He lost the farm in 1929. Not depression, not drought. It was a combination of hail and grasshoppers that did him in. He left his wife and kids and rode the rails. He'd stop at ranches and break horses for them.
He joined a wild west show for a few years. They had an advance man come to town a few days before the show. He'd invite people to bring their unridable horses to the show. If Bobby couldn't stay on two minutes, they'd pay the horse's owner fifty dollars. No one ever brought in a horse Bobby couldn't ride.
When war broke out he got a good paying job at a ship yard. He didn't get drafted because he was thirty five and he had a kink in his left arm where he fell off a horse when he was six and broke his arm and no one set it.
He got his wife and kids to join him in Oakland, and his wife got a job in the same ship yard. Money to burn, but life was so dull.
He took to rodeoing whenever he could, and when his older boy Bobby Jr was fourteen the boy took to bullriding like a duck to water. A couple more years and Billy was bullriding too. Those were the good times. The three of them in the old pick-up truck driving through the night to dusty little towns on the circuit. They lived on whiskey and baloney sandwiches and Camel cigarettes and the women loved them. Especially Bobby Jr. No one ever met him didn't like him. He had a shine to him that made people smile. Billy was pretty cute too.
They took a lot of falls. Did their own doctoring most of the time, but when Bobby Jr was gored and trampled by a bull named Charity he got hauled off to the hospital in record time.
He lived a week which surprised the medical people.
``He's been dead a week, he just doesn't know it,'' a doctor said. Billy heard it.
There were women everywhere. They came by car and train and bus and airplane and they sat by his bed and they sang to him and made him smile til the moment he died. Then they wept in each others' arms and disappeared. Bobby senior went home and gave up rodeo.
Billy went on alone.
He never would say it but every one knew he wanted to draw the bull named Charity and ride him into the ground. Every one knew he couldn't do it.
So Billy followed Charity from rodeo to rodeo and if he never drew that bull it didn't seem strange to any one.
Rodeo people. They like you, they'll die for you. They don't like you they'll watch you die.
Then Billy found out Charity was dog food. He went on rodeoing anyway. Through wives and children and twelve step programs he went on rodeoing.
Then quite suddenly he lost his taste for the life. His sons had graduate degrees in literature and computer science. There was a different crew on the circuit. Time for him to go.