Plains Folk: More Buddy Heaton stories
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
In my last column I recounted Buddy Heaton's memorable appearance in the 1961 Inaugural Parade in which he greeted President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson mounted on the back of Clyde, his trained buffalo.
Buddy Heaton is a legendary character, undoubtedly the most famous (or notorious) person to come from Hugoton and Buddy Heaton stories are rife not only in southwest Kansas but all over the West, the East, and into Canada.
In fact, anywhere Buddy appeared with Clyde (originally named Old Grunter) or clowned a rodeo, people remember him.
Recently I was in Ulysses, and learned that Buddy is a resident in the Western Prairie nursing home, having suffered a stroke a few years back. So I went in to see him. He is in a wheelchair, but his memory and his sense of humor are intact, and he can tell a good story.
I first met Buddy Heaton back in the summer of 1961, when I hired on to work for Les Winget, who was producing four rodeos: McCook, Neb.; Davenport, Iowa; Topeka, and Abilene.
Buddy clowned those rodeos, and he was a character. One of his acts was having one of the subordinate clowns come out of the bucking chutes in a wash tub on the back of a bronc. After the first couple of shows the tub rider wasn't too keen on repeating the act, so Buddy just picked him up, none too gently, I might add, and hoisted him over the chute and onto the horse.
After that, the rider voluntarily got in, having decided that flying out of the tub on his own was preferable to being put into it by Buddy.
Buddy told me that he has performed before nine presidents, Winston Churchill, and Queen Elizabeth. One of his standard rodeo-clown stunts was to tell the announcer that he had kissed every woman that came to the rodeo.
The announcer, expressing disbelief, would then call for any woman he missed to raise her hand, at which point Buddy would climb over the fence (whether or not anyone had raised her hand) and plant a big smooch, complete with lots of smearing of his clown makeup, on some girl's face.
He intended, he told me, to do this to Queen Elizabeth when she attended the Calgary Stampede, but upon reaching the Queen after barging and forcing his way past her many security agents, he decided against the smearing and just sat on her lap instead. Queen Victoria might not have been amused, but Queen Elizabeth was.
I once heard a story about how Buddy and a fellow clown, Piston Holiday, decided to drum up some attendance at a Florida rodeo by going into downtown Miami where they would get into a scuffle and Pistol would pretend to shoot Buddy, fake blood and all. All went according to plan, except that Buddy decided to carry the prank a bit further and continued to play dead even after the police arrived.
Despite all Pistol's pleadings, explanations, and imprecations (which included kicking Buddy and yelling, "Get up, you s.o.b.!"), Buddy carried out the possum act until after Pistol had been hauled off to jail.
When I asked him about this episode, Buddy said it never happened, that he had never worked with Pistol. But I got the feeling that he liked the idea and would have done something like it if he had the chance.
When I asked about stunts like this, he told me of one pulled on him.
One of his arena acts was to have a hole dug in the arena, then have a phone booth hauled out so he could take a phone call during the rodeo. (Sometimes it was an outhouse instead of a phone booth.) The booth was set over the hole, into which he would crawl, then the announcer would call for the arena to be cleared and a truck would roar in and smash the phone booth while a dummy would fly through the air.
One time, however, someone had filled the hole with water, so Buddy got a good dunking. It took him a while to find out who did it, but when he did he got his revenge. The prankster was a bull rider, so the next time he bucked off Buddy let the bull work him over a bit before going in for the rescue.
