Page 118 - January 2018

“I WASN’T INVOLVED IN THE HORSE INDUSTRY ENOUGH TO DEVELOP MY SKILLS AS A JUDGE, BUT I WANTED TO BE INVOLVED, SO I ENDED UP STUDYING PEDIGREES.”
THE PRELUDE
Larry describes himself as “the Lone Stranger” when it comes to his family’s interest in horses; neither his parents, his wife nor his children have taken much interest. “They all like horses, but none has taken them up. It just ended with me. But I have to say, for a non- horse person, my wife, Judy, does very well with them. When I’m gone, she takes care of ours and has learned how to handle them.”
An only child, he moved to Colorado with his parents as a youngster for his mother’s health, and then moved to Nebraska. He graduated from Grand Island High School, then served four years in the military before attending college.
While in the U.S. Air Force, he met Judy. “I was stationed in Alexandria, Louisiana, and went to town with a couple buddies one night,” he says. “One of them met a girl and they visited with each other, but I had to get back to my job as a security policeman, so I went back to base. When my friend came in to wake me up the next day, he said he’d arranged a blind date for me. And that was with Judy. We’re married 48 years now.”
After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Larry taught agriculture in Nebraska. “Once I got my teaching career started, I really got interested in pedigrees,” he says. “I wanted to get some answers for the performance side of the industry, but there was also a lot of research into the racing side.”
In 1987, Larry moved his family to London, Arkansas, where they’ve lived ever since. While writing freelance, Larry also taught agriculture at the high school until 2014, when he retired from teaching.
BRANCHING OUT
Following Larry’s fortuitous 1984 Speedhorse pitch, he wrote “Speedlines” for about two years, then quit when he moved to Arkansas. While there, he started writing a column called “The Working Lines” for Southern Horseman magazine. “It’s basically a ‘Speedlines’ column that brought out the history of the performance Quarter Horse,” he says.
Larry still writes his “Working Lines” column which, since the demise of Southern Horseman, is now published in The Working Horse magazine along with his “Mares With More” pieces. And when John Bachelor took over Speedhorse and hired Larry’s longtime acquaintance Stacy Pigott as editor, Larry began writing “Speedlines” again and has ever since. “One of the biggest honors I’ve ever had was to come back to work for Speedhorse when John got the magazine,” Larry says. “I loved Speedhorse because I learned a lot from it back in those years, and what I learned allowed me to go back and do more. I’m really excited about that.”
Along with “Speedlines” and “The Working Lines,” Larry also regularly writes a short
column called “In the Blood” for Quarter Horse News. His latest assignment analyzes the pedigree of the current National Reining Horse Association Futurity Champion.
Readers love Larry’s informative articles. “I’ve had owners contact me after reading an article and say, ‘I didn’t know that about my horse!’ Yes, the articles are long, but people learn from them. That’s the goal: educating the industry.”
SHARING WHAT HE’S LEARNED
In addition to his pen (or these days, his computer), Larry’s voice serves as a tool for educating horse owners. “Five of us do a monthly radio call-in show in Russellville, near here: Mark Russell, the University of Arkansas’ state equine specialist; Steven Jones, a retired University of Arkansas extension specialist; Mack Hayden, one of the best known farriers in the state; Lewis Wray, the current NCHA president; and me,” he says. “Recently, we got to talking about horses’ minds and how when you look back at a pedigree, you can see where the mind of that horse — its intelligence — came from.
“We were talking about a mare who had
First Down Dash, Special Effort and Heavenly on her papers,” he adds. “They were in the third generation, but they were there. She’s a really nice 5-year-old mare, and Steven Jones was telling me about this mare’s intelligence. She’s also a high- powered, high-energy mare, but she’s got the
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