ANGOLA, La. – The Angola Museum houses photos, publications and videos for visitors about the once infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, but it also employs two people who have lived some of the history displayed.
Bert Dixon, 81, and Ruth Tubbs, 83, have been part of the Angola Prison Rodeo, which opens this Sunday at the maximum security facility 18 miles west of St. Francisville, since the event’s modest beginnings a half century ago.
The first rodeo was in 1964 for inmates and employees.
“They [Angola employees] were doing it on Sunday just to have something to do,” Dixon, who has worked at the facility for most of his life and who lives about two miles from the facility, said. “The parents would come with them and sit on boxes or whatever they could sit on.”
Dixon was born on prison grounds and working for Angola runs in his family. He was employed in 1955 on the “chase team,” which pursued catch escaped prisoners with bloodhounds.
Tubbs, who is still an active employee and lives on the prison grounds, said she and Dixon were friends as well as coworkers.
A year after moving to Angola with her husband, she was hired in 1957 to work the watchtower nightshift. The Oak Grove, La., native said the rodeo started as a way for employees to exercise their horses.
“When it first started, it wasn’t an actual rodeo,” Tubbs said.
“Some of the men that worked here that had quarter horses, and at night they would cut the calves with them.”
Cutting cattle was a popular event in the earlier days, according to Tubbs and Dixon. It involves removing, or cutting, a calf from the herd and using horses to keep it separated for a period of time.
Dixon noted the sport was fun for participants, but “the calf probably didn’t like it too good.”
Angola sits on 18,000 acres of land. Past the guarded entrance, open fields are sprinkled with livestock, industrial buildings and flat-roofed dormitories.
“We’ve always had cattle; we’ve always had horses,” said penitentiary spokesman Gary Young. “So the rodeo was a natural fit.”
Offenders — or “convict cowboys” — are the main participants in the present-day rodeo, but that wasn’t the case until it opened to the public in 1967.
Tubbs said inmates did participate with employees in some events, such as bareback riding, but the rest was handled by staff. Angola employees worked the rodeo after it opened to the public. Dixon directed traffic and served as security with Tubbs.
“It was a job,” Dixon explained.
The inmates also profit from the rodeo in more ways than watching fellow offenders get bucked off cattle.
Angola had a separate arts-and-crafts fair, which wasn’t popular, Dixon said, but after it was incorporated into the rodeo, inmates started earning money from their “hobby crafts.”
Profits from concessions go toward prisoner re-entry and training programs.
Inmates provide or craft almost everything at the Angola prison rodeo, and one exception is the all-female barrel racing competition, which has been around since 1967.
Angola’s total prison population is more than 6,000, double what Dixon and Tubbs managed in the ’60s.
Instead of attending the rodeo, Dixon and Tubbs work at the museum on those Sundays when the public pours into this facility. They sit surrounded by some of the history they witnessed first-hand.
Although Dixon said, “I got enough of it, and I didn’t care to go back.” He and Tubbs believe the rodeo — often called “the wildest show in the South”— is beneficial.
When he was younger, Dixon said Angola was described as a “hell hole,” but the rodeo, among other things, provided inmates with something to do that they enjoyed.
Physically, Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Most inmates don’t get to interact with the outside world except at the semi-annual rodeos. Dixon said that interaction is one reason why the rodeo remains successful.
Dixon said a fullhouse was about 2,000 people when he started working the rodeos. Now, the rodeo and craft fair see approximately five times that number.
“A lot of it is just seeing all the people there,” Dixon said. “A lot of the free people come to see them [the inmates] and talk to them.”
Tubbs believed it gives inmates hope.
“(The rodeo) was a desire to be able to do more in a prison than just work here,” Tubbs said.

Gallery • 1 Photos

Javier Fernández

Ruth Tubbs and Bert Dixon, who work at the Angola prison museum, were part of the original rodeo staff when it began 50 years ago.