The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [0]
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Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The illustration credits are located on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Letts, Elizabeth.
The Eighty-Dollar Champion : Snowman, the horse that inspired
a nation / Elizabeth Letts.
p. cm.
Summary: “The Eighty-Dollar Champion tells the dramatic odyssey of a horse called Snowman, saved from the slaughterhouse by a young Dutch farmer named Harry. Together, Harry and Snowman went on to become America’s show-jumping champions, winning first prize in Madison Square Garden. Set in the mid to late 1950s, this book captures the can-do spirit of a Cold War immigrant who believed—and triumphed”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52110-1
1. Snowman (Horse) 2. Show jumpers (Horses)—United States—Biography. 3. Show horses—United States—
Biography. I. Title.
SF295.565.S66L48 2011
798.2′5079—dc22 2010050993
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket design: Daniel Rembert
Jacket photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
v3.1_r1
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
then they seem improbable, and then, when we
summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
—CHRISTOPHER REEVE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: A Night in the Spotlight
1 The Kills
2 On the Way Home
3 Land of Clover
4 An Ordinary Farm Chunk
5 A School for Young Ladies
6 Hollandia Farms
7 How to Make a Living at Horses
8 The Stable Boy
9 Where the Heart Is
10 The Horse Can Jump
11 A Grim Business
12 Horses, Owners, and Riders
13 Sinjon
14 The Circuit
15 New Challenges
16 The Things That Really Matter
17 Piping Rock
18 The Indoor Circuit
19 The Diamond Jubilee
20 “Deutschland über Alles”
21 Famous!
22 The Wind of Change
23 Camelot
24 Branglebrink Farms
25 The Cinderella Horse
Epilogue: The Galloping Grandfather
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Note About Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Prologue
A Night in the Spotlight
Madison Square Garden, New York, November 1958
The horse vans parked along Seventh Avenue came loaded up with dreams. As each ramp banged to the ground, a groom held tight to a high-strung horse whose nostrils flared at the unexpected scents of midtown Manhattan. Hooves clattered down onto hard asphalt. Steam rose from beneath thick woolen blankets. Photographers’ cameras flashed. Anxious tweed-clad owners called instructions from a distance while grooms murmured into their four-legged charges’ ears. Police in brass-buttoned coats lined up abreast to hold back gawkers. Grays and chestnuts, palominos and bays—the most pampered show horses in the world—were gathered here for the premier equestrian event of the year: the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden.
A compact, sandy-haired man stood in the crowd of horse handlers, holding a slack lead rope. His horse, a big gray gelding, looked like a workaday police horse or a Central Park hack. Nervous thoroughbreds and finicky hackney ponies scrambled up the walkway to the stables, spooked by the unfamiliar clatter of their footsteps on the ramp. But when the big gray’s turn came, he walked up willingly, ears forward, perfectly calm. Above the simple canvas blanket that covered his body, his head and neck glowed in the murky Manhattan light.
Inside the basement stables, grooms blacked boots and rubbed French leather bridles to a shine. Horses pawed and stamped. The riders, nowhere in sight, were back at their hotels primping for the parties and balls. Down at the end of a row, past much fancier stables, the gray’s owner, Harry de Leyer, held a four-tined pitchfork; he was spreading fresh straw in the stall, settling in his one-horse stable for the night. Tacked on the stall door was