Page 52 - July 2022

THE BEGINNING
Raised in Des Moines proper, Bob always loved animals although his only experience with them was with the family’s pet dog.
Sandy, on the other hand, grew up 115 miles east in Iowa City, the daughter of a rodeo master. Sandy, whose dad owned three farms on the outskirts of town, grew up with horses, showing throughout her school years and beyond.
“I didn’t know anything about horses until
THE EARLY YEARS
Showing western pleasure was the couple’s first foray into horses. Of course, Bob and Sandy soon decided they needed horse property to keep their horses handy, so they bought a 50-acre cow pasture with
50 SPEEDHORSE July 2022
we met when I was a sophomore in medical school,” Bob says. “She was a medical artist at the University of Iowa, and I met her in the coffee shop. Before I even knew what her name was, I said to myself, Someday I’m going to marry that girl!”
“He was fun, and we seemed to have a lot in common,” Sandy says of what attracted her to him. “We both have older sisters; we both have very close families.” And then there’s the horse thing.
During his medical residency, Bob started riding Sandy’s dad’s horses, then branched out into exercising polo ponies for the Iowa City Polo Club.
They married in 1966 in Bob’s junior year of medical school. Sandy continued to work at the university, and then when Bob opened his ophthalmology practice in 1973, she did technical work for him for several years. “Then I fired her!” Bob says jokingly.
“We thought we were going to get into horses right away, until our first child came along and was allergic to everything with fur, so we put the horses on hold until the kids were raised and out of the nest,” he adds. “Then we plunged in full steam.”
barbed wire fencing. After replacing the fence, they put up their house, a 16-stall barn, hay barn and arena, and after buying a couple more show horses, they began breeding for western pleasure.
In 2005, Bob jokingly says he “made the mistake” of going to Ruidoso to see what racing was all about. “Everyone was saying that it was so beautiful, and I should go out there and see it,” he says.
Picking up on his interest in racing, an acquaintance steered Bob to Butch Wise at the Lazy E in Guthrie, Oklahoma. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Bob called me and said he thought he’d like to buy something to run the next year,” Butch says. “He was green as a gourd and I wanted to keep them out of the pitfalls that newbies can get entwined in, so I said, ‘Why don’t you bring Sandy and come to Ruidoso and see what’s going on.’ So, we got him some reservations and got him into the Turf Club. He was all excited.
“I was thinking we could get him to
the Heritage Place Sale and get him started by buying a starter prospect,” Butch adds. “Well, they came to the sale at Ruidoso and
watched for a couple days and
I’ll be damned if he didn’t buy one!”
“Sandy fell in love with a yearling, and when my wife falls in love with a horse, I just get out my checkbook and say, ‘How much?’” Bob explains. “We bought this yearling, and I didn’t know anything about racing bloodlines; I’d just been involved in western pleasure.”
“We just picked her out because she was so pretty and so sweet,” Sandy adds.
The yearling was Queen Of Anywhere, by First Down Dash son Make It Anywhere and out of Queen Of Everything by Coup De Kas, and she turned out to have been bred by Butch and Nancy. “Long story short,” Butch says, “he buys this filly, their first racehorse, and she turns around and wins the Lazy E Futurity her second out. Now, she’s a stakes winner, has had three stakes winners herself, and two of her daughters are stakes producers.”
“It was blind luck,” Bob says. “I just fell into it and thanks to Butch, it’s been a real ride since!”
Queen Of Anywhere winning the 2006 Lazy E Futurity-G2 at Remington Park.
Tellher To Fly wins the 2012
Jim Bader Futurity at Prairie Meadows.
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