From the heart of the American West, Our American Stories brings you a tale of courage from the rodeo arena, where the unsung heroes known as rodeo clowns literally save lives. These aren’t just entertainers; they are the guardians of the bucking chute, quick-thinking bullfighters who put their bodies on the line to protect riders from massive, charging bulls. Today, we hear from a legend of the dirt, Leon Coffee, whose journey into this dangerous profession is as authentic as the dusty trails of his Texas home.
Leon Coffee’s path to becoming a legendary rodeo clown began with a simple desire: to buy his daughter a tricycle. What started as a way to make a few dollars quickly became an adrenaline-fueled calling, putting him face-to-face with fear and a deep-seated drive to master the arena. He learned in the toughest possible way, in the ‘school of hard knocks,’ proving that in the world of bullfighting, ability and an unyielding spirit are all that truly matter. Prepare to be inspired by the grit and heart of a true American cowboy.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Being a rodeo clown is hard work and important work. Besides being expected to entertain massive crowds, bull riders literally put their lives in the painted hands of those involved
in this unique profession.
You to share his story on becoming a rodeo clown is Leon Coffee. We’d like to thank the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for providing us with this audio. Let’s get into the story.
My dad told me, when I was born, we had horses. I don’t think I’ve had been a day in my life that I’d ben’t known at least one. Oh, man. I was born in Blanco, Texas, in 1954, in the courthouse because, uh, in Blanco, Texas, the courthouse was in front, and the hospital was in back. And we got a website called Courthouse Babies. It’s quite a conversation piece. Great-granddad, my granddad, and my dad broke mules for the Highway Department when they made roads. Mule teams and peris Nos. Granddad, when he died, was 72 years old and had 40 head of horses. My dad had to go get all them horses after he died. And those two were the people that trained me and formed my life. And, uh, long before I could walk, they, they put you on him horses and on ’em baby coats and let the little babies ride around on ’em, just kind of get ’em gentle and aurey accustomed to people. And, but I was the littlest of the herd. My, oh my, my canfolk. My granddad would gather all the boys up every s-every summer and we all stayed around up fern rode horses. And I was the littlest of the herd, so I got to ride Grunder’s coats. So I learned to ride bucket horses at a very young age ’cause I was the smallest. But I rode a lot of good bucket horses. And I started out riding by the rock horses, and then I went to bulls. And back then there was 300 guys that would enter a rodeo. Duh. You know, a little rodeo, there’d be 50, 60 guys there and they only paid four or five. And, uh, if there was paying four moneys, I was most generally fifth. Every now and then they’d let me win, like the last hole or something like that. I rode good enough to just start myself to death. It was a lot of fun. But when you get married and start having kids, you can’t do that. I had to try to feed the family. And, uh, this whole journey of fighting bulls, being a rodeo clown, came from one day when my daughter said she wanted a tricycle and I didn’t have the money to buy it. So I just got off of him and got in front of a man. Told me one time, all act to his run fast night goodie. I said, “You gonna pay me for that?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Man, now I used to get kicked out of school for that! Now you gonna pay me?” “Yeah, I can do this.” So I went to work for Steiner’s because she wanted a tricycle, and I was determined that I was gonna make enough money to do that. M. So I did it. But I didn’t. I thought I’d do this for a couple of years and go ahead and try to make a living somewhere and get a good occupation and try to feed my family. But I got addicted to that adrenaline rush that you have when you step out in front of 1,800 pounds a massive beasts with baseball bats. I gotta eat side of his hair, and the pair of God and his eye wanted to annihilate you off the pace of this Earth, and you gotta wait to make the right move. That’s an adrenaline rush. That’s match. But nobody, nothing. We, we learned from the school of heart knock. But, uh, I would drive two or three hundred miles to watch people work, ’cause it weren’t those schools that I could go to to learn how. ‘Cause if you got hit going one way, you get up and go back the other way. And if you’re tough enough, you gonna make it. If you’re not, you gonna go to house. I’ll never forget a bull that cost seventeen done. He was a yellow, ball-faced, mealy bull that I kN to this day. I’ve never gotten around. He frightened me. I got five gears: first, second, third, fourth, and fear gear. And when one get puts me in fear gear, God couldn’t catch me. This Bill put me in fear gear a lot. I just could not get around him. I’ll never forget that Bill. I hated him, but he was probably the one bull that broke an egg in me and said, “I’m gonna do it.” I—I’m gonna face that fear and got me over the hump. But I never got around it. But he hooked me a lot. But I just wouldn’t quit. But you have to understand something in rodeo. It ain’t about to color your skin. It’say about your ability. If you don’t have the ability to do it, you not gonna be there very long. And that was another driving force I had to—I had to prove to everybody that I could do it, m, besides the fact that I had to do it, m, to make a living. When you out there riding bulls and you get bucked off and you a bully’s about to run over you, you don’t say, “Send in the white guy, not the black guy.” You sit, “Send in the clowns.” There’s been places in times that were trying, but being raised in Blanco, Texas, act back off in the woods right there. I never knew what prejudice really was, and never—I mean, it just—we all eat, sleep, and break bread together. And my granddad was a Baptist minister, and I was raised in the Bible, so I had—I had no fear of what a man could do to me as long as you doing your job. You know. I—there was things that was going on back then that I—I was, uh, privy to. But never let it set me back. I just kept going. You can slum me down, if you are never gonna stop me.
And you’ve been listening to the legendary, b-black rodeo clown Leon Coffee, telling the story about his life. His early life… Well, let’s face it, how many people are born in a courthouse? And as he put it, just—well, he got into this line of work because he wanted to get his daughter a tricycle, and he was told all he needed to do was run fast and act goofy, and suddenly, he was addicted to the adrenaline rush. When we come back, more of Leon Coffee’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday, coming soon.
If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the ‘Donate’ button. Any amount helps. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we returned to Our American Stories and rodeo clown Leon Coffee’s story. When we last left off, Leon was telling us about why he got off of bowls and put himself in front of him so he could buy a tricycle for his little girl. Let’s return to the rest of the story. Here again is Leon Coffee.
There’s two aspects to what rodeo clowning and book biting is. They’ve got to have a certain personality, but then they’ve got to have the ile the tiger and control of both. That’s a very difficult task. I didn’t have it to begin. I’ve learned it over the years. But to see somebody in a wreck and run to get in it, that’s ludicrousy, but it’s what we do. The only people that really know what we do and how we do it, as bullfighters, are cops, firemen, and soldiers, mm-m, ’cause they all go into the fire, not away from it. And when you can do that with expertise, it’s great. The Crown Prince of Rodeo was Quail Dobbs. To me, Quail was a little short guy that he fought. Bill was really good. It got a lot of great rodeos. But Quail was funny. And he told me many years ago, he sais, “In no fundy, no money?” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, bullfighters are diamond. Does you terrap and knee, and you ain’t funny?” “Yeah, you go into die.” So I had to put comedy in my book fighting, and I, w-I heard a lot of my inability to do things with comedy. I couldn’t get around a certain bill, but if I could not ham it up to make the people laugh, and that’s what I got to seeing. Wow, that’s great. Everybody’s sitting up in any stands up, paying your bills. Another guy I—I learned a lot from is—is, uh, Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. I—I will say I could never keep up with Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. He was phenomenal. Tell you a story about Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. There was a school of comedy called the Red Skelton School of Comedy. And you don’t go to it, they come get you and take you to it, the Lost Bagus, and they keep you there for thr two years and they teach you how to be funny. And they took him out there and he had to train for two years to move every day, had family, everybody. Yeah, I had to live there for two years and learn how to be funny. And he learned it, and he—he was awesome. He had really good stuff, and he knew how to do things, how to make people laugh, how to make people feel good about laughing at you. And he said, “Don’t make ’em laugh at you; make ’em laugh with you.” He said, “With you.” Hmm, that’s a different look. He said, “The only person that really needs to be entertained is you.” I said, “How is that?” He said, “Eh, your clown. If you tickle, everybody else ought to be in stitches.” He said, “So try to entertain yourself.” And that’s what I’ve done. He also told me, he said, “Look, if you tell a joke, it’s all yours. If it bombs, it’s all you.” And it’s all about the delivery of that joke. It’s how you delivery, it’s when you delivery. It’s the timing. You’ve got to have the right timing to tell the right stuff to make it work. That was extremely difficult to do, but I—I went out and tried to find, uh. I studied it, uh, Red Skelton tapes, and Bill Cosby, and all the great comedians. Bill Cosby, only because he would—it was great with facial expressions. Red Skelton because he was the king of comedy. Comedy is not jokes. Comedians tell jokes. Comedy, when you work in comedy, it’s physical. And, uh, I am the last of the Mohicans that was a book writer and comedy. Nowadays, that’s just not. You don’t mix ’em, too. But it’s evolved over the years to where these guys nowadays, I couldn’t hold a candleton because they study it and they work at it, and they—they finessed everything from the word going. These, these guys nowadays are unbelievable athletes. When rodeo first got started, it was the guy that got hurt riding bulls would get out there and get the bull’s attention to get the bull away from the cowboy, you know. Just kind of, he—’cause he couldn’t ride no more, or at that time, and he’d get ’em away from him. That sir a heid all got started, and then, uh, we would, uh, had to go tell jokes or entertain the crowd and stuff. And when you go as a bullparty, you got a lot of lives on the line with the best bulls in the world. And you cannot be out of position to take that bill away from the cowboy, mm, which means if you’re out there too far and that bill sees you and he quits bucking t wants to chase you, you just crossed that cowboy around. You have to be in the right place at the right time and be there when you need to be there. That’s a very difficult task. But the guys that go there, they’re voted in there by the, by the bull riders, and when you get to that point, they’re telling you that you’re the best in the business at that time. I believe in God. I will never say I saved a guy’s life, because that’s God’s chopping. But I will say I save a lot of guys from a lot of bodily injury. I’ve had 14 knee surgeries, knee replacement. I’ve had 140 different breaks, some of ’em two or three times. Uh, Justin Heeler had a breed out on me one time. It was four pages long about the injuries that I’ve had over the years, and I’ve been beat up. But like I said, I never had any formal training of how to do it. So every time I had an injury, it was basically because I’m made a mistake. M. If you do everything exactly right, the bull can’t catch you because that bull cannot hook his own hump. So that’s the safest place in the world to be—a little difficult to get there, to say the least. But once you get there, you’re in char. You’re in charge. Cowboys go down and about to get hooked or something, you go in there and take that hooking for ’em. That’s your job. You go in there with every speck of you trying to get your job done. Whatever happens happens, and you live with it, but you try to minimize the injury to yourself and the bull ride it because you have got to face the next one. On a book I was told me many years ago, he said that if you get hurt on the first one, you ain’t gonna be there for the last one. The Good Lack gave me any ability to do what I do, mm, and I’ve always said, when he takes that ability where, that’s when I’m quit. He’s taking, m, he’s taking my book fighting ability away ’cause I was not banging enough to stay out there and keep backing bullets when I didn’t knew I didn’t have a step to do it. I’m still working some rodeos. I don’t work a lot of ’em. I still work some ’em right now. I’m still working the Houston Livestock shilling rodeo right now, but I’m not in the capacity that they used to be. Like a man told me one day, he said, “You worked a lot, a long time for that name, and I let that name work for you.” So I’m—I’m doing that, and I’m enjoying what the Good Lord gave me: the ability to do foot bude and sis, and put smiles on faces. I’m-a tell you what my motto of life was. God put me on Earth to do two things: that’s made people happy and help people out. And I can do ’em both right out there in that arena, and when he takes that ability away, it’s when I’m quit. He’s taking some of it, but not all of it. This is a place I never in my life thought I’d be. When I was trying to get my daughter that tricycle, I never thought I’d be sitting right here. I never thought that tricycle what put me in here.
And a special thanks to Leon Coffee. To see someone in a wreck—that’s a cowboy—and run into it towards that ball is, as he put it, ludicrousy. “Only cops, firemen, and soldiers understand what I’m talking about, but they don’t have to be funny, too. And funny is money in the world of rodeo clowns.” The story of Leon Coffee here on Our American Stories.
in this unique profession.
You to share his story on becoming a rodeo clown is Leon Coffee. We’d like to thank the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for providing us with this audio. Let’s get into the story.
My dad told me, when I was born, we had horses. I don’t think I’ve had been a day in my life that I’d ben’t known at least one. Oh, man. I was born in Blanco, Texas, in 1954, in the courthouse because, uh, in Blanco, Texas, the courthouse was in front, and the hospital was in back. And we got a website called Courthouse Babies. It’s quite a conversation piece. Great-granddad, my granddad, and my dad broke mules for the Highway Department when they made roads. Mule teams and peris Nos. Granddad, when he died, was 72 years old and had 40 head of horses. My dad had to go get all them horses after he died. And those two were the people that trained me and formed my life. And, uh, long before I could walk, they, they put you on him horses and on ’em baby coats and let the little babies ride around on ’em, just kind of get ’em gentle and aurey accustomed to people. And, but I was the littlest of the herd. My, oh my, my canfolk. My granddad would gather all the boys up every s-every summer and we all stayed around up fern rode horses. And I was the littlest of the herd, so I got to ride Grunder’s coats. So I learned to ride bucket horses at a very young age ’cause I was the smallest. But I rode a lot of good bucket horses. And I started out riding by the rock horses, and then I went to bulls. And back then there was 300 guys that would enter a rodeo. Duh. You know, a little rodeo, there’d be 50, 60 guys there and they only paid four or five. And, uh, if there was paying four moneys, I was most generally fifth. Every now and then they’d let me win, like the last hole or something like that. I rode good enough to just start myself to death. It was a lot of fun. But when you get married and start having kids, you can’t do that. I had to try to feed the family. And, uh, this whole journey of fighting bulls, being a rodeo clown, came from one day when my daughter said she wanted a tricycle and I didn’t have the money to buy it. So I just got off of him and got in front of a man. Told me one time, all act to his run fast night goodie. I said, “You gonna pay me for that?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Man, now I used to get kicked out of school for that! Now you gonna pay me?” “Yeah, I can do this.” So I went to work for Steiner’s because she wanted a tricycle, and I was determined that I was gonna make enough money to do that. M. So I did it. But I didn’t. I thought I’d do this for a couple of years and go ahead and try to make a living somewhere and get a good occupation and try to feed my family. But I got addicted to that adrenaline rush that you have when you step out in front of 1,800 pounds a massive beasts with baseball bats. I gotta eat side of his hair, and the pair of God and his eye wanted to annihilate you off the pace of this Earth, and you gotta wait to make the right move. That’s an adrenaline rush. That’s match. But nobody, nothing. We, we learned from the school of heart knock. But, uh, I would drive two or three hundred miles to watch people work, ’cause it weren’t those schools that I could go to to learn how. ‘Cause if you got hit going one way, you get up and go back the other way. And if you’re tough enough, you gonna make it. If you’re not, you gonna go to house. I’ll never forget a bull that cost seventeen done. He was a yellow, ball-faced, mealy bull that I kN to this day. I’ve never gotten around. He frightened me. I got five gears: first, second, third, fourth, and fear gear. And when one get puts me in fear gear, God couldn’t catch me. This Bill put me in fear gear a lot. I just could not get around him. I’ll never forget that Bill. I hated him, but he was probably the one bull that broke an egg in me and said, “I’m gonna do it.” I—I’m gonna face that fear and got me over the hump. But I never got around it. But he hooked me a lot. But I just wouldn’t quit. But you have to understand something in rodeo. It ain’t about to color your skin. It’say about your ability. If you don’t have the ability to do it, you not gonna be there very long. And that was another driving force I had to—I had to prove to everybody that I could do it, m, besides the fact that I had to do it, m, to make a living. When you out there riding bulls and you get bucked off and you a bully’s about to run over you, you don’t say, “Send in the white guy, not the black guy.” You sit, “Send in the clowns.” There’s been places in times that were trying, but being raised in Blanco, Texas, act back off in the woods right there. I never knew what prejudice really was, and never—I mean, it just—we all eat, sleep, and break bread together. And my granddad was a Baptist minister, and I was raised in the Bible, so I had—I had no fear of what a man could do to me as long as you doing your job. You know. I—there was things that was going on back then that I—I was, uh, privy to. But never let it set me back. I just kept going. You can slum me down, if you are never gonna stop me.
And you’ve been listening to the legendary, b-black rodeo clown Leon Coffee, telling the story about his life. His early life… Well, let’s face it, how many people are born in a courthouse? And as he put it, just—well, he got into this line of work because he wanted to get his daughter a tricycle, and he was told all he needed to do was run fast and act goofy, and suddenly, he was addicted to the adrenaline rush. When we come back, more of Leon Coffee’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday, coming soon.
If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the ‘Donate’ button. Any amount helps. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we returned to Our American Stories and rodeo clown Leon Coffee’s story. When we last left off, Leon was telling us about why he got off of bowls and put himself in front of him so he could buy a tricycle for his little girl. Let’s return to the rest of the story. Here again is Leon Coffee.
There’s two aspects to what rodeo clowning and book biting is. They’ve got to have a certain personality, but then they’ve got to have the ile the tiger and control of both. That’s a very difficult task. I didn’t have it to begin. I’ve learned it over the years. But to see somebody in a wreck and run to get in it, that’s ludicrousy, but it’s what we do. The only people that really know what we do and how we do it, as bullfighters, are cops, firemen, and soldiers, mm-m, ’cause they all go into the fire, not away from it. And when you can do that with expertise, it’s great. The Crown Prince of Rodeo was Quail Dobbs. To me, Quail was a little short guy that he fought. Bill was really good. It got a lot of great rodeos. But Quail was funny. And he told me many years ago, he sais, “In no fundy, no money?” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, bullfighters are diamond. Does you terrap and knee, and you ain’t funny?” “Yeah, you go into die.” So I had to put comedy in my book fighting, and I, w-I heard a lot of my inability to do things with comedy. I couldn’t get around a certain bill, but if I could not ham it up to make the people laugh, and that’s what I got to seeing. Wow, that’s great. Everybody’s sitting up in any stands up, paying your bills. Another guy I—I learned a lot from is—is, uh, Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. I—I will say I could never keep up with Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. He was phenomenal. Tell you a story about Bobby ‘Toad’ Cook. There was a school of comedy called the Red Skelton School of Comedy. And you don’t go to it, they come get you and take you to it, the Lost Bagus, and they keep you there for thr two years and they teach you how to be funny. And they took him out there and he had to train for two years to move every day, had family, everybody. Yeah, I had to live there for two years and learn how to be funny. And he learned it, and he—he was awesome. He had really good stuff, and he knew how to do things, how to make people laugh, how to make people feel good about laughing at you. And he said, “Don’t make ’em laugh at you; make ’em laugh with you.” He said, “With you.” Hmm, that’s a different look. He said, “The only person that really needs to be entertained is you.” I said, “How is that?” He said, “Eh, your clown. If you tickle, everybody else ought to be in stitches.” He said, “So try to entertain yourself.” And that’s what I’ve done. He also told me, he said, “Look, if you tell a joke, it’s all yours. If it bombs, it’s all you.” And it’s all about the delivery of that joke. It’s how you delivery, it’s when you delivery. It’s the timing. You’ve got to have the right timing to tell the right stuff to make it work. That was extremely difficult to do, but I—I went out and tried to find, uh. I studied it, uh, Red Skelton tapes, and Bill Cosby, and all the great comedians. Bill Cosby, only because he would—it was great with facial expressions. Red Skelton because he was the king of comedy. Comedy is not jokes. Comedians tell jokes. Comedy, when you work in comedy, it’s physical. And, uh, I am the last of the Mohicans that was a book writer and comedy. Nowadays, that’s just not. You don’t mix ’em, too. But it’s evolved over the years to where these guys nowadays, I couldn’t hold a candleton because they study it and they work at it, and they—they finessed everything from the word going. These, these guys nowadays are unbelievable athletes. When rodeo first got started, it was the guy that got hurt riding bulls would get out there and get the bull’s attention to get the bull away from the cowboy, you know. Just kind of, he—’cause he couldn’t ride no more, or at that time, and he’d get ’em away from him. That sir a heid all got started, and then, uh, we would, uh, had to go tell jokes or entertain the crowd and stuff. And when you go as a bullparty, you got a lot of lives on the line with the best bulls in the world. And you cannot be out of position to take that bill away from the cowboy, mm, which means if you’re out there too far and that bill sees you and he quits bucking t wants to chase you, you just crossed that cowboy around. You have to be in the right place at the right time and be there when you need to be there. That’s a very difficult task. But the guys that go there, they’re voted in there by the, by the bull riders, and when you get to that point, they’re telling you that you’re the best in the business at that time. I believe in God. I will never say I saved a guy’s life, because that’s God’s chopping. But I will say I save a lot of guys from a lot of bodily injury. I’ve had 14 knee surgeries, knee replacement. I’ve had 140 different breaks, some of ’em two or three times. Uh, Justin Heeler had a breed out on me one time. It was four pages long about the injuries that I’ve had over the years, and I’ve been beat up. But like I said, I never had any formal training of how to do it. So every time I had an injury, it was basically because I’m made a mistake. M. If you do everything exactly right, the bull can’t catch you because that bull cannot hook his own hump. So that’s the safest place in the world to be—a little difficult to get there, to say the least. But once you get there, you’re in char. You’re in charge. Cowboys go down and about to get hooked or something, you go in there and take that hooking for ’em. That’s your job. You go in there with every speck of you trying to get your job done. Whatever happens happens, and you live with it, but you try to minimize the injury to yourself and the bull ride it because you have got to face the next one. On a book I was told me many years ago, he said that if you get hurt on the first one, you ain’t gonna be there for the last one. The Good Lack gave me any ability to do what I do, mm, and I’ve always said, when he takes that ability where, that’s when I’m quit. He’s taking, m, he’s taking my book fighting ability away ’cause I was not banging enough to stay out there and keep backing bullets when I didn’t knew I didn’t have a step to do it. I’m still working some rodeos. I don’t work a lot of ’em. I still work some ’em right now. I’m still working the Houston Livestock shilling rodeo right now, but I’m not in the capacity that they used to be. Like a man told me one day, he said, “You worked a lot, a long time for that name, and I let that name work for you.” So I’m—I’m doing that, and I’m enjoying what the Good Lord gave me: the ability to do foot bude and sis, and put smiles on faces. I’m-a tell you what my motto of life was. God put me on Earth to do two things: that’s made people happy and help people out. And I can do ’em both right out there in that arena, and when he takes that ability away, it’s when I’m quit. He’s taking some of it, but not all of it. This is a place I never in my life thought I’d be. When I was trying to get my daughter that tricycle, I never thought I’d be sitting right here. I never thought that tricycle what put me in here.
And a special thanks to Leon Coffee. To see someone in a wreck—that’s a cowboy—and run into it towards that ball is, as he put it, ludicrousy. “Only cops, firemen, and soldiers understand what I’m talking about, but they don’t have to be funny, too. And funny is money in the world of rodeo clowns.” The story of Leon Coffee here on Our American Stories.
Discover more real American voices.
