Stand at the rail at Stampede Park on a July evening and look out at the infield, where the barrels sit in the grass waiting for four wagons to cut a figure eight around them before the long run to the track. The barrels have hardly changed in half a century. What went missing from that scene, in the summer of 2008, was a sound.
For 45 years, by the reckoning of the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, the Rangeland Derby began with Joe Carbury’s voice rising over the grandstand to tell people what they were already leaning forward to see. His call, “And they’re off,” became so bound to those evenings that for a generation of Calgarians the words and the dust arrived together, like thunder and the smell of rain.
He left the microphone that July. He died in Calgary on October 17, 2017, at 91, and this is the ninth Stampede since his death.
Key facts
- Joe Carbury retired from calling the Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races in July 2008 after 45 years, according to his Alberta Sports Hall of Fame member profile.
- The Alberta Sports Hall of Fame inducted Joe Carbury in 2003, citing a radio sports career that began in 1948 with the Medicine Hat Tigers junior hockey club.
- Joe Carbury called more than 25,000 thoroughbred horse races and more than 1,000 hockey games over his career, according to the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame.
- Joe Carbury died in Calgary on October 17, 2017, at age 91, as recorded by the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame.
Where the voice was made before Calgary knew it
The career did not begin under grandstand lights. It began in 1948 in Medicine Hat, where a young sportscaster called junior hockey for the Tigers, one winter game after another, the kind of work that teaches a voice to carry across a cold rink and hold a listener who cannot see the ice. From there the road ran through football, with the Edmonton Eskimos and the Calgary Stampeders, and through boxing and curling and the amateur games that fill a small city’s weekends.
Then came the horses, more than 25,000 thoroughbred races by the Hall of Fame’s count, each one needing a start and a finish and someone to name the horses in between.
That number deserves a moment. By our arithmetic, 25,000 races spread over roughly half a century comes to about 500 a year, close to ten a week, in rain and in heat, long before the Stampede arrived each July to set the same voice in front of the biggest crowd of the year. The famous call was built out of thousands of ordinary afternoons that nobody remembers.
Why one announcer became part of the Stampede itself
A voice that familiar stops being heard as a man and starts being heard as a season. Children who sat in the grandstand beside their parents grew up and brought their own children, and the start of the race sounded the same both times. That kind of continuity is rare in a city that has changed as fast as Calgary.
Alberta recognized it early. His Hall of Fame induction came in 2003, five summers before he retired, which is unusual. Honours tend to arrive after the work is finished, and his arrived while he still had the microphone in his hand.
The track keeps its memory in people more than in buildings. This site marked the loss of chuckwagon driver Tom Glass only weeks ago, and the same truth holds for the men who named the drivers as they came round the last turn. Their work lives in recordings, in the files of a hall of fame in Red Deer, and in families who still imitate the call at the supper table.
What the grandstand keeps after the voice is gone
Nothing about this story is a complaint against time. Voices pass, and someone else now calls the start, as someone should. The only real loss would come from neglect, from recordings left unlabelled in a box, from a generation that hears the name and cannot place it.
The Stampede changes every year in ways a returning visitor notices, new rides on the midway, new names on the boards, a food stand where an old one used to be. The Rangeland Derby still starts the way it did when he called it, with the wagons at the barrels and the crowd waiting on the horn.
On the last night of this year’s Stampede, the lights will come up over the infield, the outriders will stand at their horses’ heads, and for one held breath before the horn the whole grandstand will go still, the way it always went still for him.
