Page 114 - June 2018 Speedhorse

Speedhorse
Women
by Shirley Schvaneveldt • Introduction by Lyn Jank
Shirley Schvaneveldt
October 20, 1977, a blade of early morning sunlight struck the kneehigh statue of a jockey in blue silks that kept vigil in the front yard of a pale yellow bungalow in Cypress, California. Inside the house, Shirley Moser Schvaneveldt (pronounced Swanafelt) poured a cup of coffee. She had just returned home after taking her husband, Blane,
to the Los Angeles airport. He was going to the Haymaker Sale in Oklahoma City. While he was gone, Shirley planned on “taking care of all those housely chores that never seem to get done when your men are around.” But before Shirley took the first sip of coffee, the phone rang, and “the worst nightmare of our lives began. . .”
They were calling from our stables over in Stanton, just a few miles away, to say that Town Policy had been kidnapped. Part of me wanted to laugh, but the rest of me started shaking – our stable people would never pull
a cruel joke like that. Blane was already at the airport, and his flight was due out in about fifteen minutes. I called the airport, had him paged, and when I heard his voice, I lost mine. Finally, I was able to say, “Blane, Town’s gone. I’m coming to get you.” If Blane said anything at all, I don’t remember what it was.
When Blane and I had gone to the airport that morning, I guess both of us were thinking, “You’ve come a long way from Preston, Idaho, baby.” We had met there during high school in the ‘50s and got married right after we got out of school. Our business had been horses ever since. Things hadn’t been easy at first. We had dreamed about living in California for a long time before we were able to move here. But when Blane and I came back from the airport that morning, I guess we were both wishing for those safe old hills in Idaho.
Town’s story has been written about so much I won’t go into all of it here. The money part of it can be done away with in a few words. Town was no ordinary gelding. At the time he
was kidnapped, his cumulative earnings were $336,730 – an asset in any kind of book, and any sane business person would have tried as hard as we did to get him back. But his money value wasn’t what we thought about most. We thought about him.
I don’t remember the exact time when Blane started training for Ivan Ashment. I think it started when Blane picked up a little black mare at a sale and talked Ivan into buying her. But the association has gone on for a long,
long time. They have pulled many hard hills together, but no hill like the one they faced in ’77. When your horse gets famous, you’d like to think you knew it was special all the time. They always held high hopes for Town, but when push had come to shove, he had outrun their hopes, going away. He wasn’t just a race- horse anymore, he was part of the family.
Blane took Ivan’s mare, Camptown Girl, to the stallion, Reb’s Policy, in 1974. They liked the stud so much they went partners and bought him. Camptown Girl produced Town in 1975, so he had been part of our clan since the minute he hit the ground.
Ivan and Blane put up $25,000 reward for anybody who could help locate Town. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and
track gossip was that Town had to be dead. Blane and Ivan wouldn’t give up. They felt
like he might be down in Mexico somewhere. They kept after local, state and border officials, just kept hounding. Then a phone call came
in from Tom McCulloush, a cattle inspector down in Presidio, Texas, who said he had heard of a little bay running down in Mexico. It was like a detective story from there on in.
Blane made several trips to Mexico, but they dead-ended every time. He looked abso- lutely awful every time he came back. He went down there again around Easter time 1978. I think I was at the sewing machine, making a pair of blinkers, when he called me. If I live
to be a hundred, I won’t forget how sad he sounded. “I’ve got him back,” he said. “He’s in bad shape. We’re coming home.”
Mexican officials had taken Blane to a ram- shackle place, to a corral with some cattle in
it. Town was in there with the cows, bony and sick, with a heavy rope dangling from his neck. His head was down. Anybody who knows him knows how high he usually holds his head.
We settled Town at Bay Meadows and nursed him back to good health. A few weeks later, he won the Los Alamitos Derby in :21.57, the third fastest time ever run under Los
112 SPEEDHORSE, June 2018
LOOKING BACK - AN EXCERPT FROM FEBRUARY 1979 ISSUE