Page 53 - July_2021.indd

“I said, ‘I’m going to Los Alamitos,’ and they just laughed
but I said I had to try.”
his older sister, Sue, and his younger brothers, Joe, James, and David.
His father, he says, was a bit of a wild man. “He had a couple of old Thoroughbreds he liked and one that he stood and ran was called Tamboro (Our Love II-Grimalkin, Challenge Me). He’d run and match them; he drove race cars and was a bootlegger. That’s all he did. We galloped the racehorses and drove the race cars on the same track,” John says.
Back in those days, Shetland ponies were
a big thing and people would train them to race and match them. “My first match race happened when one morning, some guys came to the house and asked my dad if I was around. They had these Shetlands and wanted me
to ride them. I kept riding all through high school and part of college.”
By 1973, John had also started riding Thoroughbred racehorses for a man who lived 100 miles east in DeKalb, Texas. The man’s trainer was an ex-rider who wanted to go to Juarez and took John along. “That was my first airplane ride,” John says, “and I spent the whole summer in Juarez, then went to Delta Downs in the fall. I was going to quit high school and just ride Thoroughbred horses, but instead I went back to school.
Bill Dale with his wife Janis.
“My mom and dad had sold our house and gotten a divorce, so I lived with a family with five or six boys around my age and their father trained racehorses. He shod horses all day, every day in the summer, and every day before school I’d get up and gallop and take care of his horses.”
John finished high school — “the wittiest in my class, I might add,” he says — and attended East Texas State University, now Texas A&M- Commerce, for a year on scholarship.
“I was on the rodeo team riding bareback horses,” he says. “I liked rodeoing and I liked horses and I liked racehorses, and I majored in ping pong. I was a horrible college student! I just didn’t care anything about it.”
He quit school, got his PRCA permit and commenced to repeatedly get hurt. “I went to Shelbyville, Tennessee, and the horse spun flat, threw me off and kicked me in the top of the head,” he says. “Then I went to Jacksonville, Mississippi, and I wasn’t feeling very good. The horse I was on barreled out and got me behind her and bucked me off and when I came down, she kicked me in the left shoulder and damaged all those nerves. It seemed like for about two months there, I just couldn’t get well.”
Another injury followed in Florida and John threw in the towel. “When I quit, I went back to trying to gallop racehorses.
“When I finished with college, I started training a few in Point, Texas, where me and one guy took care of 22 head of horses. He was probably 70 years old, and he’d clean all the
stalls, and I’d tack up the horses, gallop them and bathe them. I had a little Ford truck and
a two-horse trailer, and I’d haul them over to Ross Downs and run them myself. Then I met guys like Sleepy Gilbreath and was riding so many horses that finally I quit training and was just riding them.”
BREAKING IN
In 1979, John found himself in El Paso and was starting to ride a few horses, but Sunland only ran two Quarter Horse races a day. One day while visiting friends at their apartment, John noticed some Quarter Horse books. “There were all kinds of articles about Los Alamitos,” he says. “I said, ‘I’m going to Los Alamitos,’ and they just laughed but I said I had to try.
“I went to my valet, Red Hederman, and told him and he laughed, too,” John continues. “He said, ‘Boy, that’s a lion’s den out there, that’s the best of the best; you won’t make it in L.A.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I will,’ so he wrote down the name Kenny Hart and a phone number on a piece of paper and told me that Kenny worked for Blane Schvaneveldt.”
John drove out and slept in his truck the first night. The next morning, he set out to find Kenny Hart. “I knew who Danny Cardoza was; he had a big handlebar mustache and I’d seen him win the All American with Pie In The Sky on TV. He was standing there talking to another guy, so I walked up to him and told him I was looking for Kenny Hart. Kenny
There’s nothing more important to me than for someone to be honest, and he has always
been honest with me.” —Bill Dale
SPEEDHORSE July 2021 51