Adele Von Ohl Parker

SHE WAS A VAUDEVILLE PLAYER with a string of stage ponies when she arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, and discovered there was no place left to show. Keith’s Palace Theater had shut its doors for good, finally bowing to the competition of the movies. But Adele Von Ohl Parker never let anything so trivial as an obstacle get in her way. She found an abandoned stockyard, opened a riding school, and taught her pupils to handle both horses and the business, too.

“Something of a gypsy” was the way one former pupil described her. They say she came from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she was born in 1886, and grew up teaching herself to stand atop a galloping horse and winning in horse shows and riding competitions. She clung to the back of a horse as it dived into a tank of water on the shore in Atlantic City. She claimed to be the first show cowgirl to perform “picking up.” Whether that was true or not, she rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West late in his career, in 1908 and for a few years after that, then took what she learned into silent movies and the circus, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.¹

Cleveland marked the end of her circus and movie trail, but not of her performance. Soon after her riding school began, she located property in nearby North Olmsted and moved her outfit there. Her brochures advertised “Parker’s Ranch” as a place to educate children in riding, as well as archery, crafts, carriage driving, and gardening (students worked her vegetable patch). In subsequent decades, her business repeatedly veered toward insolvency, only to be rescued by friends and neighbors whose generosity and admiration allowed her to continue teaching crowds of children.

That she attracted so many students requires some explanation. A tall, imperious, eccentric woman, she lived alone except for her many animals, the drifters who happened by looking for work, and the down-and-out circus players who came her way, looking for a place to rest, or a place to die. She raised foals in the living room, chickens in the bathtub. Once, an old acquaintance arrived with elephants from a lately busted circus. “We had real elephants to ride,” recalled a former student. After the animals demolished her stock of hay, Parker and the children took them to the park, where they swam in the river, until “the park commissioner came up screaming about crazy calls he got that there were elephants in his park.”

An unmarried old woman from the circus, she opened her house to all; it was a continual shambles that was anything but domestic. But Cleveland parents warmed to her when they saw the magic she worked with children on horseback. Many of her students came back summer after summer. Grown to adulthood, they looked back fondly on her rare blend of stern instruction and whimsy. Robert Hull recalled teenage days playing capture-the-flag on horseback, feeling “so slapdash almighty man and horseman” with the flag in hand until Adele Parker “came busting out of the woods on [that] George Hanover horse of hers and down you went off your animal, kicking in the shale and wondering what hit you and how you lost the flag.”²

Of all the activities her students adored—the three-day ride to other towns, the overnight stay on her ranch—the most spectacular was her annual Buffalo Bill Wild West show. A thundering spectacle of stagecoach robbery (she kept a coach half repaired for the show), “Custer’s Last Stand” (with Parker herself in the title role), and riding stunts, all performed on the high school track. “Complete and utter pandemonium,” was the way one woman recalled it many years later. “I rode and shot a bow and arrow. This was part of her training. ‘Just hold on with your legs and thighs dear. . . .’ ”

In 1955, she received a letter from some of Buffalo Bill Cody’s descendants, who tracked her down and invited her to come out to Cody, Wyoming, and visit the Buffalo Bill Museum. She wrote back with enthusiasm: “Long time I have been wanting to keep the name of Buffalo Bill alive and loved, he was the father of the West. Have hoped that I could put on a show to play where he played—a very small show but good stuff—to make enough money to pay for a statue—bronze—or picture—to be put in every library. . . . ‘The Spirit of Buffalo Bill.’ ”

As she described it, her life was every bit as happy as her students thought. Like Buffalo Bill, she was an entrepreneur with a colorful outfit, and she kept an eye on the bottom line which seemed always to slip out from under her. “I have 60 horses—and am in great condition—ride harder now than ever. I am alone—and am very comfortable and happy—with a wonderful business—but I would be happy if it would mean business for the both of us to do all I can for the museum.”³

She went to Cody, rode in the Wild West show parade, and “gave a superb demonstration of horsemanship in the arena at the Wild West Show on Tuesday Evening,” reported the town paper.⁴

That fall, she added to her already legendary reputation as teacher and rider with a display of courage. The sixty-nine-year-old horsewoman was driving eighteen Girl Scouts and three women on a hayride when a drunk driver plowed into the wagon. The impact threw Parker into the street. None of the passengers was hurt, but the horses bolted and the wagon lurched forward. Parker, like the professional she was, had clutched the reins even as the collision tossed her from the wagon. Now, as the horses dragged her along on her belly in the street, she could see that the main beam beneath the wagon was broken in half. If the horses continued to pull, the wagon would come apart, and this small accident might become a real tragedy. Without hesitation, she jammed her arm through the spokes of the nearest wheel, stopping the wagon—and shattering her arm. “Don’t worry about me,” she told a journalist in the hospital, “I’m tough as a pine knot.”⁵

She survived that episode, and lived another dozen years. When she died, her funeral was packed with children. Nobody was quite certain how old she was—some said eighty, others eighty-five—and the many stories about this daring western rider swirled through an America transfixed by the civil rights struggle and a failing war in the jungles of Vietnam. Her legend seemed to transcend the real world, until, like Buffalo Bill himself, her public wondered if she had been real, or if they had somehow dreamed her up. “In so many ways, Parker’s Ranch was symbolic of a lot of things that don’t happen anymore,” wrote Robert Hull. “As the years wore on, Mrs. Parker became definitely larger than life—a prodigious teacher, a strangely regal creature, and a character of such darting impulses that half of North Olmsted is less than certain she really existed.” ⁶

Adele Von Ohl Parker, “Picking Up,” 1919. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

Of Adele Parker’s adventure, only some mostly forgotten stories and a few photographs remain. One of these is a magnificent 1919 image of the cowgirl on a galloping horse, doing the “pick up” that was her specialty. She wears a cowboy hat and chaps. Her seat has left the saddle and is now planted on the horse’s side. Her thighs clutch the animal with such power, and her body swings from the horse’s flanks with such grace, that it looks almost as if gravity has failed. Her left hand grips the reins, her right hand reaches to pluck a hat from the ground. Her face is lit with joy.