Oregon, 1963. Pendleton, the last week of September. A rodeo clown named Dicks Carver is being discharged from the county hospital on a Wednesday morning with a bill for $1,100, a leg that will never bend right again and no insurance because there is no insurance for rodeo clowns. He worked the arena for 19 years.
He saved more cowboys than anyone has bothered to count. The Pendleton Roundup does not have a record for that. Nobody kept one. Here is the story. Dixon Earl Carver was born in 1920 in Elco, Nevada. The son of a man who ran a small ranch and a woman who taught Sunday school and did not particularly approve of rodeos.
He went to his first one at age nine in secret, riding in the back of a neighbor’s truck, and came home 4 hours later having decided on his profession. Not the writing, not the roping. He had watched the rodeo clown work the arena that afternoon for 3 hours and understood in the way a 9-year-old understands things before he has words for them that the man in the grease paint was the most important person in the arena and the least thanked.
He began working as a barrelman at a small county rodeo in Elco in 1944 at age 24 after two years in the army and a brief and undistinguished attempt at running his father’s ranch after the old man’s death. He was good at it immediately. Not because he was fearless, which he was not, but because he was fast and precise, and because he had the particular quality of attention that the job required, the ability to read an animal’s intention a half second before the animal committed to it.
A half second in an arena is everything. He worked his way up the circuit over the next decade, driving his own truck between dates, sleeping in the cab when the money was thin, learning the stock contractors and the bulls and the specific personalities of animals that would be in the arena before the writers drew for them.
The Elco County Fair, the Nevada State Rodeo in Reno, the California rodeo in Selenus, the Cow Palace in San Francisco. By the mid 1950s, he was on the invitation list for the Pendleton Roundup, one of the oldest and largest rodeos in the American West. And by 1958, he was the Roundup’s senior protection clown, the man the stock contractors called first and paid the most and trusted with the roughest bulls.
He kept a small green ledger in his kit bag. On the first page, he had written in his own hand a simple heading, cowboys cleared. He made an entry each time he pulled a rider clear of an animal that would have done serious damage. Not every fall, not every scramble, the ones where, in his judgment, his action had made the difference between the cowboy getting up and the cowboy not getting up.
He was conservative with the count. By September of 1963, the number was 41. He had a daughter named Clara, 12 years old, born to a woman named Iris, who had married Dixs in 1948, and died of a fever in 1954 when Clara was three. Clara had been raised partly by Dixs and partly by Iris’s mother in Pendleton, which was why Dixs was always at the Roundup and why Clara was always in the stands when he worked it.
She had watched her father work the arena every September of her life. She knew how to read an arena the way some children know how to read music. On a Thursday afternoon in the second week of the 1963 roundup, the stock contractor ran a bull named DustCloud in the bull riding event.
Dustcloud weighed 1,400 lb and was known on the circuit for doing what he did that Thursday, which was not go to the gate. He came left instead hard and fast once the rider hit the ground. and Dick’s Carver was where Dick’s Carver needed to be, which was between Dustcloud and the rider. Dustcloud’s left rear hoof came down on Dix’s right knee at an angle the attending physician at the Umatillaa County Hospital later described in writing as producing nonreoverable joint damage.
Dixs was 43 years old. He would not work the arena again. He was in the hospital for 5 days. Clara was there every day, brought by her grandmother in the morning and taken home in the evening. She sat in the chair beside the bed and did her schoolwork and did not talk about the knee and did not talk about the arena and did not ask what came next because she was 12 and she understood that some questions had to wait.
The bill was $1,100. He had $280 in the account at the First National Bank of Pendleton. There was no insurance. Rodeo clowns in 1963 were independent contractors. Nobody provided insurance for independent contractors in the rodeo world. Nobody had thought to. Nobody had thought to because nobody had formalized the question of what a rodeo clown was entitled to given what he did.
And nobody had formalized the question because the men who did the job were not the kind of men who asked those questions of anyone but themselves. Clara Carver was sitting on the curb outside the hospital entrance on a Wednesday morning when John Wayne walked past on his way from the arena to the car that was taking him back to his hotel in Pendleton.
He had been at the Roundup as a guest of honor for 3 days. He was 56 years old. He was wearing the tan Stson and the canvas jacket and the boots, and he was walking at the pace of a man with somewhere to be in an hour and no urgency about getting there. The girl was 12 years old, small, dark-haired, wearing a roundup t-shirt with a rodeo program number pinned to the back of it.
She was sitting with her knees together and her hands flat on the curb beside her, and she was not making noise. She was crying the way a child cries when she’s been crying for a while and is too tired to cry loudly anymore. Wayne stopped. He had four daughters of his own. He knew what a child crying alone on a curb looked like when something real had happened.
And this was that. He sat down on the curb beside her. He did not say anything immediately. He looked at the rodeo number pinned to the back of her shirt. He looked at the hospital entrance. He said, “Is your father in there?” She looked at him. She placed the face. She said, “Yes.
” He asked if her father had been hurt at the arena. She said, “Yes.” She said, “His knee.” She said the doctor said he would never work the arena again and that her father had not said anything when the doctor said it. And that was what had frightened her most. Her father always had something to say. He had not said anything.
Wayne looked at the hospital entrance. He asked if she had anyone with her. She said her grandmother was inside with her father. She had come outside because she did not want to cry in front of her father. He looked at her for a moment. He said that was a considerate thing to do. She looked at the curb.
She said he saved 41 cowboys. She said it the way a child says a number she’s been told is important and has decided is the most important number she knows. Nobody’s going to save him. She said Wayne looked at the hospital. He said, “What is your father’s name?” “Dicks Carver,” she said. “Dixon Carver.
” He stood up from the curb. He told her to stay where she was. He went inside. The woman at the admissions desk told him the patient’s name and room number and the outstanding account balance when Wayne asked for it. She told him the amount, and he took the long brown leather wallet from his jacket and counted out $1,100 on the admissions counter in bills, flat and deliberate.
He asked for a receipt marked paid and full. She wrote it out. He put it in his jacket pocket. He went up to the room. A nurse in the corridor told him which door. He knocked once and went in. Dicks Carver was in the bed with his right leg elevated, the knee wrapped in a compression bandage that went from mid thigh to midcfe.
He was 43 years old, lean and brown, with the kind of face that has spent 20 years being covered in grease paint and does not particularly show it except around the eyes. An older woman, Clara’s grandmother, was sitting in the chair beside the bed. She looked at Wayne when he came in and placed the face and said nothing.
Dixs looked at him. He placed the face the way rodeo men place faces, which is to say he recognized him and waited to see what he wanted. Wayne pulled the chair from beside the door and sat down. He said, “Your daughter’s outside on the curb.” She told me about the 41. Dix looked at the ceiling.
He said, “The ledger’s in my kit bag if you want to check the count.” Wayne said he did not need to check it. He said she said nobody is going to save him. meaning you. Dix looked at the ceiling. He said, “She is 12. Kids say things.” Wayne took the paid in full receipt from his jacket pocket and set it on the bedside table.
Dix looked at it. He looked at Wayne. I have a policy, Dick said. I do not take charity. Wayne said, “I know you do not.” He said, “I have a different question for you.” He said, “A man who has read 1,400 bulls for 19 years knows things that nobody has written down.” He paused.
“That seems like a problem worth solving.” Dix looked at the receipt on the table. He said, “I don’t follow you.” Wayne said he knew a rodeo producer in Fort Worth named Harlon Burke, who had been talking for 2 years about putting together a formal safety training program for arena protection workers.
He said Burke did not know what he was doing because he had never worked the barrel and the men Burke had consulted had retired too long ago to remember the current stock. He said Burke needed someone who knew the current bulls and the current arena configurations and who had the kind of count that Dicks Carver had in his ledger.
He said he would make a call that afternoon. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Dix looked at his knee. He said, “I don’t know what I know. It’s not the kind of thing you can write down easy.” Wayne said. “That’s exactly why Burke needs you to write it down.” He stood from the chair.
He picked up his hat from the bed rail where he had said it. He said, “Your daughter is outside. She has been considerate enough not to cry in front of you. You might go out and let her know the arithmetic has changed.” He walked out of the room. He went downstairs and out the hospital entrance. Clara was still on the curb.
He stopped beside her. He said, “The hospital bill is paid.” He said, “Your father’s going to be all right. Not the knee. The knee is what it is, but the rest of him is going to be all right.” She looked up at him. She said, “How do you know?” He said, “Because I have seen men who are not going to be all right, and your father is not one of them.
” He put his hat on. He said, “Go back inside.” He went to his car and drove to the hotel and called Harlland Burke in Fort Worth. Dicks Carver left the Umatillaa County Hospital 4 days later with a walking cast and a paid in full receipt and a telephone number in Fort Worth.
He called it in October from the phone in his apartment in Pendleton, standing at the kitchen counter with the composition notebook open beside him and 81 pages of notes he had already started writing. Harlon Burke hired him as a consultant in November at a rate that covered his rent and his daughter’s school clothes and left something over each month.
Dick spent the winter writing down what he knew. It took longer than he expected because Wayne had been right that it was not the kind of thing that wrote itself down easy. He filled 81 pages in a standard composition notebook by February. The document he produced was not formal.
It was written the way a working man writes in plain language with specific examples organized by animal type and arena configuration and crowd noise level and a dozen other variables that nobody had thought to categorize before because the men who knew them had never been asked to write them down. Burke had it typed up and distributed to 17 rodeo producers across the circuit in the spring of 1964.
It was the first written safety protocol for rodeo arena protection in the history of the American West. Dixs consulted on arena safety for the next 22 years. He never worked the barrel again. He trained 43 protection clowns in the protocols he had written, and those men trained others. And by the time Dixs retired in 1985, the document he had written in a Pendleton apartment in the winter of 1963 had been revised six times and was the basis of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s official arena protection standards. Clara Carver grew up in Pendleton and went to Eastern Oregon University on an academic scholarship. She became a physical therapist and spent her career in Pendleton, a 30inut drive from the Roundup Arena, where she had watched her father work every September of her childhood. She came to every roundup until she was too old to make the drive comfortably. Dicks Carver died in 1991
in Pendleton. He was 71 years old. Clara donated three items to the Pendleton Roundup Hall of Fame on Southwest Court Avenue in 1993. The first was the small green ledger from his kit bag open under glass to the first page. The heading cowboys cleared written in Dix’s hand. The number 41 at the bottom of the last entry.
The second was his grease paint kit, the tin box with the tubes and the sponges worn to nothing that he had carried to every arena from 1944 to 1963. The third was the paid in full receipt from the Umatillaa County Hospital dated September 1963, $1,100. The handwriting of the admissions clerk, neat and even on the hospital form.
The display is in the east corridor of the Hall of Fame building. The placard reads Dixon Earl Carver 1920 to 1991. Pendleton Roundup Arena Protection 1958 to 1963. 41 entries. These items were donated by his daughter Clara, who was sitting on a curb outside the hospital when the ledger still had room for more.
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