Prairie Showman

On the main line from Cheyenne to Denver, where the cow-country meets the mountains, lies the brisk Colorado city of Greeley. Into Greeley with a flivver-pulled trailer in the fall of 1930 steamed one Elzy Alumbaugh ("Buzz") Hoover, 28, husky, square-cut, leather-lunged, with a diploma from Fred Reppart's School of Auctioneering, a wife, two children and $10. He found a place to park in Greeley's junky fringe, pushed his gallon hat back off his forehead, and got down to business.

Last week this same Buzz Hoover was packing to pull out of Greeley on a streamliner for a vacation, after the busiest season his Greeley Cash Auction Market has ever had. Sales were running some 60% better than 1938's $1,000,000-plus, and on sales Buzz Hoover collects anywhere from 3% to 7%. Fall and winter business was piling up so that Buzz had to shut down his own auction school, which had 50 aspirants booked at $100 a head.

Just before he left for his vacation, Buzz auctioned 1,000-oddhead of cattle, shipped in from ranges in seven neighboring States, to "feeders" who prime the beef over the winter for choosy eastern markets. "Boy, oh boy, oh boy, lookut that pretty li'l heifer," Buzz urged grizzled buyers in his rough-hewn auction pit, "right offa the juicy meadas. Wottami bid, wottami bid for this pretty li'l heifer? Who'll start it 25, 25, 25. . . ." They bid up to $97 a head; Buzz got $57,000 for the lot; the folks headed home--men, women and children--tired but tickled after a great day at Showman Buzz Hoover's combination rodeo, barbecue, songfest and livestock sale.

For three years after he hit Greeley, Buzz was an enterprising nobody. Then in 1934 he tied up with Greeley's KFKA, a radio station in somewhat the same situation. He caught ranchers at breakfast daily in seven States with three-quarters of an hour of weather, livestock & feed prices, good humor, a singing cowboy and a guitar-twanging cowgirl with Bar X names (Claude Redman, Esther Gibson), plenty of come-ons for the Greeley Cash Auction Market. He put his auction pit on the air twice a week, took microphones out on the range for farm sales, saw to it that the folks who turned out were not only entertained but fed ("Free Barbecue at 12 o'clock. Bring your own cups"). He offered to sell anything, from a manure-spreader to a mountainside.

Now Buzz Hoover uses 23 1/4 of KFKA's 88 hours a week. He built KFKA a new transmitter, which the now booming station has nearly paid for. In Hoover Park, around his auction arena, he has his own studio, the 300-foot transmitter tower outlined with red neon lights. In the park are cattle pens, a Buzz Hoover lumber yard, garages, stores, tourist cottages. On auction days, when the radio-beckoned crowds turn out in droves, Buzz wears a slick cowboy outfit and so do Claude and Esther. His roustabouts wear natty, filling-station-style uniforms with cowboy hats, clown around on bucking steers between sales. Buzz himself is no mail-order Westerner. Colorado-born, he worked for a spell as a brakeman on Spencer Penrose's Pike's Peak cog road. As a prelude to his success story, he tells the curious: "I'm no relation to the ex-President, the G-Man or the vacuum cleaner."

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