Getting her just due: Family relishes memories of Hall of Fame barrel racer
The horse trailer Ardith Bruce won 58 years ago when she became a world champion barrel racer is still in the back yard of her home in Fountain. The belt buckle came later. Much later.
Hours after Bruce was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs on Saturday, her granddaughter, Amber West, was wearing the belt buckle celebrating Bruce’s world championship in the Girls Rodeo Association (now the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association) in 1964, the same year Bruce won the horse trailer.
“She never won this belt buckle, though,” West said. “They didn’t give belt buckles to the winners back then, so someone made this for her a while ago.”
Long wait or not, Bruce, 90, received her due posthumously. She died June 27 at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, only three weeks prior to the induction ceremony intertwined with the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo – an event Bruce dominated for almost a decade.
“She loved the sport. She was a student of the sport up until the day she died,” said West, who has served a term on the WPRA’s board of directors. “It was something she loved and it was her passion, and when you love something so much, it never goes away. She loved it until the day she left us, and she was very proud of what she did to be at the top of her game for so long at something she loved.”
Along with six Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo barrel racing titles (which made her the first barrel racer inducted into the rodeo’s hall of fame), she was also a seven-time participant in the National Finals Rodeo from 1963 to 1969. Bruce finished in the top 10 each year, West said, with a top 15 finish in the final season standings each year.
Her run came on a horse named Red, registered as Shaws Kingwood Snip, which she purchased as a 13-year-old gelding in 1960 for $1,600. Bruce’s daughter, Deb Thompson, said half of the money came from cash she saved up, while she borrowed the rest from a local bank. She won so often and so quickly with Red, Thompson said, that her bank loan was paid off within four months.
When Bruce won her world championship on Red in 1964, she not only took home the trailer, but raked in $6,510 – worth close to $62,000 in today’s money.
“Let me tell you something,” Thompson said. “She grew up in the Ozarks of Missouri during the Depression and was poor. I mean, everybody then was poor, but she was very poor. And she got to travel the United States and maybe even (competed in) rodeo in almost every state that had a rodeo.”
The Clay Center, Kan. native had a fan club that extended well beyond her family – the sign at the southern entrance of Fountain still reads “Home to Ardith Bruce.” Her biggest fan was likely her husband, Jim Bruce.
Jim Bruce was a World War II Navy veteran who was on the USS Oklahoma when it was sank in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and was part of the Battle of Iwo Jima in the final year of the Pacific theater. Thompson said he rarely spoke of his time in the service, but he’d go out of his way to brag about Ardith’s accomplishments.
Her husband was the main reason Ardith got into barrel racing. Not long after Jim and Ardith married in 1949 – a marriage that lasted until Jim’s death in January of 2008 – Jim showed Ardith how to run barrels with an older ranch horse. And she took to it right away. Ardith, with her $5 entry fee, won the first barrel race she ever ran at the Fourth of July rodeo in Muleshoe, Texas.
“She didn’t even know what a barrel race was until then,” Thompson said. “He just saw that she had a lot of natural talent.”
Eventually, it was enough to put her in a Hall of Fame class with the likes of Trevor Brazile, a 14-time PRCA all-around champion, and Bobby Mote, a four-time world champion bareback rider. And her overall drive kept her riding and doing the cloverleaf pattern into her early 80s.
Funeral services were held Friday at the horse arena at Metcalfe Park in Fountain, where Bruce’s ashes were carried around the arena in a cloverleaf pattern to give her a chance to ride one final time.
Deb Thompson, left, and Amber West stand in front of the Fountain home of Ardis Bruce, who on Saturday was posthumansly inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame as a barrel racer. Thompson, Bruce’s daughter, is holding Bruce’s Hall of Fame belt buckle, and West, Bruce’s granddaughter, is holding Bruce’s Hall of Fame trophy and wearing her 1964 world championship barrel racing belt buckle.
Ardith Bruce rests on her horse trailer after riding Monday, December 3, 2012, at the arena in Fountain’s Metcalf Park. Photo by Mark Reis, The Gazette
Ardith Bruce smiles after winning the 1964 Girls Rodeo Association barrel racing world championship. The horse trailer that was won by Bruce, who was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame on Saturday, is still in Bruce’s back yard.
