The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [50]
Out on eastern Long Island, where suburban sprawl had not yet taken over, there were still men who made their living from horses. People called them “the last of the Mohicans.” They were rough in their ways but skilled in horsemanship, and they knew a bit about every aspect of the horse business: shoeing, vetting, horse-breaking, and saddle repair. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t do in a pinch. Equestrianism was a gentleman’s sport, but the men who traded in horses were anything but gentlemen.
The other traders on the island would sell a horse off to the knackers at Northport without giving it a second thought. Board and feed was expensive, and for a horse trader, a horse sitting in the barn unsold was just another column in the red.
The luckier horses got sold to the growing cadre of young people taking up the sport of horsemanship.
Horseback riding, a sport that evoked both Anglophile gentility and rural roots, was popular among parents who wished to give social advantages to their children. The mid-1950s saw a growth in English-style pony clubs, where suburban youngsters could learn the intricacies of old hunting traditions and memorize the fundamentals of horsemanship from old-fashioned British manuals. When the U.S. Army cavalry auctioned off the last of its horses after World War II, it gave preference to veterans who wanted to start riding schools. Riding apparel was sold in the active sporting goods section on the sixth floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, where saleslady Elsa Granville-Smith proudly proclaimed that she sometimes outfitted “daughters, mothers and grandmothers” on the same day and extolled the virtues of riding for developing “poise, grace and skill.” Up-and-coming Americans liked to associate themselves with the glamorous world of horses, thus seeming to gain entry to the gated enclaves of the upper class.
The Knox parents were eager for their girls to have these advantages. They came out to the school on the train from the city. The women were clad in furs, wreathed in the expensive scent of Chanel No. 5 or Joy. The fathers were all the same—these were men who had money and demanded the best for their girls. Part of Harry’s job was finding horses that would make the Knox girls look good at the local shows. If a horse joined the lesson lineup and a girl fell in love with it, then later Harry might be able to make an easy sale. If he found a good prospect that was too difficult for a girl to ride, a parent might pay for the horse and hand it over to Harry to train, hoping that it would settle down enough to be a suitable junior mount. Harry had already discovered, while working for Mr. Dillard, that the best way for a riding teacher to make money was to find a green prospect, sell it, and make a profit.
Easier said than done. Harry had no capital. Harry was also hampered by the fact that he refused to unload a horse, like so much excess inventory. He set his sights on reject horses, the ones that no one else wanted, buying only those for which he thought he could find a home.
While trips to the horse auction at New Holland did not often turn up pearls, there was another great pipeline available for young, green horses: the racetrack. Beautiful thoroughbreds, bred to race, were sold off to the highest bidder if they turned out to be slow. Many of these horses, with their fine bloodlines and elegant conformation, were snapped up by trainers hoping to turn them into show horses. Thoroughbreds are specifically bred to be high-strung—they need to charge through a starting gate on a hair trigger at top speed. But many of these horses could be turned into jumpers with the right kind of training.
One of these off-the-track thoroughbreds might have the right stuff to become a champion jumper if a trainer