Mr. Pittman

Ojai’s Original 20th Century Horseman

Story by LEE ROBERTS

When old-time Ojai natives wax nostalgic about their early lives, many describe roaming oak-riven neighborhoods, racing across fields of wild oats, splashing through creeks and barrancas, and sliding down hillsides, all on horseback

They wistfully describe their mounts as noble or determined to leave the rider for dead.

Hundreds of horse trainers, breeders, traders, riding teachers, leather workers, and riders make up a cast of characters who shaped this small valley for more than a half-century, even as the automobile laid a track in the Southern California heart. One of those local horse masters, a Black man whom a few still remember, holds an unlikely and permanent place on that list. When Ojai Valley School Headmaster Wallace Burr hired Paul Pittman in 1947 to create and run the school’s horse program, the school leader seemed to care only for excellence. President Truman still had yet to desegregate the Armed Forces, and Linda Brown of Topeka, Kansas, whose case went to the Supreme Court and changed US education, had not yet started school. Pittman was the sole Black person in Ojai for decades, and the only one many locals ever knew. Longtime OVS Headmaster Carl Cooper describes Burr’s hiring of Pittman as all but visionary. In hindsight, Cooper explains that Burr hired Pittman as a full faculty member. “We always called him, ‘Mr. Pittman,’” says Cooper. Like every person interviewed for this profile, Cooper describes Pittman as quiet with horses, competent in the backcountry, gentle, and kind. The school’s in-town campus, serving pre-K through eighth grade children, known as the Lower Campus, honors Pittman every spring by engraving the name of the most exemplary rider graduating from eighth grade into a small nameplate under a bronze statue of Pittman, complete with a cigarette in his mouth. Pittman’s son Paul got a huge kick out of the statue when he first saw it. “Always with the Pall Mall,” he said.

Paul Pittman

photo courtesy: MONICA FAY

So revered was Pittman that his 1982 death at age 70 prompted the school to hold a memorial on campus. Ventura County notables honored him, and Santa Paula citrus rancher Alan Teague gave the tribute. No one at OVS today recalls anyone else ever honored in this way. Although more than 100 years have passed since Pittman’s 1912 Minnesota birth, students in and out of Ojai remember the horseman and still can describe how his skills and kindness echo in their lives.

Pittman joined local trainers, breeders, and traders in providing a measure of independence to Ojai’s young people in the last half of the 20th century. Miles of trails outnumbered paved roads, and mountain bikes had not yet been invented. rode horses. Every day. “It seems like everyone had horses,” says Cooper. From the Los Padres National Forest trails to local zoning requiring horse rights-of-way to hitching posts in front of businesses, the valley’s infrastructure supported horses. Members of another valley school devoted to horsemanship, Thacher, used its horsepower regularly. On Sundays, Cooper says, “Thacher students used to ride from the East End to the Presbyterian church. They’d show up in white shirts and ties,” their horses tied to a long rail behind the church. Most Ojai neighborhoods maintained a right of way for horses. Any neighborhood speeding in the Arbolada was more likely to have been kids racing ponies than moguls in Ferraris. It may be that the number of well-maintained local trails for hiking, forestry, and horses peaked in the late 1960s during an expansion of the US Forest Service trail system. Although federal legislation passed in 1968 known as the National Trails Systems Act intended to maintain broad access to federal lands, the US Government Accounting office notes that our trail system has suffered persistent backlogs and underfunding. A 2012 GAO study says less than 38 percent of the mid-century trail system receives much meaningful maintenance today. Local attitudes toward horses have changed, too. For decades, we counted on regular horse sightings on the roadside edges of Ojai yards. Today, the Bridle Trail and a handful of horseback-accessible crossing signals at Ojai Avenue traffic lights remain. Through the middle of the 1950s, Pittman and his students rode to Matilija Canyon, Soule Park, Camp Comfort, the O-Hi Frostie, the East End, the Gridley Trail, Rose Valley, and deep into the Sespe. These horse packing trips allowed Pittman to demonstrate more than his horsemanship. He had an abundance of humanity, too.

Pittman, an unidentified hand, and an OVS student perch on an OVS corral

photo courtesy: Ojai Valley School

Retired doctor Henry Butler, 80, attended OVS in the early 1950s. He credits Pittman with saving his eventual career. Butler had been sent to the boarding school as a way to diminish his exposure to his parents’ divorce, still controversial in 1950s California. Dorothy Burr, the headmaster’s wife, and Mrs. Shreiber, a boys’ dorm parent, collected Butler and five other traveling children at the Santa Barbara train station, arranged the children and their bags in two woodie station wagons, and drove them over the mountains to Ojai. By the time he was in fifth grade, Butler had noticed girls, especially that most of them rode horses. Although he had never ridden, he decided to join a horse packing trip into the Sespe wilderness. “Knowing I needed a gentle horse,” says Butler, “He loaned me his own horse” for the weekend trip. “We went along the Sespe River up one of the mountainsides, made our own fi res, cooked our own food. It was marvelous.” Butler continues. On the third day, still in the backcountry, the group of seven stopped to water the horses. Imitating a cowboy, Butler slung a boot around the saddle horn, hooking it with the back of his knee. Something spooked his horse. Butler landed hard in the dirt on his left arm. “It was a compound fracture,” he explains, “you could see bone poking through the skin.” More worryingly, “the brachial artery, the arm artery, was bent around this chip of bone.”

A 1954 riding class with Paul Pittman

photo courtesy: Ojai Valley School

Pittman was there instantly, says Butler. Like a paramedic trained in pediatric trauma injuries, “he very skillfully, gently wrapped gauze around my arm with two balsa wood splints stabilizing it,” says Butler, for a nine-hour journey to the hospital. Other campers helped

fashion a travois and attached it to a horse, who then towed Butler to the nearest road and the waiting ambulance. Butler went on to have a career in surgery that he says would not have happened without Pittman’s careful intervention. “I would have had to go into psychiatry,” says Butler, sounding less than enthusiastic about that option. Pittman first came to Southern California as part of a show-horse operation relocating from near Duluth, Minnesota. As a boy he had lived close enough to the large saddlebred-centric stables that he reportedly started working there early, possibly as a child. According to his 1942 draft card, by the age of 30 he lived in Covina, California and had joined the horse department at California Preparatory School — a quasi-military academy that struggled in the Great Depression, eventually moving to Ojai. While in Covina, according to both his son Paul and his stepdaughter Monica Fay, Mr. Pittman built his riding instructor reputation. The siblings, now in their 60s, say a young Hubert Humphrey and the children of filmmaking legend Cecil B. DeMille all learned to ride from Pittman. When Cal-Prep moved to Ojai, Pittman came too. After OVS head Burr hired Pittman in 1947, it appears the horseman stayed on Cal-Prep property, the Foothills Hotel, in the Ventura County jurisdiction north of OVS. This seems an anomaly as, like most private schools, OVS generally offered housing to its full faculty members somewhere on its Arbolada campus. The year after OVS hired Pittman, according to the Ojai Valley News, Ojai’s 1948 fi re destroyed Pittman’s Foothills Hotel home, reporting, “Pittman and a gardener … were burned out of their cottages at Cal-Prep school.” Though no one seems to know where Pittman immediately landed after that fi re, Carl Cooper refers to racial covenants* in parts of Ojai when he confirms that Pittman, “couldn’t live on [the OVS lower] campus.” Regardless of his living arrangements, Pittman made a place for himself at the school as a horseman and teacher.

Pittman winning in a Santa Paula show ring aboard Reata’s Vindicator

photo courtesy: MONICA FAY

Pittman showing Welsh stallion Whale Rock Buddy Mine at Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara

photo courtesy: MONICA FAY

Pittman started his own training stables in 1962. His reputation as a safe and dependable horseman grew. Parents could trust him to navigate the choppy waters of purchasing a first horse for the family, mine included. No fewer than 10 people from Ojai remember Pittman finding their first horse or pony for them. Pittman’s step-daughter Madeline Fay stresses that “Pappy,” as she and her seven siblings called him, “trained and sold ponies and horses.” Kathy Jenks, Ojai horsewoman and retired Ventura County animal safety official, clarifies the difference between a horse trader and one who happened to make horses his business: “He was not a horse trader, he was a gentleman” who also sold horses.

In 1965, Pittman and Jean Stengel Fay, an Ojai woman with eight children, married and bought a ranch in Santa Paula suitable for Pittman’s work. One of those children, Monica Fay, retired and living on her own horse farm near the Sierras, may have been partly responsible for the match. At age 11, Monica says she had a case of horses-on-the-brain. “I think my mother worried that I was so horse crazy I was going to get myself killed if I didn’t get some lessons,” she says, so they found their way to Pittman’s Reeves Road ranch. She remembers him as kind and fi rm. He inspired his students to improve, and a lucky few became skilled enough to ride his saddlebred Red Feather. Both she and her sister Madeline remember Pittman’s safety consciousness and competence. “I never saw him fight a horse,” says Monica. She laughs as she recalls the first time she saw people try to force a horse to load into a trailer at a horse show. “We didn’t know horses [or people] could act like that,” she says. With 30 boarded horses and plenty of Pittman’s own show horses and ponies, family activities focused almost solely on the ranch.

The bronze statue of Paul Pittman, complete with cigarette in mouth, on display at Ojai Valley School

photo: LEE ROBERTS

“We showed every weekend,” say the Fay daughters. Although the marriage did not last, the love and respect did. When Pittman’s health began to fail, the Fay family “swarmed back around him,” says Monica. Pittman died in June 1982, also the first year Ojai Valley School gave the Paul Pittman award. Then OVS Equestrian Director Greg Coulson, who awarded the first Paul Pittman award to Cara Best, says Pittman lived and breathed horses. “He was a horseman’s horseman,” says Coulson, who has run Peppercorn Ranch, now near the summit between Santa Paula and Ojai, since 1986. Best herself became a permanent part of Coulson’s operation, as depicted in the ranch’s horse-and-rider-jumping-a-fence logo. Current Pittman award winners become part of the Pittman legacy while contributing to Ojai’s long history as a place where horses have been central. Maybe they also — if they understand a little about the town’s history and the part it played in a legal system designed to segregate us according to our skin color — might become all the more grateful for Pittman. Both his students and his family members say he coped with realities like restrictive covenants and ignorance by being gentle, kind, consistent, and patient — a few of the traits required for the best in horsemanship.

*FOOTNOTE

Though unenforceable since a 1948 Supreme Court decision, racial covenants remain in many US property deeds in all 50 states. For information about California’s and other states’ effort to remove the covenants altogether, contact the National Conference of State Legislatures or your local elected representative.

BY LEE ROBERTS