Page 113 - June 2018 Speedhorse

Logan understood how I felt, and after a while we began a search for another stallion by contacting major breeders, major stallion own- ers, major horsemen. What I really wanted was for the new stallion to be like Mr. Duke.
In early summer of 1978, we got a line on a stallion in Nebraska. I was in our living room the night Logan spoke with the stallion’s owner by phone. I watched my husband’s face, and I knew something big was happening.
After Logan hung up, he told me that the stallion was not only a bay, like Mr. Duke,
but he also had a pair of hind socks, a star and small snip on his nose. He was nine years old, had gone through a lot of owners, had been raced since he was two, but had never distin- guished himself in racing and was still in the Appendix category. Logan said the stallion, like Mr. Duke, had been an orphan.
The stallion was The Last Son. Foaled in ’69, he was a result of a mating between Three Bars TB and Fairy Adams, Fairy Adams being the blind mare by Joe Moore out of a Chicaro Bill daughter, bred by Ott Adams. She was the mare Three Bars fell in love with in the sunset years of his life, the one he refused to live without. I hear that Walter Merrick, who bred and named The Last Son, finally knocked out some boards between the two stalls so Three Bars could keep Fairy Adams in his sight.
Fairy Adams produced fourteen foals in her lifetime. Four were producers – Fairy Deck by Top Deck; Vila by Leon Bars; Three Jingles (ROM) and Three Fairies (stakes placed) by Three Bars. She also produced Cona Bars by Three Bars, and The Last Son. The mare died while foaling Son. Three Bars had died of a massive heart attack only a few months before that.
Three Bars will be to people in future gen- erations what Janus is to us. I hope the account of his love for Fairy Adams will accompany his records into history, for in their story – Mrs. Merrick called it “a marriage” – is the true story of a Quarter Horse – the sprinting sire and the hardy foundation mare.
Logan and I virtually bought The Last
Son sight unseen. It was a banner day when he came home to Sugar Creek. From then on, if
I had one ambition, it was to take Son out of the Appendix category by earning an ROM in a performance event. I rode him for a couple of months and knew by the easy way he handled that there’d be no problem.
Today we have twenty mares, foundation types, from families like Leo and Johnny Dial. We accept some outside mares, but mostly breed Son to our own. He breeds on command, live cover, with no restraints whatsoever. He understands everything we say, everything we do, he’s a wonder horse.
I’ve participated in the preliminary training of racehorses, but my heart lies
with the breeding segment of the industry.
I believe that every great horse, regardless
of the endeavor in which he performs best, has speed in his pedigree somewhere. We do fully intend to send some of The Last Son’s foals to the track, but we intend to send them elsewhere, too, to prove his versatility. He has two crops on the ground now. We’re keeping a stud colt from his ’80 crop, and another from the crop of ’81. They’re back- ups for Son. His blood will always go on here at Sugar Creek.
Today our industry’s wide open, there’s nowhere it can’t go, but the stress on its young is tremendous, not just in racing but in all areas of performance. The big purses, the richest cash prizes are found where the babies com- pete. I once read an article in a magazine which said that any industry that devours its young can’t survive. We’re not there yet, but lots of knocks are coming on the door.
That’s about it. I’m thirty-three and am a com- mercial investment real estate broker by profession. Most of all, I’m somebody who cares a lot about my husband, my kids, my horses, my friends – just the world in general, I guess. But what I’m proud- est of most of all is taking a stallion that was ten years old and bringing him along in an event he had never heard of, seeing The Last Son get on in there and make it all happen. Quick.
Just like I knew he would.
It’s something you’d expect from the last foal of Three Bars and Fairy Adams. .
“. . . what I’m proudest of most of all is taking a
stallion that was 10 years old and bringing him along in an event he had never heard of, seeing The Last Son get on in there and make it all happen.”
We stood Son to a few mares in ’79, then sent him to Roy Savage in Stephenville, Texas. Three months later, Son had his ROM in team roping, and we asked no more of him. He would never be called an Appendix again. We brought him home.
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SPEEDHORSE, June 2018 111
LOOKING BACK - AN EXCERPT FROM JULY 1981 ISSUE
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