Making History Fun

By Ruth Nicolaus

Red Bluff resident is one of the volunteers updating the Round-Up museum

Red Bluff, Calif. – The past comes to life at the Red Bluff Round-Up museum, and Kara Lockie is helping to breath fresh air into it.

The Red Bluff resident is volunteering her time to update the museum.

The museum, home to the nearly 100 years of history of the Round-Up, contains a variety of items and pictures, all relating to the Round-Up.

And Lockie is re-organizing and labeling items and working on new exhibits.

She’s attended the Round-Up since she was a child, but never been big into the rodeo side of it. So she comes in with new eyes, looking at exhibits and realizing they need refreshing.

“There are things in the museum that aren’t labeled or identified,” she said. “If you aren’t an insider (to rodeo) you don’t know what the things are or why they are important, whose they are and why they are here.”

One of her bigger projects this year is creating a “retractable display” – a banner-like display that is seven feet tall and three feet wide. The information she designed on it shows the nearly 100 year history of the Round-Up, which was a challenge to create, she said. “You can’t put everything (that happened in 100 years) on it, but you can put a synopsis.”

Next year, she hopes to do a retractable for each decade of the Round-Up, for a total of ten retractables. She’d like to have it done by the centennial anniversary, which is April 16-18, 2021.

One of Lockie’s favorite items in the museum is something that is a one-of-a-kind item, it being the only one in the world.

A puppet in the likeness of Homer Holcomb, a famous rodeo clown in the late 1920s through the 1940s, was found. It is part of a one-of-a-kind display put together by the Levi Strauss Co., called the “World’s Only Mechanical Rodeo.” It was designed as part of the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco, and featured 31 wooden puppets, all famous rodeo stars, wearing Levi’s jeans, satin rodeo shirts and cowboy hats. Holcomb is one of the puppets sitting on the fence as the horse and mule in the arena move.

When the World’s Fair closed, the company renovated a truck and installed the display. It toured county fairs and towns with large Levi’s retailers. Very few pieces of the display are known to exist; the truck is in private hands.

Lockie and other volunteers are working on five areas in the Round-Up Museum: the Homer Holcomb puppet, an expanded display of the famous Growney bull Red Rock, an exhibit about world champion barrel racer and Cottonwood, Calif. native Nellie Miller, an expanded display on Red Bluff native bullfighter Joe Baumgartner, and on the Golden Circle of Champions, a program that the Round-Up and other rodeos do each year, reaching out to kids fighting life-threatening cancer.

The wife of Bob Lockie, Kara’s family has its own ties to the Round-Up: her father-in-law, who was also named Bob, was a saddle bronc rider who competed at the Round-Up.

Lockie hopes to make the museum accessible for self-tours. When long-time Round-Up employee Kathy Sibert is available, she gives the tours. But when she’s busy, people walk through the museum on their own. “If she’s not available, it would be nice if people could come in, look around, and glean some information on their own.”

Lockie, who is retired after twenty-one years working for Tehama County, loves her volunteer job. “I’m having so much fun here. History is fun. If they had made history this fun in school, wouldn’t it have been great?”

She’d like museum attendees to understand the history of the Round-Up, and how important it is to the area.

“The Red Bluff Round-Up is a huge part of Tehama County and always has been.”

The 99th annual Red Bluff Round-Up takes place April 17-19, 2020. Performances begin at 7 pm on April 17, at 2:30 pm on April 18, and at 1:30 pm on April 19. Tickets are on sale online at www.redbluffroundup.com and range in price from $16 to $35.

For more information, visit the website or call the Round-Up office at 530.527.1000.