Wrangler’s daughter chronicles cowboy’s life

Special to the Green Valley News

The hardest stories to tell are those about you or about someone who is so modest they don't think they have a worthwhile story to tell.

Like our disappearing WWII combat vets who refuse to characterize their contribution to freedom as anything other than duty, it's ironic and fascinating how some of our country's heroes are able to recognize their own accomplishments with pride, yet don't want anyone else to fuss over them because of it.

It's one of the reasons why Green Valley writer Beth Aycock teamed with Tucson's Jorga Riggenbach to chronicle the life of her father Red Howell, an authentic Old West cowboy and yet another disappearing hero on the American landscape.

Riggenbach interviewed Aycock, a former horse trader, rancher, wrangler, and rodeo organizer, when she was researching the old A7 Ranch in the 1990s where Aycock once worked for a book about the Tanque Verde Valley.

It's a good fit, since both women have lived much of what they write. Riggenbach was raised on a Colorado ranch, and no rugged range-roaming cowhand anywhere in the West can say he's ridden higher in the saddle than Elizabeth Aycock.

Still tall, lean, and lovely at 87, her soft Western drawl and graceful elegance belie the pioneer hardness honed through years on horseback, first on her father's ranch from the time she could sit on a saddle, as a wrangler with childhood sweetheart and husband Sam at Tubac's Kenyon Dude Ranch, on their own New Mexico ranch, and even as a polo-playing partner with her second husband.

Ate dust, slept under stars

Red taught her to work cattle drives alongside her brothers. It was a time when you ate dust all day and slept under the stars with lots of other hands and kept an eye out for rustlers.

“I had to be tough,” she recalls. “It didn't matter that I was a girl.”

Ranch houses and surrounding corrals remote and rustic, you grew and canned your own food, hung beef in the smokehouse, and water came from the creek, not a faucet, and though she could ride and shoot and rope like any man, her mother Nell, a schoolmarm from Tombstone Red had ridden from Carlsbad to Douglas to marry after helping her brother beat a rustling rap, made sure Beth knew how to wear a dress, too.

She encountered her first female playmates when she started school, eventually staying with an aunt in Tucson to go to U of A, though she had to quit and work as a ranch hand and riding teacher when her father lost everything in 1936.

Met Bill Veeck

She and new husband Sam took their wrangling skills into New Mexico ranching, business partners with legendary baseball owner and promoter Bill Veeck whom they had met when he brought the Cleveland Indians to Tucson for spring training.

After Sam's death, she married Bill Aycock, a retired GM engineer and one of the “dudes” she worked with who “thought he could be a cowboy,” she remembered, but “had to settle for marrying one.”

They settled into a horse ranch in Rio Rico where he taught her to play polo with a lot of celebrities and showed her Europe, Asia, and Africa.

“I got to see the other side of life,” she said.

He died in 2004, so she moved to Green Valley to continue her writing, which had already included a collaboration with Veeck on “Cast Iron Hero,” and “Round up a Whirlwind,” published in 2000, a fictional tale inspired by her father's ride alone across Texas at age 15 when he stared down the leader who threatened to shoot him if he left the group. 

“A Red Howell Fit,” scheduled to be out under Raging Brook Press this fall, is Aycock's third book about a way of life often immortalized in movies, serials, and dime novels, though Red was the real thing, not a Hollywood Hopalong.

“I've been rich and I've been poor, and I couldn't handle either one of them,” she quoted her father, a rancher and rodeo roper who rode a roller coaster life in the saddle from cradle to grave, raising Beth and his sons along with 3,000 head of cattle on his spread about a four-hour drive from Carlsbad, N.M. in one of his many beloved cars, then suddenly bankrupted in the Depression and back to ranch hand and roper to pick up a few bucks.

The title is based on the quick temper of this redheaded rounder who embraced hard work and a code of honor as he carved out his little cattle empire and became known as one of the top rodeo ropers in the country.

The Old West experience

“The book typifies the Old West experience,” Riggenbach said, describing it as sort of an expose' on the transition from the real old cowboys to the modern Western man, reflected in Red with his stereotypical patriarchal pride and toughness, leathery and hard drinking, but a family man who pushed his kids to read and study, his pockets full of candy for them when he returned from weeks away on the rodeo circuit or a livestock sale while Nell ran the ranch.

“Daddy always picked up books and newspapers,” Beth recalled, “but I never got a 'gal book' till I was older.”

“We knew the cattle brought good money when he came back smoking a big cigar, and we would all get candy, and if my little brother didn't get his first, he would pitch a Red Howell fit.”

Red still rode round-up's at age 90, though he could only see the white cattle by then, and refused a hospital after a heart attack while deep sea fishing in the Sea of Cortez, so he died the next day on his daughter's ranch.

Recently, Beth visited the Kenyon Ranch in Tubac where she taught the “dudes” how to ride for 30 bucks a month (the men made $60).

Famed psychotherapist Barbara Findeisen, a world-renowned expert in prenatal psychology restored it and founded a transformative retreat there called Pocket Sanctuary.

As she walked the grounds, pondering places where she and her beloved Sam more than 60 years ago might have helped an Easterner get into the saddle or kept a horse from spooking, she was perhaps looking back on a way of life that's pretty much gone forever.

Punching cows till sunset and learning to rope from one of those authentic American heroes we all wanted to be like when we watched Saturday morning serials; winding up the Victrola so they could dance on the ranch house porch when the kinfolk came from Texas for a barbeque; riding 15 miles across Deep Creek Ranch near Silver City to warn Sam about a planted maverick she'd branded; taking her son to the movies to watch his daddy as an extra in “Red River” with John Wayne; playing polo with celebrities; organizing rodeos in Sonoita; writing lyrics about your father and seeing them put to song; finding out you're related to Daniel Boone and an Alamo hero while your researching your book about him.

It's been a rich and enviable journey for a remarkable lady across this past century, from the days when “folks in these parts” did for themselves but still looked out for each other, to a high tech world where she can find her own book online.

Though she's proud of the fact that she can still ride, looks much younger, and can take care of herself just fine, like she always has, don't remind Elizabeth Aycock too often that it's been 87 years.

She just might pitch a Red Howell fit.

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.