Page 59 - Winter 2020

Candy’s can do approach has been there throughout her life, a journey that started with her birth on Thanksgiving Day 1953. Candy was the second of James and Jackie Spence’s five children. She has an older sister (Mary Jane) and three brothers, Jim, Steven and Trampas.
Candy’s early years were spent on the Spence’s small farm in Chaves County.
Hers was an idyllic childhood. Between gymnastics and bike rides with her girl friends on Saturday mornings, beating the boys at marbles at Cottonwood Elementary School
to Sunday mass at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Artesia, Candy embraced it all.
Most of it anyway. One has to think learning the value of a dollar--or in this case a half dollar--had to have tested the fortitude of young Candy and her siblings.
As the story goes, each of the Spence kids would get a weekly allowance of 50 cents
for doing chores around the house during
the week. And every Sunday the kids were expected to drop half of their allowance money into the collection plate at St. Anthony’s.
“We got our allowance just before we went into church,” says Candy.
Her formative years, says Candy, were about love, not luxuries, about equality, not egos.
“We had lots of love, but we didn’t have lots of money,” she says. “But everybody was in the same situation. When I grew up, there was no distinction between race, religion, anything like that. We were all the same.
“I tell people I grew up west of LA (Lake Arthur) and south of Big D (Dexter),” says Candy with a laugh. “It was a big old farming community where everybody watched out for everybody else. We grew up in a two-bedroom house. My dad share-cropped for my grandma. He hauled cotton and alfalfa and did what he could to help with the income. Everybody had to work. It was the ethic I grew up with.”
An ethic rooted in the Spence family tree. An ethic that’s been unshakeable through the toughest of times.
Candy’s paternal grandfather, James Solon Spence Sr., was struck by lightning and died when Candy’s grandmother was pregnant with
NMHBA Exec. Director Mary Barber with owners Calder & Candy Ezzell and jockey Raul Ramirez Jr. after Sister Sophia’s victory in the 2019 New Mexico State Fair Derby at The Downs at Albuquerque.
Candy’s dad. At the time the grandparents were in the process of buying the farm where the accident occurred.
“He was walking across a field to go help
a neighbor when a freak storm came up,” says Candy. “That was in 1927, so you know it was pretty rough back then. She was determined
to hang onto that farm. She knew it would be the roots.”
The tragedy occurred just before the
start of the Great Depression, but Candy’s grandmother, with the help of her four brothers, was able to hang on to the farm on which they raised cotton, alfalfa and had a small orchard of fruit.
“After my dad was born, my grandmother’s family helped take care of her kids,” said Candy. “She went back to Western New Mexico University and got her teaching certificate. She, my dad and his older sister lived on the farm and her brothers helped her. It wasn’t an easy road for anybody.”
The one thing that did come easy was her attraction to horses. That love connection started when her grandfather, Ralph Beaver Warnica, bought a little filly for the five
Spence kids. It blossomed further when her maternal grandparents would make the trip to Ruidoso Downs to watch and races and Candy tagged along.
“I was in awe of these guys (jockeys) getting on horses and going that fast,” she says.
There came a time when Candy thought she might be able to pull off a career- combination of ballerina and jockey. That idea went out the window about the time she got to high school.
“My feet started growing when I hit ninth grade,” says Candy.
Candy graduated from Artesia High School, where she was a cheerleader. She went on to New Mexico State with the goal of going to vet school. Like the toe shoes she outgrew in high school, Candy couldn’t quite fit the demands of chemistry into her head.
“The reason I couldn’t cut it with chemistry is because it was all the metric system and Artesia High School did not do anything with metrics. I was lost from day one,” she said.
She left NMSU after two years and got married. Her first marriage lasted 18 years,
“We had lots of love, but we didn’t have lots of money,” she says. “But everybody was in the same situation. When I grew up, there was no distinction between race, religion, anything like that. We were all the same.”
WINTER 2020 57