As a teenager, Pottstown resident Al Grey told his sister, “I’m going out there and I’m going to make it!” Make it he did, becoming one of America’s finest jazz trombone players. For a small town, Pottstown has had quite a few people go “out there and make it.”
Among them were John Rutter Brooke, who rose from a captain in the volunteer Civil War army to a major general and the second-highest ranking officer in the United States Army; Archie Royer, who ran away from home to join the circus and became a vaudeville star; Danny Weaver, who went from playing local sandlot baseball to become a star third baseman for the Chicago White Sox, and Anne Rice, who became a successful artist in Paris.
Another name to add to this pantheon of once well-known but now forgotten Pottstown people is William Garfield Binder. Born in Pottstown on Aug. 5, 1881, a chance conversation with a Pottstown doctor stoked his thirst for adventure and, at the tender age of 14, put his feet on the path to the wide-open plains, landing him in Nebraska.
Given that wanderlust seemed to run in William’s family, it is amazing that he came from Pottstown. His father, Aaron Binder, born in East Nantmeal Township, Chester County, went west before the Civil War and served for three years in the 2nd Minnesota Infantry, a unit he would not have joined unless he was living in that state.
For reasons now forgotten, the veteran came back East sometime after the war and in June 1880 was still a bachelor, working as a carpenter and boarding with a family in Pottstown. One month later he was married in Montgomery County to Melinda Everly, who was born in Ohio. The year 1890 found them in Pottstown with their five sons.
Though Aaron Binder was lucky enough to survive three years of warfare, he died at the relative young age of 56. Melinda faced life as a widow with five boys under the age of 10.
As Billy admitted years later, he wasn’t much for school, so at some point he took a job as a delivery boy for his uncle, John Engle, who had a slaughterhouse at the corner of Chestnut and Washington streets. When one of his customers, a Dr. Milligan of Pottstown, told the boy that he was moving to the West, Billy asked if he would take him along. Milligan pledged that he would send for the young man once he got settled.
Soon after the summons arrived, 14-year-old William was on a train headed for Nebraska. He wound up in the tiny village of Hyannis. There he was, only 14, on his own in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, where the thermometer hit minus-35 degrees in winter and climbed to 110 in summer.
His first job was raking hay on a farm, but before long he was breaking horses for the Sand Hills Cattle Co. It was soon apparent that this young Easterner, was a natural-born rider, and maybe even – a la Robert Redford – a horse whisperer.
Before long, his extraordinary talent became known to area cattleman who hired Binder to help in bronco busting, and he would travel from ranch to ranch breaking in wild mustangs to the saddle.
For a guy with Binder’s talent, it wouldn’t be long before he was riding horses as an entertainer in a rodeo. That day came in 1898, when he entered a rodeo in Hastings, Neb., 250 miles southeast of Hyannis. According to Binder, in addition to winning the bronco riding contest, he won the wild horse race, and took a second in steer roping. This sterling performance earned $280 in prize money, which was more than he could earn breaking horses in a year.
For the next 20 years, with a brief intermission, raising cattle, breaking horses, rodeo competition, and Wild West shows would be Binder’s life. Because his uncle, William J. Binder, owned The Ledger, Pottstown’s weekly newspaper, and The Daily Pottstown Ledger, the transplanted Nebraskan got a lot of local ink.
By 1909, “Bronco Bill” was performing in rodeos in Nebraska and Kansas. In September Binder and characters such as the Kansas Kid, Rattlesnake Pete, and Texas Jack were performing at a “Frontier Days” celebration in Central City, Neb. According to the local paper, the folks loved the show, “And the crowds! Why man! If you want elbow room…you would have had to dig for it.” The reporter noted that “Binder won the wild horse race” and that “He was one of the best riders anywhere, having won second place at Cheyenne and held the championship of this state six years in succession.”
A year later, William Binder had his own Wild West show, including his friend Texas Jack, who was only one of two men able to throw a wild steer with his teeth. On Oct. 1, 1910, he brought his company to Pottstown, where they gave four shows at the Mill Park grounds.
The show traveled by train and included its own string of bucking broncos and steers. The horses, sporting names such as “Corkscrew,” “Dynamite,” Death Valley,” and “Whirlwind,” and advertised as “dangerous” and “widow makers,” seemed to have the same star power as their riders. After playing in Philadelphia and New York City, the entire show spent the winter of 1910-11 at Sanatoga Park.
By the second decade of the 20th century, running a Wild West show had become difficult. The competition was fierce and the development of motion pictures was beginning, except in large cities, to thin out the audiences. In this milieu Binder gave up his show after two years.
In 1914 he and his wife were back in show business, this time with 101 Ranch Show, a large and well-financed production run by the Miller brothers, a family with a ranch of 110,000 acres in Oklahoma. The Millers hired some really big names, including Buffalo Bill Cody, Geronimo, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and Bill Pickett. In this company, the Binders were not headliners, but they were good enough to be part of this star-studded troupe.
Binder was with the 101 Ranch Show for two years. Then it was back to ranching and horse breaking until the spring of 1917 when he returned to the road with a Wild West show run by Buffalo Bill’s adopted son. When the company reached Massachusetts, America was involved in World War I, and Binder tried to join the Army to “hog tie the Kaiser.”
But at the age of 36 he was deemed a little too long in the tooth for fighting. However, because of his horse handling talent, he did join the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry as a horse trainer and spent the next three years in Allston, Mass.
Following his discharge in 1920, Billy headed back to ranching in Nebraska.
In 1928 it appeared Binder would have a shot in the movies. An Aug. 18 article in The Ledger noted that he was in Pottstown with his family for a brief visit, and that they were on their way to Hollywood, where Binder would “enter the moving picture game.”
Binder’s connection was none other than the famous western movie star Tom Mix. Bill and Tom became acquainted on the Wild West show and rodeo circuit and were, according to The Ledger, “intimate friends.” The Binders drove clear across the country to Hollywood, but his movie career was nipped in the bud by the advent of talking pictures. In 1927 the premier of “The Jazz Singer” sounded the death knell for silent films. Tom Mix, a silent movie star, was finished and all of his people, including Binder, were laid off.
Though out of the movies, Binder went back on the road with the Al G. Barnes Circus. But years of riding bucking broncs and non-stop traveling must of have taken their toll on the 47-year-old horseman. In 1929 he retired from the circuit and went back to ranch work and breaking horses.
The newspaper stories and records of Binder’s life make it obvious that he was a bit of a rolling stone. In 1921 his was living in Hudson, N.Y. In 1928 he and his family lived in Kennebunk, Maine, and in the 1930s he lived on a ranch in Montana. During World War II he lived in Honesdale in northern Pennsylvania and by 1965 he had been living in Southborough, Mass., for some time.
William Binder lived into his 93rd year, dying in Northborough, Worcester County, Mass., on April 4, 1973, about as far geographically and culturally as he could be from his Sand Hills of Nebraska.
