Page 85 - June 2017

“There’s nothing better than to watch a beautiful equine athlete — unless it’s watching your child . . .”
Dee and Betty Raper with most of their family members and the owners of Bully Bullion when he was inducted into the Oklahoma Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2015. From left to right, back row: Caleb Ellis, Rachel Smith, James Smith, Rebecca Smith-Miller, Cory Miller; front row: Dawn Raper-Smith, Vicky Chavers, Jean Chavers, Dee and Betty Raper.
Betty’s son Shawn Raper, shown here with a race filly he trained, is now a performance horse trainer.
Paso. The following year, the woman who owned the Centennial tack shop that Betty’s mother worked at offered Betty a job at a new location at Santa Fe, New Mexico. From there, Betty went to work for Dr. Leonard Blach at his clinic and at Buena Suerte the first year it opened. “I had the privilege of working with Go Man Go and several other great horses,” she says.
Meanwhile, Dee, who was born and raised
in Oklahoma, started out as a parts man at a Chevrolet dealership in Ada, Oklahoma. Being
a big horse area and given Dee’s 5 foot 5 inch stature, it was no surprise that horsemen began asking him to ride their racehorses. “At one time, he exercised Lady Bugs Moon while working for Marvin Barnes,” says Betty. “Then, he went into horse transportation and that’s where I met him: hauling horses to the racetracks.”
A New Path
Betty and Dee started dating and married in July 1973. They moved their blended family to Oklahoma — Dee’s son, Tommy, now an auto mechanic in Texas; Betty’s daughter, Dawn, now a veterinary salesperson in Blanchard, Oklahoma; and son, Shawn, now a performance horse trainer in Bridgecreek, Oklahoma.
It was in Lexington, Oklahoma, that Belle Mere Farm was born. “We’d thought about moving to a farm in Lexington, so a friend
was looking on a map of that area and found a man-made lake named Belle Mere,” Betty says. “That’s where the name came from.”
“When Mom and Dee got married and we moved to Oklahoma, that was it: Dee was my father,” Dawn says. “It was blood and sweat from the very beginning. The two of them together have created this great legacy for their kids and
grandkids and now a great-grandchild. There aren’t many people in the industry that, when you say Dee and Betty Raper or Belle Mere Farm, don’t know who or what you’re talking about.
“All my life, all I can remember is Mom working for my brother and me. It was always with horses and it was always hard work, and
you never got anything without working for it. That’s who she is and what she stands for.” Dawn continues to describe the work ethic of Dee
and Betty, “Never at any time in my life did my parents sit in an office and have someone else take care of their business. I can’t even tell you all the late nights growing up that we all sat in the foaling barn until the babies were foaled. We didn’t always have night watchmen and people who helped us. I raised two girls with the help of my mom and my dad, and James (Dawn’s husband) and I have tried to raise them in that same fashion.”
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Betty’s granddaughter Rachel Smith was the emcee at the 2015 A Celebration of Champions, shown here with
her mother Dawn Raper-Smith and Betty.