Page 22 - 11 May 2012

Foals are raised with plenty of room to roam.
trained himself. As pre-teen boys are apt to do, Pevehouse and his brothers soon began to challenge each other. Of course, the chal- lenge revolved around horses and whose was faster. It didn’t take long for Pevehouse to realize that Spot could outrun his brother’s horse, Blue, every time.
“Us kids always went to Wainwright every Sunday. We’d ride up there horseback, which was three miles,” Pevehouse said, explaining that in those days, horse racing in Oklahoma existed only in the form of match racing at small community gatherings, such as Wainwright. “I had a good friend up the road who had a mare named Silver. She could outrun everything around. After I got Spot broke, he wanted to run a race. We kept our mouth shut about what she could do and we matched a race. It was for $5, and I outrun him pretty easily.
“Well, he was mad and he wanted to run the race over, so we run again, and I still outrun him,” Pevehouse said with a smile. “After he paid the $5 he just turned around and went home. It took him 3-4 weeks to get over his mad spell, and then he started riding with us again.
“Me and my brother always had money in our pockets after that, because we would gamble on them. They would think their horse was pretty fast, and that little paint mare just couldn’t be outrun.”
And so a passion for horse racing was born. Pevehouse continued match racing through high school and into college. He attended Oklahoma A&M to study diesel mechanics at an uncle’s urging, but his heart just wasn’t in it. Instead, he took a job in the oilfields and trained, traded and sold horses on the side.
“I was too smart to get a degree,” Pevehouse said with a laugh. “I liked (diesel mechanics) to a certain extent, but if I had majored in engineering, I’d have had a degree. I’ve always been the kind of person that if somebody told me to build something, I could build it pretty well, or I had the ideas how to build it. I’d give anything in the word if I’d have majored in engineering.”
Instead, Pevehouse traveled to California one summer to work for some relatives there, and ended up continuing his college education at Southern California Bible College. It was during those years that he met the Vessels family, which further cemented Pevehouse’s interest in Quarter Horse racing. It was a growing pursuit he was forced to put on hold when he was drafted, but after serving his country and returning home to Oklahoma, Pevehouse picked up right where he left off.
BUILDING A BASE
When Pevehouse returned from the service, he rented a small farm for the cattle he had been pasturing at his father’s ranch while he was gone. Before he was drafted, he had seen a new breed of cattle called Charolais at a Dallas fair. Now that he was home, he was ready to get busy building his cattle business, which he did.
“After I got a herd built up, which I got up at one time to 48 mother cows, I could sell heifer calves for $1,500 each, when a Hereford or good Angus calf might bring $300 if it was registered. But they were an exotic breed, and everybody wanted to get a Charolais,” said Pevehouse, whose Rose P Ranch was one of the most respected Charolais breeders in the state.
While his business interests were focused on his cattle business, Pevehouse continued to follow horse racing. He and a friend, Vernon Matlock, would regularly make road trips to the Texas racing circuit of Columbus, Goliad, Laredo, and sometimes even El Paso. While Pevehouse wasn’t racing horses of his own, he was gambling, and within three years, had won enough money to pay for a 480-acre farm.
Eventually, just watching and enjoying the races as a spectator and gambler wasn’t enough. Pevehouse wanted to own race- horses. He bought a few unremarkable horses at the 1974 Haymaker Sale, and bought part interest—and eventually full interest—in
a stallion named Nip N Dude, who earned over $67,000. But when he really got serious about racing, once again, he turned to a neighbor for a horse.
“I had a friend up the road named John Winters, and he had a little mare named Three’s Gal who ran out $32,000. He bred her to a horse called Tiny Watch. They
had a colt named Gal Watcher. I followed Gal Watcher every race he ever run,” said Pevehouse. “He ran out $68,000. He proved to me that his mother was a producer.”
Pevehouse told Winters that if he ever had a filly for sale out of Three’s Gal, he wanted to buy her. And one day, Winters did. The two neighbors made a deal, with Pevehouse buying Dough Gal and Everetta Gal for $2,500 each.
“I wanted to breed Dough Gal to a good horse,” said Pevehouse. “I already knew that that bloodline crossed on Tiny Watch. Well, Tiny’s Gay was out of Tinys Watch, and he was a faster horse than his daddy, so I had to rake up $2,500 to go breed to Tiny’s Gay.”
Pevehouse could not have imagined the dynasty the little brown filly, foaled in 1979, by Tiny’s Gay and out of Dough Gal, by Moon Dough, would start. His biggest con- cern in those first few months was settling on a good name.
A group of “Candy” yearlings.
Carl shares his love of horses with everyone.
Carl and his daughter, Cheryl, who works beside him at PV Valve.
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SPEEDHORSE, May 11, 2012
Stacy Pigott/Speedhorse Jay Palmer/Speedhorse Stacy Pigott/Speedhorse Stacy Pigott/Speedhorse