Page 50 - NMHBA Summer 2017

Walt Harris, 2nd from left, with Monita after winning the Champion Handicap at Bay Meadows on May 2, 1951.
48 New Mexico Horse Breeder
WALT HARRIS
The Good Ones Need To Be Remembered
From the February, 1983 New Mexico Horse Breeder Magazine • by Debbie Fletcher
I was ten years old when I discovered an issue of the Quarter Horse Journal and horseracing. Inside, there were marvelous articles about Bart B.S., Hard Twist, Monita, Pelican, and Black Easter Bunny. They were the very best running horses alive, and all the horse magazines that had anything to say about Quarter Horses were full of their photos and accounts of their race records. Being ten, the only thing I was interested in was
the horses and I thought at the time that surely no earthly mortal was allowed to actually TOUCH one of them. Of course I was wrong, because there was one man who touched them all.
alone until the stray was located. But, stock farming just wasn’t what he wanted to
do. Every chance he got he was either on top of, or underneath a horse. Horses he loved with a passion, and racing became
his life. In 1946, Marvin Ake bought himself a gangling looking sorrel colt, and he turned him over to a boy from Hope, New Mexico. Mr. Ake didn’t know it at the time, but he was placing one legend into the hands of another. Because the long- headed colt was Pelican, and the hands belonged to Walt Harris. Pelican was the first horse Walt ever ran at a pari-mutuel racetrack, and the race they came to run in was the New Mexico State Fair Futurity.
Pelican was one of those horses that got better looking as he got older. But when he was a yearling, he was small and stringy. One day when Marvin
Ake had checked on him out in the pasture, he had come across the colt standing next to the watertrough eyeing a balefuly a full grown pelican. The horse and the bird both craned their necks the same way, and that was what Ake remembered...how much this long headed, stringy hided horse reminded him of a bird. And so he was officially named, but not without a little trouble.
He came to New Mexico with his parents in a covered wagon. All the way from Hamilton County, Texas, to Hope, New Mexico, and he came to work. His father instilled in his children a deep sense of responsibility and a strong desire to succeed. Told to mind the stock as a young boy, he knew his father meant that literally. He was totally responsible for the stock all the time, and in every way. If one animal got itself lost, the boy didn’t return without it even if it meant sleeping out in the hills
It would interest most of us to realize that Quarter Horse racing was in its formative years in 1946. The American Quarter Horse Association vied with the rival National Quarter Horse Association for prospective clients. When Pelican was a two year old, he had no registration papers. Most Quarter Horses didn’t,
Both Walt Harris and Pelican were coming to the New Mexico State
Fair prepared. They had toured the unrecognized race meets in Texas and New Mexico, and had already run six times to win six races. Pelican was fast proving himself a capable racehorse, but he was short on good looks. When the inspector for the A.Q.H.A. saw Pelican, he turned him down. He wasn’t a pretty horse, and Walt couldn’t persuade
and they were being accepted into the Associations by inspectors. Marvin Ake told his trainer to get his colt inspected before he ran at the Fair.
the inspector to change his mind. No matter...Walt paid the five dollar entrance fee, and Pelican went to the post for the Futurity anyway.
It was another easy victory for Pelican, as the wide angled photo finish showed him very much alone at the wire. It was also an easy victory for the National Quarter Horse Association when Mr. Ake turned the American branch down. All this fuss was lost on Pelican. All he wanted to do was run, and run he did. In his next six outs,
he tromped the opposition every trip including the then prestigious Arizona Derby at Rillito. Arizona was the center of Quarter Horse racing in the forties, and winning the Derby helped capture the 1947 Champion Running Colt crown for Pelican. Walt was on his way to the top.
The real break for Walt came in the early 1950s when Quarter Horse racing opened up in California. Bay Meadows ran one short horse race a day in 1949,