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The Life and Times of Gordie Peer

How It All Began

By WARREN RESEN

Very few men or women can claim to be expert in the cowboy worlds of Florida, The West, and the make believe world of Hollywood much less have been an active participant in all of them. Well, we are fortunate to have just such a unique person living in our backyard; he is Gordie Peer of Okeechobee City.

In his own words
"For a long time now, I've called Florida home. I have 20 acres here in Okeechobee. It's my home and my ranch and I raise some cattle on it. It's not a money- making venture but it's what I enjoy doing.

"If you talk with people here in Okeechobee, people that have known me around here for years, they have no idea what I ever did for a living. I never discussed it here. Today, if someone asked what I was, I would tell them I was an entertainer. And they might say, 'of what?' But I'll get to that shortly. To tell the truth, I was so scared to be out in front of the public that I didn't want anybody to know and I didn't want anybody asking me questions and stuff. I rarely would set and talk to people. All they knew was that I was gone a lot of the time. They never knew where I was and what I was doing, even the people I worked for in Okeechobee.

"The life I've been leading all these years really started from the time I hopped on a freight train when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. It happened to be that the freight train was carrying a Wild West show. That was just about at the beginning of WWII. When they stopped, and started to unload, I got a job helping. And so I just went to work for them. It was Col. Jim Estes' Rodeo. And that was easy living then. In those days you had a cook shack with your rodeo or wild west show so that you got your food; and you had a bed roll so you could sleep in the hay barn or horse barn or under one of the trucks. You had a place to sleep and food to eat and that's all you needed back then.

"The first time I come to Florida was about '52 or somewhere in there. I come here during my time in the Marine Corps. When I got out of the Marine Corps I first went out to Colorado and lived for a number of years in Golden, Colorado, which is the home of Coors Beer. It's also the home of the Colorado School of Mines but people always think of Coors Beer rather than the educational part of it. It's pretty country out there and I worked for different people trying to earn a living. I rodeo'd some too.

"My problem was that I didn't like the cold. I'd been out to North Dakota and that's colder yet. I had found out in the 50's that Florida was warm.

"After the Marine Corps, I traveled with a Wild West show called Cherokee Hammond, that was the guy's name. It traveled through all the southeastern states. And I worked with them and off and on. We'd come down into Florida when they was having rodeos and stuff, you can't go much farther east then that, and then we'd go back north or west.

"Well, I was trying to ride bulls and bareback horses at the shows but I found out they would pay me to do something with my guns too. I found that out by accident the first time a scheduled act didn't show up at a rodeo.

"We was in Erie, PA. When the act didn't show up the owner come up to me and said, 'You're supposed to be pretty good with those guns and your whip. Could you do something for an act?'

"And I said ' no, 'cause I'm afraid to get out in front of people.'

"And he said 'Well, I'll pay you to do it.'

"And I said '$15.00?'

"And he said 'You got a deal.'

"Fifteen dollars was pretty good money then. So I went out there and I shot a .45 with real bullets in it. We tied stones onto balloons and put them out in the arena and I shot the balloons and I did some gun spinnin' and stuff and I popped a whip. I worked, I don't remember whether it was 2 or 3 or 4 performances, and they paid me for it. That was money that you had, where if you contested you didn't know whether you were going to win or not. It graduated from there.

"I also used to do trick mounts onto a horse too. I would run and jump and land sittin' in the saddle without touchin' a stirrup or anything. And then I'd run and jump and stick my foot in the stirrup and set in the saddle and do a somersault forward off the horse and land on my feet.

"In Wild West shows, there was always people who developed skills with the ropes and the whips and the guns. Mostly it was with the ropes and the guns. They had trick shooters and stuff. It got to where you had to do a shooting demonstration and then you had to kind of fancy it up a little bit. Each person tried to elaborate on it a little more and that's where the fancy gun spinnin' came from starting back with Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Doc Carver and some of those other famous people.

"We were at Homestead, Florida, at a rodeo every year. In the winter time there was weekend rodeos throughout Florida where you could go from one to the other and some times you could pick up a job in between the weekends. I had gone to Homestead to work in a rodeo and there was three or four of us traveling together. But none of us had made any money there. So we split up and went our own ways. I had the vehicle and left to go back up to Kissimmee 'cause I had worked up there. In '53 I started staying in Kissimmee and I would go on the road in the summer, traveling and doin' shows and stuff. When I wasn't working on the road doing shows, or somethin', why I would come back here and work for Pete Clemmons who owned the Okeechobee Livestock Market. He might not have liked it but he let me do it.

"I was never permanent in Okeechobee. I never stayed a full year in Okeechobee until back in about '81. I guess it was then I decided I wasn't going to travel anymore. But I never stayed here a full year again until just up around '96. Then I just thought, 'I'm retired. I'm quittin'.' Actually Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger) had also quit travelin' and I quit doin' shows with him in '90. I had worked a great deal with him. There's still some people around from the old days, but they're passing away too."