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Jimmy Hatcher and a Lifetime of Stories
Jimmy Hatcher and a Lifetime of Stories
By Leonard Shapiro
James Linwood “Jimmy” Hatcher Jr., a long-time Middleburg area resident, a lifetime equestrian, and a masterful story-teller who regularly verbalized or wrote about his friendships with Averell and Pamela Harriman, Paul Mellon, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor, died on June 26, 2024 in Richmond, Virginia. He was 89.
Mr. Hatcher had recently moved to a retirement community in Richmond, his home town, from his long-time residence in Upperville, Virginia where he was known to a legion of friends and neighbors simply as “Jimmy” or “Hatcher.” He was a regular presence around the village, walking his dog every morning and greeting anyone he ran into, two or four-legged, on the way to the post office or Trinity Church.
Mr. Hatcher wrote a popular column called “Carry Me Back,” for Country ZEST & Style, in which he recounted all manner of colorful stories about his myriad experiences as a long-time fox-hunter, talented horse show competitor and judge, a college student, an art dealer and a realtor.
A reluctant cell phone owner and not particularly enamored with computers, he wrote out his 450word columns in long hand on lined notebook paper, later to be transcribed on an editor’s laptop. He never blew a deadline and over five years, missed only one edition, when his move to Richmond occupied all of his time before the June, 2024 issue.
Once settled in Richmond, however, he was back at it. He mailed in his final column for the magazine’s upcoming August edition, and it arrived five weeks before it was scheduled to be published. It began… “When Elizabeth Taylor started dating John Warner, she was not new to this area.”
Mr. Hatcher definitely was not a name-dropper. Any name he dropped, he usually knew. And knew well.
Earlier this year, he ended another column with a reference to the older brother of Helen Wolfe, one of his childhood friends growing up in Richmond.
“And oh,” he wrote, “have you guessed by now that my ghost writer, T.K., Helen’s big brother, was, indeed, none other than Tom Wolfe, who later in life became the acclaimed author of “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities?”
Mr. Hatcher was born on April 6, 1935 in Richmond, the son of James Linwood Hatcher and Martha Barrow Hatcher. He grew up in the Ginter Park section of the city, graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and Hampden-Sydney College where he was president of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.
From a young age, he was always enamored with horses and, at 16, was champion of the first Loudoun Junior Horse Show in Middleburg in 1951 on Candlewick. Several years later, he qualified to ride in the Maclay Finals at Madison Square Garden in New York, a prestigious equitation event.
After college, he served in the U.S. Army and later joined his family’s Richmond heating oil business, Wingfield Hatcher.
Mr. Hatcher decided to move to the Middleburg area in 1966 and soon was deeply immersed in the town’s horsey culture and social life. He was an avid fox hunter, frequently riding with his friends, Paul Mellon, and Pamela Harriman. He often accompanied Mrs. Harriman on trail rides around her Middleburg estate, where Mr. Hatcher also kept his horse and worked for the Harrimans.
He continued to compete in and to judge horse shows for a number of years and was named to the Virginia Horse Show Hall of Fame in 2004. He was chosen for the Upperville Horse & Colt Show’s Wall of Honor in 2007 and was a long-time supporter of the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg
Over the years, Mr. Hatcher worked in the real estate business in the Middleburg area. He also was a talented artist, and in his 60s became a devoted practitioner of yoga and pilates. He was an avid walker, in recent years usually accompanied by his beloved dog, Ricky. He also loved to dance.
Mr. Hatcher was a long-time member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville, where he once served on the vestry.
He was predeceased by a sister, Anne Hatcher Jennings. He is survived by a nephew, Joseph Ashby Jennings III and his wife Elizabeth of Richmond, and his niece Ashby Jennings Hatch and her husband Ian of Dallas, Texas. He also had five grand nieces, MacNair Jennings Cox, Grace Jennings, MacKenzie Hatch, Anne Gamble Jennings, and Ainsley Hatch.
Mr. Hatcher once said he suffered a number of horse related injuries, including a fractured skull at the age of 14. But he never stopped riding until he finally hung up his tack at age 80 when his 18-yearold mare was injured. He told one interviewer at the time, “That seemed like a good time to stop.”
But he never stopped telling stories, verbally or in print.
One of his favorites involved business magnate, politician and diplomat Averell Harriman, the former New York governor who retired in Middleburg and owned an estate off the Foxcroft Road.
“Averell Harriman, who just happened to own the Union Pacific Railroad, produced a train for the trip to California and each player had his own private railroad car,” Mr. Hatcher began one paragraph in a 2023 column about a West Coast polo match involving several local and nationally prominent players, including Jock Whitney. “Since Liz Whitney and Jock were not yet married, Liz also was accompanied by a chaperone.
“I once asked Liz about the chaperoned polo trip,” Mr. Hatcher continued,“and she said yes, it was true and that, ‘Jock had Averell put Winston Guest’s railroad car behind the horses, the better to keep Winston away from me.’”
