Rodeo: The Grey Flannel Cowboy

It is one thing for a hockey player to pose for collar ads, for a baseball manager to turn banker, for a track star to get elected to Congress—or even for an ex-boxer to take up 32 lines in Who's Who. But when a rodeo cowboy drifts into town in his own $11,500 airplane, passes up the saloons and heads instead for Howard Johnson's—"because I like the ice cream"—well, respectability has crossed the last frontier.

Any resemblance between Larry Mahan, 23, and the bowlegged characters who worked the oldtime rodeo circuit is purely coincidental. Mahan does not even know how to...