Behind The Scenes With Roxann Hart: A Look At The Woman Who Created Rohara, by Mary Kirkman

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Behind The SceneS wiTh

Roxann Hart

A Look AT The womAn who creATed rohArA

by MARY KIRKMAN

If you have been in Arabian horses for very long, you probably have heard of Rohara, the Florida-based farm which wins at any show it attends. It has been doing that for most of its 46 years in the business, and notably, it wins in both halter and performance, sometimes with the same horses. Roxann Hart, its guiding light, believes in that.

From the beginning, Hart has been the force behind Rohara. She would quickly include her husband, Karl, and it’s true that in this case, behind a successful woman is a good man. (She recalls that her first question after accepting Karl’s marriage proposal was, “Can I keep my horses?” Fortunately, he knew better than to say no. That was in 1968; the pair haven’t looked back since.) But it is Roxann who has studied bloodlines for half a century, who has a certain intuition for future superstars, and who has fulfilled a vision that grew way beyond what she could have conceived as an only child growing up with her animals as playmates.

Not surprisingly, Hart can be perceived now as an international businesswoman, one who holds her own in the competitive high echelons of the Arabian world—easily recognized, but perhaps not quite so easily known.

It might even be argued that unless you go to Rohara, where she and Karl have lived since moving their operation from Miami in the early 1980s, you might never get a glimpse of the real Roxann Hart. At home, she will talk horses, no question. But she will also give you chapter and verse on Limpy, the Canada goose.

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“Of all the places in the world I’ve been—which is to say, most of the great breeders of the world— there is one place that is the most magical and mystical, and that’s Rohara,” says Walter Mishek, who has visited the 150-acre property in the horse country north of Ocala. “It is incredibly beautiful, with an ambiance that is befitting the quality of the incredible horses that are there.” He pauses dramatically. “The only thing that needs to go are the geese!” (Mishek contends that geese lack the courtesy of ducks, who “do their business” in the lake, not on the lawn.)

Hart dismisses such heresy. Known for the natural beauty of the thousand oak trees which provide shade for the horses when temperatures rise, Rohara is home to all kinds of wildlife. “I must have 50 species of bird life,” she says, “a lot of them endangered species. We have turkeys, nesting bald eagles, pileated woodpeckers, scissor-tailed kites, wood storks, ospreys and great herons. Gorgeous sandhill cranes come through here (they will even drink out of the tall water troughs, they’re such big birds). There is enough acreage here that I think they know they’re protected. And deer and endangered fox squirrels—it’s like living on a nature preserve. In any given day, I will see unusual wildlife.”

A landmark event at the farm came when a pair of bald eagles moved into a tree near the main barn. “We watched them build a nest,” recalls Hart, “and then we kept waiting and waiting, until we finally heard the baby—they only raised one—but it was way cool. We watched it until it got big enough to take its first flight. It was amazing.”

“She wants to make sure that what the birds consider their environment, which is our work environment, is undisturbed,” observes trainer Joe Alberti, who with four years on staff is one of the relative newcomers to the farm. He’s known Hart since 1991, though, so none of this is a surprise. “We’ll do what we have to do, move horses or whatever, to make sure that they are.”

Among the exotics, Limpy is special. She arrived as a day-old fluff ball in a box with five others, a gift from Hart’s friend Dean Wikel. When the little gosling was injured, Hart nursed her back to health and now, at 11, she lives on the pond near the main house. “I can call her from anywhere in the pastures,” Hart reports, “and she finds me and comes.”

Where does this affinity for the earth’s other creatures come from?

Hart is matter-of-fact. “When I was a child, I had my dogs and cats and horses, and the animals were like friends,” she says. “That’s what I attribute it to.”

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“Of all the places in the world I’ve been—

which is to say, most of the great breeders of the world—there is one place that is the most magical and mystical, and that’s Rohara.”

- Walter Mishek

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What has distinguished Roxann Hart over the years has been that her eye for a horse has not only been true, but has evolved with the Arabian breed. The horses that emerge from Rohara now are not the same as the ones who made its name in the late 1970s, but now as then, they are at the forefront of the industry.

For Hart, explanations don’t come easily. “I seem to always be drawn to horses that are ahead of their time,” she finally offers. “Ivanhoe Tsultan was considered a backyard horse because he was not pure Polish or straight this or that, but he created his own dynasty and he was able to sire what he represented. He really showed that genotype has to meet phenotype and has to produce on. Sometimes you don’t really judge a stallion until you get a couple of generations down, and Tsultan was able to maintain the things people loved him for through several generations.”

It was the horses who would offer Hart her life’s work.

Today, when people speculate that she enjoys success as an amateur handler because she has in-house trainers John Rannenberg and Joe Alberti, she just laughs. The trainers have long lists of clients who typically come first.

Hart started early in horses. She was taking equitation lessons on Saddlebreds when she was 4, and rode an array of breeds before falling in love with Arabians. In those days, most people didn’t have trainers, she notes, so she trained and showed her own horses. “When Buck Grass was a big halter trainer down here, I’d be peeking around the palm trees watching. Or at Nationals, I’d stay up until 2 a.m. to watch people like Gene LaCroix or Sheila Varian, just to watch the great ones, to see if I could learn something by observation.” She regained her amateur card in1974, but even then, after she and Karl employed a trainer, she showed her own horse when the professional was engaged with a client’s.

From the beginning, it was the breeding program which had her heart. She remembers her first dose of reality— the first time she set eyes on the kind of standards that would come to define Rohara. It was 1970, on her initial visit to U.S. Nationals. “The first horse I saw when I got there was *Aramus,” she says, “and I thought, ‘I’ve never seen a horse like that in my life.’ When I saw the stallion class, I was star struck—and I had owned Arabians for quite a while! But that was a different ballgame. I thought, ‘I’ve got a long way to go.’”

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Ivanhoe Tsultan was the first of several stallions that Hart says she “backed into.” “I’d bought Eminee, an *Aramus daughter, in foal to Tsultan. Her first foal was a national champion mare and her second foal was a national reserve champion—and I’d never seen the stallion!” So she and Karl traveled to see him “in the dead of winter,” when he had so much hair that she could hardly tell what he looked like. But the foals she saw exhibited the same quality she had come to know, so she leased him, and eventually purchased and syndicated him.

Another was JK Amadeus and still another was QR Marc, purchased in partnership with R. Kirk Landon and subsequently sold to Knocke Arabians in Belgium. He too was ahead of his time, and he personified another principle she has come to live by. “These stallions are on the cusp of becoming great,” she says. “If you don’t move, you won’t get them.” She saw Marc, then about 8 months old, on a laptop at the U.S. Nationals in Albuquerque and was on a plane for California the next day. “We barely made it,” she recalls.

“There were people coming in the drive as I made the deal.”

“I think you need to see a minimum

of 2,000 to 2,500 horses a year. Is that hard to do? No. You can go to some farms, go to Scottsdale, go to Nationals and you’ve got it.”

- Roxann Hart And you have to accept, she adds, that when you buy them that young, great as they are, there is a risk factor. You have to wait to see if they mature to their promise.

No matter how intuitive you are, the more knowledge you have, the better off you are, she says. “I think you need to see a minimum of 2,000 to 2,500 horses a year. Is that hard to do? No. You can go to some farms, go to Scottsdale, go to Nationals and you’ve got it.

“With Montana Firenze, on top of seeing his babies, I had seen almost every single horse on his tail female line and owned some of them. I’d bred to his sire and grandsire, and to *GG Samir and Bluesprucetanzeer, who are on the bottom, and I’ve had five *Eukaliptus daughters. So, I formed a partnership with a friend to buy him; I remember that when he said we would buy him, I was sitting in a Publix parking lot and the next day I was on a plane.”

Her latest venture, another with R. Kirk Landon, is Pavorotto KA, a QR Marc son who is already a gold champion in Europe.

Trainer John Rannenberg has observed Hart’s intuition and the role it has played in Rohara’s record over the years. “Life is about making choices, whatever road we take,” he says.

“Managing a farm and directing a business is about those choices. When she’s buying a horse, she doesn’t have to dwell on a decision; she can make one quickly and she has the ability to recognize greatness and act on it.”

Selling is part of success too, Hart notes. “You have to sell your good horses and be proud of it; I’ll sell horses that will go out and beat my horses. People come to me because I have good horses—that’s very important me. You’ll see my horses as foundation stock for farms all over the world. That’s what gives me intense pleasure, that I’m making a contribution. It may sound naïve, but I feel that. That’s what I want to do.”

Another invaluable technique in spotting talent, Hart says, is knowing enough about the principle of form to function to spot when a conformation flaw can be ignored. She can rattle off a list of horses who have been headliners for her, but who couldn’t have passed a pre-purchase exam. That sort of knowledge just comes with time, she reflects, from working routinely with veterinarians and paying attention.

“I get an inner feeling from a horse,” she shrugs. “To be a national champion, you’ve got to have a minimum of three extremes. It can’t just be ‘a horse,’ although you can have the x-factor of a horse, the projection quality of that horse, overcome some flaws that it has. The way it presents itself can make a horse stand out in a ring full of other horses.”

Above: Roxann Hart with recent import Gazella, and Rohara Cashmere, below.

Over the years, Roxann Hart has won two Arabian Horse Times Readers’ Choice Breeder of the Year awards, as well as two APAHA awards (Amateur Halter Horseman and Breeder of the Year), and USEF’s Ellen Scripps Davis Memorial Breeders Cup. There also have been special trophies in the ring, among others, two U.S. National Championships in amateur halter, and years ago, a National Show Horse National Championship in Pleasure Driving. And she still admits to being thrilled that one year at Scottsdale, when she won five classes in a row, the announcer finally broadcast the winner simply by playing the song “Roxanne.”

That said, Hart is clear that her vision is not all that is important in Rohara’s reputation. For one thing, there always has been Karl, her touchstone. An attorney with a full-time profession of his own, he has put in time in the horse business, serving six terms as Region 12 director, two as president of the Arabian Horse Association of Florida, and six as a director of USEF. He also has taken his place on several AHA and USEF committees, and as president of the USEF Equestrian Trust. Last year, he was one of two inaugural members inducted into Region 12’s Hall of Fame.

“He always has been involved in our governing bodies,” she says. “That gave us a lot of responsibility because we had that aspect we had to look at.” But his role has been more than that. They’ve been together a long time. “There is a

Roxann and Karl Hart with QR Marc.

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“[At Rohara] the horses always have been and always will be the most important thing. It is not about the win or the sale— it is about their wellbeing.”

– Joe Alberti lot of respect for what he himself has accomplished. In his tiny little town in Florida, I think his graduating class was seven. He was a high school dropout, then top of his class at Harvard Law, and then went on to international law.

And he has allowed me to pursue a career in the horses and to be an individual in our partnership.”

There is also Rohara’s longtime staff. John Rannenberg will be celebrating his 30th year with the farm soon, Katie Showers has been there for nearly 20 years (first as a trainer and now as breeding manager), and Joe Alberti has known the farm for most of his life. Others log double-digit employment records as well. How does Hart keep them in an age where employees can be transient? “You pray,” she quips. “And depending on the job, I have a policy and procedure manual that I have compiled over the years. The

main thing I tell them when they come in is, ‘don’t assume and do ask questions.’ Now, with a lot of key people, we can kind of read each other’s minds. They’re great horsemen, and I think that is the key.”

There have been very few trainers over the years. Joanne Fox was the first, after Hart quit schooling her own horses, and then Rick Moser, and in the mid-1980s, Rannenberg.

“I always had my eye on John,” Hart remembers. “He would beat me with a horse that I knew was not as good as mine, and that impressed me. But it annoyed the hell out of me.” (Even so, he nearly knocked himself out of a job when, during their initial negotiations, he asked what her commitment to the horse industry was. Hart was so incensed that it took Karl’s persuasion to resume talks.)

“Then Joe—I knew Joe when he was 16 years of age,” she says. “He came in to buy horses and intern.” She grins. “He wanted to pick my brain, and I told him to get the earring out of his ear and those clothes weren’t going to work. But he was an excellent horseman then, as he is now.”

“I would have never left my farm to work for any farm other than this one,” says Alberti, who ran his own operation in Pennsylvania before coming to Rohara. “The sole reason for that is that I knew, coming here, that the horses always have been and always will be the most important thing. It is not about the win or the sale—it is about their wellbeing. Never, ever has the quality of a foal dictated the amount of time spent on it. What it needs, it gets. Bar none. Period. That to me is very important, because I feel like, as a breeder, if you are going to take the responsibility to bring something into this world, no matter what the resulting foal is, you should take the responsibility of caring for it.”

He also liked the way Hart treated him when he was a client. “When I was just starting out, I wasn’t a big money client, but she never made me feel like I wasn’t important. I appreciated it, because you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Rannenberg can be both serious and light-hearted when considering what might or might not be apparent about Hart. “Did you know she loves a John Deere tractor?” he inquires. “We have a fleet of them. Early on when she moved to Ocala, she went to buy a tractor and they said, ‘you have no credit.’ Everything was under Karl Hart.”

(That changed quickly.)

“That was the beginning of her relationship with John Deere,” he continues dryly. “Now, they practically bring the tractors to the farm for showing. We have big tractors, little tractors, front-end loaders, very souped-up big gators, you name it.”

He relates how she once took a visitor out in one of the gators and, while looking at birds, they got it stuck in a lowland.

“They buried that thing,” he confides. The visitor, a fit young man, offered to get out and push, but Hart told him, “Don’t

Roxann and her friend, Rohara Forest.

worry, I have four-wheel drive!” A second later, they rocketed out of the marshland and laughed all the way back to the barn.

Perhaps people who don’t know her see only the business side of her, he comments. Getting to the top of any industry requires tenacity and drive, and Hart has both.

It’s just that there is a bigger picture. She has a unique sensitivity that is not on display in business.

The best illustration may be the farm’s tradition when the show string leaves for a big show, such as a regional, the Nationals or Scottsdale. The horses are well-trained and the handlers are knowledgeable, Rannenberg says, but Hart knows that anything can happen in the process. She recruits friends and employees for refreshments on the back lawn, where she can keep an eye on the packing up. “When the horses all march on and get in their stalls, and their hay bags are hung and the attendants are in place, everyone moves to the front yard,” he smiles. Then the engines of the big rigs roar to life, the drivers toot their horns, and in tandem, the Rohara vans roll slowly down the driveway toward the front gate.

And Roxann Hart leads her guests in a happy dance to send them off. n

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