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A Note About Sources

The seed for this book was planted in my mind when I came across a picture of Snowman jumping over another horse. Having grown up around horses in California, I knew plenty of old cowboys and Hollywood stunt riders and I had seen many tricks performed on horses, but I had never seen a horse jumping over another horse. Drawn in by the picture, I did a little research and found that the story behind this horse and his rider was even more intriguing than the picture. I remembered reading a tale, during my horse-crazy girlhood, of a rescued plow horse who became a champion—the story had stayed with me. Now I realized that the story I remembered was the story of Snowman. I tracked down an address for Harry and sent him a letter. A few days later he called me. The first time I spoke to Harry de Leyer, I knew that this was a story I could retell.

Harry retained vivid and detailed memories of his early days in the United States, of his days as a teacher at the Knox School, and of his experiences riding Snowman. He was incredibly generous with his time. I interviewed him for many hours, for the first time in October 2008, right up until the final copyedits were finished. Some of those interviews were conducted over the phone, and some were conducted in person at his farm in Virginia. Harry also shared old home movies of Snowman and some of his competitors. The personal recollections—details about the people, the places, the atmosphere, and, most of all, what it felt like to be riding those daunting courses—were gleaned from those interviews. Where the recollections are based on the observations of others, they are noted. Several other people were extremely generous with their time. Bonnie Cornelius Spitzmiller not only shared her personal memories of her time at Knox but also her old yearbooks and the diary she kept during the time she was a student of Harry’s at Knox. Phebe Phillips Byrne, Harry’s former student and a former riding director at Knox, shared her detailed personal memories, and also her vast store of knowledge about Knox and its lore. Harry’s daughter Harriet de Leyer–Strumpf was also extremely generous in sharing her personal recollections of what it was like growing up in the de Leyer family and riding Snowman. Some of the things Harry told me are based on his experiences alone, and I am grateful for his sharp memory and his patience in answering my questions and checking with family members whenever his own memory failed him on a detail.

In addition to the interviews, I conducted extensive research in periodicals of the time, but a few books were so indispensable that I would like to mention them specifically: The Fifties, by David Halberstam, gave me a panoramic overview of the time when this story takes place. The National Horse Show: A Centennial History, by Kurth Sprague, was published privately for the centennial of the National Horse Show; I relied heavily on this book for my descriptions of the history of the National Horse Show, the social milieu, and the physical setup. Snowman, by Rutherford Montgomery, a children’s book published in 1962, was, according to Harry, based on a tape-recorded interview conducted in 1959. This book took liberties with the order of events, collapsing two years into one, but it was helpful for picking up bits of detail and for its descriptions of the young de Leyer family. I am also grateful for two excellent scholarly works about the history of the workhorse in America, Horses at Work by Ann Norton Greene and The Horse in the City by Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr.

I was also very fortunate to spend a month as a fellow at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia, which graciously shared with me the scrapbooks of Margaret L. Smith, a horse show reporter who collected articles about horse shows from 1953 to the early 1960s. Some of these newspaper clippings were not fully identified. I chose not to cite them specifically, selecting other sources