![]() ![]() I remember driving him all over to bodybuilding competitions, buying him tanning creams, and so on. When he was in high school, he got interested in bodybuilding, and right away he decided he was going to be Mr. Growing up in the small town of Greenhills, Ohio, Bobbie always wanted to be famous and he always wanted to have a lot of money. ![]() “My wife and I did not set out to raise a Naked Cowboy. “Well, it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight,” Kenny Burck replied. “How did your son get to be the Naked Cowboy?” the keynote speaker asked. Not a lot of fathers can say that about their son, can they?” Recently, a New York tourism bureau announced that the Naked Cowboy is the third leading tourist attraction in New York City, after the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. That’s right, people sometimes don’t believe me, but the Naked Cowboy is Robert Burck, my son, born December 23, 1970. Well, speaking of family, the Naked Cowboy is my son. At one time or another, anybody who passes through Times Square sees the Naked Cowboy. He’s the fellow who stands in his underwear and cowboy hat and boots playing the guitar in the middle of Times Square. Now, I believe I read in your speaker’s bio that you live in New Jersey, not far from New York? Well, maybe you’ve seen this fellow the Post put on the cover-the Naked Cowboy. It’s a copy of the New York Post from last winter, and you see the headline, ‘ SNOW JOKE,’ which refers to a big snowstorm they had in the city. “Here is something I brought to show you. ![]() Well, the Listermanns were good, obedient Catholics, while the Burcks were Protestants, you see. Now, my mother’s family, the Listermanns, happened to be Roman Catholics, and the first Listermann couple came to near Cincinnati in 1841, and that one couple has over ten thousand descendants today. My Burck ancestors in America came to Cincinnati in 1866-everybody I’m descended from since then was a Cincinnati German-and from that one pioneer couple there are over thirty-two hundred descendants today. I’ve traced the Burcks back to 1560 in northern Baden, in Germany. Burck, semi-retired, a large man with the looks of a hazel-eyed, towheaded boy, took his seat on the dais at the Golden Anniversary Banquet of the Ohio Genealogical Society at a resort hotel in Huron, Ohio, and, turning to the keynote speaker, who was on his right, asked, “How many other people do you know named Ian, besides yourself? Is that getting to be a more common name these days? It’s Scottish for John, right? Now, my last name, Burck, people sometimes think is the English Burke, with an ‘e,’ but it’s not, it’s German, and there should be an umlaut over the ‘u,’ but of course we don’t use umlauts in America. The Naked Cowboy Illustration by Tom Bachtell ![]()
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