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Show As a young man, Buck first read and later memorized poems from The Arizona Stockman, a pocket sized tabloid full of stories and poems about the West. There was "always one around every cow camp" and Buck soon found he enjoyed reciting poems for friends and acquaintances. While rodeoing, poetry was both a great form of entertainment and a good way to make friends. Buck recites both classic and contemporary poetry and generally memorizes poems about rodeo cowboys, perhaps the part of the western lifestyle he knows best. He prefers poems that deal with the rodeo cowboy's passion for his occupation, the realities of his chosen lifestyle or the ways in which the rodeo cowboy is perceived by others. Buck also "hammers on the guitar" and while living in California during the late 60s, he put several poems to music, one of which was eventually picked up by a popular recording artist. Owen H. Johnson Moccasin, Arizona (almost Utah) born: 24 October, 1916 Owen Johnson, a hard and fast roper and double rig saddle man, has been involved with cattle and horses for as long as he can remember. He's lived and worked, nearly all of his life, on the Arizona Strip, that narrow piece of land that lies south of the Utah border and north of the Grand Canyon. Raised in Moccasin, a small Strip settlement near the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, Owen was the second oldest of seven boys, born into a Mormon ranch family that was descended from the area's original pioneer settlers. He began wrangling horses when he was thirteen years old and a couple of years later started working Cowboy Poetry From Utah 65 |