Category: Rodeo LIFE Cover Feature

Laces tied snug, tennis shoe cowgirl Pat North Ommert made hundreds of laps around as many arenas throughout the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s, dazzling crowds with her signature one-foot stand and vivid smile. The trick rider, jockey, and stunt double from California traveled and performed extensively, including 56 performances at the Madison Square Garden Rodeo in New York, and riding in Powder Puff Derbies at the Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico. Yet her favorite place is still the back of a horse, and her accomplishments, whether astride or beside her equine friends, recently earned her an induction into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.
Pat was nominated 18 years ago for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame before her induction in October of 2016. “I know many of the former inductees, so I was very honored,” she says. In 1999, Pat and her husband, Dr. Willard Ommert, received the California Professional Horsemen’s Association Lifetime Achievement Award for their devotion and contributions to the horse world. Pat is also active in preserving horse trails and the equestrian lifestyle in Southern California, where she grew up and continues to live today.
Born in 1929, Pat was the second daughter of Bob and Vera North. A savvy businessman, Bob started Bob North Hardware Store in Bell, California, during the Great Depression, and the store flourished. The North’s home in Bell was eight miles away from the Los Angeles Union Stock Yards, and the vacant lots around Bell and the Los Angeles riverbed offered plenty of riding opportunities. The North family, including Pat’s sister, Laura, shared a love of horses. Vera, Pat’s mother, came to love horses after being sent to the Mohave Desert in 1912 with her younger sister. They boarded with a family to avoid the polio epidemic in Los Angeles and rode a horse to school. Vera later learned to train trick horses from a circus trainer stabled in Bell. She entered the show business, and even performed in the Hawaiian Islands with the E.K. Fernandez Wild West Show in 1934.
Pat’s sister, who had an act with their mother, was married in 1943 and retired from show business. Pat was 14 at the time and performed the Patsy North and Her Trick Horse Rex act through World War II. Her own trick riding career started when she was 16, and she performed in rodeos and fairs around California. She still holds gold card number 1890 with the PRCA. “The trick riding was easy,” says Pat, who trained her own Roman riding and jumping team of horses. “I was an athlete. During World War II, my family moved to some acreage and we raised calves and did all our own work. My Roman riding was the most fun, and I think more spectacular. The hippodrome is one of the easiest tricks, but to do it with grace is something else. The one-foot stand was really my specialty. I consider myself a tennis shoe cowgirl because I had boots, but it was usually tennis shoes for trick riding and even working the trick horse.” Rex, who was half Morgan, was Pat’s left hand horse in the Roman riding, and Juan Monroe, a registered American Saddlebred, was the outside horse. Pat competed in many of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Rodeo Roman races, and even did several publicity shots for the rodeo.
When one of the North’s horses was sick in the 1940s, the regular vet sent his new associate, Dr. Willard Ommert, to make the farm call. Dr. Will and Pat took an instant liking to each other, and they were married in 1947. “Will was my best fan and loved what I did,” says Pat. “Like my dad, he never had a problem with me performing or being in show business. It didn’t make much money in the early days, but it did take care of the horse costs, and it was always fun.”
Pat’s dad had passed away in 1951 from a heart attack, and after Pat and Dr. Will were married, Vera greatly encouraged Pat to continue her show career. Starting in 1951, Pat performed at the Salinas Rodeo with 14 or 15 other trick riders on her horse Shortcake, working her way into bigger rodeos. “Edith Happy and I worked many California rodeos together. She was a beautiful, long-torso lady who did the most beautiful stand ever,” says Pat, who performed at Salinas for 11 years. “I’m delighted that California Rodeo Salinas is using Edith’s hippodrome stand for their poster this year.”
The year 1953 took Pat to New York City and Boston for several weeks, and Dr. Will used some of his vacation time to travel with her and watch several performances. Everett Colborn from Dublin, Texas, co-owned the World Championship Rodeo Company and produced both the Madison Square Garden Rodeo and Boston Garden Rodeo. Colborn’s own rodeo in Dublin became the Pre-Madison Square Garden Rodeo. Following the Texas performance, the entire production, joined by Pat and her husband, boarded the 24 car train for New York, stopping to perform in Fort Madison, Iowa, on the way. Many rodeo and western movie figures including Tad Lucas, Jim Shoulders, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and The Lone Ranger performed in Colborn’s rodeos. Pat rode Quadrille and the trick riders did publicity work for the rodeo. “That was really fun. The head of publishing for Madison Square Garden owned a white convertible, and five of us trick riders were seen around town. We were always in our western outfits,” says Pat. “We had lunch at the 21 Club, saw the premier opening of a movie, visited the Bellevue Hospital, and had a parade. We also had a rodeo parade in Boston. I rode my Roman team and my husband rode in the parade with me. After the parade, they had a Cowgirl Special thoroughbred race in Rockingham Park in New Hampshire, which I won.”
By this time, Pat and Dr. Will’s first daughter, Annie, was three, and her sister, Janie, was born in 1954. In the 1950s, Pat acquired her Screen Actor Guild card and worked in several motion pictures as a stunt double and driver. One of her friends, showman Monte Montana, needed six women for a horse catch scene in “A Star is Born”, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. Pat was one of the six, along with her mentor, Polly Burson, Faye Blessing, Shirley and Sharon Lucas, and Louise Montana. “The last movie I worked was ‘Cimmaron’, and I was in Tucson for two weeks. They needed girls to ride and drive wagons for the Oklahoma land rush scenes. We made money on those shows, but it was a hurry-up-and-wait business. I had kids and horses at home waiting on me, and I thought of how I could use that time to be home riding!”
In the 1950s, Pat also raced horses, even while on tour with the Bob Estes Wild West Show in 1957 in Mexico City. She retired from show business in 1962, and by then, her daughters were showing in the hunt seat division. Pat also showed hunters and jumpers for a time, and when she wasn’t taking Annie and Janie to horse shows, she was traveling and working with Dr. Will. Originally in the cavalry, he was transferred to the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps after the cavalry was dismounted. He worked with Dr. Bob Miller as the official veterinarians of the NFR from 1962- 1964 when it was hosted by Los Angeles, and his renown as a veterinarian was international. He advanced equine medicine in a number of ways, performing the first equine arthroscopic surgery, and even fitting a horse for contact lenses. “Will was the chief veterinary officer for the 1984 Olympics, and he was the vet for a lot of the California horse shows. I was in the horse show world with him,” says Pat. In 1969, the couple moved to Temecula, California, where Dr. Will built the state-of-the-art Los Caballos Veterinary Hospital, the first privately owned equine clinic and surgery in California. Pat managed the neighboring Los Caballos Farm, a facility for resting and retired horses, and they also raised several colts. Pat leased the ranch out several years after Dr. Will’s passing in 2004, and continues to make her home in Temecula.
Now 87, Pat rides daily, boarding her horse a short distance away. She has four granddaughters and five great-grandsons, all of whom learned to ride from Pat. “I feel that it’s so important for kids to learn about the good earth and see livestock. I love seeing kids who know how to sit on a horse and ride,” says Pat, who supports the Pacific Crest Trail. She’s a member of Saddle Sore-Ority, along with the Rancho California Horsemen’s Association since 1970. “I feel so lucky to have been able to experience several different phases of the rodeo world. I feel I had the best of all of it.”

All Bill Smith ever wanted to do was ride bucking horses, and be like his heroes, the Linderman boys.
Smith, a three-time world champion saddle bronc rider, got to fulfill both of his childhood dreams.
The cowboy was born in 1941 in Red Lodge, Montana, and grew up north of Red Lodge in the little coal mining town of Bear Creek. There wasn’t much to do in Bear Creek. “All there was, for anybody to do,” Bill recalls, “was go to school and go to the rodeo on the Fourth of July. The Lindermans were the thing back then, and they were my heroes. All I ever wanted to do, ever since I could remember, was learn to ride bucking horses. It wasn’t about winning, it was to have a chance to ride bucking horses.”
And he did. The family had horses, and he’d ride anything he could catch. Back then, everybody had two or three head and they weren’t penned up; they ran out in the hills together. Bill and his longtime childhood friend, Chuck Swanson, would pen them and ride them all. “We’d ride the two- and three-year-olds, and we’d get bucked off and drug around.” But it didn’t matter. They were cowboys.
As young boys, they’d work on the local ranches, doing whatever they could, just to be cowboys. And they’d ride anything possible. “I spoiled lots of horses,” Bill mused. “Everything I rode, I tried to get them to buck with me.”

When he was a senior in high school, the Smith family: Glenn and Edna and their seven children, moved to Cody, Wyo. It was perfect for a bucking-horse-crazy boy. With the nightly rodeo, Bill started going, “taking his spills,” and refining his bronc riding abilities. In 1961, he bought his Rodeo Cowboys Association card (the forerunner of the PRCA), and that year, won the amateur bronc riding at the Cheyenne Frontier Days. “That was the first money I ever really had.”
From there, he was ready to hit the rodeo road full time. Starting in 1961, he rode saddle broncs across the nation, competing at every big rodeo in the U.S. and Canada and lots of little ones. He won numerous events, and some of them more than once: Houston, San Antonio, Denver, Cheyenne, Nampa, Ida.; Cody, Prescott, Greeley, Colo.; Las Vegas, Dallas, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Memphis, Tenn.; St. Paul, Ore. and more.
He loved to be on the road, and was gone most of the year. But home was still Cody, and his nickname reflected that. He was known as “Cody” Bill Smith. “They latched that on to me,” and he liked it.
Smith made the National Finals Rodeo for the first time in 1965, and then every year except one till 1978: thirteen out of fourteen years. Saddle bronc riding wasn’t necessarily easy for him at first. “I wasn’t an instant success. It took me a while to learn. I was never a natural at it.”
His childhood friend, Chuck Swanson, had moved to Cody with the Smiths. Chuck also rode saddle broncs, and was exceptionally good, Bill remembers. But Chuck didn’t hunger to be on the rodeo road like Bill did. “He was a natural, but he didn’t have the bug quite as much as me. He wanted to be a cowboy on a ranch. I didn’t have time for that. There weren’t enough bucking horses for me.”
Bill estimates he competed at about seventy rodeos a year, with his favorites being the ones with multiple rounds. Back in the day, most rodeos would be more than one round, and cowboys would stay several days in one location. He liked Ft. Worth, which was five rounds, San Antonio, which was six, and Houston and Omaha, which each had several rounds.
Bill’s childhood dream of competing alongside his heroes, Bill and Bud Linderman, came to fruition early in his career. He was entered in the Filer, Idaho rodeo, as was Bill Linderman, and it was four rounds. Smith broke his leg on the first horse, but got on the next three. “I didn’t go far,” he said of riding with a broken leg, “but I got on them. I wasn’t about to let my hero see that I was crippled. I’d buck off after three jumps, but I got on.”
He especially remembers some special horses. His favorite and one that stood out far above the rest was the big palomino horse Descent, owned by Beutler Bros. Bill drew him nine times, riding him five and getting bucked off four. “He was the greatest horse I’ve seen to this day. He could jump higher and kick higher than any horse I ever saw.” If a cowboy drew Descent, there was a good chance he’d win the rodeo, and that was true for Bill. He won Nampa on him twice and got bucked off there once. He won Tulsa on him and placed at the NFR on him.
Other horses stick out in Bill’s mind. Trade Winds, owned by Big Bend Rodeo Co. bucked Bill off once and he covered him once. Trails End, a horse owned by Oral Zumwalt, bucked him off twice. On Harry Knight’s Sage Hen, he was the high mark at the NFR, and she carried him to his first big win in 1964 in Dallas. She bucked him off several times, too. “I wasn’t above being bucked off,” he laughs. “I could hit the ground with the best of them.”
Smith missed the NFR in 1976 due to back surgery, and two years later, decided to call it quits. He was invited to a big match bronc riding at Ft. Worth, called the Copenhagen Skoal Match Ride. It paid a huge amount and included bull riding, tie-down roping, and barrel racing, all invitational. He won it, and decided to retire. “I thought, this is a good time to quit.” So he did. He was 38 years old, and “I was starting to slow down. I was still winning, but I didn’t want to keep going till I couldn’t ride anymore.”
After retirement, he and his wife Carole moved to North Platte, Neb. in the summers where he produced the nightly rodeo. He put on 72 performances each summer, seven nights a week, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It was good, he said, to get him started on life outside rodeo. “That helped me bridge the gap.”
Then he and Carole bought a place in Thermopolis, Wyo. and moved there. They have a semi-annual quarter horse sale, the third Saturday of May and the second Saturday in September. The sale started in 1983, and this May, they will host their fiftieth sale, with 58 geldings, ten yearlings and a dozen started two-year-olds. They are picky about their horses. He buys the geldings, and he, Carole, and Carole’s nephew Reid O’Rourke ride them. The horses are guaranteed, and they take great pride in having good horseflesh.

Rodeo was a good way to make a living, the best, in Bill’s eyes. “They were the best days of my life, right there, rodeoing. When you can rodeo, ride broncs, and win enough to pay your way, there’s absolutely nothing better. You gotta starve to death for a while, but once you get going, you don’t have a boss, and you can tell anybody in the world to kiss your butt and it won’t bother what you win, if you can ride.”
He holds a deep inclination for horses. “Horses are my life, from the biggest Clydesdale to the littlest Shetland pony. I love them all.”
Rodeo may have changed, but he loves the horses. “The horses still buck. That’s the thing that doesn’t change. Horses still buck.”
“I’ve had a great life, a fairy tale life, actually. A little kid from the coal mines, doing nothing but what I wanted to do my whole life.”

Larry Trenary was “hungry” to rope, and it showed. The Arthur, Nebraska cowboy spent the best days of his life, roping with his sons, Bret and Troy.
He was born in 1939, the son of Elza and Erma Trenary, both teachers, who lived five and a half miles north of the tiny Nebraska Sandhills town. He grew up in a sod house, and when his parents bought the ranch where he and his wife Sonja live, they moved there.
A ranch kid, when his family moved to Lincoln, he “hated every minute of it.” The Trenarys spent vacations and summers on the ranch, and Larry spent time with his uncle Lawrence Shaw at Sutherland, Nebraska. Uncle Lawrence was a cowboy who knew how to rope. Larry knew how to rope from growing up on the ranch, but Lawrence smoothed out the rough spots on his skills, and provided a horse Larry could ride.
He graduated from Northeast High School in Lincoln in 1957, and that summer, went to the Nebraska State High School Finals Rodeo in the calf roping, steer wrestling, bareback riding and cutting. He won the all-around and represented Nebraska in the calf roping and cutting at the National High School Finals.
Then a move to California would add to his rodeo repertoire. Larry spent a year in college in Visalia, Calif., and met two fellows: Manuel Macedo, and Bob Wiley. Manuel got him started team roping, heeling for him at amateur rodeos (team roping wasn’t new in California but it was not common in Nebraska). Wiley, who was from Porterville, Calif., roped and tied calves with Larry all night long. In the old dairy barn owned by Manuel’s parents, with the lights on, “we’d tie calves till three or four in the morning, till we got tired,” Larry remembered. “We were learning to be faster all the time, and consistent.”

After a year in California, Larry was back to Arthur, where he had been dating a local girl, Sonja Mickelson. The two tied the knot in 1959, and lived in California for a short time before making their home on his parents’ ranch north of town, where they still live today.
They ranched, but Larry’s parents weren’t rich and didn’t have a lot of land or cattle to give their son. So he supplemented his income with rodeo. He became a member of the Nebraska State Rodeo Association (NSRA) the same year he got married. He also belonged to the Mid-States Rodeo Association (M-SRA).
Larry dominated his events in the NSRA and the Mid-States. He won the NSRA calf-roping title in 1961 and 1963-64, and the heeling title in 1961, 1972, 1978-79, and 1982-83. In 1984, he won the heading title. In 1961 alone, he won the all-around, calf roping and team roping titles and was reserve champion in the steer wrestling. He also won numerous titles in the Mid-States.
Larry competed in the PRCA as well, roping at Denver, Ft. Worth, Cheyenne, Chicago, Pendleton, and other venues, and at USTRC ropings. But he didn’t want to be gone from home that much, so he returned to the NSRA and Mid-States, plus ropings and rodeos in Nebraska and surrounding states. When he turned forty, he joined the Old Timers Rodeo Association (now the National Senior Pro Rodeo) and the Living Legends Rodeo Association. In 1991, he and Tony Tonozzi won the world in the USTRC’s senior division.
His most memorable calf roping horse was possibly the best calf horse ever in the state, he thinks. Old Black “was as ugly as could be,” Larry said. Old Black supposedly came from the wild horse herds in Montana, and was brought to Nebraska by a horse trader. Uncle Lawrence traded two bucket calves for the horse and he and Larry trained him. Old Black was never truly tamed. “He was so wild, he would kick you. You could never trim his tail and hardly trim his feet. He was just an outlaw, but he was a terrific calf horse.”
Larry and Sonja have two sons, Bret, who was born in 1960, and Troy, born three years later. Roping with his boys was his joy. “When my boys got old enough (to rope), that was the finest time in my whole life.” The three were serious students of the sport. They practiced hard, setting up a video camera and watching their runs, to see where they lost time and how to make it up. “We really worked at it, because it was our livelihood.”
The three Trenarys roped everywhere. If there was a good roping, they were there. They competed across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, anywhere there were steers and a chute. They put on roping schools as well, teaching kids the fundamentals of the sport.
When Troy was seventeen years old, he was hit in the head while playing high school football. The injury put him in a coma for fifteen days. He had been an excellent heeler, Larry said, and three friends came and stayed for days, trying to help Troy rope again, but the use of his right arm was gone. Their son is still alive, and able to lead a normal life, and for that, Sonja and Larry are grateful.
After Troy got hurt, Bret switched from heading to heeling, so Larry, who heeled, lost his partner. He tried five or six different headers, but things weren’t the same. In his last years of roping, he found a good partner: his friend Marvin Mueller.
Bret’s team roping career flourished. He roped professionally for years, qualifying for the National Finals Rodeo in 1987, heading for Allen Bach.
Not growing up with a silver spoon in his mouth was an advantage, Larry feels. “I didn’t have the money to do things, and I had only one really good horse, and gosh, not very good vehicles. I was purt near broke, but kept going because of my roping.” He feels that money isn’t always the answer. To be a good roper, “I think you have to have the ability to stay on track, and the will to win. Money won’t do it. I know so many kids that their folks have a lot of money, and they want to be a great calf roper or team roper. But most of the guys who are really, really good have had to go without things in their life. You can’t give it to them. It just doesn’t work that way. They don’t seem to have enough guts to stay with something that long.
“You gotta be hungry for it, almost like you need the next dollar to eat on. That forces you to try not to make a mistake, because if you make a mistake, you’re not going to win.”
He and his boys were that way, he says. “We were like a basketball team. We trained here at home, and everywhere we went, we watched the good guys. And on the way home, we’d talk about the good guys, and what they’d done that made them so great. We just learned from them.”
The best days of his life were spending time with his boys. “It was everything,” he remembers. “We were learning together. We’d argue and fight, but it would all come out to be the best.”
Larry roped his last calf at the Arthur rodeo in the late 1970s, on Old Black. He quit team roping at the age of seventy, after having been an NSRA member for over fifty years. His roping was as good as ever, but his knees hurt. Two years ago, Larry was inducted into the Nebraska Sandhills Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Larry and Sonja take great pleasure in their grandchildren, Jhett and Mercedes, the son and daughter of Bret and Dede, who live in Salida, Colo. Mercedes, a former college breakaway roper and goat tyer is teaching school in Oklahoma. Jhett, who team ropes with his dad, is a student at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas. “They’re the delight of our life,” Sonja said.

They sold their cow/calf herd a few years ago and now background calves, which Larry enjoys. “It’s not work to him,” Sonja said. “He just loves what he’s doing. We just keep a-going.” Troy lives with his parents and helps out with the cattle work.
The couple enjoyed their rodeo years, and life now, too. “It’s a wonderful life, what we’ve done,” she said. “It’s been a great life. We’ve been up and down the road. I wouldn’t change it for anything, and I know Larry and the boys wouldn’t, either. “We love what we do.”

Jim Ivory admits he’s a gypsy, and that’s part of what has made him enjoy the rodeo world.
The cowboy, who grew up in northern California rode bareback horses at the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) four times, and has worked behind the scenes at rodeos across the world.
He was born in 1942, the son of Ed and Ellen Ivory, in the tiny ranching town of Alturas, California, the third generation of the Ivorys to rodeo. His dad worked on the ranches in the area, and “we were raised in those cow camps in the corner of Nevada, California and Oregon,” Jim remembered. Ed was a stock contractor, gathering bucking and saddle horses from the ranches and hayfields of the country. Jim and his siblings went along when it was time to rodeo. “That’s the only time we went to town, when the rodeos were going.”
He competed in junior rodeos in nearly every event. There was no high school rodeo association then, and kids ages thirteen through eighteen could enter the juniors. The family moved to Redmond, Oregon during his high school years, and he competed in amateur rodeos while in high school.
After high school graduation in 1960, he continued to rodeo. There were plenty of opportunities for it, too. “There used to be a lot of good amateur rodeos around there (California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon), and you could win a lot of money.”
By 1962, he got his Rodeo Cowboys Association (forerunner to today’s Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association) permit, and hit the rodeo trail professionally. One of the first pro rodeos he competed in was the Portland (Ore.) International Livestock Show. From there, he headed south to the Cow Palace, where permits weren’t accepted but he was on the labor list.

He rode bareback horses professionally for four years, often serving on the labor list as well. He worked for the Christensen Brothers Rodeo Co., Beutler Brothers, Harry Knight, and Cotton Rosser, and frequently for his uncle, Buster Ivory, who had bucking horses and put on rodeos.
It worked well, riding and working at the events. “The first year I won $9,000 and it was all in the bank, because I had a job all the time.”
Working on the labor list, he did everything, flanking, driving truck, feeding and sorting stock. “I’ve done everything in the rodeo business except announce,” or work as a barrelman or bullfighter, he said. He rode bulls in the amateur ranks a bit but barebacks was his niche.
In 1967, the first year of four that he qualified for the NFR, he traveled with fellow bareback rider Jim Houston. Houston had asked Jim to travel with him, and Ivory was glad he did. “He refined my bareback riding,” Ivory said. “He made me a better bareback rider than I was. He was a great coach.” One year, Houston helped hone the skills of the three top bareback riders: Ivory, Paul Mayo, and Clyde Vamvoras. It was a testament to Houston’s good teaching skills. “He was a heck of a coach, because we all rode different but he had the ability to see what your natural skills were and how to improve what you did,” Ivory said.
Jim’s best year was 1969, when he finished second to the world champion, Gary Tucker.
After the 1970 season, he quit rodeoing professionally. The most rodeos he had competed at during a year was 77. “I didn’t like that much, rodeoing that hard,” he said. He also liked to have fun. “One of my downfalls was I thought I was supposed to have fun, so I didn’t do as good as I should have, but I had a lot more fun than a lot of them.”
He also knew he wanted to quit before he got to where he dreaded it. “I saw some of my old heroes, and they didn’t want to get on. They screwed around in the chute. I said, when this is no fun anymore, I won’t do it.” He could still win, but “it got to where I didn’t really like getting on.”
In 1972, in partnership with Australian bareback rider Jimmy Dix and Jim’s brother-in-law Van Vannoy, he shipped quarter horses, including a Triple A race horse, to Australia. He and his wife Cathy lived there for four years, taking care of them.
In 1975, he and Cathy came back to the U.S, and he worked at the Sunlight Ranch west of Yellowstone. In 1977, he began producing the Cody (Wyo.) Night Rodeo, which he would produce for a total of thirteen years (from 1977-1980 and from 1998-2006).
He also helped his uncle Buster produce rodeos in Europe in 1970, spending three months there as part of Rodeo Far West. The entire rodeo “outfit” was shipped there, including 100 head of saddle horses and seventy bucking horses and bulls. A few times in the 2000s, he took a group of cowboys to Brazil to enter their rodeos: Cody DeMers, Wesley Silcox, and Steve Woolsey, and Lewie Feild, as pickup man, among others.
Jim was part of a unique group: five cowboys at the 1967 and 1968 NFR had been members of the Redmond High School wrestling team: Jim, his brother John (a saddle bronc rider), bareback rider Ken Stanton, his brother Bill Stanton (a bull rider), and Larry Mahan, who did all three roughstock events.
Jim won’t agree that they were tough, but they were: “I don’t know if we were tough or not but we were tougher than some of them.” The Redmond bunch was a good rodeo group. “A lot of really tough rodeo kids came out of that group that I rodeoed with. Jack Thrasher, the Stantons, Buzz Seeley” and others. “We could go to those amateur rodeos and win a lot of money.”

The best bareback horse Ivory encountered was a horse owned by Reg Kesler. Three Bars, a 2004 inductee into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, “was no doubt the best, rankest bareback horse there’s ever been,” Jim said. “She could throw everybody off, and it always hurt, for some reason. There’s been a lot of good ones over the years but she was unbelievable.” Three Bars was selected to buck at the NFR in three decades and won the bareback horse of the NFR in 1967, 1973 and 1980. Jim got on her twice, getting bucked off both times. “She almost killed me the first time,” he quipped, “and she did the second time.”
While he was on the rodeo circuit, Jim made Pampa, Texas his address, because his uncle Buster lived there. He loved Wyoming and Montana, and he and Cathy moved to Wyoming after marrying.
In his later years, Jim has shared his experience with Chad and Matt Burch of Burch Rodeo, and Chad loves working with him. He has an eye for bucking horses, Chad says, and they have bought many horses from him. “He knows what to look for with a horse. He’s seen a lot of them,” Chad said. “He’s a very smart man, and he’s been successful at rodeo.”
Jim has helped at many rodeos, including those for Burch, Reg Kesler, and Mike Cervi, among others. He’s raised a lot of horses that were sold to PRCA stock contractors and selected to buck at the NFR. Last year, Jim Dandy, a bareback horse whose mother Jim had sold to the Burches, carried Jake Vold to a sixth round win at the 2016 Wrangler NFR.
He and his wife live in Banner, south of Sheridan, Wyo. He still has a half-interest in two studs and three mares, and continues to help the Burches with their rodeos but doesn’t do as much as he used to. When Chad asked him to come to Kaycee, Jim told him he was too crippled to do anything. “I’m just a pretty face,” he told Chad, and Chad replied, “that’s what we pay you for,” Jim laughed.
He and Cathy, who married in 1969, have four children: sons Buster and James, daughter Mandy, and a daughter Kelly Jo, who passed away when she was four years old. Buster lives in Gillette and has two daughters and a son; James lives in Virginia with his two daughters and son, and Mandy is in Australia with two children.
Looking back on his rodeo life, Jim can’t imagine doing anything else. “I really liked to get on bucking horses, and the lifestyle and the people, the freedom and the money. It was a lot better than working on the ranch.
“I’ve been playing cowboy since I was three years old. That’s all I ever did, and I’m still playing it.”