What happened to Saddle City?

[Betsey]

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?

Yes, I think the appaloosa was called Strawberry Splash. And that did happen, about the heat stroke. We kept in touch with Marty Strasbourg for a few years after we left the islands (in fact she may have been the one who informed your mother about us marrying Limeys?). She told us that after Strawberry died, several years later, a post mortem showed he'd had heartworms or something, and that was why he'd collapsed, and NOT because she had failed to ensure that Maria conditioned the horse properly, as was the gossip at the time. So that was obviously rankling her, over the years...!http://www.hawaiithreads.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Yep...Strawberry Splash...now I remember. Such nasty gossip. I'm just surprised that nobody else suffered heatstroke up there in that awful heat.

Here's Debbie on Patrick at a show...I think the kid next to her is a very young JP Damon. From the background hill, this must've been taken at Olomana back in the early seventies.

[Nords]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

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?

I don't know the name Mokuleia Stables (only been here since '89) but Crowbar Ranch changed their name to Dillingham Ranch a few years ago and was still boarding horses on the property across the street from the polo fields. It's perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy but they still host polo seasons. There was talk of rezoning the property from agricultural to residential and selling five-acre lots for homes but I don't think anything has come of it.

Kalealoa (Barbers Point) has a dressage ring and was boarding horses a couple years ago.

I think both Schofield & Wheeler have shut down-- they were going back & forth over the last decade trying to revive their programs.

Hilltop has been hosting all the dressage shows over the last couple years. The EPA and the state have shut down cesspool sewage systems so they've been struggling to come up with the funds to connect to the city system. Don't know how that came out.

Our kid enjoyed dressage but then tried to deal with a livelier horse that had a bucking habit. She never got the hang of staying in the saddle and went airborne a couple times... that was the end of dressage.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

I don't know or can't remember where Hilltop is or who owned it.

Also, I've been confusing Crowbar (which was the Singlehurst place near Waialua) with Mokuleia. Crowbar is the one we boarded at, briefly.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Our kid enjoyed dressage but then tried to deal with a livelier horse that had a bucking habit. She never got the hang of staying in the saddle and went airborne a couple times... that was the end of dressage.

That's probably save you a bit of money, Nords!


And what a gorgeous picture of Debbie! i wonder what year that would be? 1974?

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

I remember the old Crowbar, when the Singlehursts were still there...I think they've moved up to way, way above Waialua High School since. I'm glad to see that the old place is still going, even if just somewhat.

Crowbar Ranch is (or was, back in the late sixties), really gorgeous, with beautiful stalls and a tackroom in the the middle of the courtyard, all the buildings done up with gingerbread trim, the fences neatly painted white wood, the driveway one that you'd drive down and imagine yourself somewhere in Kentucky. There was a rumour of a hot tub somewhere under a Banyan tree...There was a corral at the back for their stallion, we'd see him every time that we'd ride past along the cane roads, and once we sent a mare over to be bred which resulted in my filly, Nicole.

That wasn't our place. We were a bit more 'downmarket'. Our place was just a bit further down the road towards Kaena Point, just before you got to the turn for the airstrip. We lived in a collection of little wooden houses that had originally belonged to Camp Erdman. I'd like to think that if you passed our old place, today, that you could look deep into the overgrowth and see the one coconut tree or the one Banyan tree that must still be there, or maybe the Ironwood pines...I don't think anyone's been living there for the last thirty years or so.

As kids we'd get to work at the polo field, excercising the horses and getting them ready for the weekly games. The guy in charge of that was called Jim Phillips...a cowboy not unlike Frank Carvajal in character...all the local kids (and the Haole kids who were living with their moms at the Beach Colony while their dads were in Vietnam) who had learned to ride at our place would graduate to the polo farm. In the end, Jim got hurt in a riding accident and it turns out that Fred Daily hadn't kept up his insurance, so Jim left and someone else took over.

At that point, some of the polo players came over to our place to board and excercise their ponies...I remember only a few names from then, Bob McGregor, Sandy Parker, and there was one older man who worked as a realtor in Hauula who had a white Mercedes sports car and a young Vietnamese wife who didn't speak much English and had only grey polo ponies (I'm sure the name will come to me, eventually). I'm not sure that I would let my ten year old go out galloping along the beach riding one horse and pulling along four others, all tacked up and with braided tails to boot, to excercise them all at one go...but that's what we did and I was lucky to have such a wonderful chidhood.

One of our neighbors at that time was a kid called Brian LaPorte, who also learned to ride at or place and went on to be one of the group of polo field kids. I only remember two things about Brian....that he had braces and was forever going to the orthodontist, and that he and my sister took their respective dogs for walks so that they'd get stuck together and have puppies, which they did...and this when they were less than seven years old. I'm told that Brian is today a dentist and also has a string of ponies and plays polo...so history and tradition marches on and one can only hope that there are still horse-crazy kids in Mokuleia to continue the line.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

I don't know the name Mokuleia Stables (only been here since '89) but Crowbar Ranch changed their name to Dillingham Ranch a few years ago and was still boarding horses on the property across the street from the polo fields. It's perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy but they still host polo seasons. There was talk of rezoning the property from agricultural to residential and selling five-acre lots for homes but I don't think anything has come of it.

Kalealoa (Barbers Point) has a dressage ring and was boarding horses a couple years ago.

I think both Schofield & Wheeler have shut down-- they were going back & forth over the last decade trying to revive their programs.

Hilltop has been hosting all the dressage shows over the last couple years. The EPA and the state have shut down cesspool sewage systems so they've been struggling to come up with the funds to connect to the city system. Don't know how that came out.

Our kid enjoyed dressage but then tried to deal with a livelier horse that had a bucking habit. She never got the hang of staying in the saddle and went airborne a couple times... that was the end of dressage.

The only hilltop that I can think of was the place on the hill behind Kailua High School. I don't remember who owned it but Max Smith was affiliated with them and they ended up with my steer and the cow, named Golin, that Hannah Springer's mom gave us. I used to sit in class and watch them instead of concentrating on lessons. There is an arena up there and a barn, but the hill is steep and there's not much parking available.

Wheeler was great, except the arena was apart from the paddocks and you had to go down the hill to get from one to the other. And the red dirt....DON'T get a white horse. They had this old quonset hut for a clubhouse, with a lanai on one end and a Coke machine that was ancient even then, with tiny, thick-glassed bottles of Coke for a nickle. Some of the Wheeler people changed places and came down to us to board...I remember a fat black mare called Nonda who would get to the beach and go into the water and have a roll, and a crazy mare called Bumblebee whose owner would come down with a teeney racing saddle and spend her time galloping as fast as the wind on the beach.

I have to say that I've never like dressage...it's too formal and too rigid for my tastes. Maybe because we had come back to Hawaii from Ft. Leavenworth, where there was the Hunt, with a capital H, and there were rules and hardhats and boots....going from that to Mokuleia Stables and barefeet, bareback, and beach was all to wild for a ten year old. I'm still fairly wild, today, after all that, in fact.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

And what a gorgeous picture of Debbie! i wonder what year that would be? 1974?

I think it must've been about then, yes. She would have been maybe nine or ten.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

So I finally reached my mom and she says the player with the sportscar was Clark Reynolds (NOW I remember!), and that I shouldn't forget Bob Shriver...who she taught to ride on Nonda and was taken away at a gallop at the first lesson, hollering 'I love it!', all the way, and who turned out to become a polo player, too.

She's named more memories...Charlie Aipia, Jochim Joseph, Judy and Joannie Moses (Now I remember that the Moses brothers were the names of the farriers), and the Melones, Drury and Mo, which was at their place where the point to point where Strawberry Splash had his problems was....Drury is still going strong at over a hundred years of age and my mom went over with Siri Sussel to have dinner there the other night.

The girl called Amy who is a pilot for one of the local airlines is Amy Fujise. She flies with Kenny, Siri's Sussel's son...who I taught to ride at about eleven years old and he was my first boyfriend and my very first kiss. Ah, the memories!

Kenny's mom was a Countess (or maybe a Duchess) in what was East Germany (or maybe Austria) and had to flee with all of their horses into the mountains during the war. She became a professional ballroom dancer and married an American Army Officer who retired here and got into local politics. Kenny doesn't ride anymore because he discovered flying.

And here I am with my body halfway around the world from where my mind and heart are.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Oh go on, inflict another picture on them. This is Wheeler.
wheeler.jpg

Red dirt.


I remember a Leslie Fujise - she was a superb equitation rider, and I think she went to train with USET. We were friends until about my junior year when I drifted away from horse shows and got into surfing and trying to get into Spats and Hulas on a fake ID.

Joaquin Joseph bought Leimomi's foal Rockets Pride. Was he at the Tongg Ranch? Kula also ended up that side, in a field up the hill at Palehua. That was a beautiful place, with paperbark and eucalyptus forests, and an ancient structure that we always called a heiau, though I read somewhere that it may have been a school for studying navigation and astronomy.

I also love that corner of the island up by Camp Erdman and Kaena Point. There was a little place we used to hike to called Crystal Canyon.

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

The fake ID worked really well with the old stamped out driving licences. You just needed to shave off a number or two and switch them around. I got a job as a cocktail waitress at the Sandbox (Hawaii's home of country music, 205 Sand Island access road) that way, when I was just seventeen.

Does anyone remember that old reprobate, Howard D. Farias?

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Joaquin Joseph (you spell it better than I do), now there's a memory!

The pony farm in Haleiwa once gave us a wild Shetland stallion, who went up to be castrated by Gordon Cran at the Dillingham ranch, and then we tried to make him into something rideable...which was impossible, he was just too old and too wild for us. My mom finally gave him to Joachin and his many, many kids managed to wear the pony into submission...I heard that he finally ended up on Benny Borges' carnival pony rides, which is almost a sad and tragic end to a wild back stallion.

Does anyone remember the Haleiwa Pony Farm? Carnival rides and carousels and a fenced-in promenade. It was close by the the Lani Moo Meadowgold dairy, where you could buy a newborn bull calf for five bucks...they didn't want the boy calves, just the girl ones, and of course, the cows had to keep having calves in order to make the milk. At the entrance to the dairy was a life-sized plastic cow, which I guess wa the real Lani Moo.

[Betsey]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Our kid enjoyed dressage but then tried to deal with a livelier horse that had a bucking habit. She never got the hang of staying in the saddle and went airborne a couple times... that was the end of dressage.

Dressage has its wild side too! You graduate to a more hot blooded horse...working in a tight little ring, there's nowhere for all that energy to go but up!

i remember the winter of 71-2, when we'd just bought Kula as a 3 years old. I must have got bucked off once a week, at least. Masochism! Your daughter is a smart girl, Nords!

[Nords]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

That's probably save you a bit of money, Nords!

I'll say. Thank goodness we just paid for lessons and helped with horse support instead of buying our own. Even so it was a big budget item.

It taught her a tremendous amount about long hours and hard work.

I know old dressage riders, young dressage riders, a few rich dressage riders, and many poor dressage riders-- but I don't know any retired dressage riders.

Dressage has its wild side too! You graduate to a more hot blooded horse...working in a tight little ring, there's nowhere for all that energy to go but up!

She'd been riding for four years, she could see the trend and the work necessary to keep improving, and she was turning into a teenager. Not learning to stay on a bucking horse was a convenient excuse to quit.

Masochism! Your daughter is a smart girl, Nords!

Nah, we took up taekwondo instead...

[SusieMisajon]

Re: What happened to Saddle City?

Ah, yes...boys often replace horses during the later teen years.