When it comes to scary, Stephen King and Pennywise have nothing on what’s happening around here.
Creative writing teachers always ask their students to write what they know. Part of this is self-serving, because they don’t want to read stories about teenagers who have never served in the military writing about the Battle of the Bulge or being courtesans in ancient Rome under Caligula (courtesans under Caligula is why teachers drink, literally). But it also serves to focus the writer on aspects of their lives and experiences that they are able to write about in a voice that is all their own.
The Grand Poobah of Book Reviewers, Ron Charles, recently reviewed Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland, the memoir written by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Charles found most of the memoir without merit, but did say that when she wrote about shooting her dog Cricket in the face it was the strongest scene in the book. Noem was able to tap into an experience that was uniquely hers—shooting a family pet in the face with a rifle. (And for those readers who think I return to the death of Cricket too often in this space, I would offer that there is no expiration date on the horror of shooting a dog in the face, especially when that incident was only shared publicly to sell books. Dads for Puppies!)
All of this preamble is to let you know that I feel compelled to write about a subject that I know very little about, so if I scuff my cowboy boot in the process, it is to be anticipated, and I fully expect readers to pounce like a cowhand on an errant calf. (These are likely to be the same readers who think Governor Kristi Noem shooting her dog in the face is just more bed-wetting liberalism.) I’m not sure why this topic seems to be especially pronounced in the Fredericksburg region, but today we must address rodeos and cowboy hats.
My knowledge of rodeos is generally limited to 1970s beer commercials. There seemed to be a narrative arc that resonated with beer drinkers, specifically malt liquor drinkers, that after a long day in a corral or on the trail it was time for a beer. Who was I to argue? There were no cattle drives or bucking broncos in my little slice of Eastern Pennsylvania suburbia.
Rodeos were far from my mind until Jon Russell rode into Spotsylvania County with a backstory of teaching kids how to box and teaching those same kids how to grow up to be cowpunchers which are both apparently much-needed life skills in Culpeper County.
For those of you who may not remember Jon Russell and his lasting impact on Spotsylvania, he was hired by the previous Spotsylvania School Board to be the Manager of Executive Communications for then Superintendent Mark Taylor at a salary of $102,119.00. He was so good at avoiding communication with anyone who was not an executive that he was then promoted six months later to Chief of Staff and Kirk Cameron Book Sale Liaison at a salary of $107,225.00. Soon after the newly elected Board was seated in 2024, he resigned his position to focus more on, one can only assume, rodeos and finding the books that had been banned during his tenure.
I thought Russell’s interest in rodeoing might be an outlier, but then Virginia Senator Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) apparently took a trip to Wyoming at Cheyenne Frontier Days in 2022 on the dime of a skill game company called Pace-O-Matic, which once again placed rodeos in the Fredericksburg limelight along with the fact that Pace-O-Matic as a corporate name really lacks imagination or messaging. Company Slogan: “You might lose your entire life savings on legalized skill games at your local 7-11, but you also might break the bank and be able to pay your own way to Cheyenne Frontier Days and never have to worry about paying for another Big Gulp. Just play at your own Pace and it’s O-Matic.” Sounds like Pace-O-Matic could benefit from a Manager of Executive Communications.
I’m not sure if Reeves wore a cowboy hat on his possibly free trip to Wyoming (there was apparently a Facebook photo on the Pace-O-Matic page of Reeves for a short time but they took it down), but there is one local politician who takes tremendous pride in wearing his cowboy hat as he fights the minions of Satan in King George County and that is Board of Supervisors member Kenneth Stroud.
Not sure if Stroud rides his faithful steed to meetings, but he did address the King George School Board in his 10-gallon hat recently where he expressed concern that there are people in King George schools who want to violate our children through our school libraries and books. As some astute readers may recall, this is very similar to the plot of John Wayne’s 1973 movie, The Train Robbers. Ricardo Montalban follows Wayne and his band of cowboys to the Mexican border and then quickly turns around and rides back to Texas and provides copies of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to public schools while Wayne is away searching for lost gold.
The defiling of children through school libraries was also a plot device that Stephen King used in his classic book and movie It. In It, the murdering clown Pennywise encamps at a public school library, and when a child walks near he starts to read: “I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things…”
The child, recognizing the beauty of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, then follows the clown into a nearby sewer drain where Pennywise eats them.
Sure, a fully dressed clown with balloons stalking the stacks of a public school library might get the attention of administrators and school resource officers long before he can begin reciting Joyce, but you have to grant the Master of Horror some suspension of disbelief. Afterall, the reality is that of an elected official going to school board meetings in a cowboy hat trying to convince people that the deadly sewer drain is a library full of books and ideas.
I know which clown scares me more.
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