While growing up in Colorado, Melinda Shaffer attended the National Western Stock Show every year. She remembers the excitement she felt as a child, walking past the show horses wearing her cowgirl skirt and boots, hand-in-hand with her parents.

As a teenager, Shaffer joined the Westernaires and rode horses in the show and now as an adult, she has volunteered with the Stock Show for 16 years straight.

“It’s woven through the whole fabric of my life,” Shaffer said. “When I married my husband in 2010, I told him that part of his marriage vows was that he needed to volunteer at National Western too.”

Shaffer, like many other volunteers, has turned her lifelong love for the National Western Stock Show into an annual position where she works to keep the show running.

Since 2004, 59-year-old Shaffer has volunteered for two weeks in January every year on top of her full-time job, serving as a ticket taker, usher, information booth worker and anything else the Stock Show needs.

“I absolutely love it. It’s just part of what I do,” Shaffer said. “It’s been part of my life and part of my heritage as long as I can remember.”

Volunteer Mike Searle was born and raised in Colorado, like his father and his son and grandson after him. He had started going to the Stock Show as a child, making the trip to Denver from his mountain town each year with his dad.

He eventually started volunteering for the Stock Show in 2016 when he retired. Searle said, when setting up for the horses challenge that first year, he walked into the middle of the arena of the coliseum that he had spent so many years as a spectator in.

As he stood, Searle remembered sitting in the seats as a child and the stories his dad told him about riding bulls in the Stock Show in his day.

“It’s something I won’t forget,” Searle said. “The feeling of standing in that coliseum.”

In his years as a volunteer, Searle has worked in check-in, livestock, gator driving and now as a year-round liaison, responsible for 450 other volunteers.

Searle said he loves volunteering because it allows him to feel like he’s making a difference in the lives of those around him and in the success of the Stock Show that means so much to him and the community.

“It’s Colorado history,” Searle said. “It’s something that’s always been here and it’s something to be proud of.”

Volunteers Dick and Sharon Lynch agree, calling volunteering with the Stock Show a way to give back to the community.

The husband and wife duo have been volunteering with the Stock Show for 19 years, saying they will continue to volunteer as long as they can stand on two feet.

“It’s a time to be a part of presenting our heritage to the public,” said Sharon, 83.

“And it’s a time to make our own contribution to the history of Colorado,” said Dick, 80.

The pair have spent most of the last two decades volunteering with the junior livestock program and have sponsored a Catch-A-Calf kid each year since 2011, a program where children can catch a calf, care for it and return it a year later as a market steer.

Besides just contributing to the show, the Lynches said they keep coming back to volunteer because of the sense of community within the Stock Show.

“We’re a very close-knit family even though we don’t always see each other much more than once a year,” Sharon said.

“Most everybody who attends the Stock Show is very happy to be there,” Dick said. “We go through one whole season of Stock Show and never meet any grumps.”

As the Stock Show went all virtual this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the family of volunteers has been left with a two-week-long void in their January.

Shaffer and Searle said they have been reminiscing by looking through videos and photos from previous years’ shows. The Lynches said they’ve been keeping track of what tasks they would have been doing each day if the in-person Stock Show was running.

Though the pandemic has made many things uncertain, one thing is clear: the love of the volunteers has not faded and they will be ready and willing when the Stock Show returns.

“We’ll be back,” Shaffer said. “Bigger and better.”