The National Western Stock Show & Rodeo has a job for everybody, whether they are a teenage rodeo queen or an octogenarian with bad knees.
This year’s show wouldn’t be possible without the free labor of 537 volunteers and 60 rodeo queens, said volunteer coordinator Kellie Lombardi.
“I was afraid the bad economy was going to affect us, but no,” she said. “We’ve got people who have time on their hands, and they want to share it. It’s amazing.”
Volunteers go through training and usually wear black and turquoise vests and jackets to make their presence known.
The show, however, offers future volunteers the chance to see what they might like to do and ask questions about doing those jobs, Lombardi said.
Collectively, volunteers contributed more than 30,000 hours to the stock show last year. They deliver packages to vendors, staff information booths, herd children on school tours, and serve as the adopted cheering sections and foster parents for young competitors from across the West.
Some volunteers work shifts of just two hours a day, while some choose to work four- or eight-hour shifts. Volunteers commit to a minimum of 30 hours during the 16-day show or the events leading up to it.
Volunteers who log 60 hours or more are recognized at an annual volunteer party in February. Volunteers also receive two free passes to many of the ticketed rodeos and other events.
The minimum age for nonrodeo queen volunteers is 16, and organizers hope families volunteer together.
Last year, 520 stock-show volunteers donated $750 to buy a calf for a young 4-H competitor, as many sponsors do. But before Christmas, just three weeks before the 2008 show, a heart attack killed the calf that was to be shown by Taylor Whaley.
Rules still required the 14-year-old from Bennett to walk into the show ring, calf-less, to receive her scores for record-keeping and communication. She was cheered loudly by nearly 20 volunteers.
“You meet the nicest people, and everyone is so supportive of one another,” said prolific volunteer Cyndi Murren, who was eventually hired as an assistant to National Western president and chief executive Pat Grant.
Parades led her to the stock show. Murren had helped a raft of organizations, and then she got hooked on longhorns. She helps coordinate the annual stock show parade and cattle drive down 17th Street, which this year is Tuesday at noon.
Volunteers have been part of the stock show since its beginning in 1906. Twenty years ago, they started a program to train and coordinate their eager helpers.
Ten volunteers — Judith Berger, Sandra Clayton, Lynda Edwards, JoEllen Francis, Reid Graves, Lynn Brown-Jones, Virgil Holtgrewe, Sid Koon, Betty Kreifels and Carl Krei fels — have been there since the beginning of the training program and will be honored at this year’s show.
To boot, Holtgrewe will be honored as the 17th annual “Friend of the National Western” at the Red Meat Club’s annual dinner Thursday at the National Western Club.
Holtgrewe, a rural land appraiser, has a reputation for getting giddy with excitement when he stages events for tots and toddlers in the Ames Event Tent.
“Everybody has different things they’re good at,” Lombardi said. “And people enjoy sharing that.”
