“I should’ve been a cowboy
I should’ve learned to rope and ride
Wearing my six-shooter, ridin’ my pony on a cattle drive
Stealin’ the young girls hearts
Just like Gene and Roy
Singin’ those campfire songs
Woah, I should’ve been a cowboy”
Toby Keith
At an amazingly early age I settled on a solid career path. It’s been my observation that most of us really never do quite get around to figuring out what it is we want to do for a living as we mature. A staggeringly large number of us seem to stumble from one lame attempt after another with close calls at becoming solvent, paying rent and taxes, or at a minimum, achieving a somewhat near miss at being considered as a sophisticated consumer. I never really suffered any such lingering doubts about a bright career path.
Looking back on those formative years the clarity of a career in the outdoors more than likely had a lot to do with a steady media driven diet, fed to youngsters, by the likes of Roy and Gene and The Duke. I didn’t particularly adhere to the ‘singing cowboy’ types in those days. Hop Along, Paladin and Lash LaRue were more my speed.
The Lone Ranger and that goofy mask didn’t cut it either. But, I did empathize greatly with old Tonto. At least, Tonto looked like what I thought a real Native American side-kick ought to look like. Up until Tonto came on the scene, most movie and TV “Indians” looked to me to be more of Greek or Italian heritage, sporting a bad spray tan. And, all of these imposters seem drawn to bad black wigs.
Even as a wannabe cowboy of single digit age range, I could spot a fake accent and somebody who was likely born in, or around, the Mediterranean Sea. These “counterfeits” for sure didn’t even look much like the Cherokees up in North Carolina. I’d even, on one occasion, talked to a ‘real’ Cherokee. He’d sat next to a bear chained to a tree. He and the bear were selling rubber knives and authentic headdresses made out of died pink and yellow chicken feathers. And, they sold wooden tomahawks festooned with more oddly colored chicken feathers held by light weight leather straps.
I once maintained a fairly substantial collection of rubber knives and wooden skull-splitters in my day. There are countless fond memories of bush-whacking my little sister on a daily basis, by utilizing my best knife and a trusty brain banging tomahawk. First, I’d slip up silently from behind, just like every Indian on TV, and slit her little two year old throat from ear to ear. When she would start screaming good and loud, I’d bounce that tomahawk off of her ‘noggin’ a time or two and righteously put her clean out of her misery.
After about my third or fourth attack, the Federal Authorities were marshaled and my extensive collection of skull-whackers was confiscated for eternity. Thanks to Lash LaRue, I quickly pivoted to bull whips, gave up my “Injun” ways and returned to my preferred career path of cowboying.
In Raymond L. Atkins 2016 book titled, “South of the Etowah - The View From the Wrong Side of the River,” Atkins hilariously unravels an essay about the Bob Brandy Show that brought back some old cowboying memories.
Atkins writes; “Back in the day we had The Bob Brandy Show. Bob was a low-tech television cowboy who rode the lonesome airwaves every weekday afternoon…Every Bob Brandy Show was pretty much the same show and that was the beauty and the brilliance of it. The show aired for twenty years, and during that time they used only one script. The program had a per-show production cost of $9.63. So if more than seventeen viewers tuned in on any given day, the producers made money.
Usually Bob would lead off the show with a song, because it used to be a belief in this country that there was nothing that children liked better than singing cowboys. No, I don’t know how the legend began, and these days most people don’t seem to care for this particular musical genre. But for about twenty years there, you couldn’t turn around without running into a singing cowboy or stepping on a singing cowboy’s shadow….And, it was common knowledge among Bob’s loyal viewers that participants who won hot RC Cola or Colonial Bread as prizes were bad kids who had probably been mean to Rebel off camera. (Rebel was Bob’s mount, tricked out in garish Spanish tack, tall and handsome, a Palomino)
Rebel was a real trouper. By the way, as he got older he was not always able to hold his hay until the scheduled commercial break. And occasionally a horse-related indiscretion would occur. Since The Bob Brandy Show was aired live, this unscripted part of the program would be broadcast over the entire Tennessee Valley. And, since children can’t help being children, this additional content no doubt enhanced the popularity of the show…After a station break, Bob would have his wife, Ingrid, come out. Ingrid was a cowgirl from the Dale Evans school of cowgirling. She wore a hat, a scarf knotted smartly on the side, a matching skirt and blouse that featured fringe, wagon wheels, and such, along with fancy cowgirl boots….Maybe I like cowboy songs better than I thought. Or, maybe it was Ingrid’s hair.”
This condensed little excerpt from Atkins doesn’t really do justice to his recollections of the show. You’d enjoy his writing.
When our Cub Scout ‘Den Mother’ announced that our loose pack of Cubs was scheduled to appear on the Bob Brandy Show, I just plain damn near lost my mind. When that faithful day finally dawned, about fifteen or twenty of young heathens piled into the spacious back seat of a big old 60’s era land yacht called a Chrysler, or maybe it was an Oldsmobile, and we giddily started the 35 mile journey to Signal Mountain and live TV fame.
We had been told not to pick our noses on live TV, to wave to all the folks back home and to be good scouts when we sat in Bob’s bleachers. But me, I focused on only one single thought. I was going to ride Old Rebel. Not only was I going to finally get to sit in the saddle, I was going to kick Rebel in the flanks as hard as I could and get him to rare up on his hind legs just like Old Hop Along Cassidy did. I would be a live TV cowboy star.
I immediately confided my dream of live TV stardom with my best side-kick, Bug Eyes Bertrum. Now Bug Eyes wasn’t always called Bug Eyes. His given first name was really Diego.
One day while snooping in his old man’s closet, Diego found the old man’s treasure trove of a shoe box full of ‘girly’ pictures. Treasures that the old man had recently brought home from the state penitentiary.
Diego had finally gotten to the one picture that made his eyes bug out really big. About that time, his mother, Ms. Inelle, had slipped up behind him, quiet as a cat, and Ms. Inelle slapped Diego so hard in the back of his head that his eyes were permanently bugged out for the next five years or so. That’s how Bug Eyes came to be called Bug Eyes instead of Diego.
By all estimations, Ms. Inelle weighed in at nearly 300 pounds. She was a big woman but she was built like a linebacker in every sense of the word. She loved Harry Thornton’s Live Wrestling every Saturday night, but you couldn’t sit in the same room with her while she watched Harry’s brand of entertainment. She would get so wound up over the ‘bad ones, the ones that cheat’ that you would actually begin to fear that you might lose your life while watching live TV.
She hated Dick Butkus in addition to a lot of cheating wrestlers. Somebody had once told her that Butkus was famous for spitting on the opposing center’s hand before the ball was snapped. That was all it took for Ms. Inelle to want to square off with the fearsome Mr. Dick.
She could have very easily whipped Dick’s butt in my estimation, and she wanted to in the worst way every time she watched him play the game. She’d scream at the TV; “Just put me in that game coach! I don’t need no damn helmet! I’ll rip the head off of Butkus and stomp his head in a mud hole!” She most likely could have done it too.
Bug Eyes and I watched terrified one morning as she ‘bull dogged’ her Jersey milk cow after the old cow had kicked over the second bucket of milk. Ms. Inelle grabbed that poor heifer by the horns, pummeling her big hips into the side of the surprised cow, and slammed that cow to the ground, like it was a small goat. Then she straddled the cow’s neck and hammer fisted the cow between the eyes until we thought she had killed it. After that terrifying little episode, that cow never kicked at another bucket.
Now Bug Eyes was an inventor of high acclaim amongst us boys. He was clever beyond belief, but his highest achievement was his newest invention of what came to be known as the “Bug Eyed Flip.” This flip was not your normal Y shaped slingshot. The traditional slingshot, or flip, was not concealable enough for Bug Eyes.
His ingenious new design included three loops of red rubber inner tube attached to the long back leg bone of a chicken. For ammunition Bug Eyes had designed a length of copper conduit with a little J-hook that snugged into the rubber bands on the chicken bone. He’d take a hammer and flatten out the other end of the stout wire so he could easily hold the end of the deadly copper missile between his thumb and his forefinger. This flattened end also had the added advantage of deadly and improved flight characteristics depending on the length of the wire Bug Eyes chose to impale his intended victims.
His accuracy with this copper dart was absolutely unnerving. The day he unveiled his marvelous new invention on the playground, we stood amazed as he decapitated a sparrow at fifty paces. This flip hit about as hard as a 32 caliber pistol when he launched the rocket with all three rubber bands at once.
Concealment of his trusty weapon was paramount in Bug Eyes mind. He carried his flip and his copper bullets in a little pouch, hidden in his underwear, inside his overalls. We soon found out why concealment was important.
One day our old sour teacher turned her back on the class to write some kind of terrible punishment on the board for some our more dastardly transgressions, we were all about to suffer for.
Bug Eyes, from the back of the room, suddenly launched one blistering shot of hot wire at her impressively large rear end. The wire hit the black board like the crack of a Kentucky rifle shattering a huge gaping hole in the ancient slate chalk board. Before the chalk dust had settled, Bug Eyes had stored the flip in the secret holster in his underwear.
The teacher and the principal soon had every boy in the class stand at attention and empty our pockets as they nervously searched us and our desks for powerful weapons. She never found out who had taken the deadly shot and Bug Eyes was a bonafide hero among us boys from that moment on.
Bug Eyes old man had been rehabilitated from hot wiring Ford trucks that didn’t belong to him. He returned home from prison as a newly trained electrician. He was known far and wide in our county as being the only electrician around that could wire a newly built frame home in a single day while being knee walking drunk. It was widely stated, that none of the houses he had wired suffered a single electrical fire. Being the proud son of a famous county wide electrician meant Bug Eyes had an endless supply of stout copper conduit for his newly minted arsenal.
So, when we finally made it to the Bob Brandy Show we were horrified to find that both Ingrid and Rebel were having a bad day. Apparently Ingrid’s hair dresser had wrecked his car coming up the mountain and she just couldn’t dare go on live TV because her golden blonde hair was a disaster.
Rebel had suffered from a badly abscessed hoof it was announced. My impending shot at a Hop Along cameo on live TV was dead on arrival. Bug Eyes and I sadly conferred during a commercial break, or maybe it was a Three Stooges film, and I watched in horror as Bug Eyes slipped the flip out of the concealed carry position. I had no plan B. Bug Eyes, it seems, invariably always had a plan B.
Me: “Your’e not going to shoot Bob are you?” I was mortified about having to walk home 35 miles.
Bug Eye: “Shut-up stupid, I’m just gonna see if old Rebel can still dance a little! Watch this!”
Rebel hadn’t dropped his pre-show sedative and hay load yet and I held my breath as Bug Eye surreptitiously loaded his magnum horse shot of copper into the strong red rubber engine on the flip.
When the copper payload impacted loudly on Rebel’s flank you’d thought the horse had been hit with an anti tank missile. He let out a terrible squeal, stood on his two hind legs and pawed at the air like he was swatting at a hive of attacking killer bees. In an instant, he was on his front hooves kicking with his back legs wildly and scattering a fresh load of yesterday’s stomach contents like it was shot from a fire hose. Things were unfolding very fast at this point. This was about the time that the camera operator suddenly turned the live feed TV camera in Rebel’s direction in order to document all the excitement. That’s when Rebels right rear, the one with the abscess, connected with the camera lens, instantly careening the filthy cameraman flat on his back. The TV camera was shattered.
The now overly rowdy crowd of Cub Scouts in the bleachers went wild. Like I said, things were unfolding very quickly. We stood amazed as Rebel ran through the roll up door like it was tissue paper. Bob’s cowboy hat fell off, exposing the fact to the entire Tennessee Valley that he really wore a rug. Bald Bob ran screaming through the hole in the roll up door after Rebel. The viewing audience back home was left bewildered. Ms. Inelle later said it was the best Bob Brandy Show she had ever seen.
On the long slow ride home, we all agreed to a man, that Bob might just make a real cowboy someday yet. Rumors spread that old Rebel retired shortly thereafter. Bad nerves they said.
As Bug Eye reached puberty, his bugged out eyes suddenly went back to normal. We still call him Bug Eye to this day though. Diego just won’t cut it. He is now a propulsion engineer for NASA.
I wish Ms. Inelle was still with us today.
In today’s culture, she could have probably changed her pronoun and suited up as a man and played in the SEC anywhere she wanted. She could have been first team All American as a freshman. Ms. Inelle, I guarantee, would have definitely negotiated a fat NIL deal.
WOMR Note: Maybe we can still find this tape of the show in the Channel 9 archives. It’s a live TV classic.
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