Fifty years ago, Saturday night rodeo was as ubiquitous in Texas as the Friday night lights of high school football, according to Weldon Burgoon, 80, a local rodeo legend and recent inductee to the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.

DRC/David Minton

Weldon Burgoon tells tales of his rodeo days, at Weldon’s Saddle Shop and Western Wear on Thursday in Denton. Burgoon is a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.

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In the late 1930s, the road from Denton to Sanger’s rodeo was long and dark. Halfway there, at Green Valley, a revolving light swirled across the landscape — like a lighthouse to seafarers — the same kind of light that beckoned visitors to Sanger’s rodeo grounds, he recalls.

From 1941 to 1950, Ponder and Denton competed for the best rodeo talent and biggest audiences, eventually usurping Sanger’s popularity.

In 1951, Denton won out. Soldiers on weekend leave were more likely to visit Denton than anywhere else in the county, Burgoon said.

“Denton was more of a destination back then,” said Burgoon, who began roping his way into rodeo history in Ponder. “There were a thousand girls at the girls’ college [Texas Woman’s University] and a thousand soldiers at the USO on the Square.”

The North Texas State Fair and Rodeo has kept the tradition alive for two Saturdays every August. Bull riders will finish their rodeo competition for a $12,000 purse tonight at the North Texas State Fairgrounds. The fair ends Sunday.

In 1948, more than 35,000 people attended the Ponder Rodeo, according to records at the Denton County Historical Commission. Volunteers are researching and writing the stories of both events, as part of applications to the Texas Historical Commission for two subject markers — one for the Ponder Rodeo and one for the North Texas State Fair and Rodeo.

Burgoon was 11 when he entered his first calf roping competition in October 1941, the last Ponder Rodeo of the year. He and his family had been visiting the rodeo since it started in 1939.

“I was pretty nervous,” Burgoon said, adding that he didn’t think he was different than anyone else. “I wanted to be in the arena, where the action was.”

When the United States entered World War II, the Ponder Rodeo went into hiatus. A local house mover helped pick up all the cedar posts, wood rail, net-wire fencing and seats, and the whole thing was erected on Exposition Street in Denton.

“People couldn’t get tires or gas” to travel to Ponder, Burgoon said.

In 1942, he and his dad shared a horse and won a total of $36 from the Denton rodeo, coming in second and third in breakaway calf roping.

“I was making 25 cents an hour at Evers Hardware, so to me that $18 was a lot of money,” Burgoon said.

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Weldon Burgoon

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After the war, the Ponder Rodeo returned. To keep it going, the Deussen family and other town leaders built an arena.

The Ponder Rodeo attracted some of the best talent in the county, in part because Denton had no parking for its rodeo in 1947 and 1948. In fact, because the city needed money, it sold the corrals, pens and fences from the Exposition location for about $25,000, Burgoon said.

Burgoon had been able to compete against professional rodeo cowboys as a “hometowner” both in Denton County and Dallas County — thanks to the help of friends there — but to compete in McKinney or Waco, he needed to join the rodeo association. He paid the $15 membership fee for his professional rodeo card in 1950, the last year Ponder held a rodeo.

In 1952, Burgoon was shopping on the trading square when he spotted a colt he knew had good prospects as a roping horse. He traded for it, which cost him a roping calf and $75.

“My dad thought I was crazy because I already had a good horse,” Burgoon said.

Burgoon’s logic was, if he was paying the entry fees, he needed a good horse to help him win. He and Reddy Man worked together all winter. The following year, even though they were both green, Burgoon put together a five-week string of rodeo wins in West, Gainesville, Avondale and Waco that brought him $1,100.

For a plumber making $30 a week, that was good money, Burgoon said. He and his wife, Joy, used some of it to buy a television and later watched Gunsmoke every Saturday night.

Someone offered him $2,000 for Reddy Man, but he turned the offer down. Reddy Man died a few years later, in 1959, from what is now known as navicular disease.

“I had three vets working on him, but they couldn’t get him sound,” Burgoon said.

Many local rodeos began to die out in the 1950s, he said, as drought took its toll on the Texas landscape.

Most traditional rodeo events are based on jobs that ranchers needed to do well, he said, such as calf roping and wild cow milking. The milking event was a crowd-pleaser, “because they like to see you get run over by the cow,” Burgoon said.

But on the ranch, cows need tending after a calf is born, because when the cow freshens, the calf cannot drink it all.

Even the gentlest animals can get wild in a corral when you’re about to do something with them that they don’t like, Burgoon said.

“Cows and people are alike that way,” he said. “Some of them don’t like to be stirred up.”

Denton native Luther Wood, 86, remembers just such an incident at the Denton rodeo, when it was still located near East Hickory Street and Exposition. Wood never competed in rodeo events, but he rode in the grand entrance with the sheriff’s posse and helped with the stock.

“We were over there shuffling cattle in the pens one night; I was but a teenager then,” Wood said. “One of those old bulls jumped that fence and got out. It was lucky there was quite a few of us on horseback. We chased it clear to east Denton County before we finally got it back.”

Wood is looking forward to learning more about what the researchers uncover and write about the two rodeos, he said.

“A lot of people don’t realize the history in Denton County,” Wood said.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.