Page 85 - June 2021

“Smokin Corona is what I’d call my foundation mare. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. She’s 21 now and she’s had 10 or 12 foals. All have run; all of them.” – Margo
her bread — she went shopping at the farms. On occasion I went with her. I want to tell you something, those pacers can mortally fly!
“She had her little barn out behind their house in Fort Collins,” Margo continues. “She had a stable guy who lived in the loft and took care of her horses and her pony. She had an oval out there in that backyard — that was her rose garden — and she’d get that guy out there and he’d trot us kids around leading that pony and she’d stand there
and yell at us, ‘Okay, do this, do that,’ and we had such a good time. I think we might have been more interested in picking her roses than riding, but I learned to ride sidesaddle on that pony.”
Margo, her sisters, brother and cousins would go up to Grandfather Webster’s ranch in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in summers and the cowboys there would put them on horses with instructions to ride the fences on the 50,000 acres. “Grandpa had Herefords up there and there was nothing prettier than coming up over a hill and looking down the hillside to see all those mama cows out there and those babies sticking their heads up out of the grass. It’s a memory I’ve never forgotten,” she says.
Margo and her siblings got active in rodeo and barrel racing. “My dad and my Uncle Sam ran horses on the racing circuit that ended up at Centennial in Denver every year and I was raised on every bush track in a five-state area,” she says. “My dad always mounted us really good; most of the horses we had come from the track.”
Her equine talents didn’t stop at rodeo and racing, though. “I’ve been through hunters and jumpers, ladies’ driving horses and dressage. And I always wanted a reiner, so I went and got two. One taught me how to use the pen and the second one had a little more talent,” she says.
After graduating from Fort Collins High School, she went on to junior college in Denver. “When I came down to go to school, I tried to make it an issue to get home every weekend and my sisters and friends and I would always go barrel racing and fiddle around with the horses.” she says.
“As I met people and became more socially active, those weekends kind of disappeared,” she relates. “When I got home one time after being gone a while, my horses were gone. I got hysterical and asked my dad where they were.”
In typical no-nonsense farm fashion, he said, “If you’re not going to ride those horses, I’m not
going to feed them. If you think I’m doing it, you’re wrong.” And that was the end of Margo’s rodeo career.
After earning her degree in accounting,
she got her first “real job” and bought herself
a red 1963 Ford Galaxy convertible — which Clete pulled out of the hay barn and off-frame restored over several years and which their son, Craig, now exhibits in antique car shows.
BUILDING A LIFE AND A BUSINESS
After Margo turned 21, the office she worked in connected to a small cafe where she occasionally worked the counter in her off hours. That’s where she met her late husband, Clete, in 1963. “Clete was fresh out of the service and out of Iowa,” she says. “Those people in Iowa are salt of the earth.”
When they married in 1964, Clete was a brick mason for a masonry company but wanted to start his own firm. He went back to school to
After earning her degree in accounting, Margo got her first “real job” and bought a red 1963 Ford Galaxy convertible — which Clete pulled out of the hay barn and off-frame restored over several years and which their son, Craig, now exhibits in antique
car shows.
study engineering and then branched out on his own with the blessing of his old boss.
Margo handled the books and stepped in whenever else she was needed. “We had a rule,” Margo says. “The office is just outside the
house and when I crossed that threshold into that office and he said jump, I said how high. Likewise, when he crossed the threshold into the house and I said jump, he said how high.”
One time, Clete got the bid for a five- story load-bearing office building where
the steel rebar would be dumped at the site on the weekend, and he and Margo would go down, sort it by size and strength and move it to the various floors where it would be needed so it’d be ready for the workers Monday morning. “That’s where I learned to drive a forklift,” Margo says.
Schares Masonry also built schools, a wastewater treatment plant, shopping centers and other projects, including two jobs that
SPEEDHORSE June 2021 83
Photo Courtesy of Margo Schares
Photo Courtesy of Margo Schares