Horse Tales: My Life & Times

: s e l a T Horse

s e m i T & e My Lif

Patricia Berry Cole E D I T E D B Y K I M B E R LY PA R I S H D AV I S

: s e l a T Horse

s e m i T & My Life Patricia Berry Cole E D I T E D B Y K I M B E R LY PA R I S H D AV I S

LAKE DALLAS, TEXAS

Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Parish Davis All rights reserved

FIRST EDITION Requests for permission to reprint or reuse material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions Madville Publishing PO Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065

Acknowledgements: Thanks go to the Madison County Writers Guild, a part of the Madison County Arts Council. That fine group of people helped to encourage my mother to share her stories. Several of those stories were first published in their chapbooks. Those stories are:

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“The Jewish Mockingbird Family,” which appeared in the Spring 2009 Madison County Arts Council Anthology.

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“Jerry the Jeep” first appeared in the Summer 2010 Madison County Arts Council Anthology.

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“Autumn with a Horse named Jack” first appeared in the Autumn 2011 Madison County Arts Council Anthology as “Autumn with Jack.”

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“The Christmas Santa Almost Forgot” first appeared in the Christmas 2010 Madison County Arts Council Anthology.

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“Christmas in Salzburg” first appeared in the Christmas 2011 Madison County Arts Council Anthology.

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“Pups in Winter” first appeared in the Winter 2012 Madison County Arts Council Anthology.

Thanks also to Rhonda Harris, for her help with the editing. And to The Topps Company for permission to use their 1967 baseball card showing Denis Menke and Tony Cloninger in uniform together.

Letter From the Editor

My mother, Patricia Berry Cole was born on the 1st of May1939 and died on the 7th of December, 2019. Not many people get to live their dreams, but she did. For over fifty years, she rode, bred, raised, showed, and raced horses. With the love of her life, Jack Cole, she traveled around the world, and after Jack’s death in 1996, Pat bought a sailing yacht and basked in the tropics for a time. She spent her final years in the Andes mountains in the beautiful city of Cuenca, Ecuador.

Mom, a sixth generation Texan, was passionate about horses from her earliest memories. Her grandfather presented her with her first horse, Brownie, when she was just six years old.

The surprise took place in the backyard of Mrs. Ricks’ boarding house, now called the Woodbine Hotel, in Madisonville, Texas. Her grandparents, Judge Ebb Berry, Sr. and his wife Jessie, lived there at the time. From that moment, when little Patsy mistakenly kissed Brownie and patted her Grandy’s hand, she was “horse crazy.”

Pat spent a few semesters at St. Thomas University while working as a dental assistant for her life-long friend, Dub Worrell. The other women in the office weren’t terribly happy about the fact that Pat spent more time looking after and showing the good doctor’s cutting horses than she did in the dental office. It was, perhaps, a blessing in disguise, since she was also known to startle and drop whole trays of dental instruments, which caused both dentist and patient to jump— never a good thing when the dentist is drilling teeth!

At 20, Pat married and moved to a 10,000-acre ranch in Junction, Texas, where she and her first husband, Buster Parish,

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ran 400 head of cattle, 10,000 head of Angora goats, 300 head of sheep, and 30 head of horses.

Her only child, Kim, was born during this time, and Pat juggled her duties as wife, mother, and ranch hand there until she and Buster returned to Houston to open the Salt Grass Saddlery in 1961.

Over the next 10 years, their business grew to be one of the ten largest western stores in the nation.

During this period, Pat was an active 4-H Horse Club Leader and a Life Member of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Throughout the 60s, she trained and showed Quarter Horses in pursuit of National Championships. Pulling a red and white fourhorse rig, Pat competed in more than 750 events all around the U.S. Four different horses obtained Quarter Horse Champion status through her efforts. Only three other women outranked her in the AQHA “championships won” category at the time.

My mother and father divorced in 1969, and she took me on an oddyssey to the windy prairie outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the cold didn’t suit her, and we returned to Houston, where she met and married Jack Cole in 1972. During the 70s, Mom worked for several Houston oil and gas companies, and served as vice president of a gold and silver mining company at one point.

Probably the happiest period of her life began in 1981, when she and Jack moved to Madisonville and founded Metal Concepts, a sheet metal fab-

rication business. Their horse program shifted to breeding, raising, and racing horses. Over the next decade, they raised 98 foals and sent nearly half of them to the track. They stood in the winner’s circle many times. Their first racing-bred colt won his first race, and a year later, that colt’s brother, Oh Hy Oh, was one of the top two-year-olds in Texas. A few years later, Virgil Vengeful won the First Consolation of the All American Futurity in Ruidoso.

Jack’s passing in 1996 was a blow Pat never quite recovered from. She sold both the house that Jack built out on Highway 21 and Metal Concepts. She gave her horses away, and set off on a series of adventures that started aboard a sailing catamaran, Pat’s Cat, and concluded with a six-year sojourn in Cuenca, Ecuador, as a member of that city’s thriving expatriate community.

Mom came back to Texas in July 2019, where she spent five short months reconnecting with family before she died.

This collection contains my mother’s stories. She was a great talker, but tended to forget she’d already told you the same story many times. I convinced her to write some of those stories down. I only wish we’d captured more of them. I hope you enjoy the ones we did save as much as I do. I give you Pat’s story in her own words.

Kimberly Parish Davis PatsHorseTales.com

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Contents vi LETTER FROM THE EDITOR ix CONTENTS 10 TRENDSETTER IN WESTERN FASHION 13 MY FIRST REGISTERED QUARTER HORSE: KING JOE DOC 16 THE HORSE RACE 17 CAN YOU SAY “HORSE CRAZY”?

18 MY DAD, EBB AARON BERRY, JR.:

LAWYER, CONTRACTOR, & SECURITY EXPERT 20 DAVID: CHALKING, AND DAVID GOES WEST 22 SANCHO, THE HOUSE GOAT 24 JERRY THE JEEP 32 JIMMY DEAN AND BRIAN’S PUMPKIN 34 THE CHRISTMAS SANTA ALMOST FORGOT 36 ROUND UP ON THE HAYTHORN RANCH

ARTHUR, NEBRASKA 38 MY DOLLY DIMPLE 40 AUTUMN WITH A HORSE NAMED JACK 43 BASEBALL & HORSES 44 BO DIAMOND DANDY 46 A FEW MORE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF BO DIAMOND DANDY 48 THE SUPER DOG CHRONICLES 53 OH HY OH AND HIS CAT, KAZ 54 WHO WAS JACK LIONEL COLE? 56 PAT, THE MINER 58 MADISONVILLE: THE BEST OF TIMES on the FARM1980s & 90s 60 PAT AND JACK GO TO NEVIS 62 METAL CONCEPTS 65 THE JEWISH MOCKINGBIRD FAMILY 66 VIRGIL VENGFUL 69 VIRGIL VENGEFUL CLIPPINGS 71 THE VALENTINE’S PRESENT 72 COLE FARMS WINNERS 74 THE CHRISTMAS MARKET IN SALZBURG 76 LEFT BEHIND 77 PAT’S CAT 82 142 MARINA BAY ROAD 84 RETURN TO NEVIS—2008 86 THANKSGIVINGS PAST 88 PUPS IN WINTER 91 ECUADOR, PAT’S FINAL CHAPTER 93 CODA

r e t t e s d n e r T n o i h s a F n r e t s e in W 1964

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My First Registered Quarter Horse: King Joe Doc

When I was 17, a fellow I knew had a coming two-year-old, double-bred King P234 colt, that he called Doc. His sire was a pretty obscure son of King, and his dam was much the same (pretty obscure). He was one of the reddest sorrel colts I had ever seen. Doc had been ridden a little bit, but his owner was such a big guy, he didn’t really want to get on him much. I had just gone to work for Dr. W. H. “Dub” Worrell, who was the first president of the National Cutting Horse Association. Doc’s owner saw a real opportunity to get his colt in with some real cuttin’ horse people, so he gave him to me.

Dr. Worrell let me move the horse to his house in Houston and stable him with his horses, and he promised to help me break him. Later, Dub said that he could have given me a raise if he hadn’t had to feed both me and my horse.

My mom and dad knew nothing about my horse deal, or they would have realized that was the main reason I dropped out of college: to earn enough money to take care of him.

Here, I should mention that the owner contributed not one penny to Doc’s upkeep. I was so gullible and horse crazy I didn’t even realize I was being used, but that’s okay, because it all worked out in the end. Since the horse needed to belong to me for Dub to let me keep him there, the owner gave me the Breeder’s Certificate and I registered him in my name.

Preceeding pages: “Western Preview” by Ruth Schneider. Western Horseman Magazine, August, 1964. Article features Pat Parish as a trendsetter in western style.

I spent every spare minute at Dub’s riding Doc. After leaving his busy dental practice every day, Dub would saddle his mare, Banjo Eyes, and ride. And I would be right beside him soaking up horse talk. I had never owned a really good horse, and even though I’d had horses since I was six, no one had ever really taught me the right way to do anything. My grandfather and my father had owned horses during their lives, but certainly could not be called horsemen. A horse was just a means to an end that ate grass better suited to cattle grazing. They had sort of tossed me a pair of reins, and I climbed on and rode any horse I was allowed to get on—and some I wasn’t.

At that time, Edgar Brown, a wealthy oil man, owned a large place just west of Dub’s house.

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He was heavy into cutting horses and was in the process of buying every top cuttin’ horse in the country and hiring the trainer that went with the horse. Amy Gamblin, Matlock Rose, John Carter, and Bubba Cascio all worked for him at the same time. It was not a congenial group.

Every chance I got, I would ride down to Brown’s and hang around those guys. I guess they felt sorry for the “kid,” so they offered me advice on what and how to do things with a horse. A few of them even let me ride back in the woods with them to their secret arena to watch them train and ride their horses.

Sometime during the next year or so, I met a guy that I would marry in a couple of years. He had a two-yearold, double-bred Joe Moore mare, Boggie Do, that Jim Reno was training. Boy, she was burning up with cow and really put Jim on the map as a cutting horse trainer.

had his time in sun, if he had only had somebody on him who could ride.

While Doc was in cuttin’ training, I had to sit on the fence.

I really didn’t like that. Western Pleasure was just becoming a point class with the American Quarter Horse Association, so I decided to show him as a Western Pleasure horse. I had to learn what a “lead” was and how to get a horse to take a right lead or a left lead. The fellow I was dating, Buster Parish, was a pretty good horseman, having trained and shown hunters and jumpers, and he was a pretty good calf roper. He showed me what a lead, was, how to use my legs to cue a horse for a lead and taught me some about different bits and other tack. I soaked up any and all information on horses like a sponge. When I started going to some registered shows, I realized most of the old cowboys didn’t know

Jim Reno on Boggie Do

She was the leading Jr. Cutting Horse in the nation before she was 24 months old. Well, since Buster was trying real hard to impress me, he said he would pay for Doc’s cuttin’ training, so I moved my horse to Jim’s place. Doc did turn into a pretty good cutting horse, but never the caliber of Boggie Do. I learned to ride a cutting horse, though, and learned what an unbelievable thrill it was to have a horse drop down in front of a cow. I was never really able to show one well, because I was so intimidated by the horsemen I was competing with.

One year, I entered Doc in the Junior Cutting at the State Fair in Dallas. There were so many horses entered that I didn’t show until 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. Every top junior horse and all the top trainers had lost a cow, and I had the best herd holders and turn-back men in the business: Dr. Worrell and Matlock Rose. Amy Gamblin and Curley Linehan were holding the herd. Doc had done a great job with the first two head, while I had been falling all over him… almost came off once with him coming back under me. I was completely unnerved. I had about two seconds to go and with all my help telling me not to, I cut the same sour cow that everybody else had already lost, and I lost him. The judge told Dub that I had the whole damn thing won ‘til then. He said the horse sure hadn’t gotten any help from me. King Joe Doc almost 14

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a whole lot about showing in a Western Pleasrure class.

Besides, I was young and cute, and it was easier for me to look good on a Western Pleasure horse. I started placing and then Doc and I started winning. What a rush! I tried showing him at halter, a class that resembles a dog show with the trainer leading the horse, but he really lacked the conformation to be a good halter horse.

Buster had a 10,000-acre ranch leased in Junction, Texas, and when we got married, King Joe Doc and I moved to the ranch. He was a great ranch horse, and we covered a lot of rough territory over the next year or so. Doc’s time spent as a ranch horse really sharpened him up as a cutting horse. If he missed a cow by just a little bit, we might have to go a mile or two to dig her out of a 1,500acre pasture. He decided he would rather do it right the first time. He was smart and hardheaded. I used to say that he would spend all night thinking of what he was

going to do to me the next day while I stayed awake trying to outthink him.

When you saddled him in the morning, if you let him put one toe a half inch out of place without correcting him, the rest of your day was pure hell.

of ground. He was one of the few horses we had that you could hunt off of. My stepdaughters and little sister would come to the ranch and he was always their mount of choice.

I knew he would take care of them. They spent a lot of time swimming with him in the river. The one thing he could not abide was a rattlesnake. If he heard one buzz, you were SOL. He wouldn’t get within 300 yards of of a snake. A couple of times, while in hot pursuit of livestock, he and I were jumping brush and he must have heard a snake. In midair, he did a 180 and very nearly left me on top of the snake. He was the only sea-level horse we took to the Hill Country that wouldn’t quit you in the rocks and canyons.

One frosty morning in Junction, we went over to help some neighbors gather stock. From the minute I stepped on Doc, he tried everything he knew. He was crow-hopping all the way up one side and down the other of every canyon and kept it up for miles. Finally, we hit a big flat rock still covered with frost and while he was showing his butt, he slipped and fell. When I felt him going down, I kicked out of the stirrups and started scooting across the ground to get away from him, because it looked like he might fall a second time and I didn’t want to be under him. When the dust settled and Doc finally got his feet back under him, I started to get up and realized all my scooting had been done with a huge prickly pear leaf under my right cheek. My Levis were nailed to my behind. Pa Smith, age 80+, our host, took a great deal of pleasure from pulling the largest thorns out of my derrière. I rode for another mile or two until the pain made me go back to the house. Those darn thorns were still working their way out a year later.

A year or so later, we moved back to Houston and opened a large western store out on Interstate 10, Salt Grass Saddlery.

Doc and I now had our own truck and trailer and it was easier to get to horse shows. We went to local shows and amateur cuttings. I hadn’t really started going to major shows that much, but because of my exposure to the show ring on Doc, a fellow named Dick Ingram moved to town as manager of one of the big downtown hotels. He owned a little mare named Sissy Jinks. Sis had a number of halter points and several performance points in Pleasure and Reining. He watched me show Doc around and came to the store one day and said he would like for me to take Sissy Jinks and get her AQHA Championship. That was the beginning of my horse showing days.

Doc was such a versatile horse. He was one of the best pony horses (a horse that leads another horse) you could hope for.

You could snub up the rankest bronc or the greenest colt and he would lay his shoulder into them and never give an inch

Until I started writing his story, I really didn’t realize what a major impact King Joe Doc had on the direction of my entire adult life. Doc remained my main man until he came down with colic one night and the one vet who could have saved him wasn’t available. I stayed up with him all night and another vet tried but couldn’t save him. Oh, how I begged God to let him live, but I guess he needed him in Heaven. He had an impaction and died the next day. Bless his heart, he taught me so much and we had some of the most amazing times together.

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The lead went back and forth between the two horses and riders, and soon the race was on, crossed hearts forgotten about. As they topped the hill, Patsy realized that Brownie was headed straight for the fence and she hauled back on the reins, but with no curb chain, she made little impression on her horse. On they flew, and Patsy dropped down low over her horse’s neck, fully expecting him to jump the fence, even though it was probably two feet taller than either horse or rider. At the last minute, Brownie, put on the brakes (he wasn’t dumb), and Patsy flew over his head, straight into the barbed wire fence.

e c a R e s r The Ho One Saturday in early winter, two buddies, Patsy Berry and Jimmy Wells, met at Patsy’s house to saddle her steed, Brownie, and spend the day the way they spent most Saturdays, riding all over Madison County, tracking rustlers and other varmints. Patsy was eight years old and Jimmy was six months younger. They caught Brownie, and while the two were getting him ready to go, Jimmy noticed a piece of chain on the ground.

After careful examination, the two agreed that it couldn’t be very important so they threw it away. Only later, was it identified as Patsy’s curb chain—the part of the bridle that makes the horse stop.

The two pals mounted up, Patsy on Brownie and Jimmy on Daisy.

The combined age of Brownie and Daisy was close to half a century.

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Jimmy lived on the adjoining place, so the dynamic duo decided that on this day they would look for the bad guys in Jimmy’s Dad’s pasture. After they arrived at Well’s house and before they opened the last gate to start their quest, Mr. Wells, stopped them for a few minutes to make them promise they would not run any races… and to be sure they closed every gate they went through. Of course, they crossed their hearts and hoped to die!

Finally!!! They could get started before the posse beat them to the rustlers. As their stalwart steeds climbed up the bank and out of the creek, they were already in a long trot. Well, Daisy got her nose in front of Brownie.

No self respecting horse or rider could allow that, so Brownie and Patsy struck a lope. Daisy, not to be outdone, ran a little faster.

After hitting the fence, face first, and bouncing back under Brownie’s feet, Patsy got up, caught her horse and got back on as if she had planned it just that way. Jimmy rode along side and told her that she had scratched her face. She wiped her chin on the shoulder of her jacket, asked if it was bad, and after being assured it wasn’t bad, just a little blood, the duo continued their search for the bad guys. A few hours later they got hungry, decided to take a break and went to Jimmy’s house to get some grub.

They went in the back door discussing strategy for the afternoon. Betty Wells, Jimmy’s mom, got a really serious expression on her face and proceeded clean Patsy’s scratch with Peroxide. Then she told Patsy she better go home. Patsy and Jimmy were crushed… they still had half a day of daylight and lots of ground to cover. Patsy climbed back on Brownie and, with her lower lip quivering, slowly rode off. Betty had never sent her home before.

At the Berry spread, Brownie was unsaddled and turned out in the pasture. Patsy, dragging her feet, was met at the back door by her mom and dad. It seems Betty Wells had called ahead. Ebb and Lois Berry got white as sheets when they saw the “scratch” on Patsy’s face. They each grabbed one of the small girl’s arms and didn’t let her feet touch the ground until she was plopped onto the examining table at Dr. Heath’s clinic.

The scratch was about 3” long and ran along her left jawline. The hours that had passed since her face had gone through the barbed wire combined with the fact that Dr. Heath was no plastic surgeon ensured there would be a significant scar. Patsy’s mom was horrified that her darling little girl would always be scarred, but Patsy was proud of her mark of courage and talked so much about it that she pulled some of the stitches out.

Hey, there were some really tough hombres out there on that Saturday, but the good guys won.

Can you say “Horse Crazy”?

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MY DAD EBB AARON BERRY, JR. LAWYER, CONTRACTOR, & SECURITY EXPERT Around 1879, my paternal great-grandmother, eight-year old Georgia Cox, and her family, came from a small town in Georgia on the Alabama border to Texas in a covered wagon. It was a perilous trip, crossing the lawless area along the Sabine River, where many travelers were attacked. The Cox family settled in Montgomery County, Texas. About that same time, Watson Alonzo (Lon) Berry, after passing through Alabama and marrying a Cherokee woman, Mary, seventeen years his senior, made the same journey and settled in Madison County, Texas. Georgia married John Lindley and had four sons and one daughter, Jessie, my grandmother. Lon and Mary Berry had two sons, Cade and Ebb. Ebb met and married Jessie, and they had a daughter and a son, Ebb Aaron, Jr., my father.

My grandfather became a lawyer and was appointed to the bench at the age of 28. He later sat on the Texas State Court of Criminal Appeals.

His son, my father, had a very interesting college experience. He attended several. University of Texas, University of Colorado and Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, are the only names I ever heard. Dad was asked to leave U.T. after the Texas Rangers raided one of his poker games. He was asked to leave Colorado after taking

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the dorm mother to the grocery store, forgetting that the trunk of his car was full of bath-tub gin. I’m not sure what happened at Cumberland School of Law, but Ebb, Jr., never got a college degree.

As the story goes, my grandfather and another lawyer locked their sons in a room at the Driscoll Hotel in Austin, with a pile of law books and told them to study law for the next six weeks.

At the time, one could take the bar exam without a college degree. To make a long story short, my dad passed the bar exam with a very high grade, making him the youngest to pass the exam up to that date.

That’s how Ebb Aaron Berry, Jr., became a lawyer. The only type of law that Dad enjoyed was the law of the land. He loved tracing the history of a piece of dirt.

During the Eisenhower administration in the 50s, Dad was appointed Assistant U. S. Attorney based in Laredo, Texas. Falcon Dam was being constructed on the Rio Grande River and the town of Zapata was due to end up at the bottom of the lake. The government had to relocate the town, so it was necessary to determine who owned what in the existing town. It was a mammoth task to track ownership from the original Spanish land grants to pres-

ent day. No one was better qualified to do that than my father, so the family moved from Madisonville to Laredo.

In our new house in Laredo, Dad decided to convert a room into an office, so he put on his “thinking clothes,” which were the most awful, worn out, beat-to-shit, never-washed pants you could imagine. The rest of his ensemble included some house shoes that he had worn for as long as I could remember. One afternoon, we heard him screaming for help. The whole family ran to save him from some horrible fate, only to find him sitting in the middle of the floor unable to stand up. He was using some awful black mastic to lay cork tile and it had squeezed up between tiles. Since Dad always sat on the floor with his legs crossed to do everything, he had managed to sit on some of the black muck and glue the seat of his pants to the floor. After we caught our collective breath after our hysterical laugher, it was suggested that he simply unzip his pants and stand up.

The group dispersed and left Dad to his construction work. The sounds of sawing and hammering could be heard throughout that afternoon. Then, from the new office came a terrible crashing sound. Again, we all dashed to his rescue. His newly constructed bookshelves and piles of law books were scattered all over the floor. Dad didn’t own a tape measure, square or level, so his shelves were anything but plumb, level or square. Not to be foiled by such mundane issues, off he went to the local hardware store. A little later, he called a family meeting to view his handiwork. There he stood, shoulders back, chest puffed out with pride. His shelves were upright and loaded to the max with law books. He had fixed them to the wall with giant screen door hooks.

A night or two later, I was awakened by a horrible crash and the sound of breaking glass. The noise seemed to be coming from the direction of Dad’s bedroom and office.

I peeked through one eye at the clock and saw that it was in the neighborhood of 2:00 a.m. The next thing I knew, Dad was sitting on the side of my bed with a large, iron skillet in his hand. He wanted ME to go see who was breaking into the house. I said, “Ah, Dad, the door to the office is locked. An intruder can’t get into the rest of the house, and there’s nothing for him to steal, except your bookshelves.” He promised to follow and back me up with his skillet. I turned over and stuck my head under a pillow and started drifting off to sleep. He kept insisting that I stay awake and keep him company. Finally, since he refused to return to his own bed and the mysterious invader, I moved over, handed him a pillow and talked him—and his skillet—into sharing my space and resting his eyes. As the sun rose out of the east, Dad and

I ventured into the hostile office territory. Seems that a window weight had failed allowing the window to crash down and break all the panes. Either that, or he had scared the burglar off with that terrifying skillet.

Dad’s construction ability was legendary. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he decided to build a chicken house on our farm in Madisonville. He assembled a stack of old corrugated tin, some left over chicken wire from someplace, some mismatched poles from some-other-where and began his project. Fortunately, Mom had insisted that he build it quite a distance from our new home behind some trees. As young as I was at the time, even I knew it was one of the ugliest things ever built, but Dad was proud of his accomplishment. He called his brother-inlaw, Jack Scott, over to see his Taj Mahal. With metaphorical trumpets blaring, he said, “Well!! What do you think of my chicken house?” My uncle Jack said, “Well, you know, Brother, if I saw this chicken house in Bumfuck, Egypt, I’d know Ebb Berry built it!”

A couple of years before we moved to Laredo, Dad demonstrated his leadership ability in the security field.

Our house was built on piers and beams and we always had a problem with armadillos digging under the house.

Often in the middle of the night, they would wake everybody up with their banging against the beams under the floor. On one such night, the armadillos were having a major gathering under the house and on the back terrace. My collie, Tippy, was barking like crazy, so Dad got us all up, and took command of the unit that would repel the armadillo invasion. He armed my brother, who was 14 or 15 years-old at the time, with a shotgun. I’m not sure what jobs he assigned to the rest of us. What a picture the Berry family made that night. Mom in her cute little nightgown with her high heel mules, General Dad in his BVDs, my brother in his shorts, my little sister in her jammies, and I had on somebody’s big tee shirt. Out of nowhere, a scared-to-death armadillo ran across the terrace and over all the feet of the entire squad. Squeals, screams, yips, shotgun blasts… When the dust cleared, Dad was standing on the top step trying to escape into the house, only to have the door blocked by the rather large collie dog that had hidden behind him and was peeking between his legs. Mom, little sis and I had run the opposite direction, and our artilleryman was in the center of terrace, smoke curling out the barrel of his weapon, shaking and looking dazed. The armadillo was nowhere to be seen, but it’s said that one was found not too far from the battlefield, dead, apparently of fright.

Thankfully, Dad was a better lawyer than he was a constructor or security expert.

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DAVID GOES WEST It’d been eight or nine years since Patsy’s father had brought David home, and he had become one of her best friends, driving instructor, chaperone, and confidante. Now, Patsy was married, mother of a baby girl and living eight hours west on a 10,000-acre ranch in the Hill Country. She hadn’t really given David much thought in the last few years and one day, out of the blue, he called her, saying he wanted to come live on her ranch and work for her and her husband.

DAVID CHALKING One day, Patsy’s lawyer father drove up with a Black man in the car and announced that David had been paroled from prison into his custody and would be moving into the room in the garage. David was to be the handyman around the place. Being only 12 years old but feeling much older and bored most of the time, young Patsy followed David around to get the scoop on who, what, and where about him. She had a million questions for this new arrival.

As David proceeded to clean the room in preparation for his move, Patsy, hot on his heels, began her questioning.

“What did you go to prison for?” she asked.

David answered, “For killin’ my wife.”

“How did you kill her?” quizzed Patsy.

“With a hammer,” he said. “Hit her in the head.”

“What did she look like?” The inquisition continued.

“Well, Miss Patsy, she was so big and black, I had to chalk her when I hugged her,” he answered.

“Chalk her? What do you mean, chalk her?”

“Well, first, I hugged her from the front and made a chalk mark on both sides. Then I went around to her back, put my arms around her and hugged until I met the chalk marks I left from the front,” David answered, all logic.

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Patsy told him, “David, you will hate it here. There are no Black people living here and we have some really big rattlesnakes in this country.”

“Miss Patsy, all that’s okay. I just want to work for you,” he stubbornly answered.

Within a few days, David arrived with his small satchel in hand and moved into the bunkhouse. Happy as a clam, he fell right into ranching life. Never, in her wildest dreams, had Patsy imagined he would know the first thing about chores around a ranch in the rugged Hill Country. When cattle, sheep, goats, and horses didn’t require attention, there were cedar trees to be cut or chopped, and there were plenty of them. The posts were used for new fences and the surplus was stacked in the post yard up on top of the canyon wall to be sold.

David worked right alongside the Mexican ranch hands without complaint, cutting, hauling, and stacking. Most of the hombres, as we called the Mexicans, didn’t speak English, but that didn’t seem to bother David, or them, for that matter. Patsy was amazed. David obviously spoke Spanish—learned in prison? She had been afraid there would be animosity between the congenial Black man and the Mexican hands. Not so. They got along famously.

One day, bright and early, David jumped in the old ranch pickup with a single shot .22 rifle (a gun was always necessary for snakes and assorted varmints, both large and small). Tippy, one of the ranch dogs, piled in beside him on the seat and off they went up the canyon nine miles to some stock pens at the back of the ranch, taking supplies to the Mexicans. A terrible thunderstorm broke out during the day, and the canyons and river started running wild. As the sun set, the usually dry canyon filled with rampaging water to over 40 feet wide, and Lord knows how deep, carrying trees and boulders as big as small houses. Everybody in the Hill Country knew never to try to cross water in unexpected places.

Patsy worried about David as darkness closed in. Even after all these months, she still did not have much confidence in his ranching savvy and hoped he would ride out the storm with the hombres at the back ranch. Finally, she said a prayer for his safety and got ready for bed.

There was a knock on the door. Twelve miles from town over a low-water bridge across the river and another six miles to the ranch house, company at 10 o’clock at night was rare—like, never. She opened the door to a thoroughly soaked, muddy man and a very stinky wet dog.

“David! How in the world did you get across that canyon alive?” Erica demanded.

“Well, I starts walking, looking for a place to cross. Every time I step off in that water, ole Tip, he starts a whinin’ and won’t follow me. I’d back out too and walk on down a little piece more. I kept doin’ that until I came to a place that ole Tip followed me in and took the lead with me holding on,” he explained. “And both of us sure could use a bite to eat.”

“Oh, David! You could have drowned in the canyon!

Don’t ever do that again! And you have walked nine miles in the pitch dark! Come on in and let me fix you some supper.” She threw her arms around her old friend.

“Thank you, God!” she whispered as she headed for the kitchen.

That summer, a resourceful David found a woman cooking for the dude ranch across the river. Most evenings, he would saddle an old stud horse the ranch owned and the two of them would go acourtin’. Patsy suspected the underground ranch telegraph told him she was there, because he rarely left the ranch. Old Trey Kimble (the horse) would spend most of the night tied to a tree, but they were always home before first light to handle chores.

One hot day in late summer, the sound of the big bobtailed truck used for hauling cedar posts came roaring down the side of the canyon and brought Patsy out into the ranch yard. What a sight! The sideboards were almost bouncing out of their slots and that truck was about to slide off the narrow little strip of road into the canyon bottom. It skidded to a stop in front of the barn in a cloud of dust as David lept out. He looked terrified, his eyes the size of saucers.

“Oh, M-M-Miss Patsy!” he stammered.

“What in the world is wrong, David?” she asked.

“Well! I was loading them posts and turns around to get some more and the biggest ole snake I ever see is standing up there looking me right in my face! I throwed that post down and told Mr. Snake he could have it, ‘cause I ain’t gonna be back.”

That afternoon, David’s career as a ranch hand came to an end as he caught an eastbound bus.

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SANCHO, THE HOUSE GOAT Out in the Hill Country of Texas, people call orphan Angora goats “Sanchos.” Since we had a herd of about 10,000 goats and Angora nannies are notoriously poor mothers, we had quite a few sanchos.

My first Sancho was a pitiful little white thing whose mama birthed him and walked away without even licking him clean and dry. With all those white nannies dropping all those wee white kids everywhere, there was no way to know who his mother was. It was February and pretty darned chilly out, so there was no time to wait to see if a mama goat would come claim this pitiful little thing.

I scooped him up and dashed to the house with him, filled the kitchen sink with warm water to warm him up, wash all the dirt encrusted placenta off him, and then I put him on a towel on the oven door to see if he would revive.

Oh boy! And revive he did. In ten or fifteen minutes, he bounced out of the oven on stiff legs baa, baa, baa, baaing as only a baby goat can do. All around the kitchen of our small ranch house he went. I hurriedly warmed some milk 22

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for him, and he latched onto that nipple like a snapping turtle. He was so cute, all white and curly.

Well, from that minute on, he followed me like a little puppy. I couldn’t put him back out with those common goats, so he stayed in the house with us. He had his own corner and an old quilt to curl up on, and he settled right in as a house goat. At night, he slept on the end of our bed with us. That only lasted until we woke up one night with him bouncing and baaing all over us, his finale being that he peed on me. Sancho was banished to the screen porch at night.

Baby goats grow really fast, so it wasn’t long before Sancho was leaping and bouncing up on everything. The morning he bounced up onto the breakfast table and took a big mouthful of sugar out of the bowl, he was banished during the day, too. He was a slippery little booger, though, and as soon as anyone opened a door to go in or out, he would fly into the house. When the day came that he zoomed in and made two boing boing leaps and landed

on the dining table, burying his cute face right in the middle of a peach pie, he was banished to the barn with the other sanchos.

That spring I planted my first garden and a lot of time and effort was spent on it with our hands hauling barrels of water every day from the river to irrigate it. Everything had come up and I was just ready to harvest the first vegetables.

We had a fence around the house to keep the livestock out, but Sancho did not consider himself livestock. One moonlit night, I heard “baa, baa, baa,” outside in the vicinity of the garden. When I looked, there was the seasoned escapee, Sancho, standing in the middle of the garden with a stalk of young corn hanging out of his mouth. I swear that goat was making sure that I saw him.

I lit out the door in my nightgown, barefooted through scorpion and rattlesnake territory screaming like a washerwoman at the little devil. He refused to go out the gate and I chased him for what seemed like hours. I don’t remember how I got him out. He probably arrogantly bounced out when

he got tired of tormenting me. The garden was a mess.

He might have been mad because I took his manhood, but it was time for drastic measures. Sancho was old enough to go to the pasture with the other goats, so he hopped in the pickup with me like a dog, and I took him nine miles from the main house to the back of the ranch, through five gates with all the pastures fenced with goatproof fences, and I put him out with a group of his relatives. Carefully closing all the gates behind me and making sure he didn’t slip through, I dusted my hands together with a smug “aha!” and drove back to the house and barns.

I bet you can guess who was standing at the back door waiting for me when I got to the house. I tried taking him to different parts of the ranch four or five more times, but Sancho beat me home every time. He refused to live with the other goats, so he and I reached an impasse. He lived at the house like a dog, and I didn’t try to grow another garden, but he was barred from coming indoors.

My advice? Never have a house goat.

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JERRY THE JEEP There was once a WWII surplus jeep that was destined for the junk yard. It was a forlorn looking vehicle, the original Army drab green mixed with rust and red paint that had been added years before. Pieces of wood were screwed into the hood to rest the windshield on when it was lowered. There were

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several screws missing that attached the brake pedal to something important, but they had been skillfully replaced with baling wire. Driving along one day, I spied the jeep sitting by the side road with a hand lettered “For Sale” sign on the windshield. I turned around and went back to look it over. It was a pretty sad machine, but the tires weren’t too bad, the battery was not too old and it started without too much prompting. After the owner counted out my $200, I gave the jeep a friendly pat on the fender and christened it, Jerry. Jerry the Jeep. Jerry’s tow bar was dropped onto the hitch of my pickup and he was on his way to the ranch.

Jerry became my personal ranch vehicle. With his 4-wheel drive engaged he could crawl up and down canyons like a mountain goat. One day on the nine-mile drive to the back of the ranch, Jerry and I were flying along and I missed a turn in the road. I use the term “road” loosely since our ranch roads were far from super highways. They were actually nothing more than clearings made by several passes of a D-8 Cat through the rocks and cedar. So on this day I took a wrong turn. I looked up and the road was suddenly no more. I slammed on the brakes and as luck would have it, that was the moment when the baling wire holding the brake pedal to the something important broke. The brake pedal slammed to the floor board, but Jerry kept going.

There was nothing ahead of us but boulders half the size of Jerry. We had no place to go.

I closed my eyes, threw my arms across my face and screamed like a banshee. We were airborne for a bit before my faithful Jerry came back to earth, shuddering, dirt and dust flying everywhere, and I looked around. We were sitting in the middle of a bunch of huge boulders with no apparent exit. I threw my head back and laughed ‘til I cried.

There was no such thing as a cell phone in those days and it was a long walk back to the main house, so I got out and somehow managed to roll a couple of the big rocks to the side. Then I shifted Jerry into 4-wheel drive, and I begged my little jeep to do his best. By golly, he just crawled up and over those rocks. I hadn’t believed it could be done, but we were off and running.

When Jerry’s baling wire broke, I would put him in 4-wheel drive, drop him into first gear and crawl up and down the canyons, letting the engine act as the brake. To get to our ranch, there were 4 or 5 miles of dirt road passing through two other ranches after we crossed a low water bridge. One day I was on my way to visit with the only neighbor on our side of the river. One of the ranches I had to cross had a ragged piece of gate that the rancher would close occasionally when he brought stock down to the river. The man was too cheap to put in a cattle guard or bumper gate, and I got really smoked every time I had to stop to open and close that

gate. Earlier that particular day the gate had been open. I knew this because I’d already been to town, so as I started off to visit Sarah on the next ranch, Jerry and I were really flying. It was a beautiful day. The wind was blowing in my hair and Jerry’s windshield was down. Then wouldn’t you know it?! The neighbor had closed his gate. The baling-wire-brake failed, and I quickly went to Plan B: Close my eyes, throw my arms over my face and scream! I was ecstatic and grinning like a ‘possum. I was sure I had finally wiped out that devilish gate. When Jerry and I shuddered to a stop. I put Jerry in reverse and backed up to examine the damage. I’d only broken one thin little upright board that the chain went around. Oh well.

Jerry the Jeep and I continued on our trip to visit Sarah. Her house was 200 yards straight up the side of a bluff, with a flat spot at the top of the driveway the length of one pickup truck—no problem for Jerry. I put him in 4-wheel drive and up we went. I killed his engine leaving him in gear and he stayed put like a well-trained dog. Who needed brakes? Sarah and I drank a pot of coffee and visited, and then it was time for me to go back to the ranch. I jumped in Jerry, stepped on the clutch and that jeep and I took off down the face of the bluff, doing about 50 miles an hour backwards. There was no time to try and start the engine.

I had to concentrate on making the 90 degree turn at the bottom of the drive or I’d end up in the river. Sarah stood watching with her mouth open in a great big “O” as Jerry and I whipped around and came to a halt. I started him up, gave her a cheery wave and drove back to the ranch. As I walked in the house the phone was ringing. It was Sarah.

She said that she had never had a guest leave quite like that and in the future, she wanted me to back my jeep up her driveway. At least that way I’d be headed the right way when I left.

One winter when the weather was really raw, with snow and ice everywhere, I let the ranch hands drive Jerry back to their camp. The next morning they all came walking in to the barn. There was no sign of Jerry. The story finally unfolded that Jerry had skidded off the road and was going over the edge of the canyon. They had all jumped out and held on to him long enough for one of them to get a chain around his bumper. My Jeep spent the rest of that winter hanging out in space over that canyon chained to a big cedar tree. Poor Jerry.

All the kids in the family learned to drive in Jerry the Jeep.

They would take him down to the river bottom and make him buck and jump as they popped the clutch and ran him into big pecan trees and generally had a wonderful time.

Bless his carburetor, Jerry the Jeep, took it all, and, except for that stupid baling wire, he never missed a beat.

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f o s l a i r u Three B a d a r t s E s e d a i u q l Me I have watched Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, three or four times in rapid succession. I have not been so affected by a movie in a long, long time. Rather than just being impressed with Jones’ direction and acting, I was more impressed with the message of friendship and loyalty. I have been privileged to see a lot of the this in my life… granted, it’s been more than 45 years ago, but I lived and worked alongside hombres, wetbacks, if you will.

Let me go back to 1954 when my dad moved us to Laredo from Madisonville. The only Mexicans I had ever seen were a few itinerant workers passing through our area. I never gave them much thought and certainly never dreamed of interacting with people I believed, in my ignorance, were dirty, ignorant peons. Then we moved to Laredo down on the Texas/Mexico border. I’ll never forget the first day our family drove into town. It was dry and brown. I was 14 years old and a sophomore in high school having spent my entire life in Madisonville. I hated Laredo. I wanted to go home, but very soon I experienced the warmth of the Mexican people and discovered what mi casa es su casa truly meant.

I was welcomed with open arms. In a short time, I came to love Laredo and the Mexican people. I never wanted to leave and staged a pretty unspectacular runaway attempt when we moved to Houston a little over a year later.

Now, I’ll fast forward to early 1960 after I’d married Buster and moved, along with my cutting horse, King Joe Doc, to the ranch he leased about 12 miles west of Junction in the Hill Country. A mile and a half of the South Llano River ran along its northern border and from there it was all uphill by way of canyons, chalk bluffs, cedar and rattlesnakes. It was a lot of work, but I loved it. I’d had a premature baby girl born in late summer, but we didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to pitch in as one of the hands, getting up at 3:00 a.m. to catch the stock on bed ground. I’d surround the baby with mesquite logs and stretch cheese cloth over her to keep the flies off while I worked stock in the pens around the windmills miles back on the ranch.

Then I’d fly back down the canyon, with my baby girl on 26

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a pillow in the truck and get lunch to bring back to the hands. A typical meal included lots of fried chicken, five gallons of beans, ten or more gallons of sweet tea, and all the stuff that went with it. I always said Buster married me because I was such a good ranch hand, and he got to sleep with me, too.

The only thorn in the ointment was the Border Patrol. It was in the 1950s, I think, that the U.S. discontinued the Bracero Program that allowed Mexicans to come across the River to work. When that happened, all the affordable ranch labor dried up. We had no choice but to use illegal labor. The legals didn’t want to do the dirty ranch work— if you could even find any of them. About that same time, so I’m told, the Border Patrol started sending people from the North to patrol our Texas borders. They didn’t want the agents to understand or sympathize with the ranchers or the poor Mexicans, whose families were starving in Mexico. They hounded all of us ranchers unmercifully. If I got a call from a neighbor up the river asking for “a spool of green thread,” I knew the Border Patrol was on the way.

The nearest post was in Del Rio, a pretty long drive from Junction, but those suckers were around a lot… in cars and in the air. We did a pretty good job of keeping our hombres’ camps hidden. They had to be very careful with

their trash, no tin cans or anything like that that could be spotted from the air, and they would take game trails to their camp, changing their route often. Still, the Border Patrol would find them, ship them back to Mexico and in a few months, they would be back. Actually, I think the hombres would try to get caught around Christmas and Cinco de Mayo. They got a free trip home.

All of those hombres were really good men who were just trying to earn enough money to feed and clothe their families. They avoided trouble like the plague. I would send, via money order, almost all their earnings to their families in Mexico, traveling out of town to different post offices to mail them so the post office employees wouldn’t turn us in.

Once, when Buster was out of town for a week or so and I was on the ranch alone with a tiny baby, I noticed that our dogs started acting really strange just after dark… not barking or whining… just strange and looking out toward the brush. Our house was built against a canyon wall at the mouth of a really large canyon sixteen miles from town. There was only one neighbor on our side of the river. I tried very hard not be scared, not to think about the huge cougar that had been seen several times on the ranch—once by me while I was on horseback. Still, I kept a loaded gun at every door and one under my pillow.

Eventually, I realized that every night my husband was gone, one of more of our hombres, had camped out in the brush near the house to watch over me and my baby girl.

All of those guys were special and would have laid down their lives for me. That is why I identify with the friendship and loyalty portrayed by this movie.

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g n i w o h s e s r o H The 1960-1969 , s r a e Y 28

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T H E H O R S E S H O W I N G Y E A R S 19 6 0 - 6 9

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JIMMY DEAN AND BRIAN’S PUMPKIN One year in the late 1960s, we went up to the Ada, Oklahoma, Quarter Horse Sale to buy a gelding for one of my customers’ teen aged daughters and ended up buying two.

I kept a bay Brian H gelding that stood a little over 15 hands tall, named Brian’s Pumpkin. He had come off one of the big ranches in Oklahoma and was green broke, which meant he’d had a saddle on him but tht was about it. When I started riding him, I soon realized what a spook he was.

If I got too still and quiet on him and then moved or spoke, he would break in two bucking with me, so I had to talk to him or sing to him (God forbid) the entire time I was 32

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on his back so he wouldn’t forget I was there. I always rode him with my anti-buck device, which was a piggin’ string hung around his neck, then threaded through the pommel to hook over the saddle horn. If a horse tried to get his head down, which is what they did when they bucked, he would choke himself.

Punk was a really handy horse with a great way of going, but he was a perpetual daydreamer. If he was asleep in his stall and there was any loud bang, like a water bucket hitting the wall in some other stall, he would squall and just start bucking in his stall. He had great conformation,

a really pretty head, but he was just so bay, with no white markings at all. You had to really look at him to see what a fine horse he was. At the time, I had several junior horses that I was showing, so Punk didn’t get to go to shows that much. I won some halter classes with him, but he was too big a spook for Western Pleasure.

I was still riding him with a bosal and, which is a sort of noseband that takes the place of a bit, when I decided to send him over to an old cowboy friend who was known for his ability to bit out horses really well. He kept the horse for about six weeks, and when I brought him home, I couldn’t wait to get on him. I saddled him up and put a fairly high-ported bit, with a hump in the bar that goes into the horse’s mouth, so I’d have more subtle control.

I still didn’t trust him that much. He was big and stout, and I already knew he could buck. Why I didn’t take him to the arena first, I’ll never know, but instead I rode out in the pasture on him. We were loping along when tall goat weeds started hitting him in the belly. I felt him starting to bow up and I got a good hold on him, I thought. Well, he swallowed his head and started bucking. Every jump pulled me another notch out of the saddle, kinda like an old school room clock. I absolutely could not get his head up… or double him (bending his head around to the side so he would be forced to turn). Finally, I went over his head and hit the end of the reins like the popper on the end of a whip. The ground followed right after that. Up until that day, I had never been thrown that hard. I guess I had never been on a horse whose head I couldn’t pull up. I think you get the picture, this horse was a bronc, but I didn’t give up on him.

looked back and seen legs that long. Plus, I had no idea how well Dean rode, but I stepped off and explained that the horse was a terrible spook and could be a real bronc.

I’m sure Jimmy Dean thought if that little girl can ride him, I certainly can. I was hoping the show had plenty of liability insurance, because I was about to kill their star.

Dean let out my stirrups as far as they would go and then eased up onto the horse. Punk started to tremble and go down with his front legs out straight in front of him like a dog getting ready to lie down. Dean didn’t hesitate—just stepped on up and let the horse settle.

He shook out the reins a bit and quietly eased him off.

He walked him around the whole floor of the astrodome, then trotted and finally eased him off in an easy little lope, and that is when I finally exhaled. Brian’s Pumpkin acted like a real gentleman. Jimmy Dean rode ole Punk for about 30 minutes, loping up and coming to a nice easy sliding stop… backed him a few steps and got off.

I have never been so relieved in my life. Of all the gentle horses I had that I could have been on that night, it had to be the biggest spook and bronc in the barn. I learned later that Jimmy Dean was quite a horseman and owned a number of good Quarter Horses.

Four or five months later, the Houston Livestock Show began, and I took six or eight horses to the show, including Brian’s Pumpkin. Since Buster was on the Board of Directors and I was Chairman of one committee, Vice-Chairman of another, and a member of several more committees, I could take my horses in to the show early and stay late. The guest star that year was Jimmy Dean, and the stars rehearsed for a couple of days before the show opened. Every night they were rehearsing, I saddled Punk and took him down into the Astrodome to see and hear all the music and see all the boogers. I really do not have to tell you how far his hair stood up or his eyes bugged out. Well, on the first night of rehearsal, Jimmy Dean had been watching me ride my goofy horse around that monster arena, and after he finished with his part of the rehearsal, he walked over to me and told me what a good-looking horse I was riding. Then, he asked if he could ride him.

Oh, my gawd! Dean was 6’3” or 6’4” and Punk had never PatsHorseTales.com

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THE CHRISTMAS SANTA ALMOST FORGOT Once there was a little girl who was five years old. She lived on a horse ranch with her momma and daddy, a lot of cats and a dog or two. She had a Shetland pony named Ricky she spent a lot of time with. Ricky had already raised several families of kids before he came to live at her house. He was getting up in years, and like most Shetlands, had gotten pretty cantankerous. She would walk out in the paddock most every day with her jump rope, put it around his neck, and lead him back to the stable. Invariably, Ricky would gaze nonchalantly off in the distance, pick up a front hoof and place it squarely on the little girl’s toe. He did it every time. After Ricky ran away with her one Sunday while she was out riding with her momma and daddy and dumped her in the bushes, it was decided that she needed a new mount.

Rebel, a palomino, was located. He’d been ignored and stuck in a filthy stall way out in the back of a riding stable in the city. He stood close to 15 hands tall, and that’s a long way up for a little girl, but Rebel wouldn’t have lived much longer where he was. The old guy with his muzzle gone gray looked to be near starvation. The owner of the stable was just waiting for the day he could call the rendering company to come get the horse’s body. He must have thought there wasn’t much reason to waste good oats or hay on an old horse past his prime and no longer able to earn his keep taking riders out. The stable owner was thrilled to get $100 for Rebel rather than have to pay to have his remains hauled away. The old gelding had been afflicted with several different types of lameness, but those flaws were completely overlooked by his new owner when he backed out of the trailer at his new home. The little girl’s eyes only saw a gorgeous golden palomino with a flowing flaxen mane, the most beautiful horse in the world.

We called the vet and the farrier, and Rebel’s reincarnation began. Dr. Banker said “I can’t be sure how old he is, but I’d say, give or take, about 20 years older than God.” Be that as it may, that little girl saw to it that Rebel had the best brushed belly and legs of any horse on the

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ranch. Rebel got the same treatment as the fancy show horses that stood in the stalls around him, and he began to regain his health with good feed, hay and a lot of love from one little girl. Every day she rode him, and he took wonderful care of her, never once putting her in any danger. He seemed to know what precious cargo he carried.

Christmas drew near; the weather was frosty, and decorations twinkled all over the ranch. What an exciting time of the year! As the family stood back and admired their decorating skills, Rebel’s mistress pointed out that the horses needed stockings hung on their stalls so that Santa could bring them apples and carrots. Naturally, Rebel had the biggest, fanciest stocking of all.

A few days before Christmas, not long after dinner as bedtime was being discussed, the front doorbell rang.

Momma and Daddy pretended to be too busy to answer the door so they sent their little daughter. They heard the front door open and then quickly slam shut. They asked who was at the door.

Their little one said, with saucer-sized eyes, “It’s Santa Claus.”

“Well, Sweetheart, go back and invite him in.” Her momma said.

She returned to the door, peeked out and ever-so-slowly opened the door. And in walked Santa Claus in full uniform, with a hearty “Ho, Ho, Ho.” The little girl (who had not found a period since she spoke her first words) was totally tongue-tied. Eventually she crawled up on Santa’s lap, sat silently and stiffly observed him. After a few minutes of questioning by Santa Claus, she asked him where his reindeer were. Santa explained that they were resting for their big night on Christmas Eve, so he hadn’t come by sleigh. She finally began to tell him all the things she wanted for Christmas. A short while later, Santa said goodbye and with a “Ho, Ho, Ho,” was on his way. The little girl was very puzzled and not a little disappointed that Santa drove a car and hadn’t brought his reindeer. She had really wanted to meet Rudolph.

On Christmas Eve, the young equestrian was almost too excited to go to bed. When her parents finally got her tucked in, her last words before her eyes slowly closed, were about Rebel.

“Momma and Daddy, are you sure Santa Claus will remember Rebel?” she said. “I forgot to ask him. He doesn’t know that Rebel lives here now and not in the same place as last Christmas.”

“Of course, Honey, Santa always knows where every boy, girl, and creature lives and never forgets a single one,” they answered.

As she floated off to sleep, she was still very worried and hoped Momma and Daddy were right.

Just as the sun was coming up on Christmas morning, the little girl squealed with delight at all the goodies Santa had left under the Christmas tree. She played with all her new toys, until it was time to get dressed to go Grandma’s for Christmas dinner. Just before they all walked out the door to get in the car for the trip into town, the little girl suddenly remembered Rebel and his stable mates.

“Wait!” she cried. “We have to go to the barn and see what Santa brought the horses! Oh, I hope he didn’t forget Rebel,” she said, concerned.

The Momma and Daddy looked at each other with horror.

Santa had forgotten about all the stockings hanging on the stall doors! There was a panicked moment while the parents were silently working out how to create a distraction long enough for one of them to make a hurried trip to the barn to fill 28 stockings with apples and carrots.

Mom grabbed her Santa hat and jammed it on her head as she ran out the back door and raced the 300 yards to the barn. Fortunately, Santa had successfully smuggled carrots and apples into the tack room the afternoon before. Momma quickly crammed the carrots and apples in the stockings, with Rebel receiving a double portion. She had just skidded back into the house as Daddy and his little angel headed out the door on the way to the barn.

Daddy was praying that Santa had had enough time to distribute all the horsey Christmas Cheer.

As calmly as possible, the trio walked into the barn and that little girl’s eyes just sparkled as she cried, “Oh, Momma and Daddy! Look!!! Santa didn’t forget!”

She ran down the alleyway to Rebel’s stall and held her arms up for Daddy to help her reach Rebel’s carrots, so she could feed him his Christmas present from Santa Claus. The old horse nudged his tiny mistress and gently took the carrot she held for him. As she put her little cheek against his and stroked his neck, she whispered, “Merry Christmas Rebel.”

I swear there was a tear in that old horse’s eye!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

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ROUND UP ON THE HAYTHORN RANCH ARTHUR, NEBRASKA In the mid to late 1960s, I think it was, the judge of the Quarter Horse show of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was a man named Waldo Haythorn from Ogalalla, Nebraska. I first met him early in the show as the judge of the Youth Horse Show. A week or so later, he judged the AQHA Horse Show.

Waldo had been described to me as a rancher and wellknown steer roper. He owned a large, if not the largest ranch in Nebraska. That information led me to believe that he would like a big, strong horse, so I made sure I brought a horse to the Quarter Horse show I knew he would love, Penny’s Rojo. Rojo was a 3 year old and would show in the junior gelding class. He stood a little over 16 hands high, was a bright red sorrel and looked like he could pull down a barn. I was also showing Busy San, a gorgeous 4 year old gelding by Leo San and out of a Joe Reed mare in the senior gelding class.

I had already won everything but the grand stand, including the Junior Western Pleasure, but arrogant me

wanted both Grand and Reserve Gelding. Well, Waldo did choose Busy San as Grand Champion Gelding but did not pick Penny’s Rojo as Reserve Champion. Good sportsmanship prevailed, and I remained gracious and polite, but I was still ticked off.

The next week, we went to New Orleans to the annual AQHA Convention where I ran into Waldo Haythorn at breakfast one morning. I joined the group and everyone at the table proceeded to swap horse stories. Out of the blue, Waldo, looked at me across the table and said, “You thought I should have used your junior gelding as Reserve Champion in Houston, didn’t you? You knew he was my kind of horse.” I agreed that I had been more than a little surprised and had not been happy with his selection.

He answered, “I’m going to buy that horse from you and it would have looked bad for me to make him Reserve and then buy him.” My mouth fell open, and I waited for the rest of his proposal, as I had not been trying to sell the horse. Waldo said he had some 30 brood mares of Eddy and Joe Hancock breeding that would not foal until late May or June.

He proposed trading me his entire filly crop, regardless of the number born, for Penny’s Rojo. As he said, there might be two fillies or there might be 20. I thought about it for a few minutes and stuck my hand out and said, “Deal.” I shipped Penny’s Rojo out to Waldo’s son, Craig, who was attending Texas Tech in Lubbock. Then I waited for weaning time on the Haythorn Ranch in Nebraska.

We arrived at the ranch in October to pick up 13 prime weanling fillies, plus one or two yearling fillies Waldo had decided to throw in for good measure.

I should point out that Waldo traded fillies because they only used geldings for their ranch work and really had no use for the fillies. Today, the ranch has a much larger herd of brood mares and a production sale each year.

It just so happened that a cattle buyer had contracted for 150 head of yearling Hereford steers to go in a feed lot, and Waldo and the ranch hands were preparing to round up about 1000

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head from which to select the 150 to ship. I was invited to go along. Within a day or two, my husband and I, Waldo, and four or five ranch hands set out along with a remuda of 40 or so geldings and a chuck wagon (on a bob-tail truck). We left the ranch headquarters and headed west, I think. In the sand hills, there are not many landmarks, so as I write this 40 years later, I’m not real sure.

We rode all day before pitching camp. In that part of the world, you can cross anybody’s ranch, as long as you stay on the section line, should you know where it is. The fence is taken down, the horses and equipment cross over and the fence is replaced in the same condition in which it was found. I don’t remember how many fences came down and went back up that day, but we rode a long way to the campsite.

All the cowhands slept in bunks built into the chuck wagon/bunkhouse. My husband and I tossed a tarp on the ground under the chuck wagon and unrolled our bedrolls. The range cubes used to feed the horses were under the wagon with us, and sometime during the night, I woke up to find myself being dragged across the ground by a horse that thought I was a sack of feed. I had put so much air in my mattress, in the pocket of my sleeping bag, that I couldn’t get my arms out to unzip myself, so I had quite a ride before the horse realized I wasn’t a sack of feed. By some miracle, the rest of the remuda did not stampede over me.

The next morning before sunrise, the sky had not even started turning gray when the cook was up putting on the coffee. The cowboys rolled out and fed the horses.

After a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and fresh biscuits, we all saddled up and rode out to different sections of the ranch in pairs. I rode with Waldo. As he and I were returning to the chuck wagon for lunch, I asked him how far we had ridden that morning. He said we’d covered about 50 miles. I will never know if he was pulling my leg or not, but our horses had been in a stand-in-the-stirrups long trot all morning, and my bum sure felt like it had been in the saddle for 50 miles.

I need to take a minute to tell you about sand hills horses.

It is impossible to whip, drive or spur one over a hill they cannot see over in case there is a blow out where the wind has blown the sand away.

After lunch, the boss assigned each of us different horses that we caught, saddled, and rode for the afternoon so the morning horses could have a rest. We continued

to gather steers and drive them into one pasture. I really can’t remember how many days we gathered cattle, but we rode down two horses each day.

When we had gathered about 1000 head of steers, some of the neighbors came over to help hold the herd in the corner of a 640-acre pasture. While 850 head were cut out 150 were held in the corner of the pasture for the buyer. Only Waldo and I were on cutting horses. I was riding an old horse called Spider that Waldo’s son, Craig, and his daughter, Sally, had shown in youth cutting events. I’m almost sure he was a son of Eddy. Anyway, back to the story.

Waldo didn’t cut more than a half-dozen head of cattle out of that herd all day. He just pointed and told me which ones to cut. Every time ole Spider really got down and did something hard, he would come up, look back at me and nicker. A couple of times I caused Spider to charge the cattle and scattered them all over the herd holders. Waldo yelled at me to just sit still and let Spider do his job. Each time Waldo pointed to a steer, Spider would quietly start moving toward the selected animal before I could make a move. I swear he could read Waldo’s mind and knew which steer he wanted. The day wore on and so did my behind. Since I was the only woman there, I was really trying to hang tight and not whine about anything. When we had separated out over eight hundred head, Waldo rode alongside, and with a huge grin on his face, asked me if I was keeping a good count.

You have no idea what a good count I was keeping.

While cutting the last 30 or 40 head, I was having trouble staying in the saddle. Waldo, with that dang grin on his face, said, “I thought you liked to ride cutting horses.” When the 850 head had finally been released back into the pasture, cattle trucks arrived, the remaining cattle were loaded, and we rode back to camp. I had to pour water on the insides of the knees of my Levis to get them off. The seams had rubbed huge holes in the skin of my knees. The resulting scabs had stuck my Levis to my legs. I still carry the scars, but it was an unbelievable day that I will never forget.

The next day, for the ride back to ranch headquarters, Waldo had a pretty young palomino saddled for me. On the way, he had one of the cowboys challenge me to a horse race. I was a little tentative due to the blow outs in the sand hills. I didn’t want my horse to run up on one and

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plant all four feet sending me over his head into the next county. Still, I whipped and spurred like crazy until the race was over. The hand beat me by a little bit and Waldo gave me what for, saying I was on the fastest horse and should have won.

The cowboy leaped to my defense saying I had literally spurred the spurs off my boots. The same cowboy told me that I was the first woman that had ever gone on roundup with them. They had had journalists, photographers and all sorts of other people, but never a lady. I think I passed the acid test. I did my assigned jobs, rode the miles, cut the cattle and generally held my own without any whining. It was truly an experience of a life time.

Before we left the ranch to start the round-up, I realized that, as the only woman with this group of cowboys, I needed to be particularly careful with my language. No swear words of any kind, no matter what. My word, I decided, for all frustrating events would be “fizzle.”

A month or so after we returned to Texas, Waldo called and said, “You have absolutely ruined all my cowboys!”

“How?” I asked.

He said, “I walk around the ranch and these old grizzled cowboys with tobacco stained beards are getting the mess kicked out of them, among other things, yelling, ‘Oh, fizzle!!’ It’s really embarrassing.”

MY DOLLY DIMPLE In the winter of 1967, Buster and I went to Ogalalla, Nebraska to the Haythorn Ranch, where we spent New Year’s Eve with Waldo and Bell Haythorn. Oh, boy, what a winter it was! One of those 40 below zero winters. On New Year’s Day, Waldo took us out to look at horses. He was a wild man in an automobile, and while we were flying across a snow covered pasture, he crashed his El Camino through a snow bank into a shallow gully, tearing the transmission out. We were stranded miles from civilization. As far as you could see to the north …

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SNOW. As far as you could see to the south … SNOW. The same was true when you looked east or west. And it was really cold snow!

We had to get out and start walking … When I tell you it was cold, believe it … It had, maybe, warmed up to 10 or 12 below zero. Waldo said that with any luck, we would intercept the hands coming in from feeding cattle. We walked … and we walked … aannnd we walked. When we found them in the fields, we set bales of hay on fire to warm up … and we walked. I kept thinking, ”If I keep walking, I won’t freeze to death.” We did finally find the hands and get a ride back to headquarters. We did not freeze to death. My advice: don’t go look at horses in waist high snow on New Year’s Day in sub-zero weather in Ogallala, Nebraska.

At the end of that trip, Waldo sent one of his stallions home with us. His name was “My Beaver,” by Beaver Creek out of a Peter McCue Jr. mare. Standing 16.0+ hands, he was a gorgeous horse. We bred him to a mare I had bought that fall at a sale, Rio Rita, an own daughter of Chubby (the stallion) and out Elmer Hepler’s great broodmare, Panazarita Daughtery. Rio Rita had produced 13 foals when I bought her, 10 had been by Poco Bueno, with one, Poco Sail, being named World’s Champion Halter Mare in 1959 or ‘60. Rita was 20 years old and I hoped we might get one foal from her, and she had a beautiful filly, but she never got up to nurse her. A huge tumor on one of her ovaries had ruptured during contractions and we could not save her. It was certainly doubtful we could save the filly.

At that time, I ran the stable at a well-known Houston County Club, and I took the orphaned filly to the stable to try to get her to nurse a bottle. My vet advised me to teach her to drink from a bucket rather than a bottle because of the time and effort it would take to get enough milk down her. I spent those first few hours begging her to drink … splashing milk on her nose and into her mouth. The vet told me not to relent, that she would finally be hungry enough to drink. I cried and begged and begged her to drink. Well, miracles of miracles, she did finally take a sip … and then another … and finally after a couple of days she really started drinking. I lived four or five miles from the stable and I would get up every four hours to go feed her. I can’t remember how many weeks I did that before I got her to sleep through the night. The little devil was a real survivor. She grew, and soon, I was adding bran mash to her milk. As she got bigge, another problem surfaced. She did not know

she was a horse. Her play got a little rough and dangerous. She thought she was a human baby, and all those big horses scared her to death. I remember the first day I tried to lead her out of her stall. NO WAY! It was way too scary out there. I coaxed while someone pushed. I pulled , but Dolly dug her feet in and would not come out of that stall. Finally, I gave up and just started leaving her stall door open all day, hoping she would finally get curious enough to venture out. After about a week, she snuck up to the open door and put one hoof over the threshold and peeked around the door. Some horse banged a bucket, and she jumped straight in the air and zoomed back into her safe stall. This went on for a few days until I looked up from my desk to see her walking through the office door. From that point, She lived around the barn, sticking her nose into everything, but she was remained scared of other horses. When she got tired, she would go back to her stall and lie down with her body in the stall and her head out in the alleyway.

to stay warm, Kim would go down to muck her stall. The two of them had some real adjustments to make due to the cold and snow. Kim discovered that horse manure freezes and sticks to the floor of the stall. She became very diligent about cleaning the stall often. Dolly had to learn to let the snow stay on her back and not shake it off. She stood around shivering from the cold for a while before she learned.

When Kim and I left Wyoming a year later, I took my horses down to a friend in Parker, Colorado, and went back to Houston. I had neither place nor money to keep any horses in Texas. When my friends had a horse sale later that year, I had to sell Dolly. I don’t know who bought her or where she went. I have a feeling that she would have been almost impossible to break and not many people would have put up with a lap horse like I did. I loved her very much, but I’m sure I did her no favor by spoiling her.

At the end of 1969, the same year Dolly Dimple was foaled, Buster and I divorced, and in early 1970, I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dolly went with me, along with Peppy’s Betsy and Bo Diamond Dandy. I had a real discipline problem with Dolly, because she never understood she was a horse—a sweet but spoiled brat of a horse.

When we got to Wyoming, she lived around the house because she was still afraid of other horses. Dolly chased cars, ate dog food and slept on the porch at the back door. She would see the car when we crossed the first cattleguard onto the ranch and would race down, like a dog, to meet us. The road up to the house was about a quarter of a mile long, and Dolly would lope alongside the driver with her head in the window.

It proved quite a surprise for the unsuspecting. She and the dogs argued over the Chuckwagon Dog Food all the time. The end of her white muzzle was always stained red from the red dye in the dog food, and it’s one thing to push a dog out of the way when you walk out the door, but quite another to move a large filly.

That spring, we tried to get her to go to the alfalfa field.

I would sit on the tailgate of the pickup and she would lope along with her head in my lap. When we got her to the far side of the field, we would turn around and drive like hell to beat her to the gate, but she outran us every time. She became my daughter’s 4-H project, and during the winter, when Dolly had to move to the barn

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AU T UM N W I T H A H O R SE NA M ED JACK I didn’t know Jack in the spring or summer of his life. I married into his family when Jack, the horse, was 15 years old. He was a handsome, well-made unregistered horse, standing about 15.1 hands, brown with a blaze and socks.

Jack was a heck of a roping horse and had done well in Working Hunter classes. His IQ may have been the highest of any horse, (and a lot of humans) I ever met. My husband, Buster, and I took Jack to the ranch in Junction. He wasn’t really fond of the hard work of climbing up and down the sides of the canyons, but he loved living down in the river bottom with the rest of our horses. My stepdaughters rode him when they visited, but he developed a limp during round-up one year. We just couldn’t find anything wrong. He would seem to be fine, but as soon as he was saddled, he would limp on his right front foot so bad we were afraid he was going to fall. Whoever was 40

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on him had to get off. This went on the entire summer, and we still couldn’t find a cause. One day, all the horses came up to water near the house. They came flying up in a cloud of dust, and Jack didn’t know anyone was looking, so there was no limp. I walked out the front door and yelled, “Jack, you old fraud.” The minute he heard my voice, he started limping so badly it was all he could do to get to the water trough. About that time, one of the mares pinned her ears, bared her teeth at him and turned to kick. Jack spun out of her way and ran off a few steps with no limp. He saw me watching and immediately started limping again, only he limped off on the wrong foot. We still couldn’t ride him, because he refused to give up the act. Finally, after several months of not riding him, he forgot the limp, but he still had plenty more tricks in store for the humans in his life.

I decided I wanted to learn to ride a jumping horse, so I put the jumping saddle on Jack and off we went to the river bottom to jump a few logs. Well, the old devil would gallop very nicely up to a log, take a couple of short strides and pop straight up and over.... making a six-foot jump out of what should have been a little three-foot hop. Of course, that would leave me way behind the saddle, sitting on his butt. I’m sure I heard him give me a horse laugh. A little bit of that and I decided to stick with my western saddles and let Jack go back to his idyllic life of retirement.

One day, I had caught my horse, King Joe Doc, and put him in one of the stock pens. A horseshoe on the end of a piece of chain acted as the latch for the gate. It could not be reached by a horse on the inside of the pen. After a bit, I looked out and saw that Doc was out. I went out and put him in the pen again and made darn sure he couldn’t reach the latch. In about 10 minutes, he was out again. There were no other horses anywhere around and once more I put him up. The third time it happened, I caught Doc one more time, but this time I slammed the door to the house as if I had gone in but hid around the corner. Sure enough, in a few minutes, here came Jack in a dead run. He flipped the latch off with his nose and took off to hide again. That horse could open any gate, no matter how fool proof you thought the latch was.

One afternoon we came back to the ranch to find our two stallions together, fighting like tigers. After we broke up the fight, we found Jack in one of the stud pens with the gate shut. He had opened both gates, let the stallions out and then gone in and closed the gate behind himself to watch the fight. When horses were found in different stalls than they had been left in with all the doors open, you always knew Jack had been there. If you wanted to keep Jack from opening doors or gates, you needed to use a large Master lock and be sure to take the key with you.

Once, we took several horses down to Sabine Pass on the Gulf of Mexico to swim them in the ocean. They all loved it except Jack. He acted like he had lived 20+ years without ever swimming in the ocean and wasn’t going to start then.

No amount of coaxing would get him in the water, so one of us took him back and tied him to the trailer. Jack was as good at untying himself or slipping a halter off as he was at opening gates. Very shortly, I looked up and there hung his empty halter. That day he wasn’t enjoying anything we were doing, so off he ran. We chased him through people’s carports, down the road, up the road, and up and down the beach until he got tired of playing with us and went back to the trailer to stand by his empty halter.

When Jack was 21, my little daughter was 6 years old and she started showing him. They were billed as the oldest horse with the youngest rider. In one Youth Gelding halter class, the judge kept looking at Jack because he did have great confirmation, but his age was beginning to show. The

judge would walk up to him and put his hand in the sink in front of his withers and step back and rub his chin. He was having a tough time trying to decide where to place him. He finally placed him third in a very large class. After the show, we were talking to the judge, who was a friend, and laughed about his dilemma with Jack. When we told him he was 21, he said he felt vindicated, because he had no idea the horse was that old. Jack could do anything. He was a super Western Pleasure horse, barrel racer, or 4-H game runner of any sort. He would read the rule book the night before, so all they had to do was just sit there and he would handle the rest. One problem arose though, when we realized that Jack’s rule book was not the most current edition. His book said there would be five poles in the pole bending, but the rules changed to six. His first time out after the change, he counted five poles and rolled around that fifth pole, completely ignoring his rider to finish the event with a very good time. I’m sure he just thought they were trying to mess with him by adding a sixth pole. That generation of kids spent a lot of time convincing him that the rules had changed.

There was an old fellow, Henry, who worked for us and lived at the stable. Since there was no point in trying to confine Jack to his stall, his door was usually open and he just wandered around the stables at will. One day, I felt a lump in his jaw between his cheek and gums. I reached up in his mouth and found a very shriveled dehydrated pickle.

I asked ole Henry where Jack had gotten a pickle. Henry told me that he bought them for Jack all the time. Jack would walk up his steps, look through the screen door, then bang on it with his nose, begging for a pickle. Jack was also very fond of hamburgers and would take you to the ground if you tried to eat one around him, so we always just got him one of his own. He preferred his burgers “all the way.” As soon as we got to a show, his little mistress would take Jack to get a hamburger. You know, just to tune him up. At one show, she was busy doing something and asked, “Mom, will you take Jack to get his hamburger?”

I hopped on Jack and loped up to the concession stand.

That day the moms and dads were grilling burgers for the kids and I ordered one for both of us. Jack was so eager for his that I wasn’t able to get very far from the concession stand before I had to give it to him. As I was standing there holding his burger for him to eat, a woman said, with a great deal of disgust, “All the starving people in the world and you are feeding that horse a hamburger!” I answered, “Lady, he paid for his burger the same as everybody else.”

Jack and I stood right there while he finished his burger.

My daughter and I left Houston and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Jack had to stay behind. I was told that he lived to be 31 or 32, long past his autumn. He was the biggest horse character I ever knew and there are enough Jack stories to fill a book.

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BASEBALL & HORSES In 1965, a couple of big old boys walked into our western store. Because they were dressed in suits and ties, they really stood out. They introduced themselves as Tony Cloninger and Denis Menke with the Milwaukee Braves. Tony was a pitcher and Denny was a short stop. Seems their manager insisted that his players wear suits and ties when not in baseball uniform. Well, Tony was a good ole Southern boy from North Carolina, loved horses and had heard about our store. That day, there was a lot of horse talk, and before they left, they gave us tickets to the games they were playing in Houston on that trip. Let me tell you, the player’s seats are the best in the house, right behind home plate! Every day they were in town that trip, and any others that year, they came out to the store and had lunch with us. At Tony’s request, we took them to the ranch and showed them all our horses.

That year, 1965, Tony was having the best year of his career, when he went 24-11, but sadly got no Cy Young votes because Sandy Koufax was pitched out of rotation and won 26 games. It was the end of the season and Tony ran out of games.

on my gentlest horses. They looked like “Neds in the first reader.” None of them had ever been on a horse’s back, and It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud.

Their big butts were all over the saddle—feet and legs everywhere. We got through that first day with them sitting their horses a lot better at the end of the lesson. We got in a couple more lessons before they left town that trip and they began to lose their grasshopper postures.

The next year, 1966, the Braves moved to Atlanta and Tony made it into the record books. On July 3rd, in Candlestick Park, he hit two grand slams and drove in another run, for nine runs batted in, making him the only man—no less the only pitcher in National League history to do so. Tony roomed with Denis Menke, and he’d get up every morning and take batting practice with the team, something I’m told not many pitchers do. Denny was a strong hitter and hit his share of home runs.

Tony gave him credit for making him a good hitter.

On a trip to Houston, Tony asked us to find him a really good yearling stallion and bring him to Atlanta.

We went out to Rob Brown’s in Throckmorton, Texas, where we saw a gorgeous palomino colt by Blue Gold and out of an Eddy/Hancock cross mare. I really wanted to keep that horse but had promised Tony a good one.

That colt was, by far, the best I had seen all year. We bought him for Tony and took him to Atlanta. Tony was bitten by the horse bug, and he bought several more horses from us.

Our friendship grew, and on one trip to Houston, Tony asked if I would teach him to ride. OH MY GOD! A top athlete wanted me to teach him something athletic! I have never been so intimidated in my life, especially when he said that left-handed ace relief pitch1967 was really the end of Toer, Billy O’Dell and short ny’s career with the Braves. The stop, Denis Menke wanted opening game that year, the to join the lessons. Billy was manager started Tony and left nicknamed Digger, because Autographed 1967 Topps Card used with the him in for 13 innings. It was a cold he had a game stopped once permission of the Topps Company. miserable day and Tony pulled a to dig a hole in the pitcher’s shoulder muscle in addition to mound for his toe. I think he even had somebody bring contracting a virus that left him with a spot in one eye. a shovel out to the mound. Denis was taciturn but congenial. His wife and I became pretty good friends after When I asked why he didn’t move to the outfield since he he was traded to Houston and she had me teach her to was such a strong hitter, he told me that he was no good at any position with the spot in his eye. He couldn’t see the ride also. ball. He was traded to Cincinnati and still managed to conWell, the first lesson day arrived, and I was about to throw tribute nine wins to the 1970 National League Pennant. up until someone pointed out that these guys were very He was a bullpen coach for the Yankees and was pitching accustomed and receptive to instruction and training. My coach for the Boston Red Sox.. reticence really disappeared when I got all three mounted PatsHorseTales.com

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BO DIAMOND DANDY BY: HY DIAMOND DANDY by HY DIAMOND (tb) OUT OF: BO’S HOPE by HOBO ADAM by HOBO (1964-1991) Bo Diamond Dandy was foaled in 1964, when we lived on the Lightning M Ranch west of Houston. She was one mean little motor scooter. As soon as she wobbled into a standing position, I touched her on the rear, and she pinned her ears and did everything a newborn foal could do to kick me. That set the tone for our encounters throughout her weanling and yearling years, and the only thing that stopped her from trying to kick me every time I walked into her stall was me throwing a bucket at her. One time, she got the bucket hung between her hind legs, and that scared her so bad she never tried to kick me again.

After she was weaned, I started putting the baby surcingle (a padded donut-shaped training harness)

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on her with driving reins and a soft rubber bit. Things would go great until I put any pressure on her mouth.

She just couldn’t stand it. She’d flip over in a New York minute. I had our saddle maker at the store make me bit holder that included a bosal (noseband). Well, her nose was almost as soft as her mouth, but I learned to get along with her.

When I could wait no longer, at about 18 months, I put my saddle on her. It only weighted 28 pounds, fully rigged. I put a very light bosal on her and stepped on. It was just Bo and me—no one else was around. I had driven her so much, that with a light cluck and a squeeze of the leg, she moved off, nice and calm. That went so well that after a bit, I eased her into a trot and then an extended trot. It was all pretty colt-like, but we were moving forward with no bucking or bad behavior. At one point, while she was in an extended trot, I thought, let’s see if the girl will stop in an acre or less.

I picked her up and asked her to whoa, and I almost fainted when she kept her head in perfect position and using her withers as a fulcrum, dropped her butt down and came to beautiful stop with her hind legs under

her. I was so excited! I thought, let’s see what happens when I ask her to turn left or right. Usually a colt will walk around a turn. Not Bo. I gathered her up and put just a wee bit of pressure on her neck and used a little leg pressure. She kept both hind feet planted and did a perfect pivot left. I tried the right. Same thing. Now remember, this was the very first time she had ever had a saddle or rider on her back. And wouldn’t you know it? There was no one to see it.

Willis Bennett, a well-known cutting horse trainer, was working for me at the time, and one day, he was on a Youth Cutting Horse that he was tuning up for some folks. I was on Bo Diamond Dandy just sitting in the middle of the arena.

The cattle were so sour that not a lot of herd-holding was necessary. One old sour thing broke from the herd and ran right down my filly’s throat. I could feel her start trembling, and my only thought was to keep her from panicking and bucking me off. She gave it some serious thought, and then, all of a sudden, she pinned her ears and fell down in front of that cow. She made about 3 hard turns with that old cow and then didn’t know what else to do. I’ve got to tell you, I had goose bumps all over. Willis pulled his horse up, looked at me and said, “Today is the last day for you on that filly. She goes in my string from now on.” Bo could already spell COW, and she hadn’t hit her 2nd birthday.

Unfortunately, shortly after Willis took over her training, I noticed a small sore, about the size of the end of a cigarette on the inside of a hind leg. After a week or so, it hadn’t gotten any better, so when my vet, C.A. Banker, was at the ranch taking care of other horses, I asked him to take a look at it. It was osteomyelitis, an infection that went straight through to the bone and into the marrow. Suddenly, there was a real possibility of losing her. C. A. treated her and we had to get off her and wait until the darn thing healed. I don’t remember how long that took, but quite a while.

And to top it all off, I was traveling something like 70,000 miles from April thruogh September to participate in over 70 horse shows. During that time, I made a Quarter Horse Champion per year for four years running. I burned out, plain and simple.

I started selling or giving horses away. I called all the people who boarded or had their horses in training with us and told them we were no longer taking outside horses and to move theirs right away. When the owners wouldn’t move, we did. Willis Bennett took over management of the Lightning M and we moved to a much smaller place. Willis was devastated that I was going to take Bo Diamond Dandy away from him. In hindsight, it was probably a very dumb move on my part.

As Bo was a running-bred filly, I put her in race training in Lafayette, Louisiana. She took her training really well and on her second out, it looked like she was winning the race when she popped a knee and pulled up lame. That evening, I had bet all my available cash on her to win. My trainer’s wife had to loan me $20.00 to get home. I brought Bo home, too, and let her rest and get well.

Next, I decided to make a Western Pleasure horse out of her. She moved like a million dollars—as long as you stayed out of her mouth or off her nose. Since I still had a bunch of outside Junior Pleasure horses that belonged to paying customers, Bo got left at home a lot and didn’t make a very big mark in the show ring.

[Editor’s note: Pat kept writing about this horse because Bo spent more years with her than any other horse—27. Bo was part of the family.]

Below: Bo Diamond Dandy with her son, Oh Hy Oh 1984ish.

Opposite: Bo in 1966 as a coming two-year-old.

About that time, I was worn out with all the work that went with Lightning M. There were over 100 head of horses on the place and 68 of them belonged to me. I was keeping 28 in show shape, which meant I had to start riding at 4:00 a.m. I’d ride 4 or 5 horses before 7:00, leave to take my little girl to pre-school, go to work in the store all day, and when I got home at about 6:00 p.m., I’d start riding horses again until about 10:30 or 11:00. Horse owners would show up in the evenings with toddy in hand and want to be entertained.

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I bred her first to Lester Goodson’s son of Three Bars, Bar Depth. She had a colt I named The Corner Bar. I sold him and don’t know what happened to him. Her next foal was by a Triple Chick son, Oh My Bars. That colt was Oh My Beau, the first racehorse for Jack Cole and me. He won his first race at Weatherford. I thought we would both have heart attacks from the excitement. At three-years-old, we put Oh My Beau in cutting training and he was burning up with cow, as the saying goes. Bo’s next foal, also by Oh My Bars, was Oh Hy Oh. He was born with a blaze in the shape of a number 1 that ran right down his face—a gorgeous bay colt that won his first five races and ran AAA at four distances. Hy Oh’s story is a complete chapter in itself.

Bo had other foals, but Oh Hy Oh was, far and away, her best foal. Every colt she had was a real bugger to break. They were really tough, but about the time I was ready to send them to the packers, I’d saddle up, thinking this was their last chance.

It was like someone had put a different horse in their stall.

Over night they would move to the next plateau of their training, never to return to all the bad habits and acts that had gone before. All of them could run and all of them were born knowing how to cut cattle from a herd.

Bo lived to be 27 years old and just fell over with a heart attack down by the pond on our Madisonville farm one afternoon. Jack saw her fall, and when I got to her, she was still breathing, but died with her head in my lap. We buried her where she fell.

A FEW MORE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF BO DIAMOND DANDY Indulge me just a little more as I rewind to 1964, when Bo was just a filly. My four-year-old daughter nicknamed her Bo Do (pronounced dough). And for all that filly’s waspy disposition, she seemed to love Kim and never displayed her sometimes ugly side when Kim was around.

When we sent Bo Do to the track as a two year old, and we went over to Lafayette to watch her run her first race. While we were visiting with the trainer and his wife by the stalls on the day of the race, the trainer’s wife said she was going to have to send us a bill for all the shirts Bo had bitten off of her husband. We were standing in front of her stall, and Bo was in her usual spot, head in the corner, butt to the audience. Kim ducked under the mesh stall guard before we could stop her and ran up to Bo loudly calling her name. Everybody froze.

The trainer and his wife blanched. I knew Bo had never made a move to hurt Kim, but couldn’t be sure how she would react now that she’d been away from home and learned to be a racehorse. My heart almost stopped, but wonder of wonders, she just swung her head around, dropped her nose down, and wiggled her lips on the top of that little girl’s head. We quietly retrieved Kim, who, after giving Bo Do a hug and a kiss, loudly told her friend goodbye.

BARN CATS Bo had displayed this sort of favoritism before.

When she was a yearling and still in her kicking mode, I walked into her stall one morning. I was trying to get her to 46

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turn her head to me—moving slowly, talking softly, when I looked up and saw one of the big, white barn cats walking along a purling six feet above Bo’s head. The cat stopped directly over her and with a slow wave of his tail, he focused on Bo’s back. I was thinking, please, please don’t think about it. The door to the stall was too far for me to ease out of the way, and I didn’t want to make any sudden moves. Wouldn’t you know it? That cat dropped straight down and landed right in the middle of Bo Diamond Dandy’s back. I held my breath and silently said goodbye to my family and friends.

Bo’s skin didn’t even ripple. She just stood stone-still and looked around at the cat until he hopped down to the ground. They must have practiced that maneuver. I eased out of the stall as quietly as I’d gone in and decided a cup of coffee was in order.

GUARD HORSE Bo didn’t like many people. Those she did, she seemed to really love. Any stranger who happened to just walk into her stall unannounced was fair game. They did that only once.

She to stand with her head in a corner, one hip dropped as if she was asleep, but she would uncoil like a rattlesnake.

With ears pinned and teeth bared, she would fly across her stall at the unsuspecting trespasser.

The Lightning M barn of Bo’s youth had 30 stalls, and a lot of people would just drop by to look at our horses. Most were informed horsemen who knew to wait for you to show them the horses, but a few people would charge ahead opening stall doors without invitation.

Since there were several stallions in the barn—including a couple of really mean ones—I didn’t want any of them getting out or hurting anybody. I gave Bo Do the job of “Guard Horse.” I put her in the first stall in the barn, and when one of those smart alecks started opening stall doors uninvited, she was first in line and greeted them in her typical unladylike fashion.

If I got to the barn to find some stranger standing, white-faced in the middle of the alleyway, I knew they had already met Bo Diamond Dandy.

Above: Bo’s first snow—1970. She was in foal in this picture and had a stud colt Pat named The Corner Bar. The snow was a little deep. Below: Bo as an old lady ca. 1989. Opposite page: Bo grazing near the spot where she is buried.

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THE SUPER DOG CHRONICLES SUPER DOG COMES TO LIVE WITH US Early in June of 1969, Kim and her daddy had been over in the Texas Piney Woods along the Trinity River. Kim walked in with this tiny little red ball of fur nestled in her arms. It looked like a wind-up toy. It seems this woman my husband knew had a litter of puppies she was going to drown if somebody didn’t take them away. They were really too young to leave their mother—being only 4 weeks old—but soft-hearted little Kim grabbed the bully of the litter and claimed him for her own. I’m told that all 5 or 6 pups appeared to have a different daddy, and if you watched long enough, you would see a different little male dog trotting down the road that matched a puppy in the litter. In deep East Texas, they bred these little dogs with great noses to be squirrel dogs.

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When I put down a saucer of milk for the puppy, he started lapping so hard that his little hind end came up another notch with each lap, like an old schoolroom clock, until he fell in the bowl face first. That first night was miserable. We put him in the laundry room in a box with blankets, and he howled. Then I put a ticking clock in the box with him. And he howled. I moved the box to my side of the bed, and he howled … until, finally, I put my hand in the box with him. I slept with my hand hanging off the side of the bed touching him all night long.

The next day, he got his first flea bath—he was covered in them. Then he went to the vet in my purse. When we walked in, the vet’s wife and her German shepherd were in the waiting room. While she and I were talking, I put my little partner down on the floor, and he bristled all over and charged the humongous shepherd barking like crazy. The big dog’s eyes got really big, he yipped, and ran around behind his mistress and hid. At that moment, “Super Dog” just fell out of my mouth, and that became his name.

The second night of Super Dog’s life with us, my arm was so sore from hanging off the side of the bed that I put him in bed with me. And that’s where he slept for the next

18 years. Those first mornings when I took him outside, he had a terrible time negotiating the St. Augustine grass because it was so tall—almost two inches high. Later, when he was about three months old, my mom and I were standing by an oak sapling and Super Dog was sniffing around.

He walked up to that tree, gave it a good sniff, looked it up and down, then, lifted his little leg to whiz on it. And he fell on his back like a big bug. But, not to be deterred, he jumped up, looked around to see if anyone was watching and approached the tree again. Up and down he looked, then sidled up to it again and quick as a wink, hiked the leg and propped it on the tree, took his whiz, and finished with as big a huff as a 3” x 6” dog could give. I’m sure glad I had a witness, since no one would have believed it.

Super Dog would chase anything that would run from him, especially cats. It didn’t matter that most of them were three or four times his size. There were a few exceptions, one being an old tomcat that had lived in the field where we built our house. Old Tom didn’t give up his territory easily, and most mornings when I took the mighty Super Dog out, Tom would plant himself square in the middle of the sidewalk and dare Supie to come close. At first, he charged, barking like crazy, but Tom stood his ground and slapped the devil out of the pup, knocking him ass over teacup, but Super Dog knew how to handle that. Tom became invisible from that point on, and Supie would walk around him like he didn’t exist, never making eye contact.

He went everywhere with me in my purse or in my pocket.

Kim would put him in the basket of her bicycle, and with his ears blowing in the wind and his little paws propped on the front of the basket, off they would go. She came home one day upset and worried because Super Dog had jumped out and landed on this head, and she was afraid he was hurt.

Not our boy. He was tough.

At just a few months old, he fell in love with pickup trucks and would jump into any truck he saw with an open door.

As little as he was, he could jump like a kangaroo. One afternoon, I couldn’t find him. I called and called, whistled and

whistled … no Super Dog. Kim rode through the neighborhood on her bike. I drove all the major streets around looking for a little squashed dog. After Kim went to bed crying, I drove around all night in my night gown, crying and calling. When I had exhausted all my options, I finally called the City Pound, though I held out no hope of finding him there. A really sweet lady told me I should come see if he had been picked up, so, reluctantly, I drove all the way across Houston to the Pound. When I got there, an old Black gentleman took me down the rows of dog runs telling me to slow down and look carefully at all the dogs.

I had already walked past one particular pen full of little dogs when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little red dog standing on the heads of all the others and barking like a fool. IT WAS SUPER DOG! The man said, “Lord, that little dog sure does know you!” When the vet on duty said he looked like a five-month-old puppy, I started telling him that he was older…. The vet said, “Lady, if a dog is under six months of age, it will cost you $5. Over that, it will cost you $20.”

While I stood there crying all over my smelly, wiggling, licking ball of fur, I told the vet, “I don’t care if it costs me $100.”

He said, “This is definitely a five-month-old dog.” I’m sure when the dog catcher saw him and opened the door to his pickup, Super Dog jumped right in and took up his shotgun position ready for a ride. On the way home from the pound, I stopped by Kim’s school. The whole class cheered, and I had to take him in for them to pet. Thus ended his first brush with the law.

SUPER DOG GOES TO WYOMING When he finished growing, Super Dog was 12 pounds of rock-hard sinew and muscle, a purebred Madison County Mouse Hound (as we later dubbed him) with long red hair

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and upright foxlike ears. He had the attitude of a bullmastiff, and he was one of the most amazing athletes I’ve ever known. Super Dog, Kim, and I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1970, arriving in January to find the area in the grip of an exceptionally cold, snowy winter. We bought a ranch just eight miles east of the Capitol building, but those eight miles might as well have been eight hundred, it was so remote. One day, driving up the road to the main house, I dropped Super Dog out on the snow-packed road and clocked him at 30 mph for a short distance.

There was an old barn on the ranch that was filled with cast-off junk. It probably dated back to the 1800s. As clean up began to make room for our horses, Super Dog got really busy chasing mice, and there were plenty of them.

One day, I looked up to see a mouse hightailing it down the length of the barn with Super Dog in hot pursuit. At the end of the alleyway was a wall of hollow clay blocks with a five- or six-inch diameter hole in one of them down close to the floor. The mouse beat Super Dog to the hole, but Supie was moving so fast he couldn’t stop. His nose went in the hole, but the rest of his body wouldn’t fit. His little red butt caught up with his head making him look like an accordion, just like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. After he bounced back a couple of feet, he picked himself up and turned around to trot back down the alley, but you could see his eyes were crossed with a lot of @&@#**@ swimming around in his brain. He looked around as if to say, “Just like I planned it!” and trotted off to find the next mouse.

As the snow began to melt, gopher runs that had been under the snow began to appear. The great hunter went to work. One day he looked up and a gopher had dared to stray from his hole. Super Dog flew over the ground and got him. It was his first genuine kill. He shook that gopher all over for several minutes making sure it was good and dead. We cheered and clapped as he trotted back, proud of himself, and then he started spitting and gagging from the gopher hair. Yuk! He hadn’t realized they had all that hair.

Oat hay was stacked outside, and every time bales were

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removed from the stack, mice shot out in every direction.

We had a retarded cat that refused to chase mice, so, of course, the Super Mouse Dog had to be called in. When a bale was moved, Supie was at the ready. He caught mouse after mouse, but because they had hair on them, he was done with them once he’d killed them. The cat would sit on top of the hay bales and Super Dog would catch the mice for him. They made a great team.

While we were driving across the pasture one day, Super Dog, ever on the alert, spotted a big jack rabbit, and Super Dog bailed out the window of the pickup and took off in hot pursuit. We followed the chase, and in a few minutes, a gorgeous gray fox that, no doubt, had been about to catch the jack rabbit, jumped out of some rocks and joined the parade. The fox’s coat was in transition from winter to summer colors. The ends of his hair looked were gilded, like he was surrounded by a golden aura. The jack rabbit was in front stopping every now and then to let Super Dog catch up. Then there was Super Dog, with the fox bringing up the rear just running for his life. Once again, I couldn’t help being reminded of a cartoon. In the end, none of them caught anything, but Super Dog was proud of the way he had handled the situation.

Every day I went to the back of the ranch to feed our herd of 150 black, white-faced yearling heifers. I would load hay and range cubes in the pickup and my main ranch hand, Super Dog and I would set out. After I got to the heifer pasture, I would put the truck in grandma gear and get out to scatter the feed. Since the plains around Cheyenne have few gulleys or trees, there was no danger of hitting anything, plus I had my ranch hand on board. I got up in the back of the truck and Super Dog drove for me. He would stand up with his paws on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead, and first make a gentle loop to the right and then a gentle loop to the left. We went all the way across the pasture until I had put out all the hay and cubes. Of course, I had to be sure the windows were up so my driver didn’t jump out of the truck when he spied a gopher or a jack rabbit.

ESCAPEE Early in the 1970s, Kim, Super Dog, and I returned permanently to Houston from Wyoming. We crossed the state line into Texas on Easter Sunday after driving for 18 or 19 hours straight through from Denver. That entire part of the world was still in the grip of winter, and we hadn’t seen anything green the entire trip. It was drab and brown all the way. It was a beautiful sunny day and about 150 miles north of Houston, we suddenly hit springtime. The early grass was green as an Irish hillside and the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes were covering the entire landscape. Due to the holiday, there were few cars on the road that morning, so I pulled off the road and the three of us leaped out and just rolled in the gorgeous wildflowers. I cannot tell you how good it felt to be back in Texas. [editor’s note: Mom ommitted the part about her second husband in Wyoming. The brief marriage had not been a happy one.]

We moved into an apartment in Houston and started our lives over—again. Super Dog had never been restricted to an apartment and now had to stay on a leash anytime he was outside. Whenever the door opened, he shot through it, and the hunt for him began. He was a hunter and had a lot of hunting to catch up on. He could dig like a dragline, and he demonstrated that skill on our small fenced patio.

He also had the uncanny ability to squeeze through the smallest hole, just like a rodent. He was a master escape artist, and we spent a lot of time searching for him.

Since all walks had to be on a leash, I decided to get a second-hand bicycle so I could ride with Kim and let Super Dog run alongside. I ended up with a secondhand man’s ten-speed that must have previously belonged to somebody about 6’4”. It had been a really long time since I’d ridden a bike, and probably never a ten-speed with the brakes on the handlebars. First rattle out of the box, I ran through a hedge and hit a wall, embarrassing my daughter a lot. Then I tied a couple of leashes together, hooked Supie up and started down the sidewalk—I did not want to get out in the street. As we peddled along, Super Dog would run ahead sniffing every bush and power pole. Our first crisis came when he circled me and tangled the leash in the bicycle chain. After that problem was corrected, off we went once more. Supie ran ahead and went between two street sighs and stopped to lift his leg. I could see what was about to happen but couldn’t stop the dang bicycle in time to avoid yanking the poor little guy’s head into one of the poles. Talk about a dog seeing stars! When he picked himself up, he turned around and glared at the offending pole, and I’m sure he thought, “I’ll never pee on that pole again.” That was

our one and only dog-walking trip on the bicycles. Neither Kim nor Super Dog would go with me anymore!

That summer I met a really wonderful man. Maybe I should say I became reacquainted with him. We started dating and one night, he came to take Kim and me to dinner. An hour or so before he arrived, Super Dog had escaped from the patio and Kim and I had been looking everywhere for him, she on her bicycle up and I had walking down along the creek behind our apartment. We had looked and called and cried, but couldn’t find Supie. When Jack Cole arrived to pick us up, he found two devastated females in place of the effervescent dinner dates he was expecting, and dinner was a sober event during which all we could think about was getting back home in hopes that our escapee would be waiting at the door for us.

We had gone to a restaurant within walking distance, and on our walk home, we passed within half a block of a parking lot where a dog obedience class was taking place. Jack asked Kim and me to look down the street, and there, silhouetted by streetlights stood a little dog with upright ears preparing to totally disrupt the obedience class. I would have recognized those ears anywhere. You guessed it. It was the mighty Super Dog! I like to believe that he was as glad to see us as we were to see him.

FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH How many times did I save Super Dog from the jaws of death? He had a real mouth on him and an attitude to match. He could make the mildest mannered dog in the world want to fight. I often wondered what he was saying in dog language. It had to be pretty bad. Of course, he always picked the biggest dog around to tick off.

After Jack and I married in 1972, we moved into a nicer apartment in Houston. The buildings were brand new and the landscaping was not complete yet, so there was still a lot of mud about the place. I opened the door to take Super Dog out without his leash one day. We did it all the time. Nothing ever happened. I didn’t intend to go far with him, just a quick potty break. One of my neighbors had a pair of Dalmatians, a male and a female. She was passing our front door just then—with her dogs on leashes, as they were supposed to be—when Super Dog blasted out after them. The Dalmatians went into protection mode for their mistress, who was was wearing a cute little white bikini with a white lace cover-up and high-heeled sandals. She was like a fashion model, PatsHorseTales.com

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just tripping along with her dogs. Then her dogs yanked her down into the mud. Both of the big dogs jumped on Supie.

The male got him by the throat, and the female got him in the stomach. I jumped into the fray and knocked the female off, but the male wouldn’t turn loose. When Jack heard all the commotion and came running out, he said he saw me trying to pry the male dog’s mouth apart with both hands with Super Dog hanging out of the big dog’s mouth like a ragdoll. I was finally able to open the Dalmatian’s mouth and force him to drop Supie, and I scooped him up and left Jack to help the mud-covered neighbor up and apologize. I washed all the mud off Supie, dried him off, and put him in his bed. When I set him down, he was sitting up, eyes staring straight ahead.

I would pull his legs apart so he would lie down, and he was stiff, like a mechanical toy. He didn’t move a muscle, just sat there staring, but his bat-ears shook. We called the vet who told us he was obviously in shock and that we should just give him some time to come out of it. When he finally did come out of it, I was on the floor beside him. He blinked at me, screamed, and fell back in fear of me. He cowered every time I reached to pet him. I guess in his little dog brain, I was the one who had hurt him, since I was the first person he saw when he came out of shock. After a few hours, he forgave me and no great damage had been done by the big dogs.

The next encounter was with a Rhodesian Ridgeback/ Yellow Lab cross. Supie could really pick ‘em. He was really into protecting his space and his humans. One afternoon when we were at the farm in Madisonville, the neighbor dog of Ridgeback/Lab ancestry, wandered up to our house.

Supie was off chasing something else and had not seen him.

I knew there would be trouble when he did, so I wanted to get him inside before he saw the other dog. Now, the neighbor dog was the size of a small pony and didn’t have on a collar. Every time I started to go get Supie, the neighbor dog followed me. I finally straddled the big dog and got him by the scruff of the neck to try and put him in a horse stall. About that time, Super Dog showed up and launched himself, grabbing the big dog in the flank. Big dog threw me off, and even though he was a sweet tempered, young dog, he grabbed Supe by the neck and started shaking him like a rat. Fortunately, he didn’t have a good grip, or he’d have broken Supie’s neck. Again, I grabbed this dog’s mouth and tried to pry it open with my hands. I kicked him and hit him, and finally, he dropped Supie. Somebody finally heard me screaming and calling for help, called the neighbors, and I scooped up my little pal and checked for damage. There were a few holes, but nothing serious. Once again, when he finally came to, I was holding him and loving on him, but he thought I had ihurt him, and he was scared of me. All the way back to Houston that afternoon, he sat on the back seat of the pickup and every time I reached for him, he cringed 52

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and cowed. Again, he forgave me after a few hours, but I still wonder, what in the world went on in that little dog’s head There were other encounters. A Malamute, a Doberman… so many I can’t remember them all. The mighty Super Dog thought he was protecting me. The miracle is that he survived every fight with no real damage. Somebody told me how lucky I was that none of those other dogs ever turned on me while I had my hands in their mouths, but you know, I never once thought about that. My little pal was in danger, and I was going to do everything I could to save him.

OH HY OH and HIS CAT, KAZ As the cool breeze of the early morning gently lifed his silky mane, Oh Hy Oh gazed with luminous eyes at the world around him, outside his stall window. The unique blaze in the shape of the number 1 prophesied the racing career he would enjoy. Not much was happening on the farm and the verdant, green grass of the paddock beckoned him.

One of our young tabby cats, Kamikaze (Kaz for short), sauntered around the corner of the barn with his tail held straight up in the air. He, too, was bored with waiting on the humans to begin the day’s activities. In search of some distraction, perhaps an inattentive mouse or other prey, he passed directly under Oh Hy Oh’s window and stopped.

The sleek, bay stretched his neck down to nuzzle the cat, who froze when the horse’s velvety muzzle touched his back. The horse ruffled his fur with his top lip, then ever-so-gently, the young stallion took the cat in his teeth holding him by the skin of his back and lifting him in the air.

Kim with Little Girl and Kaz in the tackroom door ca. 1982.

When I got closer, I saw that Kaz showed no sign of distress, and then I heard very loud prrrr, prrrrr, prrrring emanating from the dangling feline.

After a few minutes of displaying his cat trick, Oh Hy Oh opened his mouth and let Kaz drop to the ground, and the two resumed their wait for breakfast.

Kaz, so named because he once rode the wheelbarrow wheel all the way around, held perfectly stiff, like a fireplace poker. Oh Hy Oh raised his lovely head and stared straight ahead as if waiting to be noticed. To the casual observer, the cat’s back was sure to be broken.

I noticed the pair, and quietly and slowly eased closer while telling Oh Hy Oh to, “Drop the cat. Drop. The. Cat.” I didn’t want to startle him and cause him to hurt Kaz if the rigid tabby was even still alive.

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WHO WAS JACK LIONEL COLE? Jack Cole was born to a Polish immigrant mother and a first generation Polish father in 1924, in Highland Park, Michigan. He was the youngest of three children, with a sister and a brother. His mother, Tilly Sanders, came to the U.S.A. from Warsaw when she was eight years old. She died in 1979 or 1980 and was around 85 years old, so she must have arrived in the U.S. around 1904 or 1905. Her father’s name was Alexander Petrovsky, but his name was changed at Ellis Island to Alex Sanders. Jack described him as a big Russian who constantly drilled him as a little boy on the names of Columbus’ ships. Polish was never spoken in their house. They had come to America and the national language in the U.S.A. was English, so that is what they spoke. Jack’s father, whose real last name was Cohen, worked for Dun and Bradstreet, but I never knew in what capacity. The family name was officially changed in 1944 to Cole, however the family had used the name Cole, I suspect, for a very long time, since Jack’s birth certificate was issued to the Cole family.

At some point, the family moved to Chicago and lived on Division Street. Tillie had two sisters, and I don’t know about brothers, but there were at least three families and the grandfather, Alex Sanders, who lived together in a narrow, two-story house with an attic. Jack and his brother, Marvin, slept in the attic. Jack told me how very cold it was in the winter and hot in the summer. Tillie Cole worked at May & Company in the children’s department for many years; her favorite customer was the great Nat “King” Cole. She said he would come into the store to buy clothes for his daughter, Natalie, and call out for “Mrs. Cole! No relation, you know!” One uncle drove a cab and Aunt Betty stayed home, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the house. She was in total control of the house and everything in it. When she mopped the floors, she covered them with newspaper and no one was allowed to walk on them. Dinner time was 6 p.m. sharp, and if you weren’t seated at 6:00, you didn’t eat. Bedtime for Jack and Marvin was 9 p.m. and remained 9 p.m. until Jack joined the Navy at 16 or 17, straight out of high school. No one defied Aunt Betty. Whoever could get a job, worked and contributed to the household. Jack’s mom told me that he built a ship model when he was 10 years old and sold it to buy paint for the house. He told me about working at a green grocer’s, and when a customer came in and asked for a peck of spinach—he was 54

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maybe 13 at the time—and he had no idea how big a peck was, but it sounded big. He started stuffing sack after sack with spinach until the owner saw what was happening and saved the day. I guess that memory was so vivid for him because he really hated looking foolish. One of his fondest memories was swiping a potato and joining his buddies to build a fire in a vacant lot where they tossed their potatoes in the coals to cook. Another lingering memory was of sneaking up to the sauerkraut barrel Aunt Berry kept on the back stoop and grabbing a handful. Those were probably the worst things he did as a boy.

By some standards, the Cole family was a “poor” Jewish, immigrant family. Tillie, Jack’s mom, told me that when he was a really little boy, maybe two or three, she had to send him to live with one of the aunts outside the city somewhere for almost a year. She had to work and there was no one to take care of her little boy while she was at work. When Jack finally came home, he walked in, looked around and said, “No front room!” Jack told me that at times they had to accept welfare food, but the adults would try to slip it into the house so the children did not see it. In some of the summers, he would go to an uncle’s farm in Iowa, I think, and work for the summer. He told of seeing a sow eat one of her newborn piglets. Pigs will do that, but the memory still upset him 40 years later. Jack Cole had one of the softest hearts I’ve ever known, especially when it came to animals. Once, I asked him if he begrudged the fact that they were poor. He mulled the question over for a moment and said that he had never given it a thought. The family was a close one, with morals and rules that were not broken. He doesn’t remember anyone ever laying a hand on him for disobedience, but then he rarely disobeyed. The punishment for infractions of the rules was the silent treatment, and, oh, how he hated that. That was how he punished me when he was really mad at me, which was not often.

Jack was a straight A student. He was on the fencing, basketball and baseball teams. A special day in his life came when he was able to buy his first pair of second-hand, hightop basketball shoes. When he would tell me that story, his face still lit up. He was so proud of those shoes. His brother, Marvin, said the girls used to circle him like bees after honey, but he was so shy he would just hang his head and kick the dirt. Jack was a real pretty boy in his youth, with the most marvelous green eyes. When he worked for the green grocer, he would walk to work with a older friend who liked to would stop off at the local house of ill repute on the way to work. Jack would sit out in the parlor eating his little sack lunch while waiting for his friend, and the unoccupied girls would all gather around him and talk to him until his friend finished his interlude.

One of Jack’s uncles taught English or History at the University of Illinois and Jack was definitely college bound.

He wanted to study Entomology, which is a real hoot because he hated bugs. World War II derailed his college plans as it did for many young men. As soon as he graduated from high school, he went down to enlist in the Navy. He was only 16 at the time, and the recruiter sent him home and told him to come back when he had quit biting his finger nails. I’m not sure how long that took, but he did enlist at the earliest possible date.

Jack with his Navy buddies after his return from the South Pacific during WWII. Jack is on the far right with “Pug” written above his head. The nickname referred to his injured nose. He served as the tail-gunner aboard a Navy search and rescue plane. The skin of his face was burned off when a shell went between his legs. He was 18 at the time.

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PAT, THE MINER In the early 80s, I was hired by a natural resources company as a Senior V.P. and Chief Financial Officer.

Among my duties, I was responsible for setting up and managing their Houston office. We had oil and gas wells in Texas and Louisiana; a galena, flourspar, and barite mine in New Mexico (near Socorro on the north end of the White Sands Missile Range); gold and silver mines in the Mojave Desert of Arizona; and a gold mine in Placerville, California. It was a small company with only 40 or 50 fulltime employees scattered over all the projects, but there was a lot going on. It was during this time that I fell in love with the high mountain desert. I never before or since saw as many stars as the desert sky holds at night.

I traveled quite a bit, going to the mines every six weeks or so. On my first trip after joining the company, I went to a couple of our mines in Arizona and made my first visit to Oatman, Arizona. Oatman is located on old Route 66 southeast of Kingman, Arizona, and not far from Needles, California. Over 100 years ago, it was a mining tent camp that quickly grew into a gold-mining center in 1915 when a couple of miners struck a ten-million-dollar gold find, and that’s when gold cost $20 per ounce. The boom was short lived, and most of the town burned down within three years of the find. When Route 66 became Interstate

40, Oatman almost died. When I was there it was an official “Ghost Town” with a population of 200 people. I’ve always wondered how a ghost town can have a population, but that’s what the sign said.

Anyway, I made that first trip in August when the temperature was about 140 degrees in the shade, first thing in the morning. Even the lizards weren’t moving. The porpose of the trip was to set up a bank account so the mine superintendent could pay the miners. When I finally found the mine (no personal GPS existed yet), the super was not there, even though he knew I was coming. I eventually got one of the men to tell me where he lived, and when I found him, he was dead drunk at 11 o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t about to hand over $25,000 to a drunk, so I went back into Oatman to call the President of the company. The only phone was in a booth on the street. I don’t have to tell you how hot it was, and on top of that, a wild donkey walked up and stuck his head in there with me. When I spoke to my boss in Houston and he could finally hear me over the HEE-HAW of the donkey echoing in the phone booth, I told him what I had found and asked what he wanted me to do. His answer was, “I’m on my way to my ranch. You just do what you think is right. Click.”

Back at the mine, I fired the superintendent and started trying to decide who to put in his place. I called a meeting of all the miners and it was a joke. Those miners absolutely would not talk to me, a woman. I would ask a question and they would answer my husband, Jack, who had only come along as my driver. He knew nothing about the buxiness. They would ask him a question and I would answer, and so our meeting went. I think I might have been found at the bottom of a mineshaft if Jack Cole had not been with me. That was one motley crew, and they did not take kindly to a woman telling them what to do. I must have chosen the right man as the new super, because later that afternoon, we were wined and dined at the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their wedding night back in 1939. Because the new superintendant kept buying me drinks, I staggered to my room drunk as I had ever been in my life.

The Bingham, New Mexico mine not far from Socorro, was a treasure trove of minerals. I think something like 58 different minerals had been identified on that property. Every

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place you looked there was a gorgeous rock, and down in the mines, the walls of fluorspar glittered like diamonds in the beam of my miner’s headlamp.

Once, I took our banker and his wife out to that mine to see the huge mill we were building on the property. On the way back north, we stopped in Albuquerque to pick my husband up at the airport and go on to Santa Fe (one of my favorite cities) for the weekend. We decided to take the old road north instead of the interstate, and the guys wanted to stop and get some beer, so we pulled over in some dusty town and they went into a bar to buy beer.

In a very few short minutes, they came out back-to-back looking over their shoulders. It seems lowlanders weren’t welcome, even if they were two big old boys.

At one point, the company was negotiating for the rights to mine the strategic mineral, tantalum in the Amazon jungle of Brazil. It was my job to project all the startup costs, including moving crews and equipment into the jungle where no roads existed. I began interviewing helicopter pilots as the only way to set up the infrastructure required was with huge helicopters. For months I worked on the numbers, figuring every conceivable cost, down to the last nut and bolt. The numbers had been massaged over and over, and we were ready to secure the funding, when the international lawyers I had hired ran into major oppostion and the project was never completed. Darn it. I had my bags packed for Brazil.

most of the bigger and more productive mines in early California were owned by English consortia.

We began core drilling all over the town looking for the gold veins. When the mines were closed in the 1800s, gold was $20 per ounce, but it was $600 per ounce in the 1980s. There was still a lot of gold in the ground that had not been profitable to mine when the mines were closed, but reopening underground minds is a real undertaking and very expensive. First, we were in San Andreas Fault territory, and second, the mines were all flooded. In order to generate cash flow, we wanted to do some open pit mining about a mile outside of Placerville. Seems I did something you’re not supposed to be able to do in California: I got all the permits necessary to begin mining in only six months. I bought all the equipment and we started mining within nine months. I spent a lot of time and money on wine and dine, but I got it done. We were rockin’ and rollin’. Our break-even was $350/ounce, but we didn’t quite get there. The price just kept diving down below $300/oz. With that, My glory days as a miner ended, but it sure was fun while it lasted.

My company leased over a thousand mineral acres under the town of Placerville, California. The property belonged to the Placerville Gold Mining Company, which had been owned by Randolph Scott and Reginald Owen, an early British character actor. It was still owned

by Owen’s widow, a White Russian concert pianist who had studied under Tchaikovsky when she was a young girl in Russia. By the time I met her, she was in her 90s and still played like an angel.

The company’s acreage included all the old mines under the town dating back to the 1850s when Placerville was named Hangtown. The fact that the company had been maintained all those years with annual surveys kept in a timely fashion was remarkable. Researching the history of all those old mines was one of the most exciting things I ever did. One interesting fact I learned is that PatsHorseTales.com

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MADISONVILLE: THE BEST OF TIMES on the FARM 1980s & 90s

Pat and Jack Cole, in order to provide a home for their brood mares, purchased 35 acres on Highway 21 in Madisonville in the mid-1970s. It was their weekend place starting with a small camper, then a mobile home, and finally a two story house that Jack built with his own hands. They moved there fulltime when they opened Metal Concepts, their sheet metal fabrication business, in 1984.

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Pat and Jack go to Nevis

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From Pat’s Nevis scrapbook.

Note the itinerary from their first Caribbean vacation that they never really intended to visit Nevis for more than one night, but they ended up there, and liked it so much they stayed for their entire trip, and then returned to buy an acre of land. They never got around to building on that land. It is now part of The Hermitage Plantation Inn on Nevis.

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Metal Concepts was started by Pat and Jack Cole in 1984. The company was sold at the beginning of 2001. They designed and fabricated commercial kitchens for large installations like jails and schools.

This page: A letter from TDC praising the quality Metal Concepts work. Next page: (clockwise from top right) Pat’s desk. The guys at work. An award for the best Christmas lights in 1999, and the renovation of the offices in the late 1980s. The guys working on another project in the shop. Jack at his desk.

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THE JEWISH MOCKINGBIRD FAMILY [editor’s note: This little story originated with Jack naming the Mockingbirds that came every year to raise their broods in the pear trees. Inspiration for the characters came from Jack’s own family.]i Some years ago there was a Jewish mockingbird family that lived in our pear tree every spring. Sol and Sally Mockingbird worked diligently building their nest with twigs, grass, leaves, and bits of colorful string that I left out for them. Sally laid her pretty little blue spotted eggs and then sat on them for the required couple of weeks while Sol defended their territory by divebombing marauding cats, dogs, other birds and any human that happened to come too close. When he wasn’t defending the home front, he was busy gathering food for Sally and building the next nest the couple would use that spring. When the little Mockingbirds hatched, Sol and Sally worked tirelessly to keep them fed until it was time for Sol to teach them to fly and Sally to lay the next batch of eggs over in the nearby pear tree.

Then tragedy struck! One morning, as I was driving out I saw Sol lying on the side of the road with both his little legs stuck in the air. He had been hit by a car. I jumped out and picked him up. He was as stiff as a board. Dead as a doorknob. It is customary in the Jewish religion to bury the dead before sundown on the day of their death, so I got the shovel and immediately buried him at the base of his pear tree where a patch of bluebonnets bloomed.

Poor Sally. Widowed with three newly hatched chicks.

What was she to do? It was still chilly in the evenings and her babies, their little eyes still closed, weak, naked and helpless, needed her to cover them with her warm body for at least another week or so. Of course, their voracious appetites had to be satisfied, too. That had been Sol’s job in addition to his homeland security job.

Word went out to the other Mockingbirds in the area, and they began arriving to sit Shiva for the next seven days. They brought grasshoppers, worms and other delicacies for Sally and the kids and took turns singing and mocking wheel barrow creaks. As Sol had always greet-

ed every morning sitting atop the light pole proudly going through his repertoire while fluttering up and down in the air, his older brother filled that spot for the seven days of mourning. He didn’t do as good a job of fluttering as Sol had, being somewhat of a klutz and missing the post top several times, but he gave it his all.

As all the visiting birds returned to their own lives and families at the end of the traditional mourning period, Sally was overcome with the responsibilities facing her.

How would she ever be able to do it all by herself? The Mockingbird family was not rich. There was no insurance to hire a nanny for the chicks while Sally foraged for food, plus the added responsibility of laying another clutch of eggs in the next nest Sol had prepared for them. She hung her little head and her feathers drooped as she was overcome with grief and longing for Sol, but she took a deep breath, and picked herself up saying, “Lethargy will get me nowhere. There’s only one way to handle this situation. Work it off!” And with that, Sally got busy catching bugs and grasshoppers for the kids.

About that time, Sol’s bachelor brother, Marvin, started flying by with the occasional worm or especially nice seed. Sally, never one to “roost around,” hesitated to get too friendly with Marvin. She did like him, and thought he had exceptionally beautiful plumage and a glorious beak, but it was just so soon after Sol’s death and she was still numb from her loss. She sure could use the help, though.

The chicks were getting their big-bird feathers and Sally really needed a partner to teach them to fly and protect them while they hopped around on the ground.

Spring continued its glorious march through a new cycle of life. The mares were having foals with their little ears plastered close to their heads as they lay in the sun drying while their mommas licked and nuzzled them. The spring flowers were a riot of color. The trees were a beautiful shade of lime green. Sally just had to get on with her life.

She had another clutch of eggs to incubate and chicks to raise. This was not possible without a mate.

As the days passed, Marvin continued to help out, never pushing himself on Sally. He sang and creaked his heart out, appearing early every morning on top of the light pole, hopping, jumping and fluttering as he never had before. He was very much in love with Sally and more than willing to take on his brother’s family if only Sally would have him. Sally had begun to take Marvin’s daily presence for granted and when he didn’t appear one morning, she was devastated. She just couldn’t imagine her life continuing without him. Late that afternoon, Marvin appeared explaining that he had been looking for a new site for the next nest and time had just gotten away from him.

Sally was so relived she fell into his open wings. This was a bird she could spend the rest of her life with.

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VIRGIL VENGEFUL GOES TO THE ALL AMERICAN

During the years that we raised Quarter Horse racehorses, we nominated a number of foals for the All American Futurity that is run on Labor Day each year in Ruidoso, New Mexico. For many years, it was the richest horserace in the world, with $1 million dollars going to the winner. Foals are nominated during their first year of life, with periodic payments until entry time. Foals can be nominated late, but the fees are very high. Virgil Vengeful is the only colt we made all the payments on, based on his first career race which he won in near record time.

The All American series of races follows a grueling schedule for these youngsters that are, at most, 32 months old. Many, or I could say, most, come from sea level or near sea level. They have to run three 440 yard (1/4 mile) races within a 30-day period at an altitude of 1 mile. The first races of the series are elimination trials in which the first, second and third place horses advance to the time trials. The fastest ten times run during these next races progress to the final run on Labor Day. The next ten fastest times compete in the

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The heat really turned up for the time trials. That year, 84 colts out of the original 285 had qualified from the next set of qualifying races, the time trials. There were nine time trial races with nine or ten horses in each race. The difference at that point was that the colts are not only running against each other, but against the clock. It was possible to qualify for the finals without ever winning a race. Only the fastest ten times run would get a shot at the million dollars. Ruidoso weather and wind is a real factor in those races, since time is recorded to the 1/100th of a second. Virgil’s race was early in the day and as the post parade hit the track, I looked up and saw the flag hanging limp on the pole. Virgil’s jet-black coat was gleaming as he pranced and bucked alongside the pony horse. When the gates opened, he took the lead and didn’t let it go, winning the race, but we still had another six races to go that day before we knew if he’d made it to the finals.

First Consolation race, and depending on total number of horses that actually enter the series, there may be a Second Consolation race.

Virgil Vengeful shipped to Ruidoso with five races under his belt. He’d won four of those. The year was 1991 and the 285 colts entered in the All American Futurity gathered on the mountain for the biggest and most prestigious contest in the Quarter Horse racing world. Virgil easily skipped down the track to win his first race in the series, qualifying for the time trials. During the ten days between races, he held court in the shed row, generally raising hell and making his presence known to one and all. Our trainer, Brent Morris, was a good old Georgia boy and he could be heard all over the barn area yelling at Virgil in his slow Georgia drawl, “Goddamnit, Virgil, shut up!!!” Brent’s wife, Rosie, was in the track kitchen one morning and while talking to a groom from some other stable, told him she was married to Brent and which barn they were in. The groom told her how sorry he felt for that fellow, Virgil, that worked for her husband, the one Brent was always cussing out. Rosie fell over laughing and then explained that Virgil was not a stable hand, but a horse.

As the day progressed, the wind picked up, blowing straight up the track directly behind the horses and the times got faster. Still, Virgil’s time kept him in the finals, until the electronic time clock broke during one of the heats which then had to be hand-timed. It always seemed suspicious that the track owner, a man named Hubbard, had a filly that ran 4th in that race. It looked like a slow race, but obviously we were all wrong, because it ended up being so fast that four horses from the race went to the finals. And that is what knocked Virgil down from the finals to the First Consolation. In addition to that bad break, Virgil bled during his race.

This happens when a small hairlike capillary ruptures in the horse’s lungs from exertion. They can choke on the blood if they can’t blow it out their nostrils. New Mexico allows the use of the drug, Lasix on bleeders and in a lot of horses, it prevents a recurrence.

Virgil came out of the time trials in good shape and seemed to recover quickly. He trained well for the next ten days or so, continuing his reign as supreme commander of his shed row. He kept raising hell and Brent kept screaming “VIRGIL!!!”

Labor Day arrived to find Jack and I were basket cases.

There we were with our little home-bred horse, who had already outrun 270 of the best two-year-old Quarter Horses in the racing world, trained by the best trainers in the world. He was the only colt in the series that had won both races leading up to the final race, which meant he would have already outrun the eventual winner. He would be running on Lasix for the first time, and we hoped it would prevent any more bleeding. May I tell you that I really found out what hyperventilation feels like. I couldn’t eat, or sleep, or breathe. I was so nervous that morning that when I tried to drink coffee, by the time I

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got the cup to my mouth, there was only one swallow left. Jack had had a heart attack less than a year before, and he was popping nitroglycerin tablets like candy.

ing. Everybody that knows her will tell you that her love of her horses is legendary. This place will find out what a wildcat looks like if you don’t wait a little bit longer.”

The First Consolation was run that day just before the Futurity finals. It was pretty hot and there was no breeze blowing. When the horses came on the track, Virgil was his usual exuberant self, jumping and twisting, neck bowed, prancing alongside the pony horse. The New Mexico handicappers had not liked him since we had been there and kept letting him go off at really high odds.

I think he went off at 20-1 in the time trials and I had already won a bundle on him. The bookies were still overlooking him on this day. I really don’t remember what the final odds were, but they were still in the 20-1 range. We were in the Jockey Club with some of my old-time horse show friends from Snyder, Texas, including Judy Hays. Every few minutes, I’d get up and go bet another $100 on Virgil to win. I have no idea how many times I did that, but I bet on him until I ran out of $100 bills.

After what seemed like hours, our vet, Dr. Storey, came flying up and gave Virgil a couple of shots. In just a few minutes, Virgil blinked, stood up, gave a good shake, and looked over at the grandstand with his ears up to acknowledge his standing ovation. Then he marched off to step in the trailer and ride down the track. I swear he gave them all a royal horse wave.

Finally, the horses were behind the gates and started to load. Always, when Virgil was handed off to one of the track crew that heads the horses in the gates (holds their head straight in the gate), he became all business and his goofing off ceased. He was there to do a job and he wasn’t going to let anybody beat him. The gates opened and “THEY’RE OFF!!!” Virgil Vengeful took the lead… and held it… and won it!!! I’ll never forget looking up at the monitor as Jack and I were on the way to the Winner’s Circle and seeing the camera zoom in on Virgil with that gorgeous head out front as he crossed the finish line.

Leave it to ole Virge to keep things interesting. As Brent was leading him into the winner’s circle, he looked over at me and said, “He’s going down! Let me get him on the grass!” and Virgil collapsed. Brent was holding Virgil’s head in his lap and I was stroking the horse’s neck and begging him not to die. Everybody seemed to be moving in slow motion. All the jockeys were circled around saying, “Come on, Virgil! Get up! You can do it, boy. Get up.” One of them filled his helmet with water and started bathing him to cool him down.

Meahwnile, the track crew was milling around complaining about the delay of the races. They had already brought up the horse ambulance and had the chains out to drag Virge into the trailer. The President of the Quarter Horse Association was standing there holding the trophy unsure what to do with it. Somebody else was holding the cooler to be awarded, and my friend Judy Hays walked over to the AQHA president and asked him if he knew the lady who owned the horse. When he shook his head no, she said, “Well, I do, and I strongly recommend that no one touch that animal as long as he’s still breath68

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As the adrenaline drained out through my toes, I wobbled back up to the Jockey Club. When Virge won the race, I had left my pile of winning tickets on the table without a thought. Fortunately, Judy Hays had picked them up and cashed them in for me. As she handed me a huge wad of $100 bills, she said she had no idea how much was there, that they had just kept counting out $100s at the window. I don’t think I ever even counted it, but it was a lot of money. Jimmy Randalls, an old cutting horse acquaintance and big New Mexico rancher came over with his wife to congratulate us. Jimmy, at that time, was a New Mexico State Commissioner or something important. He said, “Pat, who named that horse Virgil?” He started laughing and said, “Never mind. It could only have been you.”

His wife told me that when Virgil stood up, there had not been a dry eye in the entire grandstand. She said a few people were openly sobbing.

Virgil Vengeful’s performance that day overshadowed the finals of the All American Futurity, making the rest of the day totally anti-climactic. He had made the Quarter Horse world give him his due. He didn’t win the million dollars, even though his pay day was substantial, but he won the hearts of the Quarter Horse racing world.

VIRGIL VENGEFUL CLIPPINGS

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the Staunch Avenger colt I had bought. He was a good looking devil and Jack asked what that “good looking” colt was and who he belonged to.

I was just seeing him for the first time myself. I asked, “You like him? Even though he’s gray?”

“You bet!” said Jack.

THE VALENTINE’S PRESENT

I said, “Well, sweetheart, I’m glad, because he’s your Valentine’s present.” So far, so good. Then I said, “That’s not all, honey. Do you want to see the rest of your present? You’re getting his mother and the foal she’s carrying too.”

Once we got them home, I thought Jack would give the mare back to me because she was gray, but she was such a big, beautiful, sweet natured thing that he fell in love with her. Mighty Class (TB) was her name. Jack named the yearling colt Navy Blue (TB). Mighty Class gave us some wonderful foals, and Navy Blue went to the track wearing our silks. I must say, those gray horses made the pastures shine.

Jack was a firm believer of never returning a gift and he didn’t return his Valentine’s gift that year. When I finally fessed up to my subterfuge, I was completely forgiven.

One year, a few weeks before Valentine’s Day, I got a call from a good friend, an astute horseman, telling me that a well-bred gray Thoroughbred mare in foal to and her yearling colt by Staunch Avenger (TB) were for sale at an unbelievable price for all three.

There were a couple of problems. The first was that my husband had threatened to send me to the moon if I bought any more horses, and the second was that he did not like gray horses. Top all that off with the fact that we did not own any Thoroughbreds; we were Quarter Horse breeders. But I just could not resist the deal, so I bought the package—sight unseen—without my husband’s knowledge.

There was a problem of how I was going to get them home without putting my head in a noose. I enlisted trainer Brent Morris’ aid. He went to Aubrey, Texas, and picked up the pregnant mare and her year-old colt and brought them back to his place in Weatherford. I still hadn’t told my husband about my purchase.

Then a light bulb went off. Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday we’d already planned to be in Weatherford to watch one of our Quarter Horses run. Jack was tired and didn’t want to make the long drive to the races that weekend, but I talked him into it. Next I had to talk him into going early to stop by Brent’s barn.

When we got to Brent’s, there were four or five yearling colts in the paddock in front. Of course, one of them was

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Cole Farms produced quite a few winners in the 1980s and 90s These are just a few of the win pictures for horses NOT named Virgil Vengeful.

Opposite page from top left: 1983 Take Revenge at Bandera Downs; 1983 Oh Hy Oh at LaBahia Downs; 1989 Notate at Alameda County Fair; 1988 Notate at Glenn County; 1988 Notate at Los Alamitos; 1989 Notate at Los Alamitos. This page from top left: 1983 Oh Hy Oh at G. Rollie White Downs; 1990 Windy Comment at Bandera; 1993 Take Revenge at Bandera; 1993 Take Revenge at Bandera; 1993 Take Revenge at Bandera; 1994 Not Too Windy at Houston.

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THE CHRISTMAS MARKET IN SALZBURG

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Christmas time in the city of Salzburg, Austria, had been a dream of mine since our first accidental visit in 1985.

We’d chosen it at random from destinations listed on the departure board of the bahnhof in Inglestadt, Germany.

It sounded like a romantic destination and the departure time was good. It was love at first sight when we stepped off the train. It was fifteen years before we returned to Salzburg, en route to Mallorca for the birth of our first grandchild who was due in early January.

Our misadventure began when we landed at the Munich airport missing one bag. It continued when we rented a car and discovered that in the last 15 years, a new airport had been built an hour and a half away from Salzburg. All our well-laid plans to arrive in Salzburg before dark flew out the window. Okay, we thought, we can do this, and away we drove with lots of luggage in a little bitty bright green kiddy car. Dark arrives very early in that part of the world and it was pitch black by 5:00 p.m. It was also rush hour as we neared Salzburg. No problem. We had been there before. Of course, it was on a train, and we had never driven a car there. Not to mention, the old part of the city, where we had booked a hotel, was closed to automobile traffic.

As we drove into the city, we spotted the sign for our hotel, the Goldener Hirsh. What luck! There it was, the first rattle out of the box. There was one small problem, however, since all the streets were one-way, the wrong way, and auto traffic was not allowed in the old city where our hotel was located. Policemen tweeted and horns honked, so we had to keep driving away from the city center. Lost does not begin to describe our location somewhere in a very dark residential section of the city with signs all in German. After a very long time, we saw a police station, but a visit with them produced no help as they could speak no English and we could speak no German. We were exhausted and lost in a foreign city where we didn’t speak the language. Should we pull to the side of the street and cry? Or continue driving in hopes of spotting that damnable hotel sign again? We did both.

Then, Miracle of Miracles! The hotel sign reappeared. There was only one way to handle the situation; we jumped the curb and drove the wrong way down a one-way street while a policeman ran after us frantically blowing his whistle. We didn’t get arrested and finally made it to the back door of the Goldener Hirsh. I jumped out and opened a door that led into a very stark tunnel with four or five unmarked, medieval looking, very solid doors. There was little chance anyone would even hear a mere knock on any one of them. As I stood there on the brink of hysteria, I noticed a small doorbell-type button high up on the wall. Noth-

ing ventured, nothing gained, I thought. So, standing on tiptoe, I pushed the button. A disembodied voice from somewhere responded, “Goldener Hirsch. May I help you?” In English! I identified myself and asked for someone to please come get me. The voice said, “Oh, yes, Mrs. Cole, we have been expecting you.” I vowed to learn to speak German when I returned to the United States.

After registering, we turned the kiddy car over to the bellboy, who looked at our little machine and laughingly said, “Why do the people with the most luggage always have the smallest cars?” It would be an understatement to say we were glad to get out of Mickey Mouse’s car.

We were shown to a beautiful room that opened onto Getreidgasse Road just across the street from the Festival Hall. Next we asked for anything from the kitchen with a pile of whipped cream on it. With that, we began a lovely Christmas time in Salzburg.

The next morning after breakfast, we set out for the Christmas Market. The city was as beautiful as we remembered, but little snow had fallen, and snow was an important ingredient in my imagined scenario. In the land where “Silent Night” was first sung and Julie Andrews sang about the hills, there was supposed to be snow at Christmas.

Midmorning, we stopped for the most wonderful cup of hot chocolate, piled high mit schlag or whipped cream at a remembered café on Mozart Platz across the street from Mozart’s birth place. Still no snow. We enjoyed the city, the cuisine, Christmas garland, lights and shopping for several days. It was in Salzburg that I discovered only white lights are used in their Christmas decorations. Still no snow and it was almost time to leave for Mallorca to await the birth of our grandchild.

On our last night, we retired to our room after an excellent dinner. Then, as I was gazing wistfully out the window, snowflakes the size of an open hand began to float silently down. I threw the window open and tried to catch them on my tongue. Jack was just drifting off to sleep when I shook him awake, insisting he come to the window and look at the snow. “Aw, Hon, give me a break. I grew up in Chicago and I’ve seen enough snow to last a lifetime,” he said, but he humored me and sleepily came to the window to see my Salzburg Christmas snow. My Christmas in Salzburg was now complete.

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Left Behind [written in 2006] Love only ends two ways. Boy leaves girl or girl leaves boy. One of them is always left behind. I have firsthand knowledge of how it feels to get left behind and it hurts like the devil. I still get mad every time I think about the woman in Madisonville who walked up to me in the Corral Café one day and told me how sorry she was that Jack had died.

She then said, “… and you will never get over it.” I wanted to slap her, because she was so right.

It’s been ten years this past March since Jack died, and I haven’t begun to get over it.

I just wish I didn’t have to keep living without him. I try to be happy and positive, but I really don’t seem to be able to pull it off.

I can’t put into words how lonely I am and how very difficult it is to come up with any dreams. I feel like I am just marking time.

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The severity of the pain reflects the depth of your love.

Pat’s Cat REINVENTING MYSELF In March of 1996, I lost my husband and partner of 25 years. I continued to run Metal Concepts, Inc. and our horse farm for the next 5 years, but in 1999, a man I met online talked me into buying a sailboat and going cruising. He lived in Maryland and had been sailing for 40-odd years. One day, he called and suggested I look at the boats on PDQ.com.

It was a comprehensive website with a tremendous amount of information about sailing catamarans. Never having sailed myself, except as a guest a few times, I had many questions. After a few days, I called PDQ’s 800 number in Canada, and by chance, Simon Slater, the son of the PDQ designer answered the phone. After more

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than an hour and a half, he’d convinced me of the safety, speed, and stability of the PDQ. I would probably have bought a boat right then except that there was a yearlong wait for a new one. Thus the search for a used PDQ began. My Maryland man and I looked at every PDQ on the market from Maryland to Florida, and finally, in August, we found hull number 45 in Florida. I purchased the boat in November 1999, but left her in Melbourne, Florida until summer 2001. Meanwhile, I sold my company, my horses, and my home, and my Internet boyfriend and I sailed the new boat up to Solomon’s Island in the Chesapeake in June 2001. Sadly, after a month on the waterway with the guy I had been thinking of as a significant other, he became an insignificant other. He didn’t teach me to sail or handle the boat at all, and on Labor Day, 2001, I left Mr. Internet and moved aboard Pat’s Cat with Patrick, my cocker spaniel, and Dudley Do Wrong, my bobtailed cat. Many different people helped me learn to sail and handle the boat.

LEARNING TO SAIL The boat was docked at Solomen’s Island, Maryland. Neither Patrick (the dog), Dudley (the cat), nor I had ever spent much time on a boat—apart from my ill-fated and unpleasant trip to deliver the boat from Florida to Maryland with Mr. Wrong at the helm. I didn’t know how to sail and the other two weren’t much help.

So there we were. What do we do next? Where do we go and how do we get our sizeable boat there? Hmmmm!

Thank goodness for the kindness of people in the yachting community. A really nice power boater spent a week or so teaching me to maneuver with the two engines. Some other folks would come aboard, and I would take the boat out into Chesapeak Bay, hoist the sails and try to make her move in a forward direction. It was a while before I could tack without putting her in irons. (That’s going backwards for landlubbers.)

Every time the engines started, Dudley hid under the pillows and Patrick trembled. When we left the dock, Duds really panicked. He lived in his litterbox like Garfield for a while.

Patrick adopted a worried look, but since I seemed okay, he would eventually curl up under my feet at the helm.

Shortly after our move onto the boat, 9/11 happened.

Since we were located at the confluence of the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers, right across a small bay from Pax River Naval Station and only 56 miles from Washington, D.C., the mood around the marina—in fact, the entire area—was very subdued. The U.S.A. had been attacked at her very heart, and no one knew what to do or where 78

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to go. A boat didn’t seem like such a bad place to be right then. I made sure we had plenty of provisions and kept her fueled at all times.

About that time, Dr. Heather arrived. She had spent the previous nine months cruising the Bahamas single-handed on a 27’ Albin sailboat. At 40 years of age, she’d gotten tired of the Canadian medical system, and left on her boat. Almost every day, she would come to my boat and take me out to drill me on how to sail. She was an excellent sailor and a great teacher, and when I decided to make my maiden voyage as captain going north to Annapolis for the boat show in October, she agreed to go along as crew. Patrick and Dudley rounded out the rest of the crew.

ANNAPOLIS BOAT SHOW The annual Annapolis boat show opened on a Friday and ran through the weekend. My crew and I decided to leave on Tuesday for the one-day trip so we could find a good anchorage before everyone else got there. We threw off the dock lines about 8:30 in the morning. As soon as we cleared the harbor, Dr. Heather insisted we hoist the main and jib and turn off the motors. There was a fair breeze and we were making six-to-seven knots on a broad reach with the sails close-hauled. At the time, I had no idea what a broad reach was, and I sure didn’t know what close-hauled sails were, but I took Heather’s word for it and pointed the boat’s nose (I now know the pointy end is called the bow) north toward Green Marker 77.

Previous Page: Pat’s Cat docked outside Pat’s 142 Marina Bay Drive house in Florida, and Pat sitting on the coach roof with Patrick.

Below: Dudley Do Wrong napping in a pile of pillows.

Facing page: Detail from the Pat’s Cat sales brochure. The morning view from Pat’s balcony at 142 Marina Bay.

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We sailed and sailed aaannnd sailed, but Marker 77 didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Our speed dropped to 1 to 1½ knots. After an hour of so of this with a lot of sail trimming and the auto pilot set, I was standing in the cockpit thinking, “What in the world has happened to my beautiful boat? At least I’m on the way to Annapolis and I’ll just look for a buyer.” Meanwhile, I’m sure Heather was thinking, “What a pig of a boat! What’s the big deal about speedy catamarans?”

About that time, I walked to the back end of the boat, which I now know is the stern, and looked over the dinghy which had been blocking our view. It appeared we were dragging something. I called Heather over to confirm my observation. We both watched it for another 15 or 20 minutes. We shut everything down and snagged a line that didn’t belong there with a boat hook. We pulled it up and tried to no avail to winch it in. Finally, after a tremendous effort, a mud-filled crab trap appeared. We had been dragging that thing for hours and still hadn’t gotten to Marker 77. Can you imagine the ride those crabs had had? We cut the line loose and released the trap. Fortunately we hadn’t had the motors running or the prop would have been fouled and ruined.

But there was still something hung in the rudder. I wanted to just start the left engine (now I know to call the left side of the boat the port side) and proceed to Marker 77, but Heather cautioned there there might be something humg on that side as well. She put on her wetsuit and went into the cold, cold water to clear the rudder and props. Finally, we got back underway and passed Marker 77 en route to Annapolis. We had spent the entire day making just a few miles. Our one-day trip had turned into two, and at about 4:00 p.m., we dropped anchor in Hunting Bay. An interesting aside is that Hunting Bay is below author Tom Clancy’s home where Clear and Present Danger was filmed.

The next morning, Heather taught me to sail off the anchor, and we proceeded to Annapolis, arriving at about 1:00 p.m. Back Creek seemed like the best spot to anchor. It was already getting crowded, but we managed to find a spot and settle in. Patrick was very happy to hop in the dinghy and go for a run in a nearby park. Thus, the first half of my first voyage as Captain Pat concluded.

GETTING MY SEA LEGS On November 11th, 2001, a new cruising friend came by the boat and said, “Let’s go to the Bahamas.” My one 80

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cruise as Captain had taken place a month earlier when Dr. Heather and I had sailed up to Annapolis for the boat show, so it still scared the devil out of me to think of attempting a Bahamas venture by myself. Nevertheless, in less than 2 hours, I threw off the dock lines and followed two boats out into Chesapeake Bay and headed south. One of the gals from one of the other boats came aboard with me and we sailed off with 25 knot winds directly astern. We set the sails wing and wing and clipped along at 12 knots surfing waves as we sailed down the Bay. What a glorious feeling!

Captain Pat was at the helm. Along the way, people would ask where I was going, and my answer was simply, “south.” I had no idea where I was going. The thought of navigating the big ports of Norfolk, Charleston, and BeaufortMoorhead City terrified me, but I made it through all of them without being rammed by a single freighter. I had good charts and excellent navigation equipment (not that I knew how to use most of it), and I learned a lot about navigation on that trip down the Intracoastal Waterway— sort of on the job training.

At Dowry Creek Marina in Belhaven, North Carolina, I decided to stop for a few days while the other two boats continued south without me. I phoned Rex Ageton, a friend who lived in Denver, and without hesitation, he hopped on a plane to North Carolina to act as my crew for the remainder of the trip.

I was forced to face another lingering fear two days south of Belhaven when I experienced my first soft grounding in an area that was supposed to have had enough water. I got to try out my “unlimited towing” insurance from BoatUS. That $99 was well spent.

On December 22nd, I pulled into the Smyrna Marina in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, intending to stay only 2 days. Rex needed to return to Denver, and New Smyrna is close to Orlando and with its big airport. All the other boaters at the marina received me with open arms, so I stayed. One year later, I am writing this from a slip at the Smyrna Marina.

I love the community of New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

During this last year, I have cruised to the Abacos for the month of June. With a couple of friends on board, we cruised up and down the Cays, anchoring in some of the most beautiful clear water with gorgeous white sand beaches imaginable. In mid-October, I sailed down to Key West for Fantasy Fest and the annual Jimmy Buffett Meeting of the Minds convention. For most of my cruising I have had crew onboard, but have sailed single-handed a time or two when crew was not available. Just last week, I left Key West alone and sailed to Key Largo before I picked up a crew member.

It was my first time to set and trim sails all by myself, and it was particularly satisfying and exciting to overtake a 52’

Beneteau that had left Key Largo an hour ahead of me. To say I have not been scared would be a lie, but it has been go by myself or stay tied up to the dock.

Again, my many cruising friends have been a great support group extending the hand of friendship all along the way and continuing to tell me that I can do it. The catamaran generally and the PDQ particularly is very forgiving and easy to handle for a neophyte sailor like me. I have learned a lot about boat handling and diesel engines during this last year, doing most of the routine maintenance myself.

People always seem surprised that a 60-something, 5’2”, 105-pound woman would be single-handing a 36’ boat. It’s particularly gratifying to see the expressions on the faces of the dock admirals when I side-slip her alongside the dock or back her into tight space with a mere whisper against the dock. I have received a few standing ovations. The only thing that could make this experience better would be to share the wonderful sunrises and glorious sunsets with a beloved partner.

It truly is an experience to be shared. Patrick and Dudley don’t get very excited about the sunrises and sunsets. When I say, “Hey, guys, take a look at this sunset,” they answer with, “Where are the Kibbles and Bits?”

Above: Captain Pat on Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos—June, 2002 .

At left: Oh, the yachtie shenanigans! Pat’s Cat got TP’d.

At bottom: The logo Mike Davis drew for Pat’s Cat.

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142 MARINA BAY DRIVE NEW SMYRNA BEACH, FLORIDA [editor’s note: Mom got caught up in the property bubble that burst spectacularly in 2007-2008 in Florida. Her 142 Marina Bay Drive Townhouse with it’s very own dock for Pat’s Cat was a great deal when she bought it as a fixer-upper, but she was lucky to sell it and leave when she did in 2008. These are pictures of the house she took when Cindy Lindburg listed the property for sale. Cindy was instrumental in helping her to get this house sold. I can’t tell the number of times she told me that Cindy had worked her tail off--going way above and beyond what the average real estate agent would do.]

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RETURN TO NEVIS2008 [editor’s note: During Mom’s Florida years, she left us a lot of pictures of people at parties. She had several very good friends there, like Christa Kelsey and Judy Kerr and her neighbor Cindy Lindburg, but I only really know their names, and cannot identify any of the people in the pictures. This piece about a trip to Nevis and the next one are the only snippets we have from Mom that discuss those friends.

During this period, she bought a townhouse with a dock for her boat. She sold the boat, then sold the townhouse and returned to Texas in 2008.]

Nevis, West Indies A Trip with Girlfriends: January 2008 Travelers: Pat Cole, Christa Kelsey, and Judy Kerr

O

ur odyssey began at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, January 22nd with a nasty alarm clock pulling me from the arms of Morpheus. We had agreed to take only carry-on luggage, so I packed in my sea bag. My traveling companions, who had started this “carry-on” deal, both showed up with sizable suitcases. You know, the kind with wheels and handles? While I had all my stuff hanging over my shoulder. Christa’s husband, Jim, had volunteered to be our taxi driver to Orlando airport. He and Christa picked me up 6:15, then picked Judy up, and we were officially off to Nevis. Christa’s 96-year-old father, Fred, told us to have fun in Venus, as he couldn’t remember the name of the island. We made all our flights with no problems and arrived on Nevis, aka Venus, at 3:00 p.m., caught a cab to the Hermitage Plantation Hotel, had our luggage thrown into our cottage, and went straight to the bar for our first Rum Punch. The 350-year-old main house is the oldest surviving wooden structure in the Caribbean.

I started seeing faces I recognized, and soon, Hermitage owner and old friend, Richard Lupinacci, appeared with his wonderful smile and a big “welcome back” hug. His lovely wife, Maureen, came down a little later.

It felt like I had gone home. We were so hungry that, to

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prevent us chewing on the furniture, P.G. the bartender brought us some calamari and a little later we had a superb West Indian dinner. Soon after, we wobbled down the hill to our cottage, having consumed liberal amounts of wine and rum punch, and fell into our beds.

The next day at 7:00 a.m., there arose such a clatter I thought Christa and Judy were having one hell of a hair pulling fight, breaking furniture over each other. I looked in on them and they both were still snuggled down in their beds. Judy peeped out from under her pillow and said, “What was that?”

Christa said it was coconuts falling on the roof. I, being the old island pro, said it was a Monkey Pod tree throwing its seeds on the roof. Out on our screened porch, I found a troop of 20 or more Vervet monkeys doing the “River Dance” on our roof.

Every morning we were there, they came across our cottage roof between 6:45 and 7:00 a.m., did their dance, and threw seed pods on the roof for 15 or 20 minutes, then went off to do whatever monkeys do all day. No alarm clock necessary.

I called my old friend, Dr. Adly Abdul Meguid, the owner of Mt. Nevis Hotel to say hello, and he invited the three of us to lunch on Thursday. In the mid 1980s, my company, Metal Concepts, Inc., had designed and furnished all the kitchen and bar equipment for Meguid’s hotel. Everything went into a container and was shipped to the island and we went down, in the middle of a hurricane, to install it.

One day before we met him, our daughter Kim, who was living on Nevis at the time, was hitchhiking into Charlestown when Dr. Meguid gave her a ride. While they were introducing themselves, Kim told him that her mother and father built commercial kitchens. He called us in Texas and ordered all of his hotel kitchen equipment from us. In the process, he and his wife Sally became our good friends.

I called Monica and Don Haldane, acquaintances from Canada now living on the island. On my first trip to Nevis in the early 80’s, Jack and I met Monica during the construction of their house. Monica was an actress and Don was an award-winning director. A day spent with Monica is recorded in that first photo album of Nevis.

What a day!! Don had a stroke last year and does not get out much, so they were unable to come to Hermitage for dinner or drinks.

On Thursday, after we left Mt. Nevis, we stopped in Charlestown and wandered around so Judy and Christa could shop. After the last hurricane, the town really got a thorough cleanup and the waterfront looked great. We also stopped by Nisbet Plantation for a stroll on their beautiful beach.

I met Joel Shenkel, a retired advertising exec from NYC who had been living on the island for a number of years, when he came to have breakfast with Maureen Lupinacci. He remembered my daughter, Kim and her dog, Ting. Said he was sure Kim owes him $5.00 for buying her a drink 20 years ago at Golden Rock Hotel.

On Friday, Judy and Christa took the ferry over to St. Kitts for the day. They hired a driver to take them all over the island and up to Brimstone Hill. Since I have spent plenty of time on St. Kitts, I opted to stay on Nevis and go up the mountain for a look at the property Jack and I used to own. I spent several hours reminiscing with Maureen and a long while sitting on the porch of Goosepen Cottage where we were staying just studying the dappled pools of sunlight coming through the palm fronds and listening to the trade winds rustling through the mango and the Poinciana trees I remember in vibrant April bloom. It felt like a rain forest, silent except the occasional chatter of island patois from hotel staff mov-

ing around the property. Huge butterflies, pigeons and little wrens or finches flittered around. It was so peaceful. What a great place to restore and recharge.

The temperature was 78 degrees and big puffy clouds hung in the sky. An occasional rain cloud passed over and dumped a brief shower, and the perennial cloud hung over the mountaintop behind me. Off in the distance, a car engine on the main road echoed up the hill. Trees and ground covered by coral vine provided pink accents against a vibrant green backdrop. Remnants of an old stone wall built 350 years before stood while a yellow butterfly the size of my palm fluttered past. A tiny hummingbird landed on a branch. Vines like long, straight hair hung from the trees. Birds nibbled fruit and twittered.

Friday night celebrated Robert Burns birthday, complete with haggis (flown in from Scotland) and a piper.

None of the three of us could handle the haggis, so we skipped dinner, but we got so hungry during the night we almost chewed our arms off. When the monkeys hit the roof at 6:30 Saturday morning, we fell out of bed and raced to see who could get breakfast first.

Saturday, we logged a lot of hammock and swimming pool time. At dinner that night, when we were telling everybody goodbye, Richard Lupinacci said he would see us at breakfast. We said we had to leave for the airport by 5:15 a.m., so would probably miss him. He chuckled. “The airport is closed,” he said. “The fire truck won’t start, and runway can’t reopen until it does.”

Knowing what island time is like, it was highly unlikely that any effort would be made to start the truck before Monday. So, Saturday morning, we got up at 4:15 and started calling anybody who would answer to get a status report. Christa finally got through to American Airlines and changed our reservations. Then we went back to bed to wait for the monkeys. We finally left the hotel around noon for the Nevis airport where, we checked in and were then transported by taxi halfway back around the island to the ferry depot for a trip to St. Kitts to catch a plane. The ferry left Nevis two hours late, and then we had to take a taxi from the ferry dock on St. Kitts to the airport where the plane was another two hours late leaving for San Juan. We finally got to San Juan about 7:00 p.m., and wouldn’t you know it?

The plane from San Juan to Orlando was delayed.

I learned years ago not to sweat the small stuff when traveling in the Caribbean. You truly are on island time. We finally got to Orlando around 1:00 a.m. Monday morning.

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THANKSGIVINGS PAST For the first years of my life, up to about the age of eight, we always had Thanksgiving with my Berry Grandparents.

My grandmother, Jessie, was a wonderful cook and could set a beautiful table. Her holiday table glittered and glistened. I always begged to spend the night at her house the night before so I could be up early and get to the kitchen where the tastes and smells were so absolutely glorious. Jessie had a stool for me to stand on so I could see and taste everything. She always had her sterling silver goblets on the table, and I was allowed to drink out of one. She gave me those goblets as a wedding present. Her dining room would seat eight or ten without crowding, but the chairs were covered with wool needlepoint and

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they scratched the backs of my bare legs. That was if I got to sit in the dining room with the big folks. You see, I was the baby of the family for the first seven years of my life. Usually, there would be Mammy, my great-grandmother, Jessie and Grandy, Mom and Dad, my aunt Janice and uncle Jack Scott, my big brother and me, my great-uncle Carey Lindley (his wife died before I could remember her), Cary’s son, Bill Lindley, his wife, and two children. I was totally smitten with Bill who was an army air corps officer.

I drooled on his spit-shined shoes even at the age of four. From there the numbers fluctuated over the years from 14 to 20. My grandfather died when I was eight years old and their farm, that adjoined ours, was sold. Those Thanksgivings in the big dining room at Jessie and Grandy’s ended, but I can remember them as if they were yesterday. When grace was said, everyone added something they were especially thankful for that day. Even I got to add my thanks for my pony, Brownie.

After those years at my grandparents’ house, Mom took over the Thanksgiving dinner. We often had two or three cadets from Texas A&M who were un-

able to go home for the holiday over for dinner. We always ate in the evening after the UT—A&M game, when they played at Kyle Field in College Station.

I was always a sucker for a uniform. Then, over the years, we moved from Madisonville to Austin to Laredo to Houston, and the family got too scattered to get together every year, but my mom always had a beautiful, bountiful Thanksgiving table.

When I got married and lived in Junction on the ranch, we drove to Houston to have turkey with my in-laws one year and my parents the next. It just didn’t feel the same, so when my husband, little girl and I moved back to Houston to open Salt Grass Saddlery, I took over Thanksgiving dinner duties. I declared that dinner was to be at my house, and amazingly, everybody who was in my part of the country showed up.

The years passed and Buster and I divorced. I remarried and Kim and I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. I introduced those folks to a real Southern Thanksgiving, with cornbread dressing, pecan pie, and all the trimmings. They sometimes looked askance at my offerings, but they sure fell in and ate it all.

Unfortunately, that husband in Wyoming and I divorced and Kim and I moved back to Texas. Then in 1972, I met and married Jack Cole. Jack was a Yankee from Chicago and Los Angeles, so I had to bring him up to speed on Southern cooking. We had some wonderful family Thanksgivings with all my family, which had grown with all the nieces and nephews.

east coast. After sailing up to the Chesapeake the infamous summer of 2001, I started back south from Solomon’s Island, Maryland, on November 11th. Thanksgiving day found me and three other boats in our flotilla in the middle of Pamlico Sound. We had all forgotten what day it was. When someone remembered, we hailed each other over our radios, dropped anchor, and all four boats rafted up together. We each scoured our galleys, and together we had kielbasa sausage, mashed potatoes out of a box, and English peas out of a can. Of course, we had wine. It turned out to be a pretty special day for a group of new friends and Patrick, my cocker spaniel. It was also a bit melancholy because the horror of the September 11 attacks was still fresh, only two months previous. Still, we all gave thanks for our lives and asked God to bless all the lives lost and the brave souls that worked so hard to save as many lives as possible.

After the Thanksgiving of 2001, the next ones were celebrated with many new friends in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Some 40 or 50 gathered at Christa and Jim Kelsey’s house. They owned the Riverview Hotel on the Intracoastal Waterway, where Christa insisted on cooking the entire dinner. We would bring any adult beverage we might want to drink.

What a fun day with really great friends. In 2008, I sold my boat and townhouse and returned to Texas. I do miss the camaraderie we shared in New Smyrna Beach.

In the intervening years, Jack and I built a really neat house on our farm in Madisonville, and moved there in 1984 and opened Metal Concepts. Mom and Dad had divorced, and Dad had remarried and moved back to Madisonville. We had Thanksgiving a few times with Dad and his wife, Ruth, but by the time we moved there permanently, dinner was at our house. We would look for people who either lived too far from their families or had no families to invite for Thanksgiving. We usually had upwards of 14 people sit down to offer thanks. Those were great times with a truly diverse group of people.

When Jack died in 1996, I’m afraid I just ran and hid.

I really don’t even remember where or if I celebrated Thanksgiving. In 2001, I sold everything in Texas and moved aboard my catamaran sailboat on the

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Pups in 88

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r e t n i W As we move closer to the Winter Solstice, I reflect on winters past and my canine friends that made those journeys with me. There were three, in particular, that I remember best; Super Dog who traveled the chilly road with me for 18 years; Cara for 14 years and Patrick, Cara’s son, for 14 years. The three of them lived with me for a total of 38 winters.

Super Dog arrived at his new home with us, curled up in my little girl’s arms when she was

eight years old and he was just four weeks old. He looked like a wind-up toy. His coat was long and red with black guard hairs on his upright ears and a face like a little fox. He had the demeanor of a Rottweiler. His lineage was iffy, at best, coming from the Piney Woods of East Texas where those little dogs originated with great noses, excellent eyesight, phenomenal hearing, and circus dog agility. They were used as squirrel hunting dogs, and they came in all colors

P R I N C E S S & PAT Princess is the Ecuadorian street-dog who accompanied Pat back to Texas on her last return home. Princess currently lives in Denton with Kim and her menagerie.

PAT & C A R A The Metal Concepts years were guarded by Cara and then Patrick, her son. Here Cara helps in the office in 1990.

TIPPY Tippy lived too brief a life out on Highway 90. No little girl ever loved a Collie dog more. He’s burried under a big old oak tree in the pasture there and if you watch close, you can still see the irises Patsy Berry planted on his grave there.

and shapes but were usually small dogs with adult weights of 12 to 15 pounds. It was not unusual for every puppy in a litter to have different daddy. As Super Dog matured, people would ask his breed.

I always said he was a “Purebred Madison County Mousehound.” Right after his arrival I took him to Dr. Buddy Molt, DVM, our very good friend and veterinarian. Dr. Molt’s wife was in the lobby with her German Shepherd. I set my five-inch-long, four-inch-tall dog down on the floor, and he started growling and charged the German Shepherd. The big dog’s eyes opened very

wide; his ears fell flat on his head; he yelped and hid behind his mistress. The first words out of my mouth were “Super Dog!!” That became my little lion-hearted friend’s name and he lived up to it for the next 18 years.

When Super Dog was about 2½ years old, he, my little girl and I moved from Houston, Texas, to a ranch just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. This was his first encounter with snow. His red coat grew into a luxurious coif that made him look like a little lion. He sure had the personality for it. Often as we drove up the road to the ranch house, he jumped

SUPERDOG Superdog stuck around for 18 years...

He was a fierce guard dog, and absolutely devoted to Pat and Jack. He traveled from Houston to Wyoming and back again, living his sunset years on the Hill on Highway 21 In Madisonville.

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out on the packed snow and ran alongside of the car with a yearling Quarter Horse filly we had that liked to chase cars. He could run 30 mph for a hundred yards or so. During most winter mornings, we would load the old ranch pickup with hay and range cubes to feed the cattle, and while we did that, Super Dog busied himself killing the mice that scurried out from under the hay. He left the bodies for the retarded cat that sat on top of the haystacks.

He then jumped in the truck ready to handle the next chore and off we went across the snow-covered pastures.

When we got to the cattle, I’d shift the truck into low gear and get out of the cab, climb in the back, and put out hay and cubes as the truck crept across the glistening white plains. There were few trees, fewer rocks, and almost no ravines—nothing to hit. Those plains had once been covered with herds of buffalo and crossed by Conestoga wagons taking pioneers west. It seemed that they went on forever. Super Dog refused to stay in the bed of truck, and he’d jump down to the ground to bark at the cattle. They charged him and he ran under the tailgate, and since I was afraid he would get run over, I left him him in the cab of the pickup. One day, the truck started making uncharacteristic lazy zigzags across the pasture.

That’s when I noticed Soupy through the back window. There he stood on his hind legs, eyes straight ahead carefully watching the terrain with his front paws on the steering wheel as he steered the pickup, first right and then left. From then on, he became my regular driver and made daily winter feeding much easier.

Super Dog lived with us for another 15 years. He was one of the most intelligent, bravest little animals I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He took all his jobs very seriously and did them well.

After Super Dog went to heaven in the spring of 1986, it was another year and a half before we were able to think about having another dog friend. His 90

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was a very big collar to fill, but just before Christmas in 1988, Jack Cole and I looked at each other and decided it was time to find Soupy’s successor.

That very day we found a highly recommended, local breeder of, what were called “apartment–sized” Cocker Spaniels. We requested a champion-bred, beautifully-conformed female with an attitude. The breeder had just the pup, an eight-week-old red female, with a real “in your face” attitude, and we went straight out to the kennel to meet her. As soon as we entered the puppy nursery, a gorgeous little red girl with a freckled nose flew across the floor, her long ears flapping behind her. She leaped into my arms, pressed her little face against my chest and gave me the biggest puppy hug, I’d ever had. It was all over for me. I never even looked at the other puppies. She had already been named “Terror” due to her antics and alpha dog attitude. We changed her name to “Cara” a name that had much the same sound as Terror but sweeter. She was a real character and took over the house right away. As we had a two-story house, we wove red and green ribbon through the banisters to keep Cara from falling through.

It looked a lot like an Italian Pizza Parlor. From the beginning of her regime, she was spoiled rotten and went to the office with us every day. When she was about a year old, Cara developed epilepsy. It was a genetic disorder that probably would be passed on to any puppies she had. Still, when she was three, we decided to take a chance and raise one litter of puppies. She was bred to a very handsome male from very royal lineage and on St. Patrick’s Day, she had a litter of seven puppies, we lost four but had 3 beautiful male puppies; 2 blondes and one dark red.

A tragic accident took the life of the red one and left two. The largest boy went to live with my sister and the runt of the litter, Patrick, stayed with us. He was small and gorgeous. He had ears so long that he constantly stepped on

them and did somersaults. He weighed about 25 pounds fully grown.

Cara went to Heaven when she was 14 years old and Patrick was eight. Patrick had been so attached to his mom that there was a very real chance that he would pine away for her. Instead, he became my Velcro dog. He took every step I took. Within a year of Cara’s death, I moved aboard my 36’ catamaran sailboat with Patrick and his best animal buddy, a bob-tailed cat named Dudley Do Wrong. Patrick was afraid of water and had never been swimming.

He had swimming lessons every day for several weeks in the Bahamas, but he still didn’t like the water. He spent most of his time on board curled up at my feet when I was at the helm.

During the 2002 Olympics in Utah, the guys and I went to spend time with my brother who lived near Park City, Utah.

It was their first plane ride and the first time they had seen snow. Duds decided he would watch the snow from inside, but Patters bounced out every time I went out. Most days I would put on snowshoes and he and I walked up and down the snow-covered mountain with sun sparkles that looked as if a giant hand had scattered millions of diamonds. On one of those glorious days with snow 12 to 18 inches deep, Patrick and I were out with me on my snow shoes. After close to an hour, I decided it was time to go inside. Icicles were hanging in Patrick’s long, curly locks, but I couldn’t pick my foot up. I heard my brother laugh from his second story balcony. When I looked up, he was laughing so hard he couldn’t speak.

He could only point. I looked behind me to where he was pointing, and on my entangled snowshoe sat a smiling cocker spaniel. His undercarriage had gotten too cold to go on, so he decided to hitch a ride. That ended our days of snowshoeing together, as the minute I put the snowshoes on, Patrick hopped on behind me and nailed my foot to the ground.

ECUADOR, PAT’S FINAL CHAPTER

Mom was no longer writing by the time she moved to Ecuador. She couldn’t remember the stories, but she wouldn’t admit it. She spent her last six years there among good, kind people who cared enough to look after her in spite of herself. The surprising move came after her friend, Rex Ageton and his wife, Cheryl DeWitt moved to the picturesque city of Cuenca and invited her to visit them there.

I visited in 2018. The top and bottom photos are from that trip. The top picture shows the stunning view from Mom’s balcony in Cuenca.

In the middle, Mom enjoys Cuenca’s flower market with her friend Cheryl DeWitt, and her friend Mary Jones shared the picture at middle right of Mom dressed for a night out. The bottom photo shows me clowning with Mom at a popular Cuenca café. On the next page, Mom and Cheryl DeWitt pose beside one of Cuenca’s beautiful rivers, and visit an orchid farm.

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CODA

Mom returned to Texas in July of 2019 with the help of her good friends, Rex Ageton, Cheryl DeWitt, Mary Jones, Tony Bishop, Juan Carpio, and others, who recognized that she it was time for her to come home. She returned with Princess, the little street-dog. She’d forgotten many things, but her sense of humor remained right up to the very end, and we, her family, were given the gift of a few months to reconnect with her before she passed away peacefully on December 7, 2019. —KD

This page, top: Jacqui Davis, Mom, Liz Davis, Judy Jackson, and Kim Davis in September 2019 on the Denton, Texas, courthouse lawn. At left: Mom in cute sunglasses, September 2019. Back cover: Mom clowning in Florida in approximately 2006.

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