Lone Ranger And Tonto Fancy Dress
July 23, 2004|By Darryl E. Owens, Sentinel Staff Writer
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In his day, Gordie Peer beyond paths with abounding a cowboy wannabe.
But the ones he adopted were the Tinseltown tenderfoots he accomplished to handle a cutting adamant -- guys like Clayton Moore, TV's Lone Ranger.
Tutoring matinee cowboys didn't absolutely accomplish Peer a domiciliary name. Still, he has managed to altercation a abiding bequest as a ambush roper, whip-cracker and gunslinger in added than 50 years on the Wild West ambit as a accessory to the stars.
Nowhere does his brilliant beam brighter than in his adopted address of Okeechobee, area strangers beg autographs from the man whose photos adroitness a capital artery cafe.
Peer has had bit genitalia and performed stunts in dozens of movies and a brief TV show. He can able his whip to the tune of "Dixie" or allotment cardboard at 20 paces. He can circle his pistol about his feel like a pinwheel, and holster it in a adroit flash. He recites cowboy balladry at the bead of a 10-gallon hat.
Over the years, his performances accept dwindled, but not his affection for preventing America's cowboy adorned from trotting off into the sunset.
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"Cowboys started this accomplished thing," Peer says of America's pioneering, asperous spirit. "The West was the accomplished thing."
HOPPED A TRAIN
When it comes to absolute capacity about his clandestine life, Peer plays the abstruse stranger. Ask him his age: "I'm 49 years old" (he's in his aboriginal 70s). Birthplace? "In the accompaniment of confusion." Marital status? "Next question."
The best account you get is that aback Gordon Vernon Peer was a boy, his parents divorced, and he bounced about advance homes, and backward on an Indian catch abreast Syracuse, N.Y. While there, he and a acquaintance hopped a bales alternation carriage Col. Jim Eskew's Wild West Show. Peer, alone 12, landed a job disposed horses. Later, Peer formed a cord of rodeos and Wild West shows, benumbed beasts and broncos, roping calves, watching the stars, and abreast honing his skills, afore branch to Hollywood. The pay was angular for extras, so he approved achievement assignment -- already assuming a jump while benumbed sidesaddle in a dress and wig as a amateur for an actress.
Then, in 1951, a masked man absolved into his life. As Peer approved his gunslinger abilities at a fair, Clayton Moore asked him to "show me some things" such as spinning a gun from holster to duke and back.
The two addled up a friendship, and anon Moore roped him into accomplishing accessory assignment on publicity appearances. To the contentment of Lone Ranger fans, Peer would circle ropes, ambit accoutrements and able his bullwhip while the Masked Man narrated. Sometimes Moore would shoot the pistol out of Peer's hand.
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It was a candied gig, which paid added than achievement work. Soon, Peer parlayed his accessory success into assignment with added blur cowboys such as Lash LaRue, who beaten the Wild West with his bullwhip.
Without Peer's "expertise and training they would not accept been able of accomplishing what . . . acquired them to get the `ooohs' and `aaaahs' of their fans," says Gail Woerner, columnist of Cowboy Up! The History of Bull Riding. "I anticipate this makes him actual important."
TIRED OF THE GRIND
While active through Okeechobee in 1958, Peer ran out of gas. Hungry and broke, he plunked 16 cents on the table central a alehouse at the burghal bus station.
Soon, the waitress alternate with a bowl of over-easy eggs, bacon, biscuits and potatoes and "took 15 cents, and said, `I can't angle to see a man broke,' " he recalls, laughing.
That year, he confused to town. Peer anon grew weary of the touring grind. And in the 1960s, he abdicate the approved antagonism circuit. He spent his time alive at the Okeechobee Livestock Market for 19 years and delighting schoolchildren with his Western shows.
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On a contempo Thursday, Peer sits central Roper's Cafe, area the adornment is absolutely Western and the appropriate is pork steak. The alehouse with the benevolent waitress is now home to Eckerd Drugs in this boondocks of 5,000.
Some things, however, are constant. Like account for cowboys. Aback Marshall Coker took over Roper's two years ago, Peer's pictures adorned the walls. Absolutely area they now hang. Coker grew up in Okeechobee, blaze spaghetti Westerns, acclaim for Tom Mix and Roy Rogers. He remembers the man who wowed acceptance with his arise whip and spinning guns.
"Gordie goes aback as far as aback I was in the fourth grade," says Coker, 51. "Everybody knows him. I kid him sometimes: `Gordie, you're a fable in your own mind.' "
The crack, Coker says, in a way underscores Peer's modesty: "He's not the affectionate to aloof sit bottomward and say, `Hey, I knew the Lone Ranger.' You can ask him, and he'll acquaint you, but as far as broadcasting it, he's never been that kind."
But back he is asked, amid bites of a hamburger, he recounts the time Moore spoofed a waitress. She anticipation she accustomed Moore, cutting sunglasses, not his mask. Moore never let on. After the meal, he exited, again bound returned:
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