Rodeo clown back in action in Stanley on Friday

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By JEFFREY HAGE The Chippewa Herald
Thursday, June 14, 2007 9:57 AM CDT

STANLEY — You can call him Jose, the Chicken Roper or the Rodeo Mascot. Some have even called him the Committee Clown.

But don’t call Bill Ebben gullible.

The Stanley-area farmer knows he is the butt of jokes at the Stanley Rodeo. He even volunteered for the role.

“When Bill joined the rodeo board, he volunteered to do anything to get a laugh,” said Tom Smith, a board member and co-owner of Stanley Oil.

For the past three years, Ebben has done exactly that.

Ebben farms 260 acres south of Stanley. He milks about 40 Holsteins and uses crops he grows to feed the animals.

But for one weekend a year, Ebben trades farming for a little clowning around.

He proudly considers himself Stanley’s homegrown rodeo clown. Ebben recalls how he just fell into the job at one of the rodeo’s first organizational meetings in 2003.

The next year, during Stanley’s inaugural rodeo, Ebben played the role of an Hispanic mule rider named Jose who rode around the arena during intermissions while garnering laughs.

“I had that goofy hat on and rode that mule,” he said. It’s an act that brought him months of notoriety and even resulted in the single dairy farmer getting a few marriage proposals.

“The guys ran an ad in the paper with me in that get-up trying to get me a wife,” he said.

As Ebben tells it, the ad searched for a woman with healthy livestock. Before being considered for a hand in marriage, he needed to see the livestock first.

It’s that kind of relationship with members of the Stanley rodeo board that makes Ebben a hit.

During the 2005 rodeo, he was scheduled to rope a rooster as part of the intermission entertainment. But when it came time to open the gate and release the rooster, unbeknownst to him, a boy in a chicken suit came running out of the gate.

“I tackled him anyway and tied his legs together,” Ebben said. ‘The crowd roared.”

The next night Ebben was ready for the gimmick. But so were the rodeo board members.

Ebben expected the boy in the chicken suit again and had plotted exactly how he would wrestle the boy to the ground. But he wasn’t prepared for the kind of wrestling that was in store for him.

When it was time for the rooster to shoot out of the gate, it wasn’t a young Stanley boy dressed in feathers. Instead, it was a heavyweight wrestler from the Stanley-Boyd High School wrestling team.

The two were rolling around in the dirt like they were on a mat at the high school wrestling tournament.

“A clown had to come over and separate them,” recalled Bill Peterson, president of the Stanley Rodeo. “It’s a good thing he did, because someone was going to get hurt.”

“They sure made me look foolish,” Ebben said.

But that’s the role Ebben plays as the rodeo’s official clown.

“Some people think I have way too much fun,” he grinned.