Plains Folk: Buddy Heaton was a legend
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
A lot of colorful figures roamed the plains of Western Kansas during the later 1800s: Stagecoach Mary, Buffalo Jones, George Armstrong Custer, Wyatt Earp, Cannonball Green, Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson. An equally colorful figure, one who would have been right at home in those rugged pioneer times, is still alive well into the 21st century.
Buddy Heaton was one of the nation's leading rodeo clowns during my youth. I met him during the summer of 1961 when I worked for Les Winget, who was producing four rodeos in Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. Buddy clowned those shows, and also performed his famous act with his trained buffalo, Old Grunter.
Buddy would ride Grunter at a high run into the arena, put him through a number of tricks and routines, and always end with a flying leap into the back of a pickup truck. Grunter, of course, came to a sudden stop when he hit the front stockracks, and Buddy would crash onto the top of the truck, an invariable crowd-pleaser.
Buffalo are notoriously difficult animals to deal with and very few have ever been successfully trained. Back of the chutes we joked that Grunter wasn't really tamed and trained; Buddy was just tougher, stronger, and meaner than the buffalo.
Some of the stars of the television series "Wagon Train" entertained at the Davenport, Iowa, rodeo. They liked Buddy's act so much that they contracted with him to appear on the show.
Old Grunter, however, got a name change. He became Clyde, and Frank McGrath, who played Charlie Wooster, the cook, rode him on screen.
Clyde made a few other memorable appearances. Buddy rode him up the capitol steps in both Denver and Salt Lake City to greet the respective governors of Colorado and Utah. I've also heard that he took his buffalo up the elevator in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver, as well as into the elevator at the offices of the Salt Lake City Tribune. Buddy was never one to shy away from publicity, so I guess he decided to go right to the source there in Utah.
In 1961 Buddy and Old Grunter took part in the Santa Fe Trail caravan that went from Kansas City to Santa Fe. Two years earlier they got their picture in Life Magazine by winning a race with a quarter horse.
Not only are buffalo hard to train, they also are deceptively fast, quick, and agile.
Undoubtedly Clyde's (I use the name interchangeably, as does Buddy) most famous appearance was in the 1961 inaugural parade, where a photograph shows Buddy and Clyde right up against the viewing stand being greeted by President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. Lady Bird and Jackie are judiciously (not to say timorously) seated farther back on the stand. Actually, Buddy was not authorized to be in the parade.
Never one to stand on ceremony, he showed up at the starting point and tried to join in, but was stopped when he didn't have the necessary paperwork.
But when the Parliamentary Polo Players, a group of Texas horsemen who played polo with broomsticks and a basketball and who knew Buddy from the Fort Worth rodeo, rode by, they called out to join them. Which he did. As they rode past the viewing stand, Lyndon Johnson waved Buddy over, and one of the more memorable moments of inaugural parade history was captured on film.
Given today's security precautions, it's hard to imagine a buffalo in an inaugural parade, much less an uninvited one.
