Bronco Buster : At 13, Floyd Stillings ran away from home to ride the redeo. Seventy years later, he still follows the horses : use this version please

Floyd Stillings reached into his desk drawer to retrieve a small cloth sack resembling a Bull Durham tobacco pouch.

The old man’s hands, as tanned as the leather of a fine saddle, carefully lifted out a medallion. In the morning sunlight that filtered into Stillings’ apartment in Arcadia, the medal shone like gold.

On the front, with a cowboy atop a bronco, the lettering said “National Rodeo Hall of Fame.” He turned to the back to read this inscription: “Floyd Stillings Honored and Inducted Dec. 19, 1987.”

He brought the award home from a banquet in Oklahoma City, home of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, which since 1965 has honored 112.

“I haven’t gotten too hopped up on (the award) yet,” Stillings, a champion bronco rider in the 1920s and 1930s, said last week.

“Hell, I should have been in there years ago. Most people who rodeo spend six, maybe 10 years at it. I spent 21 years. That was a long time. I stopped in March of ’42. And that was more than a few years ago.”

For the last three decades, Stillings has lived in Southern California. Most of that time, he worked as a trainer, breeder and owner of horses at the Santa Anita race track. He still goes there when the horses are running, using the passes he earned as a trainer.

At 83, Stillings lives alone in a tiny apartment on the second floor of his landlord’s large home. Sybil, his wife of 35 years, died 13 years ago. He has one main room with bed, desk, couch and lounge chair. In his small kitchen, he uses a hot plate. When he walks up the stairs to his apartment, his aching back forces him to bend over and balance on all fours.

“I’m paying for all those rodeos,” he said, in which he broke dozens of his bones.

Stillings is a sturdy man with a healthy head of white hair and a curl that falls onto a forehead lined like cracked sod. His eyes are as blue as the sky over Montana, where he journeyed at age 13 after running away from his family in the horse and grain country of Pullman, Wash.

From a storage closet, he brought out a stack of scrapbooks that tell part of the story of Floyd Stillings, cowboy.

Why did he ride?

“I loved it. I didn’t have to prove nothing. I went to school on horseback at 6, 7 and 8 years (old). What else could I do (except rodeo)?

“I led a wildcat’s life,” he says. “You had to be ‘bout half bronco to do it.”

He opened a scrapbook. Yellowed clippings and faded black-and-white photographs fell from it.

Stillings left home because he and one of his two brothers “fought like stray dogs.”

In Montana he helped break cavalry horses for the U. S. Army during World War I. “When I left home, I left. I didn’t tell nobody where I was going. I thought I was a man. That’s when hell started.” He had to learn fast because he had to eat.

He turned to a page in the scrapbook with a picture of a crowd gathered under circus-like banners proclaiming: “T. O. Burroughs Wild West. Real Bucking Horses and Long Horned Steers.” At the time, in the early 1920s, he was a teen-age rider in the Burroughs show. In a round-topped cowboy hat that would have done Tom Mix proud, he romped across the dirt arenas of the West, once even traveling to Hawaii.

Stillings found another picture. Astride a bronco named Hell To Set, he was wearing chaps inscribed with leather letters that spelled his first name.

In another 1920s photograph, staring out from under a huge hat and with a scarf swept around her neck, was Louise Hartwig, then Stillings’ girlfriend. At one rodeo, he saddled her bronco, left the chute without watching her ride and came back later to find that the horse had bucked her and trampled her.

On two other occasions, he saddled broncos for women who were killed by them. He said his saddling had nothing to do with the deaths, which he blamed simply on bad luck and tough horses.

Even his girlfriend’s death, Stillings said, didn’t slow his desire to ride. “That just puts a match to the kerosene . . . just makes you that much more determined to ride.”

Wedged into the scrapbook was a series of letters written through the years by friends who felt that he should be included in the Rodeo Hall of Fame. One was from Gene Autry, who cited Stillings’ work in rodeos Autry ran in the 1930s and early 1940s. The Autry letter, dated 10 years ago, said: “He was always a top cowboy and I respected him very much.”

Another letter, from Lloyd W. Taggart, a former employer of Stillings’ who was in the construction business in Wyoming, listed Stillings’ major achievements.

In 1926, he was bull riding champion in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The next year, he won the saddle bronco championship in Chicago. Two years later, he won the bronco championship at the celebrated Cheyenne Frontier Days. In 1932 and 1933, he won the bronco riding at Madison Square Garden; he made the finals in that event in eight other years. In 1933, he was bronco winner at the Pendleton Roundup in Oregon.

“The Chicago show was the turning point of my life,” Stillings said. “I was hard and in good shape, and I was staying sober.” By this time, he was earning good money and had a national reputation.

He was following in the path of a man he’d first met and admired at the Pendleton Roundup in 1922, Ray Bell. Today, Bell, a breeder of race horses, also lives in Arcadia.

Bell, who was named to the Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1986, said Stillings was a determined if not a flashy rider. “He’s a real 100% Westerner,” Bell said. “The kind you’d have met in the 1880s on a covered-wagon train.

“He does get hot awful quick. But he’s never said a cross word to me. He means what he says, and he don’t exaggerate. He just tells the truth.”

Stillings lived as hard as he rode. One year he won $1,000 at the Cheyenne Frontier Days. “You could buy a brand-new Chevrolet for $500,” he said. “That one year, I bought three in six months’ time.” The first one was totaled in a trip from Denver to Deadwood, S.D. A bronco-rider friend was driving when they crashed into horse-drawn wagons. Later, in Deadwood, he met up with a woman rider named Jiggs. She told him where they could find a keg of whiskey, and off they went in the second car, which he’d bought from money he won in Deadwood. By day’s end, they’d finished off the whiskey and the car. He won again in Soda Springs, Ida., enough to buy the third car.

Stillings interrupted his story to explain another photograph, which showed his spurs sticking straight into the side of the horse. “When I made up my mind to ride your horse, your horse was rode,” he said. “If you spurred the son of a bitch hard enough, he’d weaken.”

In his youth, Stillings said, he was very strong. Even today, his handshake lets you know that, for a man of any age, he has a vise-like grip. To illustrate, he crooked the middle finger of one hand and then the other. “I could chin myself with that finger right there, with a handkerchief wrapped around it.”

What of the horse being forced and spurred?

“Forget the horse,” he said. “You ride the horse ‘till it quits bucking.”

From the closet, Stillings brought out a pair of thick steel spurs wrapped in leather. “They’re cut to hold the stirrup.” He cradled them in his hands, shifting them back and forth, just looking at them in silence.

“Hell, I’ve had a horse buck me off with both my arms on the ground and both feet still in the stirrups,” he said. To explain, he retrieved what he called “boot-shoes,” custom-made for him. Rubbing his hands on the still-soft leather of the ankle-high boots, he explained that the odd cut of the shoes held them fast in the stirrups. And if a cowboy really wanted to make sure that his boot stayed put, Stillings said, he would melt bubble gum into the crevice where the heel met the stirrup.

Reaching under his bed, Stillings pushed aside the control switch for his electric blanket. He jerked out what looked like a thick roll of leather that snapped as he unfurled it. “I rode many a bucking horse with these.” They were his chaps. He studied them and then, discovering a dark spot on the leather, said: “There’s still blood on them. That’s old, dried blood.”

Stillings said he could tell more stories, of beautiful silver belt buckles won and then stolen, of championship money paid in gold that he lost when a Wyoming bank shut down during the Depression, of working as a cowboy extra in the movies, of roughnecking on oil rigs, of riding from rodeo to rodeo throughout the country, across Australia, Japan and England, and of the thousands who cheered him in Madison Square Garden.

He could tell these stories, he said, because he’d lived them. “There was a lot of rough trips in them journeys. It wasn’t all holidays.” He looked as if he might cry when he said this. He didn’t. He just paused in silence and put away the scrapbooks.

Now, he said, he just wanted to go to the track and watch the horses race.