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Allen Brown was 15 years old in 1948 when his father packed his family into a Ford Model A to make the long drive from outside Brandon, Manitoba into Calgary.
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The family left on Saturday afternoon and drove straight through to Sunday evening, eventually arriving at their destination: the Calgary Stampede.
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“I just thought it was the greatest thing I had ever saw,” said Brown, now 90.
“It was something big to me. It’s bigger now, but even then, to a 15-year-old who had never been anyplace, it was just amazing.”
The cross-province trip left quite an imprint on Brown, who made it a point to come back again — and then again, and again, and again.
Stepping foot on Stampede grounds this Saturday marked 75 years since Brown first visited the festival, with only a handful of years missed through the decades.
A lot has changed over those 75 years, both for the Stampede and for him.
Many Stampede staples, like pancake breakfasts, the parade and the rodeo have existed since the 1940s, but other elements like the busy midway and events programming grew alongside the Stampede’s rapid expansion as Calgary’s population ballooned post-war. To give a sense of the magnitude of growth, the Stampede’s attendance was 267,420 in 1944, compared to 1,216,859 in 2022.
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