Twice-Crowned World Champ Living High on the Hog

By ALLAN TURNER
Houston Chronicle

LITTLEFIELD - It's 5 a.m., and the rosy fingers of dawn are snug in the ebony glove of a country night. Here and there, a light glows from a farmhouse window. Somewhere in the distance, an engine coughs to life.

The farm animals begin to stir, the roosters consider crowing. Then, out of the vast darkness cloaking rural Lamb County comes the nasal shriek:

"Soo-ey! Here hawg! Here hawg!

"Onk-onk-gree-onk!"

Roxanne Ward - the world's twice-crowned hog-calling champion - is awake and on the job.

"If the wind is not blowing, you can hear me for five miles," she boasted. "If the wind is blowing, you can hear me for two miles - depending on where you are. But with a microphone I'm totally awesome."

Since February 1995, when she first won top honors in the Weatherford, Okla., world championship, the 40-year-old Littlefield secretary's life has been transformed. The daughter of an itinerant farm worker who had spent her life in cozy but drab farm communities, Ward now rubs shoulders with the rich, famous and glamorous.

Barefoot, attired in overalls and straw hat, a red ribbon tied on her toe for good luck, she has appeared on "Good Morning America" and nationally syndicated television talk shows. She and her husband, Joe, an auto mechanic, have taken their first airplane trips. Their TV hosts have rolled out Hollywood's reddest carpet: limos, $600-a-night hotel rooms with maids who turn down your bed, hot tubs, photos with the stars.

Ward is the host of her own video, "Learn to Call Hogs with Roxanne Ward," and has cut a not-yet-released record, "The Night of the Cajun Hog Trot."

And almost every morning she is awakened by disc jockeys from around the globe who just want to hear her dulcet calls. Businessmen are courting her endorsements; networks are negotiating for additional television appearances.

Wherever she goes - from Littlefield's only Mexican restaurant to a jet airliner at 32,000 feet to a hospital gurney awaiting surgery - Ward is beseeched to cut loose with a gut-tingling hog call.

Such dizzying celebrity might overwhelm the less well-grounded.

But Ward, who has known her share of hardship, has remained hog humble.

Today, just as they have for 15 years, Ward and her family live in a tiny brown and white farmhouse just off FM 1075 midway between Anton and Littlefield. "I've lived here longer than any place I have in my entire life," she said, "and I plan to stay. They're going to have to carry me out of here."

The house is filled to bursting with pig art - photographs, ceramic figurines, drawings, knitted samplers, pig-shaped mirrors - and Ward herself is bedecked with pig jewelry. Her clothing often features pig designs.

"The only article of clothing I don't have pigs on is my bra," she said. "I just haven't been able to find a pig bra yet."

Outside, a yard full of dogs is dominated by the head hog - in fact, the only hog -in residence: Farnsworth Burgess Ward, a 4-1/2-year-old, Oreo-eating pot-bellied pig whose fat hangs like saddlebags off his sides and rump.

Ward allowed, "I'm not the only person who lives here or I would have more hogs."

But the issue is academic. "I couldn't keep them around anyway because Farnsworth is jealous. He'd run them off. He doesn't like children, either, or strangers in general. He'll open his mouth and show his tusks and charge you. He'll scare the fire out of you, but he can't hurt you. He's too fat."

So demanding of attention is Farnsworth that should Ward be occupied elsewhere in his domain - planting geraniums in her garden, say - he will seek certain revenge.

"He'll eat the flowers," Ward sighed. "He won't do anything while I'm planting them. He'll just watch me. But when I leave, he goes to work. When I get back, the flowers will all be uprooted. They'll just be laying there."

Farnsworth is Ward's most-called hog, a patient pawn to her high-decibel practice sessions.

Ward estimates she won 25 lesser hog-calling championships before working up the nerve to enter the big Oklahoma contest in 1995 and again last February. "The first time, about 16 years ago, it was a little county contest. I thought, 'I can do that. I can't win a beauty contest, but I can do that.'
"I won first place. There was so much clapping, I just loved it."

Ward credited her world championship wins, in part, to the seriousness she brought to the art of hog calling.

"They had entries from all over, but a lot just weren't serious," she said. "An entrant from New York just came on and said, 'Yo, pig!' Another woman pulled a butcher knife and started calling, real sinister-like, 'Here piggy! Here piggy!' I think the judges appreciated that I was a serious candidate."

Ward has a country woman's intuitive understanding of animals.

"They are very smart and intelligent animals," she said of hogs. "You can almost understand what they're thinking. They smile. You can tell when they're mad, tell when they're hungry.

"They make different sounds -they grunt, oink, snort. When they run and jump and make a certain snort sound, they're happy. When they're sad, they make a deep grunt. They lie down. You can tell from their facial expressions.

"I do eat pork. But not if I know the hog. I will go to the store to buy pork chops. But I don't eat my friends."

A Nebraska native, Ward said she first sought the company of hogs to escape her three younger sisters.

"They were afraid of hogs," she said. "My parents never had to worry about where I was - they knew I was down in the hog pens. I related to the hogs very well."

Before she was 16, Ward and her family had lived in Nebraska, both Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and Arizona.

"Once," she said, "we lived in four different houses in six months. My father was a jack of many trades and we followed the wheat harvests. We went from Canada to the Texas Panhandle every year."

Ward dropped out of high school - she later obtained an equivalency diploma - and married young. That marriage brought her two children, but ended in divorce.

Fifteen years ago, she married Joe, a man she calls "the love of my life."

But trouble followed.

On a honeymoon trip to Ruidoso, N.M., Ward lost control of her pickup, which overturned five times. "It rolled over on me, breaking both legs and crushing my pelvis."

At first, doctors thought she would die, then that she would never walk again. They were wrong on both counts, although over the years Ward twice has been fitted with an artificial hip as a result of her injuries.

It was while awaiting the second hip replacement that Ward began to appreciate the fame her national championship has brought her.

"I was lying there waiting for the operation to begin," she said, "when the anesthesiologist insisted that I cut loose with a hog call, right there in the operating room.

"I did, and the first thing you know, nurses and doctors were running in there from all over the hospital."

Here Ward interrupted her tale with knee-slapping, rollicking laughter.

"They must've thought," she sputtered, "they must've thought they'd begun the operation without first knocking me out!"