Page 47 - NMHBA Summer 2017

LaRae had had health issues in recent years. She spent three days in the intensive care unit of an Albuquerque hospital after suffering a stroke about a year and a half ago. She had fainted a couple of times
at home and was on high blood pressure medication.
But her feistiness, her sense of humor, her devil-may-care, tell-it-like-it-is attitude never wavered. She loved to drink Crown Royal whiskey and she chain-smoked.
She was country-tough, it seemed, from the moment she was born on Claude and Myrtle Davis’ cattle ranch in the sandhills of Nebraska.
“Her dad had three boys and then he had a cowboy,” says Gary. “His cowboy was LaRae. She was a daddy’s girl.”
A daddy’s girl who became one of the boys during her successful 45-year career of training racehorses. A woman who earned
a college degree in dental hygiene, but quickly realized that a dental chair was no match for the racetrack and all the thrills that went with it.
LaRae Sumpter was always too high-strung, too full of adventure and imagination, to lead a vanilla-colored life.
In her 70-plus years on this earth, LaRae took full swings at everything she did. And she did it with vim and vigor, regardless of the consequences. Political correctness was never in her genes.
“If you don’t like her apples, don’t shake her tree,” said her longtime friend W.L. Mooring a few years ago. “She don’t care if you’re the president or the governor. She’s going to say what she wants to say.”
“A lot of people liked her and I’m sure a lot didn’t because of how she was,” says Gary. “There was nothing phony about her. She trained horses when most women weren’t allowed on the backside.”
But there was so much more to LaRae Sumpter, and if you spent enough time around her, you got to sample the tender, caring side of her.
This was a woman who would open up the Sumpter home to Native American kids at Christmas and made sure they didn’t go away without a gift.
A woman who twice a year placed flowers on the gravesite of a little girl who got lost in a snowstorm and froze to death on the north side of the Cross5 Ranch nearly 90 years ago.
A trainer who promised jockey Don Lewis when he was dying of leukemia that she would look after his teenage daughter. LaRae gave Lewis’ daughter, Donna, a job in her stable and the two became lifelong friends.
A wife who spent 10 days and nights sitting at Gary’s bedside when he was hurt so badly in a starting accident at Sunland Park that the doctors considered amputating his right foot.
“She helped a lot of people. She was always giving advice, whether you wanted to hear it or not,” says Gary.
A great believer in celebrating holidays and special occasions, every Christmas she’d insist that Gary decorate all the
trees around their home with lights, even though given the remoteness of where they lived, they were likely to be the only ones to see the lights.
Every Thanksgiving she’d prepare a big meal for just the two of them.
“I’d tell her, ‘LaRae, it’s just the two us,’ and she’d say, ‘We have to celebrate with the spirits.’”
A woman so loved by her neighbors
on the Acoma Reservation that many of them attended her graveside services at the ranch. They said prayers and wept openly.
LaRae’s grandfather was a full-blooded Lakota Sioux and perhaps that’s why
she shared such a bond with the Native Americans and their love for the land and the spirits.
“She believed in the way the Native Americans live and the way we lived up here,” says Gary. “There are a lot of spirits up here and she could feel ‘em. She said she wanted to be buried on this ranch. She felt at home.”
Gary and LaRae met at La Mesa Park in the summer of 1973. She was training and getting a 2-year-old colt ready for the Land of Enchantment Futurity. Gary had arrived from Oklahoma and had gotten his jock’s license a year earlier.
He and LaRae lost touch for several years, but reconnected at Sunland Park
in 1979. Gary had won the All American Futurity three years earlier with Real Wind and his career after the futurity was on the rise. But his personal life was a mess.
He was drinking and had become dependent on diet pills to make weight. “I was drinking and going crazy,” he
says. “She straightened me out. She got me off the alcohol and off the pills. Without her, I’d have been dead by now.”
Gary says they never left each other’s side after they reunited in 1979. And three years later, they were married at Circus Circus in Las Vegas.
Though total opposites in many ways, Gary and LaRae became a perfect match.
“She was my rock, she guided me,” says Gary.
Gary says LaRae constantly boosted his confidence, whether he was riding racehorses or running their cattle ranch.
“She gave me a lot of confidence,” he says. “She bragged on me. She encouraged me. I was a very weak person and needed someone like that. We’d fuss and argue, but by night
it was all over. I guess that was the best part about fussing and fighting—making up.”
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