The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [72]
Harry had brought four horses with him: his chestnut mare Wayward Wind, a hunter named Cicero, his student’s flighty and difficult horse Night Arrest to compete in the green division, and Snowman. Of the four, Snowman looked least likely to be there. While the other horses paced nervously in the new surroundings, Snowman contentedly munched on his hay while the de Leyer children clustered around him—excited that their favorite horse had come to compete in a real horse show. With the eager confidence of children, they were convinced that their Snowy would win.
In 1958, Sands Point was a new kind of horse show. The show, founded in the 1930s, had at first been held on the grounds of a private estate with a roster of exhibitors’ names—Vanderbilt, Guggenheim, and Marshall Field—that excluded all but the most privileged. But Port Washington, in Nassau County, only twenty-five miles from Manhattan, was developing rapidly, and land once dedicated to equestrian pursuits had been increasingly crowded with postwar housing. The show had died out during the war, and had not been revived until 1954, when Bernie Mann, the trumpeter, nightclub impresario, and owner of Riviera Wonder, revived it as a fund-raiser to build a new ballpark for the town. On a twelve-acre plot loaned to the community by the sewer company, the local Lions Club built and maintained the new ball field, which doubled as a temporary show grounds. Youth groups, the Boy Scouts, the fire company, and local businesses all turned out to help make the horse show a success. The new Sands Point show did not have the stuffy feel of other Long Island horse shows—instead, the show grounds were packed with children and families out for a weekend spectacle.
The show’s first events were the hunter classes, where horses are judged on style and performance and the judging is subjective. The competition is based on the old English sport of foxhunting, and the qualities of steadiness, beauty, and dependability are prized. The show started off well for Harry. He brought home a blue ribbon in the hunter class on Cicero, then another blue ribbon in the green hunters on Wayward Wind. Already the de Leyer stable looked more promising, with two blue ribbons fluttering next to the tackroom and two silver trophies proudly displayed on the station wagon’s dashboard. The open jumper classes, in which Snowman would compete, would not get started until later in the day.
In open jumpers, only skill over fences—big fences—matters. Though the rules changed later, in those days horses were faulted for “touches,” so that over a five- or five-and-a-half-foot fence, a brush of a front or hind hoof against one of the poles counted as a fault. After the first round, the jump crews raised the fences and only the horses that had jumped clean entered the jump-off. Very quickly the fences could tower higher than a man’s head, steadily increasing the odds of a horrific crash. Sometimes a rider fell, sometimes a horse crashed; in the worst-case scenario, both tumbled. It was a high-skill, high-risk, high-thrill enterprise.
After the hunter classes were over, Harry got ready to ride Snowman in the jumper division. He took his blue blanket from the army-navy store and folded it four times, laid it carefully on the big gray’s back, and then settled his saddle on top. The style at that time was to use a saddle pad made of real fleece, a soft and absorbent material that looked fancy and protected the horse’s back. But a fleece saddle pad cost twenty-five dollars, an expense the de Leyers could not afford. The army-navy saddle blankets were not stylish, but they were cheap and functional. Harry had discovered that you could refold the blanket and place a clean side against the horse four times before you had to launder