The Bulls Are Here

The Bulls

Dr. Craig and Maureen Booth

Are Here Every year during those dazzling days of midSeptember, you counted on it. We were two long weeks into the school year. The scorching air of summer was just beginning to wane under the new slant of the sun. Then the trucks rumbled into town, and a battalion of By Lyman Hafen boys and girls swept through the neighborhoods as fast as they could pedal yelling, “The bulls are here!” Swanee Kirby’s hulking stock trucks growled onto the rodeo grounds and lurched to a stop at the stock pens on the north side of the Lion’s Dixie Sun Bowl. Before the first trailer gate was lifted, the fences were already lined with wide-eyed girls and boys from every sector of town. A sigh of delight and terror rose from our chests as the bulls rumbled out of the trailer one by one, briskets waggling, snot blowing, throats gurgling as they trotted heavily down the ramp to their pens. And there they stood like alien monsters in the golden afternoon, shifting from side to side, twitching their massive humps, pitching their high-racked horns, claiming their territory as the sunlight glinted in their eyes the size of cue balls. It was an annual rite of fall for a kid growing up in 1960s St. George. In recent years, I’ve learned it was the same for St. George kids growing up in the 1950s. It all became clear to me a few years ago when I received a text out of the blue on a mid-September day. It simply said, “THE BULLS ARE HERE.” I didn’t recognize the number, but I heeded the call. With no bike at hand, I jumped in the car and drove straight to the Sun Bowl. I walked up to the stock pen

fence and stood near a man whose hands gripped the top rail. He was looking into the dusty pens and smiling at the massive animals shuffling in the dirt. He turned his face to me and smiled even wider and said, “I figured you’d come.”

I knew him immediately. He was Doctor Craig Booth, someone I’d admired all my life. Over the next few minutes, we reminisced about our common memories—mostly about the joy of rodeo week when we were little boys in St. George. His memories were from the 1950s, mine from the 60s. Those were transcendent minutes as we shared almost identical feelings about the sheer ecstasy of rodeo week in our quiet little town. Both of us had treasured those memories all our lives, and there we stood in the same place we stood as kids.

The next year, I got another mid-September text from Craig Booth. This time we agreed to meet before daylight at Denny’s on the south end of town. We could have breakfast, get to the Sun Bowl as the sun broke over the east black ridge, have a good look at the bulls, and get to work on time. Breakfast was a literal and figurative grand slam that morning. We shared boyhood memories and compared notes on the larger-thanlife people we’d both known. I was amazed at Doc Booth’s breadth of experience and knowledge and the endless number of people he knew, places he’d been, and things he’d experienced. He was just as interested in my stories, and all our stories seemed to intersect in uncanny ways.

At one point, I asked him about the merciless nature of pancreatic cancer. I had two friends who’d recently suffered from it. He knew them both. One had died within a year of diagnosis, as most victims do. The other had miraculously survived. Doc Booth asked me for my pen. He switched into a seriously focused mode, unfolded a napkin, and drew the outline of a pancreas. He had not been their doctor, but he knew the details of both cases, and on his napkin, he showed me in thirty seconds where the cancer had occurred in each man’s pancreas, all the while sketching away like a kid with crayons. He showed me how the one cancer was inoperable and how the other, because of where it occurred, was successfully, though also miraculously, removed.

We talked about our mutual love for the Arizona Strip that morning. He wanted to know more about our family ranch in Nevada. And I chided him about how he had single-handedly introduced to the world the iconic hike in Zion known as the Subway. In the early 1980s, before anyone knew about the route, Craig Booth began taking his friends and neighbors through the magical narrows of the Left Fork of North Creek off the Kolob Terrace of Zion. He made the hike scores of times, sharing the route with hundreds and hundreds of fellow hikers. It went viral from there, making it necessary over the last several decades for the National Park Service to limit access through a permit system. When we got to the Sun Bowl that morning, we were suddenly little boys again. We were as mesmerized by the bulls in the twenty-first century as we’d been in the twentieth. Looking out over the Sun Bowl, Craig recalled his days playing high school football there. We both laughed as we remembered setting up on the line of scrimmage on the weekend following the rodeo. It always took a week or two to finally clear off all the little piles of fertilizer the horses and bulls had left on the turf. Craig shared his memory of a tragedy that haunted him all his life. During warmups before a football game in Milford, Utah, on October 27, 1961, his teammate and friend Wendell Hafen collapsed on the field. Craig worked shoulder to shoulder with Coach Walt Brooks to revive him. At the time, there was no hospital in Milford, so they took him to a doctor’s office, but it was too late. Wendell had suffered a heart attack and had died there on the field.

That’s when Craig Booth began to imagine becoming a doctor—something he accomplished several years later— but not before graduating from Dixie High School, attending Dixie Junior College, and

Through his entire adult life, Doctor Booth was focused on healing others— “ physically, emotionally, spiritually.

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Through his entire adult life, Doctor Booth “ was focused on healing others—physically, emotionally, spiritually. “

serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the North Central States Mission. He married Maureen, the girl he’d adored since junior high school, before entering medical school at the University of Utah, where he was student body president.

He could have gone anywhere and made his mark as a great doctor, but he chose to return home to St. George at a time when you could count the number of doctors in town on one hand. What he and his dear and talented wife, Maureen, achieved here over the next forty-plus years cannot be captured in words. I can think of no one who touched more lives individually or impacted a community more broadly than Craig Booth. He was president of the Utah State Medical Association from 1987 to 1989. He was Utah’s Doctor of the Year in 1994. He was medical director of the original Dixie Regional Medical Center and helped design the new campus of the medical center in St. George. He and Maureen served as mission presidents of the Arizona Phoenix Mission from 2002 to 2005. After that, he worked in the regional rehab center. Ever the healer, he worked in the wound clinic for several years, then the Doctor’s Free Clinic, then the Booth Wellness Center at Dixie State University.

Through his entire adult life, Doctor Booth was focused on healing others— physically, emotionally, spiritually. At the same time, he was always busy making this a better place to live. He was one of the most ardent fans and generous supporters of Dixie High School and Dixie College sports. He was a founding member of the St. George Exchange Club, a long-time member of the St. George Water and Power Board, a temple worker at the St. George Temple, and the designer and funder of the magnificent flag pole that stands on the Red Hill at the head of Main Street where a glorious American flag waves above the city.

I’ve only mentioned a few of Craig’s deeds. Countless more, like the hundreds and hundreds of babies he delivered, wounds he healed, and lives he saved, are known only to those who were the beneficiaries of his competence and compassion.

For the next few years after our first encounter at the Sun Bowl stock pens, Craig texted to let me know the bulls had arrived. We’d meet for breakfast before daylight, and as the sun rose, we’d be looking through the fence at the bulls and catching up on shared memories of the town we both love.

He won’t be there this year. Sadly, he left us just a few weeks ago. The shock of his passing still hovers over old St. George. He is genuinely missed and has left a gaping void, wide and deep, the kind of wound only his Christ-like compassion and skilled care could heal. For those of us who knew him, we turn to the faith in Christ we shared with him for peace, comfort, healing, and for some kind of answer.

I plan to be there this year. I’ll walk up to the fence and look through the rails at the bulls on those hallowed grounds where every September since 1934 our community has gathered to revel in the pageantry of rodeo, where every year we try to hold onto something that seems to be slowly slipping through our fingers.

After I’ve taken a good look at the great and terrible beasts pawing the dirt with their huge hooves, I’ll turn and look up toward the Red Hill. There, at the head of Main Street, I’ll see the magnificent flag waving over our hometown.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 15 grandchildren.