"Full Speed Ahead!"
    Of course I was keen to drive Samson and Scott helped me break him. We decided he would compete as a roadster pony. Every day I drove him for miles and miles. Scott only allowed me to look for "speed" once a week or so and he came out to see how I was doing only occasionally as I think he was "short-handed" after I started spending all my spare time driving Samson. This lovely little pony's ancestors would have been amazed at his long feet and pads but no more amazed than I was the first time we actually went to a show. By then I thought I could control him with my little fingers·.he was so very responsive·.and that I had the accelerator at my fingertips.
Peg Lansing "did" his braids, I donned my red and white borrowed silks and headed into the ring! Here I was, driving a little grey pony, at a big show with all the Hackneys. He really stood out among the blacks and bays and the crowd loved him. I was twenty-five years old and did not have the vaguest notion what I was doing. We entered the ring at a faster trot than I had ever achieved during all my work (which included at least ten miles per day, six days per week for three months). This pony was fit and excited and I had no more control than I would have had in a fighter plane. I did manage to reverse but he never slowed down at all during the class and we were whizzing past everyone and just managing not to crash into the rail or another entry. I am amazed now that I was not thrown out of the whole show! In the end he began to tire and I got him into the lineup. This routine continued throughout the week's three roadster pony classes but by the last one I had found the "low gear" levers and was getting fourths behind the three old-time trainers and in front of the other amateurs. What fun we had the rest of the season. In the "off" season we cut his feet back and raced on a pony track near the ranch on Sunday afternoons.
     I would be the only adult female driver among a bevy of what I thought of as "old men". I think Scott actually WAS past eighty by then. He had been a professional horseman since his father sold him with a load of trotters traveling by train to New York from North Dakota when Scott was eleven....in 1898! I kept in touch with him after we left Florida and last saw him when he was 103 years old, still driving both ponies and cars, and had recently used his favorite breaking bit (a double ring unbroken snaffle made by a blacksmith in Chicago when he was still a boy) for the last time on a Zebra for Busch Gardens. That bit is one of my prized possessions, although I never fully understood its uses until I read Tom Rider's "From The Box Seat".
     All this fun came to an end on August 3, 1964, when my husband Joe had a riding accident. He was hospitalized almost a year. During this time, most of it in Houston, Texas, we had plenty of time to try to figure out a future. We started by arguing over what kind of horses we would raise when we moved back to Arkansas. Joe was finally released from the hospital, I got a part-time job at the Hughes, AR post office, we bought a Welsh pony and Gayfields was born!

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