She'll Always Be
the Queen of
the Rodeo
By Diane Booth Conway,
Merced County Fair Publicity Director
Press Archive: 6/29/2002
Born with clubfeet, Dottie Greer wore leg braces that kept her from running with the other children, but when she was on a horse she’d ride like the wind.
"I spent a lot of time on horses," she said. Her skills on horseback won her the title of Merced County Rodeo Queen in 1941 when she was 17 years old. Dorothy "Dottie" Fragie Greer, now 78, was the first to hold that title.
The oldest daughter of Violet and Lewis Fragie of Merced, Dottie didn’t have heels on her feet and wore braces up to her knees until she was 13. She couldn’t walk fast enough to keep up with the other kids.
Then she discovered riding horses. For her fifth birthday a family friend gave her a Shetland pony and the little girl was hooked on horses. Her mother signed her up for tap dancing lessons to help strengthen her ankles.
Nothing seemed to stop Greer from doing what she wanted to do. While a sophomore at Merced High School, back when it was on G Street, she became the first female cheerleader at the campus.
At 16, she was the only girl to ride a broncing calf at the Merced County Fair’s Rodeo. "I was very much a tomboy," she said. "I hunted and fished and rode horses." The daredevil teen-ager broke her collarbone while attempting to perform a stunt on her palomino stallion, Golden Pride.
Although she has packed a lot of living into her seven plus decades, she’s not one to dwell on her past accomplishments.
In fact, it wasn’t until a newspaper article about the 2001 Merced County Fair Rodeo Queen competition appeared last summer, that Greer’s family learned she had been the fair’s first rodeo queen.
Her niece, Michele Gabriault saw the story about the fair’s Rodeo Committee bringing back the Merced County Fair’s Rodeo Queen contest after several years and struck up a conversation with her Aunt Dottie about it. "I never knew she had been the Rodeo Queen until we started talking about the rodeo reviving the rodeo queen contest," she said.
The Rodeo Queen Contest at the 2001 Fair, put on by the Merced County Fair and the Rodeo Committee, was the first in recent history. Five local horsewomen entered the competition and were judged on horsemanship, personality, appearance and stage performance. Judging took place before the rodeo and the winner was announced at the 2001 Merced County Rodeo.
Breanne Christie of Merced will reign as the Merced County Fair Rodeo Queen until the 2002 Rodeo Queen is crowned at the Rodeo on Saturday, July 20, 2002. The new queen will be eligible to compete at the California State Pageant for Queen of the California Cowboys Professional Rodeo Association (CCPRA) and also represent the county and the fair in local parades and public-speaking events.
The year before Dottie Greer won the Merced County Fair Rodeo Queen title, she was named Miss Merced County of 1940. She won that honor after selling more tickets than the other candidates. The daughter of Lewis Fragie, a Merced Police Department captain and Merced’s first motorcycle officer, she said the police, fire and sheriff’s departments all supported her. "I couldn’t lose," she said.
As Miss Merced County, she led the 1940 Merced County Fair’s parade riding on her stallion, Golden Pride. The parade route went down Main Street, now 16th Street, to J Street, now known as Martin Luther King Way, and ended up at the fairgrounds.
On horseback beside her was actor Leo Carrillo. She remembers the Hollywood star was dressed all in black, rode a black horse and both the actor and his horse were covered in beautiful silver jewelry. "I remember he (Carrillo) wore a black leather vest with silver buttons."
The following year, when she was competing for Merced County Fair Rodeo Queen, she and the other contestants demonstrated their horsemanship for the fair’s board of directors.
While the directors sat in the Grandstand reviewing stand they judged the queen hopefuls as they rode around the arena. "They judged us on the way you backed the horse up and walked the horse, the way you got on and off the horse, the way you handled the reins and your posture while sitting in the saddle."
When told the judges were ready to see her performance, Greer threw a simple halter over her horse instead of a bridle, and didn’t put a saddle on Golden Stallion. She rode him bareback over to the judging area.
"I rode to one end of the arena and reared up on the stallion and did the same thing at the other end of the arena," she recalled. After her performance, her father caught up with her and proceeded to yell at her for being so reckless while riding the stallion. "He was very upset that I hadn’t saddled up the horse or put on a proper bridle. He was concerned that with all the mares in the arena and the one stallion, there could have been trouble. Up until then he had never laid a hand on me, but he slapped my face. He told me, ‘You could have been killed.’"
Winning the Rodeo Queen title was a big moment for Dottie Fragie Greer. "I was very excited about becoming the First Rodeo Queen," she said, adding that she was particularly proud of her skill in riding Golden Pride "since no one else could." She also entered the competition in 1942 and won again. "Since I already had won the title they would not award it to me again," she recalled.
In 1941, Golden Pride was the last Palomino Stallion registered in California, according to Greer. "That was because there had been so many stallions that had been bred and they had become so common," she said.
The horse was a beautiful golden color with a white mane and tail. "He almost looked like Gene Autry’s horse, but he was too many hands high," Greer said.
After losing a couple of the family’s horses to sleeping sickness, her father decided it was time to sell Golden Pride. He advertised the stallion in a horse magazine that sold saddles, blankets, shoeing services and other horse-related products. There was a parade of folks who came to check out the horse.
In August 1941, Greer recalled three members of the Japanese cavalry came to the Fragie home to see the horse, kept in the stables in back of their home at Childs Avenue and R Street.
Greer, her mother and two sisters stood on the family’s screened porch watching the three officers dressed in full uniform, examining the horse. But when they got on the horse, Greer said, "They were small people and they were too small for the horse."
That same year, cowboy actor Gene Autry also paid a visit to the Fragie home to inquire about Golden Pride. Wearing a cowboy hat and jeans, Autry arrived at the house in the back of a chauffeur-driven sedan.
When he sat on the horse, the big animal dwarfed the Hollywood star, Greer said. "The horse made him and the Japanese cavalry members look like midgets."
Eventually the stallion was sold to the Vallejo Palomino Stud Farm for $1,500. "That was a lot of money in those days," she said. In 1945, when Dottie was married and pregnant with her first-born son, Jim, she and her father went to the stud farm to visit Golden Pride.
They walked into the corral where the horse was kept and Dottie whistled to the animal. "The horse looked up and ran over to me. He started nudging me on the cheek like a dog would," Greer recalled. A man working at the stud farm yelled at her to get out of the corral before the horse injured her. But Greer wasn’t worried.
"With me he was just like a puppy. I guess he (the horse) was mean to everyone but Jack (his trainer), my Dad and me."
Born and raised in Merced, Greer was the oldest of three girls. Her father was not only captain of the Merced Police Department, but he also wore the badge of sheriff’s deputy, since police officers also served as sheriff’s deputies in those days. Her mother operated a restaurant for a few years and later ran a dress shop.
Her younger sisters, Carol Fragie Gabriault and Carolyn Fragie DeVaurs were born Friday the 13th of August, 1926. They were Merced County’s first set of twins, according to Greer.
"My mother said it was a lucky day. My mother and father thought they were having one baby and instead got two."
After her mother gave birth to Carol, the doctor advised her father that a second baby was on the way. Dottie Greer remembers how her father delivered her sisters’ birth announcement. "My Dad took me in our family car down the street telling everyone about the twins." She still recalls the proud papa honking the horn and yelling out the car window that her mother had just given birth to a girl and her twin was on the way.
Carol Fragie Gabriault, who sat on the fair’s board of directors from 1985 to 1993, served as president in 1991. She also served on the Merced City Council from 1975 to 1983, serving as Mayor Pro Tem for two years. She was the first woman to serve as Merced’s mayor from 1981-83. Married to Bruce Gabriault, Carol died in 2001. Her twin, Carolyn Fragie DeVaurs, who lived with her husband, Robert "Bob" DeVaurs on East 26th Street, died in 1999.
The Fragie family home is still standing, but that’s about all that’s the same, Dottie Greer said. "There was nothing on the other side of our house from 13th Street on. All that was there were wheat and hay fields."
Growing up she recalls when the Merced County Fair’s Rodeo was held at Applegate Park. "All they had were bleachers." She remembers a family, who had a truck garden, owned the property that is now the park. She said the story goes that the family couldn’t pay their taxes so the city took over the land.
As a teen, Greer would roller skate on the sidewalks of 14th Street near the three blocks known as Chinatown where there were restaurants like the Tea Garden and the New China Café.
She and her sisters helped out in their mother’s Mexican food restaurant, now known as the Rice Bowl. "She made everything from scratch, including her own tortillas." The Fragie sisters also worked in the packing sheds during the summers, sorting and packing tomatoes. Later on, their mother ran a women’s clothing store in the Hotel Tioga called the Tioga Dress Shop.
She also remembers when M Street was a two-lane road and G Street was called G Grade and it really was a steep road. "I remember it was high – I can’t remember when they made it flat."
During her teen-age years, she said, "Only two people had cars when I went to high school. You rode bikes or a bus or you walked." In June 1941, Greer graduated from Merced High School during commencement ceremonies at the Merced Theatre. "There weren’t 200 kids in that class," she said.
That summer she took a job at Woolworth’s on 17th Street, working behind the candy counter. "I was paid 16 1/2 cents per hour."
She went to work as a secretary in the provost marshal’s office at Castle Air Base and then got a job as a receptionist at the War Board Office, that was in charge of rationing gas, tires and other items due to the war effort.
In the spring of 1943 she went with a friend to a dance at the Air Base’s Officers’ Club and was introduced to her future husband, Hank Greer, a flight instructor from Kentucky.
The couple dated briefly and were married April 27, 1943, just before Hank Greer, who had volunteered for overseas duty, headed off to Europe.
Dottie Greer’s husband flew P38s, P51s and C17s, among others. "He flew everything the government had," she recalled.
While returning from a mission, her husband’s plane turned up missing. He was trying to fly a battered plane to Vacaville to be used for training. Dottie, who was six months pregnant with the couple’s first child, waited for word about her husband. One night while staying at her parent’s home, the family ran outside when they heard the loud drone of a plane overhead.
It was Hank’s plane flying very low and circling the house. "He was letting us know he was OK," she recalled.
After the war, Hank sold Nashes at the Merced dealership, then headed up the Buick dealership. Dottie worked for Farmer’s Insurance as an antiques appraiser and also ran her own antique shop in the 1960s before the couple moved to Lake Tahoe in 1968. The couple had two sons, Bill and Jim Greer, who live near Sacramento. Bill lives in Granite Bay and Jim’s home is in Carmichael.
For 24 years, the Greers ran a motel and a motel/apartment complex in Lake Tahoe, one off Highway 50 and the other on Heavenly Boulevard. They moved back to Merced in 1992 and Hank Greer died in January 2000.
Trying new things just seems to come naturally to Dottie Fragie Greer. She resumed the flying lessons she’d started as a teenager after her two sons were grown. "I was 55 when I soloed," she said.
Last spring she and a grandson decided to do a little bonding with a bungee jump. She leapt from a tower with a bungee attached to her and made a 180-foot drop at 65 mph before she set the record for being the oldest person to jump at that site.
Not content to stay home and reminisce, Greer recently checked another "to do" off her wish list. She wanted to take a spin on a Harley Davidson motorcycle and did just that. "I thought it was great!" she said. She looks forward to her 79th birthday on July 21, and she’ll celebrate her birthday a day early when she is the special honored guest at the 2002 Merced County Fair’s Rodeo Queen Contest. And she’ll be sticking around to watch the rodeo action.
Top of page
RETURN TO PREVIOUS PAGE
