Ocean or mountains? Not a hard call for one Joseph man

Published 1:30 pm Saturday, July 30, 2022

JOSEPH — In a tradition stretching back 76 years, volunteering at the rodeo starts for many at childhood. For Joseph native Max Prout, his first involvement started in Cub Scouts.

“My uncle Wick (Willard) Prout helped start the rodeo,” Prout said. “We would come down and clean up the rodeo grounds and in high school I worked the gates for the bucking chutes.”

For the first 12 years of his life, he and his brother, Gary, grew up in the dam tender’s house at the foot of Wallowa Lake. Their father worked for the Associated Ditch Co. The boys enjoyed access to the lake, learning to swim and boating.

“We had a milk cow, pigs, chickens and a big garden in front of the house — Mom canned everything,” Prout said.

Long retired from military service, Prout said he joined the Navy after graduating from high school during the Vietnam War. After 10 years with the branch, he moved over to the Coast Guard and served another 14 years.

“Growing up in Joseph you could work for a mill, go into logging or ranching or go to college, which was way too expensive. I had the option to go into the military and once you were there, you could get a GI Bill for education,” Prout said.

During his time in the military, Prout said he took advantage of both military education courses as well as correspondence courses.

“I took courses wherever I was stationed,” Prout said. “I have credits from 13 or 14 different colleges.”

Eventually, he said, the credits added up to a bachelor’s degree in general studies.

With the Coast Guard, Prout said he had a variety of experiences from drug interdiction, turning back Haitian refugees in Florida and even protecting George H.W. Bush’s family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

“When I was stationed at Cape Cod our patrol area was from the mouth of Ambrose Light/New York Harbor to the Maine coast and out 200 miles into the Atlantic,” he said.

A military career allowed Prout to retire as a relatively young man and he said goodbye to the oceans where he’d worked and moved back to the West.

“The joke was when we retired we would throw an anchor in the back of a pick up truck and drive until we found a place where no one knew what it was and that’s where you would live,” Prout said. “I saw so much of the oceans I didn’t want to go back — they aren’t as beautiful as our mountains.”

Today, Prout’s medals and commendations are lovingly stored for family history with his daughter, Prout said.

Since retirement, he’s also gained a love of the desert, spending part of the year in Arizona and the warmer months in the Wallowa Valley. Prout also kept very busy working for Oregon Parks and Recreation Department as both a staff member and a camp host in Southern Oregon, Wallowa Lake and Minam state parks.

As he spent more and more time in Wallowa County it wasn’t long before his brother asked him for help managing the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo stagecoach that travels to some of the rodeos the court attends.

“The stagecoach is the best advertisement for the rodeo,” Prout said.

For more than a dozen years Prout helped manage the team of horses and maintain the stagecoach, a labor of love and adherence to a strict checklist that details how the horses are managed and each piece of equipment and tack is connected in the precise order. Caring for two large draft horses and a carriage dating from the late 1800s takes strength and keen attention.

About two years after his brother was handed the reins of the stagecoach and team by Dave Turner, he asked his brother to help — and they had very little time to learn the system and train newly acquired draft horses.