What happened to Saddle City?

[Betsey]

Looking down at Waimanalo on Google Earth, I noticed that the ranch at Saddle City, just makai of the Olomana Golf Course, seems to have been converted into houses or something. Does anyone know when this happened, and how come?

Back in the sixties they used to put on Wild West shows there - there was a little street of mock ranch houses (a bit like the facades the townsfolk build in Blazing Saddles!. Later it was a more ordinary ranch/riding stables. Frank Carvajal owned it, and sold it to Harry Mau in the early 70s.

I spent a lot of time hanging out there as a kid!

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Betsey, I'm sure I knew you back then....did you have a little buckskin gelding and did you live on Kailua Bay Drive (I think that's the name of the road...the one that goes along the houses from Kailua Beach almost to the Air station) and did you have a brother slighly older (if I remember correctly) than you with dark hair? Were you one of those two sisters who both ended up marring British Naval officers?...my memories go a bit fuzzy on details and who was married to whom and whose horse belonged to whose family...Wait! I see that you're posting from Liverpool, so maybe my brain isn't quite as fuzzy as I feared.

We lived at Saddle City at the time that Frank and Gerry (well, Frank and Susie Beiswinger, who got pregnant by Frank when her husband was off on the manland, and...) were there and I remember the almost revolution (and the TV cameras) when Sue Cates and a whole group of people went on strike against Harry Mau and took their horses and their business up to Shirley Lau's place, instead.

We were living there at the time...my Mom Inge, my sister Debbie, my brother Robert, and myself, our horses Patrick, Wednesday, Nicole, and Wiki Wiki, and a big yellow goat that Harry Mau hated with a passion and ended up killing, skinning, and probably eating (we found the hide and a pool of blood up the dirt road by the little bridge that goes over the river that Frank used to dump the cow heads and hooves and hides into after slaughter...those were wild days at the OK Corral.

A few names and faces come back to me from back then..Marty Strasbourg, a girl named Pipi who went to England to learn to become a professional riding instructor (she and Marty shared the same boyfriend, a Marine nammed Terry), Sue Cates who insisted that her Great Dane dogs not stay in the Halawa Quarantine and paid for a private quarantine at her home..and her daughter Dorothy who fell and broke some bone (can't remember which one) and ended up at Castle Hospital right next to Coco Strauser's soon-to-be-sister-in-law who had been riding double with Jeff and fell. They say that Coco went off to California to become a jockey.

Lisa Weiderholdt, who I found out decades later had died from measles while pregnant with her third baby...I introduced her to her husband Rick and will never forget her or her dog Punkin, who would sneeze on command. Remember that young and handsome VW Beetle-driving Veterinarian, Dr. Callahan, who cut off the leg of a horse that had died of colic so that he could make a lamp from the bones (poor horse got left in the arena and nibbled sand along with blades of grass that were poking through the fence) ....and who himself died a few years later from some msterious disease (did anyone ever use HIS legbones for a lamp, I've wondered all these years?).

Hannah Springer and her entire Hawaiian family...years later I ran into her dad carving out a canoe at the City of Refuge, and a little while back my Mom sent me a clipping from the Big Isle News about what she's been up to. Remember Grover, the older Haole man who used to clean the pool...or the wild-haired German hippie lady at the end house who wrote stories about Egyptian cats?

And Melody Music, who HATED her name (she had a pinto gelding, but I can't remember his name)...her parents had six boys before she was born, and kept on trying for a girl so that they could name her Melody. And Vicky Vasallo, who had a brother caled Victor and a sister called Vanessa (who am I to judge?...I have a Kalani, a Keala Kai, and a Keoni, myself)? She had a thinnish chestnut gelding and she liked to use the crop quite a lot...I've often wondered if she went into dominatrix services as an adult.

Holly Fernandez (I always envied her because her uncle was THE Fernandez of the carnivals) with her beautiful bay that once was going too fast and flipped himself over a six foot fence, and Angie Mielke with her long, long braided hair and that wild Beetlebomb bay gelding. And Emily Dick and I, who spent a few days hitch-hiking on the North Shore and learning a bit more about life than any fifteen years olds should.

For all the fear that Harry Mau was going to build a racetrack there and ruin the morals of us kids...nothing ever happened except for a couple dozen more housing units put into place. And the pool falling into disrepair.

Those were good years. On rainy days we'd go and ruin the greens at the golf course by sliding on the accumulated puddles, on good days we'd walk up to the Olomana clubhouse for fries or walk over the road to Town and Country Stables and watch the buckouts. I used to drive up and down that bumpy dirt road that led to Saddle City until I just about ruined our old Corvair.

If this is you, and that is your brother....I have to apologize for my lack of confidence as a teenager. I liked him and he liked me...even though I did once get him to drink the liquid from a can of black olives by convincing him it was coke (bad joke and I'm sorry for that, too). So then, once I was eating a crackseed (or maybe it was a black olive) and smacking my lips and at the same time I offered him one (I guess it must've been a crackseed...I still feel really bad about that olive brine joke) and he didn't notice and thought I'd blown him a kiss and then he blew one back at me and although I was perfectly happy about that, considering the crush I had on him at the time, I chose to be polite (or timid) and rattled the package of seeds at him so that I could avoid the whole issue and so that he'd not be embarrassed, either. Sigh, such is youth and now I am old frumpy lady and I still have caught myself thinking of that story every now and then for all these years and I am happy that I can finally bring it to a lovely ending.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Betsey, did you have a car that looked something like a Quatrelle...something like a VW station wagon?

Something like this?
http://images.google.com/images?q='V...N&hl=fr&tab=wi

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Hi Susie


Yes, I definitely remember you! And so many of those crazy stories...like the goat - it used to lick up the fumes from car exhausts, I guess the goat equivalent of sniffing glue. And tromping up to the Olomana Clubhouse, tracking mud and manure past all the rich golfers. I remember Sue Cates and everyone riding off in protest - didn't they get the TV cameras there?

Angie of the Rapunzel hair, Maria Stalcup (and various other Stalcups), Coco, Libby, Ruthie Oliver. Hannah Springer - she's mentioned in Manu Meyer's book, Ho'oulu. My sister was in touch with Marty Strasberg a few years ago.

I remember all of you - your brother Robert was one of the best riders on the island, Patrick and Wiki Wiki. Did you live in the house next to the Haunted Pool?

My sister and I did both marry Englishmen, not naval officers though. But we didn't have an older brother. I wonder if you're thinking of Ginger Krauss? We lived across the street from each other. I've just made friends with her again on Facebook! Or maybe Libby (I can't remember her last name, but she had a brother or two, and a horse called Bay Lady). We had a pony called Leimomi and a hunter/jumper called Kula Ike.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Now I have to wonder whose brother that was!?

I don't remember that Ginger had a brother...but I remember her fat little bay Arab mare, Sultana.

Before moving to Saddle City, we were at Mokuleia Stables. Then my parents divorced and Mom got a job at the phone company and moved to Waimanalo and Libby Robinson and her family took over out at Mokuleia...I heard that she'd married a Dillingham from the ranch out there. Saddle City was good, but Libby got the best deal.

We started out in the house by the pool, then Hannah's mom took it over and put in new screens and louvres and made it beautiful and we moved two doors down on the other side of Ruthie's sister.

If I close my eyes I can see Maria Stalcup and her brother (at least, I think there was a brother)....but that's not the brother I'm looking for.

Little Ruthie Oliver, whatever happened to her? She and her mom were so tiny and the dad (and their buckskin quarterhorse) were so big. She had a brother, too (not the one I'm looking for, either), one that smiled a lot and played jokes on everyone.

I can't see Leimomi in my mind's eye, but wasn't Kula Iki a dark bay of about fifteen hands, with a round belly?

Patrick lived to be an old, old man, he died at thirty two. Wiki got given back to Max Smith and had his cribbing collar taken off and starved to death out in Kaaawa with belly-high grass all around him. I have never met a crazier horse than that Wiki Wiki. He was afraid of all men except for Max and Robert, and he could turn from a quiet little thing to a wild-eyed attack horse in a second...I remember him calmly eating from a bucket and turning his head to look back at a car and then kicking out the headlights before going back to his dinner..and once, out of the blue, he pinned Rob to a car and might have killed him...that was when Mom called Max and told him to come and get his horse back.

There were TV cameras out there on the day that they all left, and everybody tried to hate Harry Mau for a while. I hear he runs a place further into Waimanalo and rents out the place for movie-making...must be those movies that make me weepy for home when I see the scenery...Mighty Joe Young, Jurrasic Park, George of the Jungle, A hundred and One First Dates...you just KNOW it's Waimanalo when you see it.

I did see Harry's son at the quarantine center when I came back to Hawaii with my collie (I'd gone to London for a few years). He was visiting his Rottweiler who was expecting puppies. And one of my cousins took his dogs over to give to Harry just before commiting suicide a few years back.

He imported lots more wooden houses and made the place into a rental community...all those old wooden houses with corrugated tin roofs. The original ones like the one we lived in used to be officer's quarters from the Tripler BOQ, from what I remember...which certainly explains why each room had its own toilet and shower.

Do you remember when the place flooded and the horses were chest deep in water in the barn and all the worried chickens stayed stuck up in the rafters? Or when one of the horses in the big pasture got stuck in the swampy part and had to be pulled out and had maggots in it's mane? Or when a sweet little dumb horse tried to climb over the gate of his stall and got stuck and we all helped with the hernia surgery from that and sat on his neck and poked his eye and added more anesthisia if he moved or began to blink? Or when my filly got out onto the road and got hit by a car and the car was a mess but all she had was a split lip and a patch on her leg that needed sewing up? Or the vet that took over from Callahan and his fancy pickup truck with the fiberglass liner and all the equipment?....that was a change from Callahan and his messy Beetle. Or the farriers?...two skinny Poruguese brothers, I can't remember their names.

We had wonderful childhoods.

Do you still ride? I don't, but two of my kids do.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Oh Brother, where art thou?



Kula, me. Gwen.

The sawdust in the shed behind was used for bedding. We used to construct tunnel systems inside it. You'd come out smelling woodsy with your hair and eyebrows white with dust.

saddlecity2.jpg

Me, Leimomi and Gwen. Those are the old houses, in the background.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

One more grisly memory: Frank Carvajal and the guys were doing their annual thing of branding the calves. They'd tie and throw them, brand them, and castrate them. The remaining delicacies were thrown to Cowgirl, that amazing Australian Blue Heeler, and the other resident dogs.

We must have been staring in horrified fascination, because Frank glanced up at us and said, 'Cows was made to take pain.'

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

I'm sure that I have some pictures of those times around here...somewhere. You and Gwen I remember, Kula I don't...he's not small and dark with a belly, after all.

I tried to call my Mom and tell her about this thread, but she's on Oahu at the moment, so it will have to wait. She'd remember every horse and every character of every horse.

Cowgirl! I can't see a Blue Heeler without seeing Frank in my mind. Do you remember when they got another heeler who was kind of young and dumb and he got himself kicked in the head by a horse and got a lump on it that made him look like a unicorn?

Frank was certainly a character, a real cowboy. He'd come from Spain and couldn't read or write in English, but he could do anything, build anything, fix anything. And always while wearing his black cowboy hat and those boots. And the hat had to be 'just so', just the perfect shape...he taught me how to shape and block a hat with steam.

I don't live far from Spain, and every time we go across the border, I catch myself looking for Frank or someone who might look like him. But our side of Spain is more the industrial and tourism Spain, so I guess that I'd have to down to Salamaca to where the fighting bulls are raised to see those hats blocked and shaped in his particular style.

At one time, there was a TV commercial that was filmed with him and Cowgirl at Saddle City, I think it was the Bank of Hawaii. Most people watching that would have thought he was simply an actor portraying a cowboy and wouldn't have realized he was the real McCoy....but we cheered every time it came on.

His wife, Gerry, painted cowboy scenes that were good enought to be printed in the Western Horseman magazine. Years after, when I was an adult, I happened to meet a woman who happened to have one of Gerry's paintings hanging in her house. The lady didn't know who the artist was or any of the stories about Saddle City.

Your pictures are lovely, and bring back so many memories. I can see our house behind you, and I can just envision the pool at the back, or Hannah Springer's red Jeep, maybe...or Ruthie's sister and her husband Nikki screaming at each other, or I can see the wall mural painting that one of the Strauser brothers painted on his bathroom wall...it was a sheet of music with the notes and words to 'Angel of the Morning'...of course, he also had a waterbed (who didn't, back then?), and a girlfriend who would sigh each time after sex and say to him, "Wouldn't his would be so much better if we were married?", and then they did get married and it didn't last very long.

And the golfballs that used to come crashing through the windowpanes...it's a wonder that nobody ever got hurt or killed.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Oh Brother, where art thou?



Kula, me. Gwen.

The sawdust in the shed behind was used for bedding. We used to construct tunnel systems inside it. You'd come out smelling woodsy with your hair and eyebrows white with dust.

[ATTACH]1680[/ATTACH]

Me, Leimomi and Gwen. Those are the old houses, in the background.

And didn't we all walk around barefoot, even around horses!

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Now I have to wonder whose brother that was!?

I don't remember that Ginger had a brother...but I remember her fat little bay Arab mare, Sultana.

Before moving to Saddle City, we were at Mokuleia Stables. Then my parents divorced and Mom got a job at the phone company and moved to Waimanalo and Libby Robinson and her family took over out at Mokuleia...I heard that she'd married a Dillingham from the ranch out there. Saddle City was good, but Libby got the best deal.

Mokuleia Stables was beautiful! Kula went up there for a rest cure one time, but of course he wouldn't rest, spent all his time galloping around his paddock, terrifying us by jumping over the barbwire fence to find more running space. I thought horses weren't supposed to be able to see that well! A few years later, Val Monet's horse Banger killed himself doing the same thing.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Postscript:

I was sad to hear that Harry Mau died in March this year.

But a friend tells me Frank Carvajal is alive...in Montana!

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Montana?! That's COLD next to Hawaii and Spain!

I'm sorry to hear about Harry Mau....I guess that someday, someone will be mentioning the same thing about us on an Internet thread....we were kids then, and they were adults and not yet old people, and so that's how we remember them.

I need to talk to my mother and get stories staightened out...Libby is/was Libby Roblyn, and not Robinson (I think), the family with the buckskin was the one with the VW station wagon, somebody's brother is the Kailua drive one and I think they had a dark blue station wagon and maybe the fat bellied bay, too. And it was my mom who told me that you two had married British officers.

I'm pretty sure that my sister, Debbie, has sent me pictures of her on Patrick at a Town and Country or Olomana horse show...she was about seven or eight at the time and she's lined up next to someone who I'm sure is called Amy, who is now a pilot for one of the local airlines...but Amy WHO?

And can any of us forget Kent Ghirard and his troupe of little Shetland performing ponies? Or even Benny Borges who ran the pony rides at the carnivals? Or the practically state funeral for Oro at T&C? Georgie Sumners mare that had twins and stepped on the head of one and so it died after a time?

And not to forget that for all the fun and care free days of horsiness, it was dangerous and people and horses died. People's little sisters, daughters, friends....horses, dogs (goats),...now that I'm a mom I see that much more clearly.

Having said that, though, this thread is one of the most memory evoking ones I've had the pleasure of contributing to (even if I don't always get the stories straight).

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Didn't Maria Stalcup used to have a reddish Appaloosa gelding? And didn't he have heatstroke and almost die at a point-to-point somewhere in the red dirt of Wahiawa?

And barbed wire was always a danger...there were two big bay drafthorses living in the big pasture before the bridge and one of them ripped open the entire chest area after being hung up on a fence. I remember seeing the same horse years later, at a circus parade downtown near the H.I.C., being ridden by Ruthie Oliver. The scar was still there and still ugly, but the horse lived.

Can anybody say if there are still a large number of riding stables on Oahu? Have they all survived? Besides Saddle City, Shirley Lau's place (she did the Tropical Trolley wagons in Waikiki, too), the place right above Shirley's, Town and Country, Olomana, Schofield, Wheeler, Kanaohe Bay, the Singlehurst place in Waialua, and Kokohead Stables, Mokuleia Stables, the Polo farm, Camp Smith...I can't think of anymore right off the bat....are those places all still there?

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

It was dangerous, and dysfunctional, and wonderful! It taught me so much.
Maybe that's why I'm making such a project of looking back, at this stage in my life, as my own kids are growing up (without benefit of horseflesh, sadly).

Gwen my sister has a memory of meeting Frank at a Renaissance Fair in Kapiolani park in the late 70s or early 80s. She says he got real emotional, saying how 'all you kids were like my own'. She was really touched.

Was it Amy Barlow? That's the only Amy I remember; I mean, apart from Amy Rich! Will Debbie let you put the picture up?

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

No, it was an Amy with a Japanese last name. The picture is in my computer...somewhere.