Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 23, 1994 TAG: 9406280019
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
John Payne's mouth earned him a pile of money.
One look at this 40-year-old Oklahoma cowboy's incarnation as the One Armed Bandit tonight during the Roanoke Valley Horse Show at the Salem Civic Center and you'll know why.
Payne saw a crummy rodeo act one night, mouthed off to the booking agent about what he thought of it and found himself in the show the next year.
`` ... I could have been more entertaining than that running naked through the ring,'' he said.
Payne had to have a better plan than that, but he didn't.
The Lord would provide, he believed.
``I've had obstacles throwed up in front of me all my life,'' he said. ``I'm patient, though. I've learned to think about them until I can figure out a way to overcome them.''
Such is the outlook of one who learned to live with an artificial right arm tucked into his belt so it wouldn't get in the way. Clean up to the shoulder, the arm is gone , the result of a mishap at age 20.
Payne was working as an electrician. He didn't know an awful lot about the power business, but he did know the difference between a live wire and a dead one.
He feared not that day he climbed that pole to work on a wire he believed had the juice cut off.
He was wrong..
``Grabbed right ahold of 7,200 volts,'' Payne said.
Anybody who knows electricity knows a man who latches onto a live wire isn't going to be letting go. Payne didn't as he flopped around, 20 feet off the ground, for 10 seconds or so. That was how long it took for the current to burn most of the flesh off his right arm. That was the only way he was able to release that wire.
Doctors who saw him later aren't sure of the sequence of events. Either the 10 seconds being hooked up to all that juice killed him and the subsequent 20-foot fall got his heart going again, or he survived the shock only to be killed by the fall.
Either way, they're sure he was as dead as dead can be for a while.
Payne doesn't remember much but a sensation of rain falling on his face. That and somebody trying to beat the tar out of him.
``What the hell are you doing?'' he asked, sitting up.
One of his buddies from the line crew was crying and the tears were dripping on Payne's face as he desperately tried to administer CPR. Later, the poor guy liked to beat the stuffings out of him in an attempt to thump his chest and get his heart going again.
Payne wasn't out of the woods yet, though. He knew by taking a brief inventory. His arm and part of his leg were badly burned. Plus, there was this big hole in his side where the current had exited.
``I just knew I was going to die,'' Payne said. ``I'd seen animals on the ranch get up into a fence and get tore all to pieces and die from the injuries. I was tore up a whole lot worse than that.''
But he didn't die.
Instead, he learned to be a one-armed cowboy.
Then, he had to come up with a rodeo act.
``I had a lot of sleepless nights after that,'' he said.
Bit by bit, it came together. At first, Payne decided he'd herd four longhorn steers into a gooseneck trailer with nothing more than a good quarter horse, a bullwhip and a pack of yipping Florida Cur Head dogs.
This notion, he soon dismissed. Not dramatic enough. Hang herding those steers into the trailer; any drugstore cowhand could do that. He was going to drive those longhorns right up on top of that trailer.
The One Armed Bandit & Company was born.
Still, the act - ``a demonstration'' is what he likes to call it - took some refining. That's what he was doing one day when his father, a lifelong rancher, paid him a visit.
Payne's horse and dogs were worn out; the steers had busted the fence and run off; the hood and roof of Payne's truck had huge dents in them where uncooperative cows (they didn't want to climb on top of that trailer) had stampeded; and Payne - whipped - was lying on the busted fence.
The elder Payne surveyed the scene and said: ``You know, when you got electrocuted, they said that there might have been some brain damage.''
After a couple of initial missteps (Payne and his horse fell unharmed from the top of the trailer, for one), the show took off.
Five years in a row, Payne has been the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association's specialty act of the year.
Said he: ``I'm just about as big a star as I want to be right now.''
by CNB