SAN ANGELO, TX — San Angelo rancher, businessman, philanthropist, and pilot Richard Mayer was honored Friday night with the 2018 Gold Spur Award. The award is awarded annually to one individual on the San Angelo Stock Show and Rodeo committee for going beyond the call of duty as a volunteer.
Mayer began his involvement with the San Angelo rodeo in 1974. His charge was to organize the arena. The bucking chutes, the gates for timed events, the grandstand for rodeo officials, and most of all, the dirt. “This dirt is sacred for Mr. Mayer,” said rodeo announcer Boyd Polhamus Friday night.
Every year, two weeks before the rodeo start date, tons and tons of dirt is trucked in and laid on the arena floor. The task of provisioning the dirt has become an annual tradition in San Angelo.
“Over all these years, he never left the arena,” Polhamus said.
Today’s rodeo is more sophisticated than it was in 1974, and Mayer has kept the arena up with the times, working out details with City of San Angelo officials over the years.
Mayer’s granddad is Sol Mayer, who built a small ranching empire in Sutton and Schleicher Counties. Part of those ranching interests near Fort McKavett, south of San Angelo, was donated to the Boy Scouts of America where Scouting Camp Sol Meyer today serves thousands of scouts. Sol Mayer’s passion was to help the area kids.
Like his grandfather, Richard’s passion for helping kids around the region fuels his involvement with the San Angelo rodeo. He is active on the San Angelo Livestock Show and Rodeo Scholarship Foundation. The foundation sends about 15 high school students per year, who are connected with agriculture, to college over four years, $2,000 per year. Since 1987, the rodeo scholarship program has awarded over $1.5 million to about 750 students.
Richard and his family are also major donors to Angelo State University.
He and his wife, the former Betty Joe Clark of Beaumont, have been married for 53 years, and have continuously served the San Angelo community since moving back here after a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy Air Corps, and flying planes as a civilian pilot in Houston, in the mid-1960s.
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