Leon Coffee, 2 others inducted into Bandera Hall of Honor

“I am so overwhelmed,” Kaiser said.

She thanked everyone who’s helped her along the way.

“I feel very honored by the life I’ve had, and I give all credit to God,” Kaiser said.

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Leon Coffee, who has been a bullfighting clown for more than 40 years and has broken more than 140 bones, recounted the first time he realized being a bullfighting clown might be an option for him.

He’d been watching some rodeo cowboys practicing, and the guy in charge asked him to go in and try distracting the bull from the cowboys, which is one of the main purposes of a rodeo clown. The man told him that all he had to do was “run fast and act goofy.”

“They kicked me out of school for that, and you’re going to pay me?” Coffee said, spurring laughter from the standing-room-only crowd.

In addition to other rodeos, Coffee has performed at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo since 1983.

Inducted posthumously into the Texas Heroes Hall of Honor was Irish immigrant Mary McGroarty, who disembarked from the Queen Mary at Ellis Island in 1951 at the age of 26. She and her husband ran the M. Boyle Mercantile General Store and later the Old Spanish Trail Restaurant, or OST, in Bandera.

“Mary’s devotion to St. Stanislaus was deep as she prepared the altar with Mary Stein for several decades and through her work in the church’s food pantry,” according to a news release from the museum. “Her love of history came through in her work to help establish the Bandera County Historical Commission with Margie Langford. Mary was instrumental in installing the county’s first historical marker at the old First State Bank on 11th Street in Bandera, a building Mary and Patrick once lived in with their sons, James and Patrick.”

McGroarty’s son, James, accepted the award on her behalf.

“She would help anyone, anytime, any day,” he said of his mother.

He told a humorous story about taking his mother to see a justice of the peace after she was accused of running a stop sign.

“‘There used to not be a stop sign there. … I’ve been running that stop sign for 65 years,’” he quoted her as saying to the judge.

McGroarty was described as being just as proud of her Irish heritage as she was of being a Texan and Bandera resident.

“In my mother’s name, thank you very much,” her son told the assemblage.