Ep. 95- Pendleton Round Up President Randy Bracher
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” ~ Randy Bracher, Pendleton Round Up President
Randy Bracher is the president of the legendary Pendleton Round Up who jokes that his forefathers got kicked out of Ohio due to moonshinin’ so they moved to Oregon and joined in with all things Pendleton Round Up.
A fifth generation rancher in the Pendleton area, Randy’s great, great grand-ancestors came from the Finland, Norway, and Germany area to Ohio through his father’s family. Exonerated from Ohio for their bootleg moonshine operation out of the back of their wagon part shop so they moved to Oregon. There in Pilot Rock, the farm and ranch came from the mother’s side of the family that settled 30 miles east of Pendleton after coming over on the Oregon Trail in 1876. At 3,000 foot elevation, it reminded them a lot of being at home but, after four to five feet of snow, they couldn’t do much in the winter to make a living besides raising horses, mules, and the first polled Herefords this side of the Rocky Mountains.
When they decided to find a place to winter their cattle, Randy’s great, great grandfather went to work for the railroad in Pendleton to help create off farm income. There he helped build the railroad from Pendleton to Pasco, Washington. As a result of the Homestead Act, he took payment in the form of land. Many of his friends couldn’t figure out how to make a living on the land they took, moving back to the midwest, and Randy’s great, great grandfather bought their land from them. To this day, they still raise cattle in the area and the original homestead is still at the top of the hill!
“There’s some pretty cool history up there! We live 18 miles away from there in a lower irrigated land,” says Randy. Farming and ranching is what they are still doing to this day!
Many of Randy’s friends are also in similarly historical pieces with multi generational farms. There’s not many first or even second generation farmers around Pendleton, especially in the dry-land wheat country and cattle ranches. As a part of being a generational ranch, it’s really important that you communicate with your family. Randy currently spends the time working with his brother as partners to run their farm and ranch.
“You can’t get out your forefathers, your dad or whoever your acquiring or want to acquire the farm or ranch from is going to be a huge access and my dad was pretty dang awesome to my brother and I,” says Randy, laughing about how his father would let them fail (within reason) and then they’d learn their own lesson.
Agriculture Resources for Running a Farm
“Farm Credit Services does a phenomenal job of farm succession planning with a couple classes a year. They really cater to especially young farmers and ranchers - all across the nation… You get to meet farmers and ranchers from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, northern Nevada - it encompasses a lot of country - so you get to meet a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds and they’re all having the same issues,” says Randy. Whether a tragedy that you can learn from but there is a lot in industry magazines and more, there is more and more articles in there about succession planning, making wills, planning for retirement - anything like that.
Pendleton Round Up
Generational Volunteering
“Being on the board, my grandfather was a volunteer for a few years but it was just something you did back in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s,” says Randy. In those days, they had to cattle drive the stock into the round up grounds and gather the wild horses east or south of town for the bucking stock. Randy’s dad, however, was on the Happy Canyon board and was the show director - which was also Randy’s start to his volunteerism as an actor in the Happy Canyon skit.
For the volunteers themselves, there is a lot of jobs between stripping chutes and ushering cows and a lot of those roles are generational. Being a Pendleton Round Up director is a job application.
What Community Means to Pendleton
In 1910, they put together a board together and the first mission was community support and to raise money to build the park that is now right next to the Round Up grounds. Community is what Pendleton Round Up is about and Pendleton, the community, is about the Pendleton Round Up.
From the attitude and the aura of the community, there are two time periods in the area: “Before Round Up” and “After Round Up.” That’s the writing on the wall - other places plan things around Christmas and we do around Pendleton Round Up.
In fact, all the schools are out for the week of Pendleton because they need the youth volunteers to help out and to be able to host 600,000 guests to camp around the areas. And the saying in 2021, after being shut down in 2020, was “Welcome home.” Pendleton missed it’s guests - not just economically, but the friendships and camaraderie. As president, Randy kept inviting people back home and that they couldn’t wait to have them back.
Happy Canyon
Randy’s dad was, as we mentioned earlier, the show director early on and was the conductor for the Happy Canyon pageant. In his tenure, he came on to help “change it up” as the show was starting to lose its luster. Randy’s dad brought in a contractor from Hollywood to redesign the show and it wasn’t liked enough that they kept doing it and took snippets of the changes he made and put it back into the old show.
“I can remember when dad was a part of the show - dad was the head guy of the ‘Hick Band,’” says Randy. “A lot of the cast is a lot of farmers, ranchers and school teachers.” There is a place for everyone at the Happy Canyon show!
Cowboy and Indian Gathering
The largest tipi encampment and the largest cowboy and Indian gathering, it’s a big honor for them to work together. An intermission show in the middle of each performance, Wild Indian Relay Races, a pow wow, pageantry, and more - it’s a great cultural event.
Becoming Round Up President
Originally asked to be on the board, Randy shared how there is a big difference between really great volunteers and great leaders. Randy shares how the freshness of new blood is a great way to keep your rodeo growing and improving.
After volunteering for twelve years as first sorting stock and then the “caller on the hill.” This position is the gentleman that tells the cowboys that are bringing the timed event cattle up from 50 feet under the grandstand who are entering the chute blind. Pendleton Round Up did all of their splits inside the arena and that was his next job to sit through every slack and performance to be the guy directing traffic throughout the rodeo. Splitting guys means mostly in the steer wrestling but it happens in every event, so that you weren’t running bulldogging steers or hazing horses back to back to back. It’s inefficient so they had to split three or four between them.
For the hundredth anniversary in 2010, they started to implement technology via the addition of internet into the arena so that they could talk back and forth to the secretaries for splits. That saving of time moved them to iPads and other forms of technology to make that communication cleaner and clearer.
In 2012, a couple of directors on the board at the time, Tim Hawkins and Dave O’Neil, asked Randy if he wanted to be on the board. Not knowing what it took, he thought it was a bunch of fun guys putting on a hell of a rodeo. It’s not like that - it’s a business. You have to put in an application, get a letter of recommendation from a current sitting board of directors, and then do an interview process in front of the entire board. It covers everything from what you’ve done for the rodeo and community and more.
With seventeen directors and a president, you get a pool from anywhere from five to fifteen applicants a year that are in the pool but maybe only one or two will get picked. New directors are brought on every year but the directors are 2 four year terms. After four years, you can run for president but it doesn’t often happen.
“It’s indescribable to explain what it’s like on that board,” says Randy. Many of the 1,100 volunteers at Round Up, you can have twenty plus veteran volunteers that you have never met. The board of directors is unique in that it can have a diverse occupation line up from doctors to lawyers to ranchers to farmers.
Randy got the bug of horseback riding early because of his grandfather and with a father that excelled in farming, Randy “got the best of both worlds.” He got to be a sustainable farmer and a good horsemen and rancher. A next door neighbor (10 miles away) raised bucking horses for a stock contractor so Randy got started in helping him with his stock. As a freshman in college, he would fill his suburban with bareback riggings and bronc saddles and take a bunch of guys over to Andy’s to buck horses.
“I lived with, at one time, a pretty stellar bronc rider named Marty Campbell,” says Randy who, as a result, started to become a knowledgable fan of bucking horses and their genetics. Pendleton, in 2012, had the primary stock contractor of Sankey Rodeo. The primary is the contractor to get the subcontractors of other horses from other stock contractors.
Pendleton takes 265 plus head of rough stock in order to make the event happen. Instead of bringing 85 horses, they’d only bring 66 so horses would have to buck twice. That resulted in a Friday pen that wasn’t stellar which meant turn outs and poor rides. As the second best day of ticket sales, it meant the spectators weren’t getting the bang for their buck.
In 2014, Pendleton Round Up became it’s own primary stock contractor and started doing all the hiring. They already had the timed events and so Randy was tasked with it as the livestock director. Joining up with the arena director and Dave, the former livestock director, they’d go through all the horses and bulls in pro rodeo and start booking.
“We wouldn’t buck anything twice and let the event representatives pick the stock and it made a stellar round up!” Says Randy. “If you came on Wednesday for the rodeo…. you would get a just as great night as that.”
In 2014, the neighboring Hermiston FarmPro Rodeo won the award for the most consistent stock in the PRCA and Randy decided to make that award their goal. And they did it - in 2015!
Finding those stock contractors with similar mindset of community spirit and team spirit. The goal was to bring them all together at pick-up men camp at Round Up and get together as a team. They are all a part fo the team, the family and the community. Constructive criticism for Round Up, they want to hear. It was one time of year that they have all gotten along and in the end, pro rodeo has become better.