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Also, while at A&M, he took a job breaking and galloping horses for a racehorse trainer. “We weren’t very good,” Rich says. “We were at the bottom level on the Texas nonpari-mutuel bush track circuit — at the entry level, to put it politely.”
But the rides earned him $5 apiece, so he was able to avoid the menial jobs most college students ended up with. The rides also earned him a thrill and a glimpse into the world of racing. “The first time I worked a horse out of the gate, I thought, ‘This is COOL!’”
Then one fortuitous day, Rich’s school advisor called him in to tell him that Quarter Horse Journal needed someone to write book reviews. “They’d send the book and I’d write a one-page review for $10,” Rich says. “That’s how I got started.”
FEEDING THE FIRE:
Establishing His Career
After graduating in December 1978, Rich faced a choice. He’d been offered jobs at The Cattleman and Quarter Horse News, but when AQHA’s executive director of publications, Jim Jennings, called to tell him about a recently vacated position at Quarter Horse Journal, he knew that was the job he wanted. He started there two weeks after graduation.
Originally, Rich figured he’d work
at QHJ for a few years, then move on. But Rich loved the job’s travel so much, he
stayed. “I was offered a job for higher pay as a livestock paper’s agriculture editor, but when I thought about it, I realized that I’d be working
in a 100-mile radius there. At the Journal, I had a 2,000-mile radius,” he says. “I liked the travel, and I just fit with horse people.”
Rich’s place in the equine industry
was sealed just four years after starting at
the Journal, when he received the Wrangler Award for the Best Western Magazine Article — the Oscar of Western writing — from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City in 1983. The article chronicled the career of Tom Blasingame of JA Ranch near Amarillo, who’d been cowboying for 85 years, since age 6.
“I don’t want to get into a deal where I sound like a braggart,” Rich says, smiling, “but having said that, I’m fixin’ to start bragging. That was my single biggest success in the horse world. The Cowboy Hall gives Wranglers for the best Western magazine article, the best Western book, the best Western TV show and the best Western movie.
“The night I got my Wrangler, Dennis Weaver [TV “Gunsmoke’s” Chester] and his wife were emcees, and Kirk Douglas got a lifetime Wrangler for all the Westerns he did. He had a table right in front of the stage. It was a black-tie dinner and I was wearing a Western tux with my brand-new pair of Justin lizard boots, and Kirk Douglas applauded me. That was pretty cool!”
The award, a reproduction of the Charlie Russell bronze known as both “The Wrangler” and “The Night Hawk,” sits sentinel on Rich’s mantel, a reminder of the boxes of plaques and other awards he’s received throughout the
years from American Horse Publications and the Livestock Publications Council. “That’s my career high-point,” he says.
Since then, he’s traveled across the U.S. and Canada to Mexico, Argentina and Brazil — researching, photographing and writing about his passion. “I went to Los Alamitos and Ruidoso a lot, and loved writing about the old racehorses,” he says. “Steel Dust is remembered as a great sire of cow horses, but he actually was a racehorse.
“We started a racing section in the back
of Quarter Horse Journal and I really enjoyed that. Then, in January 1988, the first issue
of Quarter Racing Journal came out. From that point on, I did almost exclusively racing stories.
“Quarter Racing Journal was a news- oriented business magazine for the Quarter Horse breeder who had fed his horses in
the morning, galloped them, and with the morning’s work pretty much over, would sit down and read the magazine. That was my guy. We covered races and also wrote a lot about the issues facing the industry — drugs, casino competition, the market for yearlings — and it did really well.”
During the years Quarter Racing Journal was a stand-alone publication, Rich became known for his historical “Quarter Paths” column about more obscure name’s generations back in racehorses’ pedigrees. “Back in the 1700s, when Quarter Horse racing first started in the Colonies, they’d pack little quarter-mile tracks out in the
Rich spends a lot of time these days turning his and Mary’s grandkids and others on to horses at Notquitea Ranch, where they live with their Quarter Horses, chickens, cats and a dog.
Richard & Mary Chamberlain
SPEEDHORSE August 2020 45