Jim and Carlee Miller ran a broodmare business like Jo and Toss’ next door to us in Ohio before they moved their business to Versailles, Kentucky. I missed being able to look out my windows and see mares and babies flying around, but when we visited them in Versailles, they drove us to the races at Keeneland, introduced us to friends in the Thoroughbred business, and took us to watch mares being bred at a famous barn. When I got ready to write Breeding Ground, they answered countless questions about the ins-and-outs of their broodmare operation, and discussed their experiences working in Lexington’s horse community.
Pat Salomon, a long-time friend, taught me most of what I know about horses while she boarded my first two, and taught my kids how to ride the real-life Bert. She helped me learn dressage on a modest level on my own “Sam” (a quarter-horse-Thoroughbred-cross named Max, who appears as himself in two of my Ben Reese novels).
In the early 1980s, one of Pat’s friends worked at Claiborne Farm and arranged for our family to meet Secretariat – who waited at the hilltop corner of his paddock till his groom had stationed us at the opposite corner. He charged straight down the hill, reared up inches away from us, whipped his head from side to side, stamped a front hoof a time or two, then stood quietly, graciously looking each one of us in the eye with an obvious sense of noblesse oblige, before accepting our carrots.
Seeing him (and Riva Ridge and Spectacular Bid) at the Claiborne operation was partly responsible for making me want to write about Lexington’s horse world.
Peggy Brown, a good friend, and well known Centered Riding instructor who’s taught professional riders (as well as amateurs like me) all over the world, helped me with my last horse. She and Sue Harris (another very well known instructor with whom Peggy works and writes) also let me question them closely about horse behavior and training techniques during, and after, the sixties.
Interviewing MacKenzie Miller, the much revered trainer who won every important Thoroughbred race when he trained for Paul Mellon, Charles Engelhard and others, was an inspiring experience for me. His integrity, and love of horses, and his perceptions about competing well in a business that sometimes attracts the crooked and the cruel, framed the way I approached the book. He and his wife, Martha, couldn’t have been kinder, when they didn’t know me from Adam.
It was my friend Betsy Pratt Kelly in Midway who put me in touch with the Millers. She and my other friends in Versailles and Midway – Sharon and Jim Rouse, Peggy and Joe Graddy, Jonelle Fisher, and Kaye Bell (who was once an exercise rider for Mack Miller, who told me “she did have a clock in her head”) – answered a whole lot of questions, and introduced me to more of their friends, which gave me an appreciation, and some small level of understanding of the history and community they’ve been born and raised in.
Dr. Rick Henninger, my horses’ vet for many years, answered my equine medical questions, even researching the techniques and pharmaceuticals used in the early sixties in ways I wouldn’t have been able to. Talking to him has always been a pleasure and I couldn’t have written the book without him.
I was helped in the Loire region of France by Jean-Jacques DeGail, who’s spent much of his life studying WWII. He and his wife live near Esvres-sur-Indre in a very beautiful old mill – and there he helped shape my understanding of France during and after the war, as well as the character and accomplishments of the local and national Resistance. The story of the anti-Nazi priest being betrayed and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, and the local villagers denying today that there were collaborators in their village – and that he was sent to his death – is an accurate depiction.
For those interested in the horse business in Kentucky, I would recommend three biographies by Jonelle Fisher, a long time resident of Midway:
For All Times: The Story of Lucas Brodhead
MacKenzie Miller: The Gentleman Trainer from Morgan Street
A Soul Remembering: A Collection of Vignettes
These books too helped me understand the Thoroughbred world, and the horses who work there:
Equine ER: Stories From A Year In The Life Of An Equine Veterinary Hospital by Leslie Guttman
Secretariat: The Making Of A Champion by William Nack
The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, The World’s Greatest Race Horse by Lawrence Scanlan