Friends share memories with Cowboy Hall of Famer
Karen Peterson photo
Karen Peterson photo
Top, Charley Lyons gives credit to the washtub for helping to pay for his St. Ignatius ranch. Above, Charley Lyons celebrates with friends in Arlee Saturday after returning from a banquet where he was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Karen Peterson photo
Howard Nuernberger shares some of his favorite “Charley” stories.
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ARLEE – Charley Lyons used to take a bath in one on Saturday nights when he was a kid. It wasn’t your regular full-sized tub, but the small metal type — the kind that makes your knees bend up so you can fit.
“It was an old-fashioned bathtub,” Lyons said.
Lyons decided it would be fun to put that tub on a horse.
“The idea was to put the tub on a saddle tree and put it on a bucking horse,” he said.
This might be a strange idea for a regular person, but it wasn’t so strange for a rodeo clown.
“I came up with acts to entertain the crowd,” he said.
Lyons, wearing his best clown outfit, carefully held onto the sides of the rodeo chute and dipped down into the old-fashioned washtub, which was strapped to a bronc. He settled into the tub filled with flour, instead of water, and the horse was let loose. Right out of the chute, the horse bucked and flour exploded from the washtub into a cloud of dust.
“Flour went flying everywhere,” he said. “The only way out of the tub was to crash and burn. I never got seriously hurt, just a few broken bones.”
Lyons first performed the trick more than 50 years ago. The Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame recently decided to recognize Lyons for his contribution to western culture by inducting him into their hall of fame for District 10.
Folks gathered in the Biscuit Café last week for coffee and cake on his return from the ceremony.
“He’s in the Cowboy Hall of Fame and we came here to celebrate,” Dib Espinoza said.
Lyons said he was honored to be inducted into the hall of fame.
“I still put my pants on one leg at a time, but I am glad to be there on the same wall with some of my good friends.”
Folks reminisced about tricks they’d seen him perform.
“That washtub act was a wild event,” Howard Nuernberger said. “It was one of the few clown events the young guys didn’t copy; it was too physically demanding.”
Lyons also competed in rodeo events and Nuernberger was his competition.
“We competed against each other,” Nuernberger said. “But with clowning, he knew he was going to get a paycheck, so he did more clowning, and he was funny. Generally, the cowboys in the rodeo would ignore the clown acts, they’d seen them all before — but that one with the washtub never got old.”
And there was this other trick.
“He would bulldog a steer off a Shetland pony. The pony was shorter than the steer so he had to kind jump up there to get on the steer.”
Nuernberger is glad the hall of fame is honoring his friend.
“It’s about the outstanding things people have done to contribute to the western lifestyle,” he said. “It’s a heritage we are very proud of.”
Sidney Powell was at the celebration. She came back from the Cowboy Hall of Fame banquet with a plaque posthumously honoring her father, Ed Shall, for his contribution to western culture.
“He was basically a homesteader,” she said. “He raised thoroughbred horses and eight kids. The ceremony was wonderful, very historical.”
