Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > March > 24 > Entry
Above the chutes at Rodeo Austin 1
When traveling to unexplored lands, it helps to be escorted by royalty.
Monday, I stuck my nose behind the scenes at Rodeo Austin, lingering at the stock pens, dining with organizational founders, thrilling at the bronco and bull chutes above the president’s box.
All this, because I know former rodeo queen and Rodeo Austin board member Michele Golden, who kindly offered to lift the veil on the annual event.
Hungrily, I listened to tales from living legend Verlin Callahan, lawyer and unofficial rodeo historian Bill Knolle, board president and natural statesman Gilbert Turrieta, as well as helpful anecdotalists Hap Feuerbacher and Fred Weber.
The rodeo loyalists praised the event — which includes carnival, parties, barbecue cook-off, stock exhibitions and auctions as well as pig races and cow milks — for preserving Western heritage, but most emphatically for raising $1.5 million annually in scholarships, and not just for agricultural students.
Michele Golden, Verlin Callahan
I’m under the perhaps false impression that this prodigious charity work is widely known, so I spent time collecting other newspaper story ideas — 55 of them all told — that might appear in our publication with time.
More to come…
Rodeo Austin continues through March 28, www.rodeoaustin.com.
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By Shirley
March 2, 2011 3:05 PM | Link to this
This is your best writing yet!