DENVER. About 15 miles north of his usual spot at the top of Empower Field, on the Mile High school board, Bucky, a white fiberglass horse statue, is indoors for the first time in decades.
With the Broncos scoreboard undergoing a major overhaul, growing 70 percent, Bucky needs to step aside for a while. By then, he, too, will be refreshed in an extensive process.
Thus, for the first time in 22 years, and only the second time since he first entered the Mile High Stadium in 1975, Bucky was carefully lifted off the top of the scoreboard and lowered to the ground to deliver the Broomfield BSC logo.
It was there that BSC Signs discovered old newspapers hidden in his hooves, as if highlighting Bucky’s status as a legendary landmark. The clipping from the San Diego Union dated November 15, 1974 refers to the time of Bucky’s birth.
Perhaps it was after reading the story of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Hoff that Jim and Mildred Rory stuck the newspaper in Bucky’s hooves.
The papers remained there for nearly 50 years as Bucky became part of the Broncos’ game and tradition.
From 1962 to 1985, Roris was the operator of the Fiberglass Zoo in Alpine, California, where they created many legendary characters. Over the years they have taken orders from all over the country, with Jim hauling the finished product in his flatbed truck.
They probably got their biggest client in the mid-60s when Western star Roy Rogers called him to commission him to pay homage to his famous matching horse, a palomino named Trigg. They measured the horse, enlarged it, shaped it, and created a fiberglass figure that Rogers would later exhibit at the Roy Rogers Dell Evans Museum in Apple Valley, California.
In 1974, Denver approved a $25 million pledge to expand and improve Mile High Stadium (including the scoreboard), which was due to begin construction in 1975. The city entered into a contract with Chicago-based Stewart-Warner Corp. to create a scoreboard. Part of the design obviously needed a unique design element to tie it to the franchise, so the company named it Rories.
Since they already had the mold for Trigger, Mildred asked Rogers if he would mind if they reused the mold for this stadium project. According to a 1993 Rocky Mountain News article, Rogers approved the stipulation that the new horse should not be called Trigger.
“We originally designed it for the Trigger,” Mildred told the Denver Post in 1997, “but Roy Rogers let us use the Broncos uniform and we destroyed it.”
The finished horse weighs 1600 pounds and is 27 feet tall. Roris’ company loaded him into Jim’s truck and he drove 1,000 miles to Denver.
“Jim Rory shipped the statue he and his wife created to Mile High Stadium and was delighted that it arrived safe and sound,” Joel Klein wrote for the Post. “Then he turned around and returned home to Alpine, California.”
Bucky’s installation was completed sometime in the summer of 1975; he first appeared in a photograph of the scoreboard structure on the second page of the August 28 issue of the Denver Post.
Unfortunately, Jim passed away just two years later and never got the chance to see him on the scoreboard that made him famous and loved.
Twenty years later, in 1997, Mildred visited family in Parker and Grand Junction, Colorado, and took time with her daughter and niece to play at Mile High Stadium to see some of their most famous work. She had seen him in photographs before, but had never seen him in person.
In early September 1975, KLZ radio announced a competition for the horse’s name. According to an announcement in the September 11, 1975 edition of The Washington Post, the winner would receive round-trip airfare for two, hotel accommodation, and $100 for Denver’s season finale in Miami.
Although the winner did not appear to have been announced in a scan of the Denver Post archives, the contest judge later recalled that the winner’s actual name was Bucko, not Bucky.
”Thousands of applications came in and the judges settled on Bucko because the name was presented multiple times,” Post’s Cindy Browski wrote in 2001, when Judge, former Denver City Councilman Joe Chancio wrote after speaking with him.
”It depends who you’re talking to, what name you’re talking under,” Matt Sugar, then a spokesman for the MetLife Stadium football club, said in 2001.
Birds soar above his head at dawn, and a crane takes position with its long arms extended over the stage. The crew crawled through the sunroof and stood almost a quarter of Bucky’s height, looking up at the massive statue.
The crane then lowered the harness, carefully positioned by several workers in the hoist, to support Bucky on his journey across the land. The guys on the roof removed it from where it was bolted on, and soon Bucky was ready to get into the truck that took him to the BSC sign.
BSC Signs owner Joe Landin said Bucky was reinstated through an extremely thorough process over the next few months. BSC and its subcontractors assessed the structural integrity of the Bucky through a variety of tests: they drilled holes at the attachment points and inserted cameras for close observation, and checked the wall thickness with an acoustic method.
After these evaluations, they took it to E&J Fiberglass to add a new layer of 3/16 inch fiberglass, doubling the original thickness. Upon his return, Bucky received reinforcements of new construction foam on the lower half of the hind legs and in the tail attachment area.
“It had a fiberglass coating, a fiberglass resin coating, a fiberglass gelcoat, a primer gelcoat,” Landing said. “He puts a primer on it, which promotes adhesion. He has two coats of AkzoNobel primer. Then two coats of primer, white, and AkzoNobel too. Then four coats of clear. It had a coat on it. Then it was polished.
While BSC had previously dealt with the miniature Bucky adorning the Mile High monument at Empire Field in the Mile High Lot J parking lot, the real Bucky posed more problems. They had to think through the logistics and design the structure on which Bucky would be mounted for transportation and storage. Even though their 21,000-square-foot manufacturing facility can handle most projects with ease, they had to set up a temporary paint booth for Bucky.
BSC returned the flawless sparkling horse to Empower Field at Mile High on Thursday. By noon he was back in his old home, albeit on a new level. The scoreboard is 31 feet taller than before, and Bucky stands 161 feet above the field.
For those who worked at BSC and Mortenson Construction (who oversaw the repair of the scoreboard), taking part in this project and returning Bucky to his usual high position was a source of pride.
Watch exclusively on Empower Field at Mile High as Bucky’s 27-foot statue of the horse takes on a new look and returns to its place on the leaderboard.
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Post time: May-23-2023
