“Buddy Heaton lived his fantasy as a cowboy in goat skin chaps and a 10-gallon hat.”
Harold L. “Buddy” Heaton, a rodeo clown and horse trainer from Southwest Kansas, is the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Cowboy Entertainer Inductee for 2005.
Born in March of 1929, to Lloyd Heaton and Fayetta Maude Hazard Heaton Hagaman, Buddy developed his riding skills early in life. While most children were learning to ride their bicycles, Heaton was learning to ride horses, bulls and buffalo. By the age of twelve, Buddy had learned to jump horses over cars and had acquired a talent for performing as a rodeo clown and bull fighter. His early interests led him to a career on the rodeo circuit, including appearances at premiere rodeos in Cheyenne, Wyoming and Calgary, Canada. Buddy later recalled, “There was a rodeo man in Dodge City who hired me to clown and fight bulls whenever I could get out of school.”
Soon Buddy turned his focus on being the barrel man at the rodeos, stating, “I would get in a barrel and let the bull knock me aroundxI was wild.” During the 1950s and 1960s, Heaton would expand his rodeo clown act to include various animals and soon gained the reputation as an animal trainer. On May 13, 1952, Buddy and his step-father Fred Hagaman’s legendary Appaloosa “High Hand” was born, sired from the stallion Buddy used in his clown acts. Buddy soon trained High Hand for rodeo events and horse races, tricks such as: smiling, pretending to bite Heaton’s back side, sitting, laying down, counting and most famously the illusion that Heaton could lift High Hand off the ground by simply laying his hand on the horses back when in actuality High Hand could jump straight off the ground with all four feet. Heaton also taught his horse how to walk on its hind legs, which he continued to do even after retirement.
In 1957, Buddy won the bulldogging class at the Denver Stock Show on High Hand, who had never participated in a bulldogging event. High Hand was inducted into the Appaloosa Horse Club Hall of Fame in 1988.
Buddy continued training animals, gaining national attention by successfully training an American buffalo, named “Old Grunter” who went by the stage name “Clyde”. While in Salt Lake City, the two caused quite a stir when they rode an elevator at Tribune Newspaper’s Office Building. Life Magazine published photos of Heaton and “Old Grunter” competing in a three-way race between the buffalo, a mule and a horse held at Denver’s Centennial Turf Club,. On January 20, 1961, Buddy and his buffalo, who had recently appeared on the TV show “Wagon Train”, again made national attention when they participated in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Parade, where he shook both Kennedy’s and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s hands while in front of the reviewing stand.
Over the years, Buddy continued to travel the rodeo circuit and introduce his three sons x Ted, Tom and Buddie Lawrence [deceased] x to horses and livestock. Then he managed the livestock barn in Liberal for twenty-five years, before retiring in Hugoton, Kansas. His son Ted later surmised his father’s legacy as, “What’s amazing about Dad is all the things he has survivedxHis body is filled with pins from bull clowning and he has won several battles with cancerxHe’s been through a lot, and he’s a survivorxThere is only one Buddy Heaton in the world.”
