It still involved horsemanship, personality and appearance, but it included a barrel racing component. Cowgirls rode their own horse for the first round of barrels, then drew from the other candidates’ horses for the second round.
Dallas took Badger, who was 15.3 hands and “drop dead gorgeous,” but he could be a handful. “You had to ride him correctly or he might decide to dump you off,” she remembered.
Badger’s “naughty” side came out; another queen drew him for the barrel race and he misbehaved.
She also remembers, from the Miss Rodeo America contest in Chicago, a paint horse who had been snake bitten on his lower lip, which gave him a funny look. The first cowgirl who drew him for the barrels couldn’t get the sour horse away from the others. That night, Dallas told her Gramp her luck would be that she’d draw the paint the next day, and she did. But he behaved better for her. “He was perfect for me,” she said.
She won the 1957 Miss Rodeo America title, and was put to work right away, heading to Denver for the Stock Show, where she also had the chance to run barrels as a Girls Rodeo Association member.
She remembers traveling about 100,000 miles that year, making appearances at Denver, Helldorado Days in Las Vegas, the Lions Rodeo in Pomona, Calif., a three-week series in West Yellowstone, Belle Fourche, S.D., the Diamond Spur Rodeo in Spokane, the Iowa State and Kentucky State Fairs, and more.
Gramp got a new nickname as he chaperoned Dallas that year: the Eye. He kept an eye on Dallas and the other rodeo queens. “I was only eighteen,” Dallas said. “There was no way he was going to let those cowboys get to me,” she laughed.
Dallas turned over her crown at the Cow Palace, where her best friend and fellow Nebraskan Lolly Cameron Klug competed. Lolly finished in the top five for the Miss Rodeo America title; the pageant was just one adventure the two women would share over their lifetimes.
Dallas’ rodeo queening was over; she had graduated from Lincoln (Neb.) High School in 1956 and had put in three semesters at the University of Nebraska.
Then she became a flight attendant for United, but only for a year, because in 1959, she married, and in those days, flight attendants couldn’t be married.
After her marriage failed, Dallas, who lived in Scottsdale with her two children, went back to college in the early 1970s. She became a veterinary technician, and married one of the veterinarians, Larry George, in the office where she worked. They married in 1974.
During her first marriage and as a single mother, there was no time or money for horses or rodeo.
But when Gramp passed, he left her money in his will to buy a horse and a trailer and start back up, and she did just that. She bought a thoroughbred mare and did dressage and jumping. Then she got two quarter horses, Cactus Moon Star, “BJ,” and TJ Plum Classy, “Classy,” a little roan mare with white socks. She worked with Cynthia Canterbury and her husband, Red, and went to the AQHA World Show, qualifying for the Amateur Trail and Open Trail and finishing eleventh in the world at Amateur Trail.
Dallas also had a gray mare, Zippers Tight Jeans, “Gracy,” who she raised and with whom she won an Open Superior Trail Award in the AQHA. On Gracy, she qualified in 2003 and 2004 for the Select World Trail in Trail.
Her fourth horse, Pleasure on Impulse, “Promise,” earned Register of Merit in western pleasure, trail, showmanship and performance halter, finishing in the top fifteen at the 2010 Select World in performance halter. Promise also carried Dallas’ granddaughters to many championships.
She’s retired from the show pen, “because judges look at eighty-year-old ladies differently than fifty-year-old ladies,” she quipped.
On the thirtieth anniversary of her crowning as Miss Rodeo America, at the insistence of her friend, Lolly, Dallas attended the convention in Las Vegas.
The women were put to work as volunteers with the MRA “store,” selling programs, memorabilia, and event tickets. Every year, from 1987 through 2021, she and Lolly ran the store. As time went on, it grew to include Wrangler clothing and products. “We went from three tables (of merchandise) to racks,” Dallas remembers. They decorated the store, and in the past few years, began selling roses for the pageant contestants.
The store was a way to meet lots of people: parents and family members of contestants, and fellow volunteers. “We were there every day,” she remembers. “I loved it. I got to meet everybody, the parents, the grandparents. It wasn’t a job, it was a labor of love.”
Dallas and Lolly were a good team. At the MRA convention, they roomed together and worked together. “Every night, we’d go to our room and do our spreadsheet, spread out our books, and make our deposit,” she remembered. “We’d laugh and have fun.” Dallas said Lolly was the “brilliant” one, and she was the go-fer.
The two women, friends since their youth, are “attached at the hip,” Dallas said. “They laugh at us and call us the Bobbsey twins.”
Dallas volunteered with the Miss Rodeo Arizona pageant for years, was a member of the association and served as president. She’s a lifetime member of the Miss Rodeo Nebraska Association and the American Quarter Horse Association. She and Lolly have both judged state queen contests, from California to Missouri, and from Florida to Washington.
Last year, after the women’s 65 years of service with the Miss Rodeo America organization, Dallas and Lolly were recognized during the coronation ceremony on December 5. “They treated us like queens,” Dallas said, “for the whole week. They turned the two of us out to pasture in grand fashion.” The women got a standing ovation for their years of service.
She and Larry blended their families: her son, Burr (Janiece) Shields and daughter, Cathy (Michael) Cushing, and Larry’s daughters, Cyndi (Drew) Callahan and Debbie (Roger) Benson. She has eight grandchildren: girls Ashlie, Mandie, Jynsen, Kyndra, Cory, Sarah and Maddie, and a boy, MJ. Jynsen, Kyndra and Cory showed horses with their “Grammy,” riding her horses, with Jynsen and Kyndra winning a combined nine buckles showing Promise. She has two great-grandchildren, a boy, Brody, and a girl, Savannah.
Her husband, Larry, passed away in October of 2020.
Lolly loves her best friend. “She’s a chip off the old block, from her granddad,” she said. “She’s just truthful and wholesome. What you see is what you get when you talk to Dallas. She’s the most precious person there is in the world today.”
Dallas loves her MRA family as much as she loves her non-rodeo family. “The nucleus of that organization genuinely cares about each other,” she said. “I don’t know how else to say it, but rodeo is a family.”
Rodeo exemplifies the Christian life, of which Dallas is a believer. “I love the Lord, and that’s one thing I love about rodeo, too, the prayers beforehand, the national anthem.
“I’ve been very blessed.”
Dallas is a 2014 inductee in the Miss Rodeo America Hall of Fame; Lolly was inducted in 2015.

“He was extremely fast from the horse to the calf, he was well mounted, and he was a competitor. He wanted to beat you and still be good friends while doing it.”

Roy Rodriguez let his actions speak louder than his words.
Whether it was in the rodeo arena, on a rodeo board, with his family or at his job, the Clayton, Michigan man did the right thing, even if it didn’t benefit him.
A calf roper, team roper, and bulldogger, he dominated the rodeo arenas across the upper Midwest for several decades.
He was fast, well-mounted, and for him, rodeo was a business and a way to provide for his family.
Roy was born to Juan and Beatriz Rodriguez in 1944, the youngest of six children, in Cotulla, Texas. When he was two, his parents moved to Michigan because of the promise of better paying jobs. His dad went to work for a company that made motor parts for the Ford Motor Co.
In Texas, Juan was handy as a ranch cowboy and with leatherwork, but also with a rope. He competed against some of the toughest ropers of his day in match ropings, beating many of them. But he didn’t have the wherewithal to rope full time.
When he came north, he worked at a dairy farm for a short time before beginning at an auto parts factory, where Roy would join him after high school.
Juan was a founding father in the Michigan Ropers Association in 1948-49. He competed in the organization, as did Roy and several of his brothers. At the age of 55, Juan was the MRA champion. Two years later, his son Ray was champ, and in 1974 and 1978, Roy was champ.
In addition to the Michigan Ropers Association, Roy was a member of the now-defunct Midwest Cowboys Association.
He graduated from high school in 1962 and a year later was working for the same company as his dad, starting as a laborer, then, two years later, as a foreman. By the age of nineteen, he was in charge of a multi-million dollar plant from 11 pm to 7 am each day.
He was a “weekend warrior,” competing on the weekends and being home for a job Monday through Friday.
He followed in his dad’s footsteps with his roping abilities. Calf roping was his strength, but he team roped and steer wrestled, too.
He competed not only in the MRA and the MCA, but Mid-States Cowboy Association (the eastern association, compared to the western association), winning the tie-down title in 1978 and 1983. He also competed in the International Pro Rodeo Association. He was consistently in the top fifteen in all of his associations. Finals weren’t always held, due to a lack of funding, but when they were, Roy was at them.
In 1966, Roy was drafted and sent to Vietnam for a year. He was discharged in July of 1968.
While in Vietnam, he became acquainted with another rodeo cowboy, Ned Londo. Roy was in Fire Direction Control, Ned was in the 11th Armored Calvary Black Horse, on the gun. As is typical in the military, there was plenty of slow times, with nothing to do. Roy and Ned found a coil of rope , made a dummy and roped the dummy to kill time.
But their biggest fun was a bit of rodeo in the jungles of Vietnam. Kids would walk by, heading to the rice fields with the Brahma cattle they used in the paddies. One time, it turned into a dare. “I don’t know if he said it or I said it, but one of us said, if you rope him, I’ll ride him,” Ned said. So Roy roped the Brahma and Ned rode it. “She didn’t buck much but we had fun and the kids enjoyed the show.” The village elders did not appreciate the rodeo, however, and the commanding officer spent the evening in the village smoothing things out!
A year after his return to the States, Roy danced with a brunette girl at the dance hall by the lake. Later that night, at the hamburger joint, they met up again, and he asked her out. It was love at first sight, Sharon said. They married on Valentine’s Day, 1969.
Roy made his own rope horses. His first horse was his dad’s, a big buckskin that stood 16 hands and weighed 1,600 lbs. When he went to buy his own horse, he found a black barrel horse in Oklahoma with the reputation of stopping so hard he flipped people over his head. The horse had been sold to a woman for the barrel racing, but it was also a calf horse. When Roy asked how much, the woman priced the horse so low “I couldn’t turn it down,” he said. He bought it, named it Smoky, and that weekend, went to a couple of rodeos and a match roping. “I ended up winning the match roping, placing at both rodeos, and I paid for him.”
Smoky was “no speedster but he was quick,” he said, “for probably a good 100 feet. He’d get out of the box so quick, I’d get a shot off quick and I wouldn’t have to run my calves so far. He was quick and he was stout. He basically looked like a miniature draft horse.”
Roy was the first calf roper in his part of the country to dismount on the right. It happened by accident. It was the early 1960s, at a rodeo in Michigan, and Roy was late in arriving. His dad advised him to not break the barrier, because the calf was fast. “When that calf came out, he flew,” Roy remembers. “I caught up with him at the bucking chutes. I was committed on the right side, and we were running so fast, I finally ended up throwing the rope and flew off the right side. And from that day forth, I got off on the right.”
His wife Sharon was a farm girl, not a rodeo girl. She had always wanted a horse, so when they married, Juan bought her a saddle with a high back. “It was like a death trap,” Sharon laughed. “It had big swells in the front and the back came up. When you got in that saddle, you weren’t going anywhere.” She learned to ride and enjoyed it.
The couple volunteered in several associations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Roy was president and Sharon was secretary of the Michigan Ropers Association. They held the same roles in the Mid-States Association for three years.
When their children rodeoed in high school, there was no high school association in the state of Michigan, so they, along with others, traveled to Ohio to compete. After a few years, Roy said, “this is ridiculous. What does it take to get a high school association in Michigan?” It required $300. He went on a campaign at his rodeos, asking for donations. By the time the collections ended, he had $1,500. He and Sharon were founders of the Michigan High School Rodeo Association in 1989 and stayed on as board members till their kids were through high school.
Their children: Raul, Ryan and Mindy, all competed in rodeo at one time or another. Raul was a roper, finishing third in the National Inter-Collegiate Rodeo Association in the steer wrestling. He continues to rodeo and is a PRCA judge. Ryan, a rodeo clown, worked PRCA events for years, including the 2010 National Finals Rodeo. Mindy, a barrel racer, qualified for the National High School Finals Rodeo.
Raul remembers his dad always stood for what was right, even when no one was watching. He often told his kids, “this is not going to benefit you,” he’d say, regarding whatever situation they were in, “but it is the right thing to do.” He always dressed western for rodeos. “When you went to a rodeo, you’d better look the part,” Raul said. “Boots polished, jeans starched, a long sleeve shirt and a hat.”
In addition to his fulltime job, rodeo board memberships and competition, he and Sharon had 160 acres, a couple dozen head of cattle and horses, a stud and brood mares. He was plant superintendent by the time he retired from his job in 2004 after 44 years of service.
He roped his last calf in 2009. He’d had his knees replaced and didn’t want to put them through jumping off a horse.
He’s won two calf roping titles in the Mid-States (1978, 1983) and two in the Michigan Ropers Association (1974, 1978). In 1974, he finished in the top twenty in the world in the International Pro Rodeo Association.
“He was fast when nobody was fast,’ remembered his friend, Jeff Tracy. The Orient, Ohio cowboy roped against Roy numerous times. In the Ohio area in the ‘70s and ‘80s, cowboys were making runs of eleven, twelve, and thirteen seconds. But when Roy came to town, he was tying calves in the tens. “He was extremely fast from the horse to the calf, he was well mounted, and he was a competitor. He wanted to beat you and still be good friends while doing it.”
Oftentimes Roy and Sharon’s oldest boy, Raul, rodeoed in high school in Ohio without his parents. Roy made Jeff Raul’s parental guardian while in the state. The Rodriguez family “isn’t big on patting themselves on the back,” Jeff said, “but they let their actions do the talking.”
Roy had a family to support with his rodeo. When he bought his first house, he had a decade to pay it off. “I got it paid in ten years, with the help of rodeo,” he said.
“He had a family to support,” Jeff said. “He was good. No matter where you put him, he would have been an excellent athlete. It just happened that he roped calves.”
Roy and Sharon have four grandsons and one granddaughter: Paxton and Preston, the sons of Raul and Polly; Rad and Riot, the sons of Ryan, and Reese, the daughter of Mindy and Gary Fetzer.
He’s loved his life. “I’ve been blessed, with almost everything I’ve done. I have a wonderful wife, I have good kids, and good grandkids. So what more can a person want?
“I would do it all over again. I’d do it just like I did it the first time.
“I’m blessed.”