Looking back on all the ups and downs over 92 years of living, Willie Crosina is very grateful his path in life has always kept him firmly rooted in rodeo.
“I’ve been a little bit of a lot of things,” said Willie, flashing his sparkling eyes and trademark smile.
A cowboy, ranch hand, bookkeeper, truck driver, rodeo clown and bull fighter and, later, a western wear store owner, Willie has been a well known and beloved figure in the Cariboo Chilcotin for the last nine decades. But it’s his dedication and commitment to the world of rodeo that Willie will always be remembered for and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Rodeo is unique – you try and beat your competitor but not undermine him. Competitors travel together, help each other out, root for each other. No other professional sport is like that,” Willie said.
“It’s like country life. If someone has a problem, everyone comes to help and those who don’t, don’t last long.”
One of the founding fathers of what is now the British Columbia Rodeo Association (BCRA), Willie continues to play a vital role in all aspects of local rodeo serving as a director for the Williams Lake Stampede and announcer for the Williams Lake High School Rodeo Associations. Not to be outdone, his wife Terry, the quieter of the two, has volunteered alongside Willie at the Williams Lake Stampede as a timer for 40 years herself and still attends volunteer work bees on the Monday evenings with Willie leading up to the Stampede’s five rodeo performances.
In Williams Lake High School Rodeo, Willie has been a steadfast figure through generations of rodeo competitors and their families, having served as a clown and bull fighter in his younger years and as a beloved rodeo announcer the last 20 years or so, missing only one rodeo since 1972 three years ago due to a bout of pneumonia.
“It’s nice when the kids say they want me there,” Willie said of continuing to volunteer for the 12-hour days of a rodeo announcer. “I can’t remember everyone’s names anymore but they all seem to remember me and come and say hello. I’ve told them I’ll keep doing it as long as I can still climb the stairs (to the rodeo announcer’s booth).”
Willie was born in Quesnel on August 1, 1924 to Bill and Inez Crosina.
“I was a Dr. Baker’s baby,” Willie said of his parents making the trip from Williams Lake to Quesnel to be under the care of the well-respected doctor, for which the Quesnel hospital is still named after today.
Willie, the first of seven children, was brought home to the Mountain House Ranch, owned at the time by his pioneering grandfather, Louis Crosina, where he would spend the first nine years of his life. Moving to 150 Mile House at age nine, Willie was able to go right into Grade 3 in his first year of formal education thanks to the homeschooling efforts of his mother.
Willie graduated from Grade 8 at the 150 Mile’s little red schoolhouse in 1938 and then moved just outside of Wells with his aunt and uncle, Jack and Clara Moffat, to work on the family’s dairy farm and continue his high school studies there.
“I was the only one besides Omar who got to go to high school,” he said.
In order to live there, however, Willie was expected to work on the dairy farm which meant he would get up at 4 a.m., hand milk five or six of the 22 to 30 cows the family had, and bottle and deliver the fresh milk, sometimes crawling up steep snow and ice-covered driveways to the houses in the winter, before being dropped off at school.
At the time, customers would pay a quarter for a quart of fresh milk delivered to their door daily. Willie would ride in the back of a covered truck with comforters around the bottles to try to prevent the milk from freezing. He recalls one time having no explanation after some customers got very upset that their milk did not have the usual thick layer of cream on the top of the milk.
“I found out years later my friends were skimming the frozen cream off the top and eating it like ice cream.”
At the end of every school day, Willie would “usually run” the two and a half miles back to the farm to do his milking chores all over again before starting his homework or walking back into town to play basketball.
“It was quite an experience but it certainly didn’t hurt. It got me my Grade 12 education.”
One aspect of high school and life in Wells Willie loved was basketball. In the late 1930s business was good in the community with two mines, Cariboo Gold and Island Mountain Gold, in operation. The mines built a community hall where many students and adults would play basketball.
“I could run all day,” Willie recalls. “And I could jump higher than anyone else even though I was shorter than most of them.”
Willie points out that while he doesn’t have much hair left these days, in his youth his hair was fiery red and, sometimes, he had the personality to match.
“I could be ornery too. I never liked to fight. I only got into two fights in my life, but I never lost either one,” he said of two specific conflicts, one in high school and one at a Riske Creek rodeo.
After graduating high school, Willie went back home for a time to the Mountain House Ranch. But with the Second World War well underway he felt the need to enlist and at 19 years old Willie joined the Royal Canadian Air Force with the help of local recruiter Tony Woodland.
Willie trained in Edmonton, Regina, Macdonald, Manitoba and Quebec as an air gunner.
“I wanted to get overseas but I didn’t make it,” Willie said of the war ending.
Willie came home again to Mountain House Ranch before branching off on his own to work for Harold and Pattie Cripps.
“Those were good years,” Willie recalls of going to community dances with friends.
“Sometimes you’d dance until daylight then go straight to work, especially if it was haying time. There were no days off unless it rained. And in the winter you had to feed the cows.”
Willie was working at the Alkali Lake Ranch as a cowboy in 1948 when he and Charlie Twan went to a Riske Creek rodeo and dance.
“I saw this girl at a distance and I asked Charlie, who is that cute girl with the big brown eyes?”
Although he didn’t get a chance to meet her that night – the young cowboys were too busy trying to hide from cow boss Bill Twan who wanted to take them home – Willie would go on to marry his beautiful brown-eyed girl, Teresa (Terry) Pigeon.
Terry was a perfect compliment for Willie. She shared Willie’s love of the Western lifestyle as she herself grew up going to rodeos and spending time at the Williams Lake Stockyards where her father Ray Pigeon worked as manager and brand inspector. Her grandfather, Antoine Boitanio, was well-known as a great horseman. Boitanio Park was named after him.
The two married in Quesnel on July 5, 1950.
“We went to the Calgary Stampede for our honeymoon,” Willie said. “That was the start of our love of rodeo.”
Willie had already worked as a volunteer for the Williams Lake Stampede in 1947 for George Felker. He had also tried his hand competing in calf roping and bareback, where he had a spill.
“I was walking out of the arena and the judge said you missed him out and I said that’s fine because I just retired,” Willie said. “I realized it just wasn’t my piece of cake, at least not that part of it.”
In the early 1950s Willie worked for the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association as a manager and bookkeeper. That experience led him to take a job away from Williams Lake as the bookkeeper and store manager and postmaster of the Quilchena Ranch, owned by the Guichon Cattle Company, in the Nicola Valley for the next eight years.
Before they moved away, while they were gone, and when they returned to Williams Lake in 1962, the couple had six children; Allen, Louise, Tony, Mickey, LeeAnne and Ray.
Willie provided for the family by working long hours for Elton Elliott who owned Hodgson Freightways, where he loaded trucks, drove and hauled cattle. He later also worked at a feed warehouse owned by the Armes Brothers on Mackenzie Avenue where Surplus Herby’s is today.
“I think Terry got the biggest load raising the kids, I was always working,” he said. “She did a really good job.”
Though they were busy with work and family life, the two always found time for rodeo.
On weekends Mike Isnardy held informal jackpot rodeos at his Springhouse Ranch which the Crosinas attended regularly.
“That’s actually where I started clowning,” he said, noting while he entertained the crowds in between events Terry managed the money matters and timed events.
The rodeos became so popular that friends of Isnardy asked that they bring the event to Terrace which they did in the summer of 1965 for $500, with Willie serving as truck driver, rodeo clown and bull fighter.
“People were sitting in the trees to watch it. They climbed whatever they could to see the rodeo – they had never seen anything like it,” Willie said of the rodeo they put on. “It was really something. The crowd just loved it.”
After taking that initial rodeo on the road, Willie was one of several people who met at the Chilcotin Inn in December 1965 to discuss forming a formal rodeo association. He said the step was necessary to hold riders accountable to pay fees, which in turn allowed riders to always get paid their earnings at the end of rodeos.
At the close of the meeting Willie became one of the founding members of the Interior Amateur Rodeo Association, which was later changed to Interior Rodeo Association and finally to the BCRA, which is what it is still known as today.
“Twelve of us bought membership cards that night,” said Willie, who served as the secretary treasurer for five years.
Willie, along with his trained donkey Bimbo, became a popular act on the rodeo circuit, clowning, bull fighting and even competing in wild cow milking.
“I got more bruises from wild cow milking than I ever did from bull fighting,” Willie said. “I never did get hurt bull fighting.”
And his donkey Bimbo won him many cases of beer over the years when cowboys bet Willie they could ride him. “He’d just duck his head and kick and there was just nothing left,” he said. “He knew better than to do that with me.”
Becoming a rodeo clown wasn’t that much of a stretch for Willie, who was willing to do anything for a joke or to amuse himself. Unbeknownst to everyone else he once went in disguise to a masquerade dance at the Rose Lake Hall dressed as a woman.
“I found out what women put up with,” Willie said, laughing, adding that the joke even fooled his sister who was at the dance.
Willie eventually put away his clown face and scaled back his physical duties of rodeo and for the last 20-plus years has served as the rodeo announcer for the high school rodeo as well as for the rancher’s challenge at Stampede.
He and Terry have both been named lifetime gold members of the Williams Lake Stampede and BCRA for their dedication to the sport.
“We never use them,” Willie said of being able to get into rodeos free of charge for their decades of service. “I figure these little rodeos have enough troubles making it. I don’t even think about it.”
From 1983 to 2002 Willie found another thing he was good at and that related to rodeo – owning and operating a western wear store.
Willie’s Western Wear, located first in the mall, then on Second Avenue across from Shopper’s Drug Mart, carried all the necessities for his rodeo and ranching clientele.
Of course interacting with his customers was his favourite part and he still recalls how when someone in a First Nations family would pass away, they would go and see Willie, sometimes even after hours, and pick out a new hat, jeans, western shirt and boots and a new buckle for their departed.
“It was something. They really were my best customers. If you treated them fairly they’d treat you fairly.”
Other customers also appreciated Willie’s kindness and honesty when it came to opinions on outfits.
“You can’t let someone go out in an outfit that looks terrible, eventually someone is going to tell them and then it’ll come back to you.”
Willie retired from the store in 2002 and recommitted himself to being one of the directors of the Williams Lake Stampede at the request of Fred Thomas.
Currently, Willie heads up the sponsorship committee as well as all of the local events such as the mountain race and rancher’s challenge. He also oversees the drill team.
And, if that weren’t enough, Willie still organizes the annual tour to the Canadian Finals Rodeo in Edmonton, Alberta every November and has for the past 41 years.
“The funny thing is it started over a coffee at the mall,” Willie said of the trip, which sees local rodeo fans book the tour Willie organizes which includes a bus charter to Edmonton, accommodations and rodeo finals tickets.
“We’ve had the same tickets for the last 40 years and they’re almost all in the lower bowl.”
Willie loves watching the rodeo and meeting up with old friends he’s met through his years of rodeo and operating the western store, such as good friends Vern and the now late Mona Elliott.
Willie recalls a memory of being at a buyer’s social with Vern and all the fellows joking that they didn’t have to worry about dancing with their wives because Willie was their “designated dancer.”
“I love to dance,” Willie said, who has always had lots of friends but has always remained true to his love Terry.
“I’ve always thought that if you can’t give a friend a hug there’s something wrong in the world.”
Willie said rodeo has given him many good things over his lifetime – friends, laughs and good times – and he’s thankful for it.
“I’ve made a lot of good friends.”
