Plains Folk: Gerald Roberts remembered
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
We always went to the Flint Hills rodeo when I was a kid, and I well remember the bull and bronc rides of Gerald and his older brother Ken, the Riding Roberts Brothers.
They were both world champions, Ken in bull riding (1943, 1944, 1945) and Gerald as all-around (1942, 1948).
Several years ago I had a chance to meet and interview Gerald, who had fascinating tales to tell of the days when a rodeo cowboy led a gypsy life. This is the story he told me of how he started rodeoing.
As kids Gerald, Ken, and Marge (oldest in a family of six) rode every milk cow, hog, horse, and mule on the place. Finally, their father E.C. started buying carloads of wild horses out of Colorado for the kids to break, then selling the tamed animals to area farmers and ranchers.
In 1933 the Roberts family started putting on a rodeo on the home ranch, the forerunner of what became the Flint Hills Rodeo.
Marge got the rodeo bug and by promising to go through high school got her mother to agree to let her ride for the Clyde Miller Wild West Show in the summers.
When Gerald graduated from the eighth grade, he worked out the same deal with his mother and immediately set out for Nebraska to join Marge and Ken riding steers and broncs in the show.
Everything went fine for a couple of weeks, and then, Gerald said, he got thrown pretty hard from a bronc and was knocked out for several minutes.
At this point Clyde Miller, talking to Ken and Marge, found out that this kid, who looked several years older, was only 13. When he finally came to, Clyde immediately sent him home.
But instead of staying home, Gerald went to a rodeo in Oklahoma, where he learned that a Wild West show in Nevada was hiring. So he hopped a freight and (illegally, of course) rode the rails to Winnemucca.
Gerald had to switch from the Santa Fe through several other lines to the Union Pacific, this during the early years of the Great Depression when out-of-work and desperate men were filling the hobo jungles of railroad towns.
After a summer of riding broncs and steers, but no more bad spills, Gerald hopped another series of freight trains and headed home.
As the train neared Strong City, Gerald could tell it was not going to stop, so he crawled on top of a box car and screwed down the brake. As the train came to a halt, he jumped off and hid in a corn field while the cursing brakeman looked for the problem and finally got the train rolling again.
