Tex Tinkle Did Not Die

In the summer of 1949, Jerry Jean Tinkle received a telegram informing her that her husband, Tex, had been killed in a rodeo accident in Camden, New Jersey.

Jerry Jean was only 19 years old at the time and had given birth to a daughter less than a month earlier. Alone and broke in a strange town, the former rodeo trick rider steadily rebuilt her life; by the summer of 1954, she had remarried, had a second child, and even started a career as a proofreader for a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia.

One day in July 1954, Jerry Jean walked into the newsroom. As she made her way to her desk, she suddenly heard a familiar voice:

“My God, baby, I’ve searched all over the country for you!”

It was Tex, alive and well and dressed in an Army uniform. He had been sitting with a reporter, giving an interview about his rodeo exploits, when he saw her walk by.

Tex and Jerry Jean stared at each other for a long beat before grasping hands. In shock, they leaned on each other as they walked out of the newsroom to carry on this unexpected reunion in private.

“I JUST ACCEPTED IT WITHOUT QUESTION”

You can’t make that sort of news in a busy newsroom and not sit down for an interview. A day or two later, they talked with reporter June Cooper about how this all came to be.

“We were traveling the rodeo circuit together,” Jerry Jean explained. “We had been married for two years and that was our business. Tex was a bull-rider and I was a trick rider.”

In August 1949, Tex was riding in a rodeo in Roanoke, Virginia when he suffered a bad fracture to his ankle and leg. He was still hobbling around in a walking cast when he decided to head to New Jersey for a week-long show.

Even though she knew Tex shouldn’t be riding on a barely-healed leg, she didn’t protest his decision. She had just given birth to their baby girl, Donnita Jean, during a rodeo stop in Mechanicsville, Pennsylvania three weeks earlier and needed the rest. He was only going to be gone for six days.

Then she received the telegram that he had died.

“He had been injured badly so many times…” she told the reporter. “I didn’t have any family to advise me, or any money to go up there. I just accepted it without question.”

Tex had, in fact, suffered a bad head injury in Camden...so bad that a friend believed him to be dead and wired Jerry Jean. A rodeo couple who knew him -- but not Jerry Jean -- had taken him in when he was released from the hospital and loaded him into their trailer.

“I didn’t know anything until the troupe stopped in Nova Scotia,” he said. He didn’t know his own name until they told him. “I seemed to have all my mental faculties, but there were blank spots in my past that I couldn’t remember.”

“I was carrying pictures of my tiny daughter in my wallet, but I didn’t know who she was,” he added.

About six months after the accident, all his memories came flooding back at once. “I went back to Roanoke and hunted and hunted, no one there knew where she had gone.”

Eventually, he gave up. In 1951, he filed for divorce in Nevada on the ground of desertion and remarried before being drafted into the military in 1954.

Jerry Jean met Roanoke native Wayne Ferguson sometime in 1950 and they married at Langley Air Force Base in May 1951. An officer in the Air Force, they moved to Newport News not long after their wedding. He adopted Donnita, who was soon joined by a half-brother.

In the movies, the sheer coincidence of their reunion might be the start of a rekindled romance. Not in this case.

“It’s wonderful seeing Tex again, but we’ve both grown up and we’ve both taken up such different ways of life,” said Jerry Jean. “We wouldn’t be happy going back together again.”

Instead, the Tinkles had come over to the Fergusons for dinner.

There had been a few tears, especially when Tex was reunited with Donnita, now nearly five years old. But mostly, Jerry Jean said, it had been a nice evening of catching up and reveling in the oddity of it all. “We’re just so happy to see each other -- all four of us.”

“IT’S JUST YOU AND THE BULL”

June Cooper’s story was picked up by the Associated Press and ran in newspapers all over the county in the summer of 1954.

There was no follow-up, so we don’t know if Tex and Jerry Jean kept in touch or if Tex built a relationship with his daughter. The Fergusons eventually had two more children and moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Wayne died in 1979. Jerry Jean followed six years later.

Tex Tinkle just kept on riding.

He was widowed in the early 1960s and left to raise his son, Rusty, who was born with Down’s Syndrome in 1958. Rusty grew up on the rodeo circuit, helping Tex sell leather goods to help keep them afloat.

Eventually, Tex rode in all the great rodeo venues -- including the Calgary Stampede, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Madison Square Garden. He gave his final interview at a rodeo in Oklahoma in 1986, when he was 57 years old.

After forty years, he was still in love with the sport.

“Once you’re up there on that bull, the only thing you got to worry about is hanging on. It’s just you and the bull,” he told the reporter.

At that point, he was only riding a few times a year. “I get a lot of teasing from the other cowboys,” he said. “But I don’t know, I think I’m well liked. We get along good. And they think it’s kind of amazing, that I still ride bulls. I don’t have any plans for quitting, either. I know that I’ll have to someday, and I’ve slowed down a lot from when I used to rodeo for a living. But I love this. I do it because I love it.”

Tex died in Oklahoma in 1998 at the age of 79.

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This is the first in a series of Recovered Stories, forgotten tales from the newspapers over the past 200 years.