The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [67]
Crazy as it might seem, his only hope was to make a champion out of his quiet lesson horse, Snowman—the placid mount that the timid girls rode during the day, that his children straddled to go swimming. Sure, getting a third-place ribbon in a green jumper class in a local show did not mean much of anything, but Harry felt it deep inside himself. He believed Snowy had untapped potential—unfulfilled promise that mirrored his own.
14
The Circuit
Sands Point, Summer 1958
In the 1950s, the average person had little access to the goings-on of the upper class. The wealthiest Americans—whom the social historian Paul Fussell dubbed “the rich-out-of-sight”—tended to live a life apart, playing in private clubs discreetly tucked away behind barely marked gates that protected long driveways. Called “coupon clippers” after the coupons they cashed to collect interest on their bonds, most of them did not work at all. Unlike the new middle class, whose members toiled from nine to five and commuted to offices, the rich golfed, played tennis, sailed, and, of course, rode horses.
The pathway to a spot in the nighttime finals of open jumping at the National Horse Show led through these hidden playgrounds. Meandering up the Mid-Atlantic, through the estates of New Jersey, across Long Island, and up the coast into Connecticut, through polo grounds and hunt clubs that occupied some of the choicest real estate in America, “the circuit” took riders inside the gates of the kinds of places that most Americans never saw. These all-white, all-Protestant bastions of “old money” were carefully cordoned off from ordinary folk. Membership requirements were not made public—if you had to ask what it took to gain entry, you were not member material.
A mix of amateurs and professionals competed on the circuit. The amateurs were mostly young men and women with limitless funds and abundant free time who devoted themselves to the pursuit of sport. Not every amateur was rich, but all had the right kinds of social connections. The professionals relied on the sponsorship of wealthy patrons. Attached to the barns of rich owners, the professionals showed the horses week to week, traveling with them, shipping them, caring for them, and handing over their ribbons and trophies to the owners. Side by side, amateurs and professionals competed, all eyes turned toward the National Horse Show in the fall.
Harry had never been one to settle for the expectations established by others. If he rose at four A.M. to groom, muck, and trailer; if the children helped out; and if his wife was behind him, then, he was sure, he and his horse, together, could do the work. Other horses might be fueled by their owners’ fortunes, but Harry was a new breed of sportsman: fueled by an internal drive to excel, and a belief that the ability to do so was within his own hands.
Like many other breakthrough athletes of that era, Harry was competing for the right just to show up at the starting line. Like other ordinary working people, Harry had more than enough to manage with his daily life alone—family, work, children, and responsibilities. But Harry believed that it was possible to aspire to more than that—not just to exist and get by, to make ends meet. In an era when people were told to believe that the best you could hope for was a small house in a suburb where hundreds of other houses looked exactly like yours, or to don a suit for a corporation and become “an organization man,” Snowman and Harry insisted that they had the right to rise above the ordinary.
The 1958 show season started at the Devon Horse Show, held yearly since 1896 on suburban Philadelphia’s tony Main Line. A contemporary article from the New York Times, “PHILADELPHIA SOCIETY, CHANGING BUT CHANGELESS,” described the Main Line as “a symbol as well as a location,” characterized by a “subtly rigid code of manners.” Devon’s show grounds were elaborate: a large wooden sign over the entrance was emblazoned with the slogan WHERE