Lady Bug... My First Real Horse

Time for another "Tuesdays' Show & Tail" hosted by Angela over at West Virginia Treasures! It is a meme to share about past or present pets or furry friends we’ve known. If you’d like to join, here is the link to the Guidelines. Angela, we appreciate the opportunity to share some of our treasured friends or other interesting animals we’ve seen!

My Dad was my very first horse, and I about “rode him into the ground!” I had loved horses from the time I was a very young baby. My Mom used to tell me that I would cry when I was only one year old if I saw a horse and couldn’t sit on it. (Most of these colored pics were taken off of 8 MM films my Dad took.)

She said she thought it was because the one and only time she got on a horse, she found out later, she was pregnant. (She was afraid of horses, though my Daddy loved them.)

The highlight of my year was going to my Daddy’s company picnics because they always had them at Hart Park where there was a Pony Riding Ring, and we have a lot of 8MM films of me bobbing along on a pony when I was very young. I took this picture off of that film.

They also had a carousel that was my second favorite ride… because of the horses, of course!

My Daddy loved horses from the time he was tiny, too, and 2 of the few pictures I have of him as a child is with him beside and on a horse.

These would have been taken in about 1923 when he was 3 years old.

During my tenth year, he made friends with several people at one of the stables, and “got me a job” training a 6th month old filly. He told me that the man that owned her would even let me name her, and since she was a Pinto, I called her Lady Bug.

Her mother was a dark bay pinto with the exact same markings as Lady Bug, but Lady, herself, was a buckskin colored pinto. Her father was a very famous (in our area of California) Palomino Saddlebred/ Quarter Parade Horse.

Later, when I started riding her, we found out that she was a natural “single-footer” and had that wonderful “running walk” gait that is so wonderful to ride. She could go for miles in that gait at 7 miles an hour with no trouble when she was older, because my Dad rode beside me on a little Honda scooter for about 2 miles and paced her. She wasn’t even overly warm when we slowed down!

About a month or so after I started training her, my 11th birthday came around, and I found out that Daddy had gotten her for me. We have 8 MM film of THAT too, and this is a clip of about 2 seconds after they told me that Lady Bug was mine. Can you see the smile?

I had Lady until I was almost 16 years old, and she had a buckskin filly that we named Dusty. My Dad had a really bad heart problem during the last 10 years of his life, and, as I’ve mentioned before, he passed away when I was 17. That last year or so, he was very sick and in a lot of pain, and we had to sell Lady at that time. She went to the friend of a good friend of ours and lived out the rest of her life at that place. They registered her as a pinto and used her as a brood mare because her foals came out pinto and they had that wonderful running walk, from what we heard.