“Pete was a character. He taught fiddle lessons
at the shop. As a neighbour, he was great. We
got a kick out of him because he was very
cowboyish and could tell the old stories.”
A
“He was pretty funny,” she says. “Pete was
a character. He taught fiddle lessons at the
shop. As a neighbour, he was great. We got
a kick out of him because he was very cowboyish and could tell the old stories.”
Mullaney ran a barbering school in town,
as well as schools in Regina and Winnipeg.
Among his students were his sons
Deryle and Doyle and their friends
Dallas Dorchester and Tom Glass.
Glass was 16 when he entered
into Mullaney’s barbering school.
“We were young kids, kinda
wild and loose, but Pete helped
us see the straight and narrow,”
Glass says. “He was a great guy
to me, treated me like a son
and was really good to me.”
Glass knew Mullaney from
years before, when the barber drove pony wagons with
Glass’s father Ronnie.
“I just decided to try
something different, didn’t like
school much,” Glass says. “Pete’s son, Der-
yle, he was a friend of mine, and he went
to Texas a year in between the school. We
were driving pony wagons and doing the
barber school in the meantime for some-
thing to do.”
Mullaney graduated over 1,000 students
in about 11 years at his barbering schools.
In between haircuts, Mullaney somehow
found the time to get married (he and wife
Florence separated in the ‘60s), have kids,
and become a major player on the chuck-
wagon circuit. His son Doyle, a well-known
chuckwagon driver and veterinarian, was
born in 1944 and still lives in the Okotoks
area where he runs the Big Rock Animal
Clinic on McRae Street. Deryle, born two
years later, in 1946, is also involved in the
horse business from his home in Didsbury,
where he trains race horses. Mullaney also
had two other sons, Maurice and Marvin, with
Florence.
He got started in chuckwagon racing in
1947, when he met a guy by the name of Cliff
Claggett, according to chuckwagon historian
Billy Melville. Claggett was a chuckwagon pro-
moter, who took his show, aptly named Cliff
Claggett’s Wild West Show and Chuckwagon
Races, on tour through Eastern Canada and
the United States.
“(Chuckwagon racing) was fun,” Mullaney
says. “I loved the horses, and I carried my
school canvas on it — a white canvas, and a
red, white and blue barber pole.”
While on the chuckwagon circuit, Mullaney
kept his fiddle close at hand, entertaining
outriders with jigs, waltzes or polkas.
In 1954, Mullaney won the Canadian Championships. In 1957, he won in Winnipeg. In
1966, he won the World Championships. And
he’s got the belt buckles to prove it. In 1995,
the World Professional Chuckwagon Association honoured Mullaney with a special award.
