Sponsored by Friends of the Magazine — Senior Spotlight — Around the Town
Shirley Oberg Get yourself a good grip on something, because, you’re in for a wild ride when you saddle up for a chat with Shirley Oberg. In her 85 years, she’s been all over the US rounding up horses with her husband Don, a fearless, high-adventure horse trainer. They started their adventures early, marrying when Shirley was 18 and Don was 19. Their first home? It was a little sheep trailer parked in a relative’s orchard. That’s right; the newlyweds started out camping. Don employed his innate horse-training skills on an 88-acre farm. Shirley rolled up her sleeves and worked alongside Don, watering, feeding and caring for dozens of cattle and horses. To them it was all play. Don’s fearless knack with breaking in horses quickly grew, putting them in high demand. Among his contracted clients was the notable
Robert Redford. To keep up with a growing client base, they self-designed and built an indoor horse arena so they could train high-dollar horses year-round. With an impressive 3,500 horses on their tally, Don was accustomed to sustaining “minor” injuries. But in 1975, a horse fell backwards onto him. Despite later finding out he’d broken his pelvis, hip, spine, two ribs, and his neck, Don walked into the house, changed his shirt, took up some crutches, and ambled into the hospital. Doctors were utterly astonished. “He was such a hard head,” Shirley recounts with an exasperated laugh. Don tried juggling crutches and horses, but training just wasn’t
something the Obergs could keep up after that. At the time, they had 25 horses under contract with the Redfords, among other clients. Sadly, they had to sell their self-built arena. What was the horseless horseman supposed to do!? To keep Don acceptably active and sane, Shirley turned his attention towards another dream: building a sod cabin. He’d had a sod-wall chicken coop on his childhood cattle farm. So, they set about building themselves a bigger, humanoid version. Once done, the cabin’s thick earthen walls had little yellow & blue meadow flowers. It was the best insulation they’d ever experienced. Shirley definitely has had a happy, rugged, busy, out-of-doors, life.
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