Buck Would Have Approved How Sharon Runs the Show

A towering statue of a robust woodsman once greeted visitors to the Los Angeles Sportsmen’s Show in its early days at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium.

It was supposed to be the mythical Paul Bunyan, but it could have been H. Werner Buck, who was somewhat shorter at 6-feet-4 but bigger than life just the same. Like Bunyan, Buck was a giant in his realm.

Harry Werner Buck did not create the great outdoors, but he showed millions of people how to find it. He may not have invented the show business, but he did the lasting blueprints.

That’s the show business, not show business, although sometimes when Buck’s imagination got rolling it was hard to tell the difference.

In 1946, when the world was adjusting to peace, it was the vision of Buck and partner Mel Morrison to offer some diversion. So they brought camping and fishing and hunting to city dwellers and, if that didn’t grab them, maybe log rolling, camel races, movie stars or a golf demonstration by Babe Didriksen Zaharias would.

Morrison died in 1958, leaving Buck to run the company alone. Buck, only 59 at the time, was checking out a fishing tackle show in Kansas City in 1977 when he died suddenly. Some feared that a wonderful era had ended.

Not so. The Pan-Pacific is gone, destroyed by fire last May, but Buck’s show is still going strong, perhaps to the surprise of some--particularly its succeeding producer, Sharon Buck.

“I hadn’t given any thought to running it myself,” she said. “It was his baby. I was a housewife raising three children. I didn’t know anything about the business.”

In their 25 years of marriage, she never spent a day in the office, but Saturday it will be show time for Sharon once again. The show will celebrate its 25th anniversary as the Anaheim Sports, Vacation and RV Show when it opens at the Anaheim Convention Center.

In fact, it’s the 45th year of Buck’s baby that started at Gilmore Field in Hollywood in ’46 and was progressively moved to the nearby Pan-Pacific in ‘48, then to Anaheim in ’66. They also ran a second show at the L.A. Convention Center from ’71 through ’79.

Sharon Buck, 47 when her husband died, really didn’t want to do this.

“I was interested in art,” she said. “I was an art student before I was married. About the time the last child left home I would have gone back to art school.”

Perhaps overachievement runs in the family. Son Craig is a two-time Olympic volleyball gold medalist. Youngest daughter Stacy played at UCLA. Eldest daughter Leslie also played and is the only one who really qualifies as an outdoors person. Married, with children, she works for the Department of Forestry in the state of Washington.

Sharon Buck owns a pop-up tent, some fishing rods and a couple of canoes, but they see little use. Odd, isn’t it, that the family that introduced so many to the outdoors spends most of its time indoors?

“I’m more of a spectator,” Sharon said. “It took all of my time watching my three children play volleyball--Craig, especially, every single volleyball game in the Los Angeles area.”

Occasionally, Buck would take his family on an outing to his home state of Montana.

“I remember fishing on Flathead Lake,” Sharon said. “I never did fish, but we went out in somebody’s boat, somebody put the worm on the hook and I did drag something in. I was so thrilled, but they said, ‘Well, you drowned it.’ I never did understand what I did wrong.”

As producer of the shows, she has done little wrong. Despite her previous lack of business and show management experience, the Anaheim show is the largest in the West and may be the largest in the world when it expands into a third new exhibition hall next year.

She gives primary credit to two people: Milt Honek, who was Werner Buck’s longtime salesman, and Steve Fletcher, her business manager.

“Milt had been with the company clear back to Pan-Pacific and maybe Gilmore,” Sharon said. “He said, ‘You can do it.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’

“So I came in a couple of days a week and just saw how things went. A lot of stuff rubs off over the years. You go to different shows and conventions. I guess you know more than you think.”

When Honek retired two years later, Sharon and Fletcher carried on.

Until Buck died, Fletcher had had no business or show experience, either. He was a lawyer.

“I came in the day Mr. Buck died,” he said. “I practiced law with Mr. Buck’s attorney, and he asked me to go along with him over to the offices to see what could be done. I’ve been with Sharon and the family and the company ever since.”

There was skepticism at first.

“The industry being made up of a small number of show producers and people in the convention center business around the country, that network had some dubious thoughts about the continued existence of H. Werner Buck Enterprises and the shows,” Fletcher said.

“One of the first things Sharon was asked to do was to meet with officials of the city of Anaheim to verify that she was going to continue with the shows in the Werner Buck tradition. I think initially she was looking at operating the company for two or three years. Thirteen years and 30 shows later--including the (Anaheim) boat shows--she’s still here. This is probably as much a surprise to her as anyone else.”

Her success hasn’t been a matter of simply following her husband’s formula. Changing times have demanded changes in the operation.

“Things have come about in the last 10 to 15 years that Werner Buck never anticipated,” Fletcher said. “The show business nowadays is four times as complex. There is more involvement by government agencies, more regulations, greater demand for the convention center dates, much more competition for the entertainment dollar.”

Also, Fletcher said, Sharon developed her own management style.

“She doesn’t go about it the way her husband did,” he said. “She has changed the company to reflect more of her personality. It’s become less of a dollars-and-cents business pursuit and more of an attempt by Sharon to be fair to the exhibitors and, most of all, to provide the public with this unique type of outdoor show recreation entertainment. She likes the shows to be family oriented . . . neat and clean and a place you’re happy to bring your family to.”

One more thing, Fletcher said, is that “Sharon attempts to hire people who will do the best jobs in certain capacities and then lets them do their jobs.”

Sharon Buck said: “That’s the only way I could do this. My husband didn’t delegate authority. He liked to do everything and (believed that) if you want it done right, you do it yourself. He liked to do it. When someone starts something and it’s theirs, they want everything done right.”

And if H. Werner Buck walked into the Anaheim Convention Center Saturday, what would he think?

“Probably, he’d be in awe of the luxury of things now and the number of travel exhibits and how far they come to be in the show,” Sharon said.

Buck coined the term “recreational vehicle”--RV--when he presented some primitive models in early shows, which he advertised with duck calls on radio.

Chief Needahbah, an Indian whose ancestry may have been Central Casting, was master of ceremonies for the acts, which Buck would still find familiar now. He had log rollers, lumberjacks, Twiggy, the water skiing squirrel; Killer Willard, the boxing kangaroo, and Prof. Sneed’s “Croaker College,” which featured performing frogs dressed up like Dolly Parton.

Now he would see log rollers, lumberjacks, Argentinian jugglers, Arthur, the log rolling dog, and more RVs than he could imagine.

Some things haven’t changed at all. The Eastern Sierra Packers were at the Pan-Pacific, promoting their back country trips, and Buck could still get a sample from Johnny Marzolino, the Mackinac Island Fudge man.

“I think my husband would be pleased that we’ve maintained the quality.” Sharon Buck said.