Baxter Black is a man of principle: He doesn’t accept awards.
So just call his noble position as grand marshal of today’s National Western Stock Show, Rodeo & Horse Show cattle drive and parade a homecoming. The parade starts at noon at Union Station and progresses south to the state Capitol.
Things have come full circle for Brighton’s most famous former veterinarian. Everything started with Colorado cows — his best-selling books, his widely published newspaper column, his weekly commentaries on National Public Radio, his six appearances on “The Tonight Show.”
A 1969 Colorado State University graduate, Black was raised “tormenting cows” in Las Cruces, N.M. He moved to Colorado in 1980 to work for a livestock pharmaceutical company.
Newly divorced and flat broke, he rented an apartment on East Hampden Avenue and drove a 1964 Plymouth Fury with a broken door held shut with duct tape.
Part of his job called for giving talks to ranchers and veterinarians, and soon the talks became more about humor than veterinary information.
During a talk at the National Western’s Red Meat Club in Denver in 1980, the publisher of a local weekly newspaper asked him to write a column. His first published work was in July 1980 in the Record Stockman of Wheat Ridge, which produced a $25 paycheck.
His weekly “On the Edge of Common Sense” column is carried in more than 150 publications nationwide.
With paid speeches taking up more and more of his time, Black left veterinary work for show business full time in 1982.
In 1989, he started his weekly “Baxter Black on Monday” radio program that airs on 200 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.
In 1997, Black was ready to move on from Brighton, as the fast sprawling suburbs gobbled the landscape like a grazing herd. He had his wife, Cindy Lou, a native Arizonan, moved to Benson, Ariz., in Cochise County about 50 miles from Mexico.
The people who have followed his career and show up for autographs are the same no matter where he goes, he said.
“My stories are their stories. I just tell them back to them,” he said. “It’s always the same people who come, people who love the land, people who have an attachment to the land, people who understand that animals are a part of the circle, like the way the snow in the winter fills the stock ponds in the spring.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
