Page 82 - March 2017

Coady Photography
Terwilliger bred Grade 3 stakes placed winning gelding Shroom (above) out of his Cherry Creek Futurity winner Bac By Design, who was Lonnie’s last stakes winner.
Terwilliger and Vicki Coldiron
bred Eye Dew (above) out of Lonnie’s good mare Nadica, who won the1991 Canterbury Park Derby-G2.
Terwilliger and Coldiron bred Grade 3 stakes placed winner Jess Naughty.
Terwilliger and Coldiron bred
the first of Wave Carver’s babies to sell at public auction. There’s a lot of personal excitement and investment, a lot of good feelings and emotion involved there. After that, Lonnie asked me to go in on foal shares on both those mares, so that’s how our business and friendship relation- ships have evolved.”
EVOLVING ROLES
As the years have passed, Lonnie’s operation has evolved as well. “When I was younger, Pee Wee and I would break the babies here,” he says. “There was a time when we did everything from start to finish. We’re set up for it, with sheds and a walker and all, but after we got older, we’d just halter break and trailer break them and take them to John Hammes out at Holly [Colorado]. Ross Harmon would break them out there and then John would get them going.”
Where he used to get his joy from the hands- on foaling and from raising the horses, then following them all the way to the winner’s circle if they went there, his focus has shifted to having been involved in the bloodlines that he’s raised through the years. At 72, he says, “The old age thing takes care of a lot of the hands-on part!
“We’re still hanging in there, though,” Lon- nie adds. “It’s pretty hard to make ends meet with the way farming and ranching are going— the grain prices and cattle prices. But, horse racing just gets in your blood.”
Even with all his horse racing successes,
he considers his marriage and his kids to be
his biggest success. “There’s that old saying that behind every good man is a good woman prodding him along. Without that, I guess I couldn’t have accomplished half of what I have in that period of time. It’s always been a team effort, from Cheryl and the boys to the trainers and the riders and all the way down. We’ve been lucky to have them all. But as for me? I don’t think I’m all that interesting.”
“But as for me?
I don’t think I’m all that interesting.”
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80 SPEEDHORSE, March 2017