I grew up in western Kansas and spent a lot of my K-12 years working on an uncle’s eastern Kansas ranch. My cousins were actual cowboys, even winning state roping and riding championships. I liked the work, but it turned out that I don’t like horses all that much.
In the late-60s, my wife and I rented an apartment from a dude in Dallas who desperately wanted to be a rich guy and had bought a “ranch” that he planned on turning into a horse breeding business. Since my wife loves horses and I had spent some of my youth working on a ranch, our landlord thought we’d be cheap ranch help. For two years, I trained, fed, castrated, exercised, and got tossed on my ass by a motley collection of thoroughbreds and some wonderful, world-class quarter horses. Most of which were almost as smart as a two-stroke motorcycle; especially the thoroughbreds. I have documented my horsie experience before, in Geezer with A Grudge: “#48 An Attempt at Understanding.” The end result is that I have enough trouble keeping track of one scatterbrain and I generally don’t ride horses or want to ride horses.
At the beginning of my electronics career, I was a tech, then an engineer, in commercial ag equipment; electronic scales, to be precise. Most of my customers were feedlot owners from Louisiana to North Dakota and all states between and west to the Rockies. Many of their employees were cowboys at the tailend of both a career/life and a way of life. I met a lot of working cowboys in that job and saw a lot of rodeos. I am not one, but I know a cowboy when I see or hear one and I know a great rider when I see one.
There are two things that are guaranteed to piss me off are Nashville country singers wearing cowboy hats and Harley assholes pretending that their idiotic motorcycles are throwbacks to “western riding style.” (Obviously, there are more than two things that get that reaction.) Nashville and the southeast are no more likely to produce a “cowboy” than Wisconsin or Minnesota. If you own a horse and you live in those places, the horse is a pet and your “ranch” is a hobby farm and your “western style” is a costume. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you Charlie Daniels, Garth Brooks, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Clint Black, and the rest of the limp-wristed spaghetti-western country star pose-alikes.
My wife’s grandfather and great-uncle Kye (pictured at left) were eastern Colorado real-life cowboys. This picture has hung in our homes since the early 1970s. Kye McKeever worked as a ranch hand until he died. My wife’s grandfather, Ira McKeever, was the Monford Ranch range manager until he quit to start his own successful cattle ranch in the 1940’s. His ride of choice was a 1950’s Ford pickup, but he had a horse or two mostly to entertain his grandkids. Several of Ira’s Colorado neighbors still used horses for daily work and transportation well into the late-60s (1960s). Those men would be as likely to submit themselves to a gynaecological pelvix exam riding position as they would to wearing a ballerina outfit to a cattle auction. You’ll notice a cowboy has his feet under his ass, so he can stand in the stirrups when necessary and guide the horse with his heels and toes.
This kind of idiot crap is for handicapped fools who could no more negotiate a parking lot turn than ride a motorcycle functionally. This isn’t “western style,” but it might be Hollywood or New York-style. (Donny looks about as “comfortable” sitting on a propped-up Hardly as he did catching a soft-underhanded toss baseball.) I don’t have any objection to the Village People or any other kind of reverse-macho posing you’re up to, but I do object to hearing that this kind of motorcycle is somehow connected to American cowboy history. It isn’t. In fact, nothing about the cruiser heritage has anything to do with horses or cowboys.
If you look at the idiot extremes, like the picture at right, it’s hard to imagine what sort of weirdness is being imitated. My best guess is some sort of handcuffed-to-the-ceiling fantasy. Creepy. It’s not cowboy, though, in any way, shape, or (especially) form.
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