Oral History Program Joe & Carrie Ruiz Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 19 June 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joe & Carrie Ruiz Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 19 June 2018 Copyright © 2024 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Ruiz, Joe & Carrie, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 19 June 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Joe & Carrie Ruiz Circa 2017 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Joe and Carrie Ruiz, conducted on June 19, 2018, by Lorrie Rands. Joe and Carrie discuss their life and their experiences in the rodeo community. Alyssa Chaffee, the audio technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is June 19, 2018. We are doing a phone interview with Joe and Carrie Ruiz, for the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Hall of Fame. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and present with me is Alyssa Chaffee. It is about three o’clock. Thank you again, guys, for your time and your willingness to do this. I really appreciate it. For me, this is my favorite time of year, and I truly appreciate being able to interview all of the candidates for the Hall of Fame, so I appreciate your willingness. Carrie, let’s start off with when and where were you born. CR: I was born in what’s called Taylor, we’re in Taylorsville now. I was born next door to where we live. We live in what was my grandparents’ house, and I was born and raised here. LR: Okay. I grew up in Salt Lake so I have an idea where Taylorsville is, but can you give more of the actual area? CR: We’re on the border of Murray and West Jordan. Taylorsville is south of Salt Lake. Our physical address is 6335 South 1300 West. LR: Okay. It said in your packet, that you grew up on, your grandfather’s ranch. CR: I’m the sixth generation. My brother and sister and I, we own what’s left of it, and we have six acres left. My great-great-great-grandfather purchased it in the beginning. There was quite a bit of land, and then it was split up over the years between the kids. My grandpa and his brother ended up with most of it to farm. 1 They had sheep and had a couple of bad experiences with sheep, and then they had cattle. My Dad took over what was his father’s part and farmed that. So I was raised being with that and around horses. As kids, we started doing 4H and also horse shows, and then switched to rodeoing. I met Joe when I was sixteen and we got married when I was nineteen. LR: I was curious, because I grew up in Salt Lake, it’s hard to envision a ranch being in Taylorsville. Is that where it was located? CR: Yes, it was located here. It originally went from the Jordan River to Redwood Road, and then between 6200 South and 6600 South. LR: Wow. Visualizing what’s there now, it’s hard to imagine it was a ranch. That’s crazy. CR: Right, and if you were to drive by our house, you can’t tell that we have six acres behind it. LR: Okay. CR: There’s our house, which is my grandparent’s, and then my Dad’s house is south of that, and next to his was an uncle, and now my brother is next to that house, and my sister’s behind him. There was another building lot my other Aunt had, and her kids sold that. On our side of the street, for the last forty years, has been relatives and then going north, it’s cousins on our street. I still have second cousins. LR: That’s crazy. So, what were some of your responsibilities on the ranch as you grew up? 2 CR: Well, I drove the truck when we hauled hay, I rolled bales, helped with the chores, feeding cattle and horses and weeding the garden. JR: You got to get to irrigate! CR: After my Dad passed away I learned how to irrigate, so that’s been fun. My cousin said I looked just like my Dad, the way I leaned on my shovel. LR: That gave me chuckle. Where did you go to elementary school? CR: Well, I started at Plymouth Elementary, kindergarten through second, and then I went to John C. Fremont when they built that. I was there for third and half of fourth grade. Elementary for half of fourth through sixth, living in the same house. LR: Okay. That’s funny. CR: Yeah. My Dad was my bus driver for several years in elementary school. Junior high I went to Valley Junior High, and then they built Kennedy Junior High in Kearns, so I went there for two years, and then I went to Cottonwood High School. LR: Okay. When did you start competing, with your horses? CR: Probably in my early teens. I’m the oldest of the three children, so my brother and sister, they accomplished a lot more as far as competing than I have. LR: Was there a reason why you waited so long? CR: Well, my Dad didn’t really get into that until then. We had grown up riding horses. We used to ride our horses down Redwood Road, to go to a nearby dairy to buy candy, but there’s no way I would even attempt that now. We had ponies that we’d hook to a pony cart, and we’d drive that down 1300 West. That was before 5400 South went all the way through. So we’d ride our horses all over, and I’d 3 ride my bike to Kearns shopping center. We lived in the middle of nowhere when I was growing up, and now we’re in the middle of the city. LR: Right, that’s crazy. You said that you met Joe when you were sixteen, would you talk about that? CR: Sure. I wasn’t competing on my horse at that time. My brother and sister were, and we had gone to a horse show in Spanish Fork, and Joe was working for Noel Skinner at the time. Noel, was going to show him the reining, and Joe became interested in reining. He was raised on a ranch, but he wanted to go watch Noel show him the reining, so I ran into him there. I thought he was pretty cool. I didn’t know how old he was at the time, and the next weekend, we saw each other at another horse show in Ogden. The next weekend, he was leaving on a LDS Church mission. So we met three weeks before he left on his mission. LR: Okay. So did you write to him while he was on his mission? CR: I wrote to him, but I dated other guys, and we were married six months after he got home. LR: Okay, so when did you get married? CR: We were married December 12, 1975 in the Salt Lake Temple. JR: We had a reception in Taylorsville. LR: Alright. Joe, let’s move over to you. When and where were you born? JR: I was born September 26, 1951 in Florence, Arizona. My family ranched in the area there. My Dad was moving around, working at different ranches, so my childhood was spent on a little ranchero. The one that I remember was in Florence. We were out West of the San Pedro River, and were over by Oracle 4 Junction. That was the main one. My Grandfather, Miguel Ruiz, he had a ranch in that area, called Black Hills, and my Grandmother had a ranch that she inherited from her Dad. He was called Strechner. He had five daughters, and he had a section of land for each one of them, so that little ranch was scattered all over the area there. My Great-Grandfather Charles Strechner, was a rancher, and one day he come along, and he found some guys rustling his cows. He didn’t have a gun, so he confronted him and said, “I’ll go get my gun.” He left to go home to get his gun, and they shot him in the back. He made it home, got his gun, but they wouldn’t let him go back. They took him to Wakeman, which was up there along the San Pedro River, but he died along the way. He didn’t make it back. So my Grandmother kept the ranch, and my Grandfather kept the ranch, and they ran there for a while. They leased property in Florence, and my grandparents were the first people to raise cotton in Arizona way back when. They also had leased ground on the San Pedro River, which was East of where the ranch was, and they had brothers and sisters that lived adjacent to them. They would have wild animals go by, and they had to, hide and be prepared for the worst. LR: Okay. Where exactly did you move around with your dad, or did you live with your grandparents? JR: We lived together as a family, and we moved. The last ranch that we lived was a place called Little Springs, it was just North of Oracle, then when I was in high school we moved to a farm in Florence, and he worked there for a few years. I went to grade school in Oracle, and graduated from Oracle, and moved when I was a Freshman to Florence, and went to high school in Florence till my senior 5 year. My senior year my parents divorced, so my Mom, with all the children, went to Hayden, Arizona. We lived next door to my Mom’s parents, and I played football there. I didn’t think about anything but football. I did track in 1969, I set the high school track record that is still there, in high hurdles. All this time when I was living in Little Springs, I would work with my Dad, a lot of the time for a dollar or two a day. That’s where we grew up, mostly. I played in the haystacks, milked cows, roped and rode the calves and got bucked off, got stung by a bee, and killed snakes. We just got into everything. LR: When did you start riding horses and competing competitively. JR: We started riding horses at an early age. I have pictures of when I was three years old riding horses, but we didn’t start competing until I was in high school. We moved to Florence, I was like sixteen, and I helped on a ranch. The man we worked for was named Bill Fellers, and he had a couple of sons. One of the older ones was my age, and they would team rope. So we tagged along, and team roped with them. One year, I won the Florence team roping with my Dad when I was fifteen. When I went up to college at Central Arizona Junior College, we kind of separated and split from them. Then when I went to my buddy Sam’s, the son of Bill Fellers, he kept roping. We got together and we started roping. We were roping every night. We went to Flagstaff for the college rodeo, and I got in the team roping with Sam and another guy by the name of Arthur Clarke. The Clarke’s lived on the Saint Jude River and they did a lot of roping. Sam and I roped and we didn’t have good luck, but Arthur Clarke and I, we won the team tying. Back then it was team tying. The header would rope the steer, and the 6 heeler roped the heels, and then the header would get off his horse, run down, and tie a square knot around the steers legs. We won that one there. That was when I started competing. My brothers and sisters weren’t competitive. LR: I’m looking at the history that I have that was sent with the packet, and it said that you ended up moving to Utah with Sam? JR: Right. When I graduated from the junior college down there I didn’t have any plans. Well I did, I had plans of going to Australia with a friend, so we saved up some money, and he got cold feet and didn’t want to go, so we didn’t go. About that time, Sam and I got to running around, and his Mom sold their farm in Florence and was moving to Utah. When they moved to Utah, she was looking for a business, so she bought a place in the mountains called Mirror Lake Lodge. We were supposed to go there to work, so we went there and started cleaning it out for a while, but then kind of things went south, so I kind of hung out with them for a while. Then I went to school at BYU for a couple of years, and, just before I went on my LDS mission I met Noel Skinner, and traded horses with him for a while. When I came back, I drove with him for two years. I got married, and then I worked for him for several years there. That’s when he started competing in the reining. Carrie, at the time, did a little jackpot roping, with my brother-in-law Mark. She would barrel race, and won a couple of jackpots barrel racing at the time, so we did a little rodeo for a time together. LR: I’d love to hear the story of how you met your wife, from your point of view. JR: I’d seen her before at the barn, she’d always train down at the barn at the Draper Arena. I was working there and I saw her, and I was roping calves, but I didn’t 7 have a horse, so I was roping on foot, pulling them over backwards. Then her Dad would watch me, so he went and told the family about this guy roping calves on foot. He was pretty impressed, so she come over there, and she wasn't impressed. But I saw her and she was a cute girl, and then at this show in Spanish Fork, I literally bumped into her, and we started hanging out and talking. I liked her, asked her where she lived, and for her phone number, and I called her up. We went to the drive-in. I was going on my mission, but, I just liked her a lot. I dropped by and visited her one day at her house, and she wasn’t home, only her Mom was. She was sluffing school and came home early, and we visited again there. LR: Out of curiosity, where did you go on your LDS mission? JR: I went on the Mexico City mission. At that time it was Mexico City, Guadalajara, Acapulco, a lot of things. It was a bigger area than it is now. Now I think there’s eight missions, but at that time it was a much bigger area. Of course I spoke Spanish, so that wasn’t a problem. LR: Right. So when you come back, you quickly get married, and begin your married life together. One thing I’m curious about, you’ve mentioned reining, will you talk about that for a little bit? JR: Reining is a competitive sport, it’s called the figure skating of horses. You have prescribed patterns that you run, and it includes transitions from high speed to slow speed, sliding stops, 360 degree spins, and flying lead changes. The horse has to be able to listen to the rider to the point where we can direct him completely. So the reins, at the time, we would go to the quarter horse shows 8 and show them there, and I didn’t show very much until probably the early 80s. I was riding for Noel when I was working for him and then I went on my own and I rode on my own. I was riding horses for Carrie’s dad a lot, he would buy and trade horses a lot, so I’d ride horses for him. Ed Giles would send me some colts to ride, he was a local race trainer, rode a lot of colts for him. That’s when we started showing them at quarter horse shows in reining, basically. We had registered APHA reining horses. We showed across Utah with our horses and we showed them across the intermountain area. We went to California, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Oklahoma. We’ve been to Oklahoma several times, and in the process we showed them. Several horses are several world champions, and the reining, and the cow horse. In the APHA you have to qualify horses for the real show, and then at the world, then you compete. The paint world show, we showed paints as well in reining, you didn’t have to qualify, you just entered. So in 1994, we went to the paint world show in what was called “Hitman”. He belonged to my neighbor, and she would come over and ride the horse on our property, and I said, “I sure like your horse, I’d like to make a reiner out of him.” So we made a deal. I started riding him as a three year old, but I told them he’s not going to be ready to go to the world show as a four year old. We stayed on him for about a year, and then we took him to the world show as a five year old. We showed him as a working cow horse, showed him in the reining, and showed him in the freestyle. The first class that we showed him was the working cow horse, we tied for first. The way they separated at the time, there was a judge designated as the tiebreaker judge, 9 and we were reserved. The next day, we showed in the APHA Senior Class, and they have five judges, and we were first under four judges and second under one judge. That same night, we showed him in freestyle reining, and we showed Hitman to this thing called classical gap, and we were reserved world champions in that freestyle reining. So we had a really great show that week. LR: So I understand the reining, it’s more about the training of the horse than it is the rider, is that right? JR: Yes, the horse was trained to the highest competitive degree, and at about that time, some of us got together, like Dale Davis, and every little break we got together and started working on reining, reviving the Intermountain Rein Horse Association that had flourished and died off. We tried to get it going, and we’d put on training, or it clinics at the South Jordan racetrack and my father-in-law was manager there, so he would let us use it, and we put on clinics there in the evenings, and educated people. Then we had our Association, we started having little reining jackpots, and then I went to the NRHA chain and applied to be a judge, and have been a judge ever since. The NRHA said, “you have take a test,” there is a test to be allowed to judge their events. I have judged two regional shows. The NRHA chser and NRBC, those are the shows I’ve judged at, and I’ve also judged in Canada several times and Mexico and several in the United States. I have never been overseas judging, but I’ve judged in the Midwest and back East I think once. In the Southwest, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and then Dakotas. A little bit back east, but not much, mostly out here in the Rockies. 10 LR: Okay. And what does the NRHA JR: That’s the national reining horse association. I don’t know what year they started, or had their first, I think it was 1966. Their goal now, it’s a big deal now. The latest show I judged was like five years ago, the National Reining Breeders Class which was held in Sadie, Texas. These shows are like a weeklong. We started the Intermountain Reining Association locally, we went out a little, did a little jackpot racing that lasts maybe two or three hours, and we asked for volunteer judges from people that were in the area. Then we started adding different events and got longer, and we started having events for maturity, jackpot classes for different events, and then we added the derby, which is by the horses ages. We had year-end awards, and then it grew, and we had regional shows here, and people from more associations would qualify for the next rein horse show. The regional finals were moved around in Colorado, we had them here a couple of years, and then those people qualified for Oklahoma City maturity, and it’s still that program. But it started from a little two hour thing, and now the Intermountain Reining Horse Association has grown into three or four days. Last year it was five, this year I think was four. But they have like four days of shows, nothing but reining horses. LR: That’s crazy. So you helped establish that? JR: Right. LR: That’s just amazing. Going back just a little bit, when you were first married where did you guys live? 11 JR: When we first married, we were living in Spanish Fork. Robert Redford bought a barn down there on the Spanish Fork River, and the Skinners were working there, and I went to work for him. I worked for him for a while, and then I went to work for the Utah Fire and Light Company, because I needed more money. I had a wife, and once you get a wife you need more money. So I went to work at the Fire Company in American Fork, but we lived in Lehi, we bought a little house trailer and we lived in Lehi. That’s when we did those jackpots on weekends, with my brother-in-law. So we lived in Lehi for about a year, and then this house, her grandad’s house, it went up for sale, and her Dad bought it, so we turned around and bought it from him. We lived in this forever. Her Dad was born and raised in this house, she was born here, and they moved next door. I think she was like a year old. So she’s been here all her life, hasn’t been anywhere! CR: That’s true. LR: Except for when you would travel. So Carrie, were you working at the time when you were first married? CR: I worked before I got married, and I had the option to commute, but it would have been an hour each way with the drive, and I wasn’t making that much money. So when we moved to Spanish Fork, when we were working for Robert Redford, I wasn’t working. It was really fun though, because we’d get up at five o’clock in the morning and we’d go out in the barn, and he had some of my Dad’s horses, and we’d go ride our own horses. He taught me how to rope, and we had a great time. Then, later in the day, 8 o’clock, something like that, he started his job there. It was an awesome place to live, except when the wind blew through the 12 canyon. We were living in a mobile home so that was kind of scary some mornings when the wind would be pretty strong. But it was beautiful. LR: Okay. You mentioned after Spanish Fork you moved to Lehi. How long did you guys work for Robert Redford? JR: We got married in December, we were there probably about six months. LR: So not too long. JR: Right, I needed more money, so I had a friend that worked for the power company, and they called me and asked if I could go work there. I asked the Robert Redford people for more money and they couldn’t come up with more money, and I was like the third guy on the totem pole, so I didn’t try to push there because of the guys ahead of me and so I said I’ll go. LR: Okay. There’s a few names that I keep seeing here, and Noel Skinner is one of them. How long did you work with him? JR: Before I went on my mission I was working for him for about thirty five days. Back from my mission. I went to work for him again and we worked for him for a while, yeah. CR: Yeah, you worked for him when you came back. JR: Yeah, I worked for him for about six months at Spanish Fork. We moved up here, and I worked for the power company, but then I just wasn’t cautious enough at the power company. I was afraid I would kill somebody or myself, so I quit there, and I just started training horses. I rode horses and trained for half a day, then I came home and rode horses the rest of the day at home. I had two places I rode horses- there at Draper for Noel, and then I came home and rode them here. 13 Ross Parker would get me horses, he was the center of influence and got me a lot of horses. He was the manager of the racetrack, knew a lot of people who had colts and he’d send them over. LR: So Ross Parker, that’s Carries Dad? JR: Yeah, her Dad. LR: Okay, so I just made that connection, was it weird or hard working for her Dad? JR: No, I wasn’t working for him only, I mean he would get me business, and we’d live on his property here, because the property we lived on had our horses. It was all his property. We could have gone to a different barn, but he didn’t want us to make the payments to board there, so we’d put them in the barn here, and he just kept horses for us to ride. He held horses for a lot of people that he knew. Carrie was instrumental in keeping it going, because she kept the relationship with him going pretty good, so it worked out great. LR: Okay. It also mentions that you started making bits and spurs that, and then ended up kind of developing your own bit. JR: Right. I worked for a manufacturer in Salt Lake, a small company called Unero, and we had sporadic work. So they had a lot of down time just to sit around in the shop and wait for something to happen. So we’d go get the welder, and I would put together some bits. Skinner was pretty influential in selling a lot of them, because he’d say “could you make a bit for that,” and I’d make his stuff, and he liked it and would personally sell it to his clients. So I would make a bunch of business for him and take them down there and he’d sell them. Afterwards I still 14 kept making bits here, and I had people from that clientele, his customers, and then we advertised also in the Intermountain… CR: The Horseman’s paper magazines that were in the area, but they’re no longer around now. JR: So we’d get some traffic from that, some business, and then, afterwards I started looking at bits. I designed a bit that I liked real well for transitioning; a transition bit from a snapping bit to a solid bit on colts, it’s a lot less stressful for them. I sold quite a few of those, one lady up in Ogden liked them cause she was running bare horses. She sold a bunch of them for me up there. One of the bits that I made and modified from a dog bone mouthpiece, and I made it heavier, and she loved it. So she moved to Oregon, and she started training her horses over there, and she’d let her customers use them, so now she’s a pretty regular customer. LR: That’s just really cool. It sounds like that’s where you have made most of your business, around your manufacturing of these bits. JR: Well, most of it’s training. At one time, we had sixty horses here that we was training, and the bits were, kind of like a little trickle. It’s kind of like a little stream coming in, but my business, my true business was from riding horses. At one time, Carrie would ride ten horses, my son Dustin would ride ten horses, and I would ride twenty-five horses a day. LR: That’s a lot of riding! CR: We had one client that still has horses in training with us that we show, and we’ve had their horses for over thirty years. So we’ve been pretty fortunate. 15 LR: Somehow that doesn’t really come through on the file that we got, that your training, is truly what you do. It sounds like that’s really what you loved to do, the training and the riding. JR: Yes, so we trained horses, and we showed them. We’ve kept reining mules, we’ve had reserve world champion working cow horses, world champion reining horses in the H2HA, the NRA, the APC, and the AMA. We’re not just punky little showers, we’ve showed at the national levels and won there. CR: So we’ve shown quarter horses, paints, appaloosas and Arabians. We had the saddle bred horses for Blake Petersen, he was quite a famous Utah opera singer. That was fun, because he would give us free opera tickets. Joe wasn’t all that crazy about the free tickets but I thought it was cool to go to the opera. It’s been fun, because we were able to raise our sons and teach them how to work. They’re not really involved with horses, because it was more work than fun for them, but they do have good memories. We would take them with us to all the horse shows, and they would meet new friends. Luckily they were all boys and they were in the teens so they could have fun at the horse show. LR: Right. It’s amazing how boys are like that. So, were you able to involve your kids in the business? I know you said they didn’t like to ride, but… JR: Well, it was work, they would clean stalls, they would get water, they would help us fix stuff out at the barn. They were reliable, we’d go to town and they’d be at home and we knew it was going to be okay, because they cared if they were in charge. We had some hired help, but they don’t have the same feel your family does for the business, so they would drop the ball. 16 CR: Our two oldest sons wrestled, they actually wrestled at Olympic levels, and our youngest son plays professional basketball. Our wrestling sons, they convinced their friends to come and help clean stalls. That’s when we had all those horses, because they told them that’s how they got to be State champions. So we had a pretty good stall crew for several years. JR: Several of the kids went on to be state champions. LR: Wow, that’s awesome. CR: I think they learned a lot about competing from traveling with us. We would listen to motivational tapes, and we tried to learn different things about competing, that we hadn’t really been taught. We tried to improve upon that, and I think they had the work ethic. I know one thing, all their coaches were amazed with their work ethic, and they were coachable. I think a lot of that came from them being involved in our business. LR: Right. Which makes absolute sense. The any other stories you guys can think of that you’d like to share? JR: Oh yeah. We had, you know the thing with Handy Andy. So they had, the county fair up in Davis County fairgrounds, and they had reining. At the time it just said reining, it didn’t say reining horses. We said, “okay, we’ll put our mule in.” There’s like twenty-two horses in there, and we show up with this mule. He was this big stomper, he maneuvered great and, he was well broke. We showed up there, and we won the reining, and the next year they said no mules allowed. CR: Only horses. LR: I guess they didn’t like losing to a mule. 17 JR: Yep, yep. LR: That’s, really funny, any others? JR: Yeah. One year, we took two non-pro riders to the H2HA world show. John Tillman had qualified in working cow horse, and he was actually tied for first, and they had a run off. At the run off, his horse kind of froze up on the fence, and he would have taken second, so he was the reserve world champion in working cow horse. He was out from the Vernal area, and he had only been riding for like six months, he didn’t really have much before he got qualified, so he did his best. It was great. CR: We had a great time hauling youth with us too, and had good experiences with helping other kids with their competing. We had a good time with them. We had lots of good times with clients over the years, and lasting friendships. I know that three letters of recommendation that were sent in was very humbling. We only had the one that we read, but, we had a great time with all those people for several years. One lady, Carmel Clay, Joe gave her daughter lessons and helped her from the time she was eight or nine, until she was, in her twenties, and Carmel was really thankful. So we had lots of great friendships, lots of other trainers and people that we are excited to see at shows. We still go to now, but when we got to the shows, we look around, and I think we’re probably some of the oldest people there! LR: I have a question about the training. Do you train one horse at a time, or, is it multiple horses at the same time? 18 JR: Well, the training actually is one on one. Through the years I’ve found a way to save time. I will sometimes take a colt, and I have a unique way of exercising the other horse when I’m not on him. What I do I call chasing one horse with another horse. I’ll have a lead rope on him, and I’ll actually chase the horse in circles and get both of them warmed up. When I get them warmed up for ten minutes or so, I’ll tie the one up and go work on the other one, do maneuvers for that day, and then go on the other horse and work on his maneuvers for the day. So I save about ten minutes or so doing that, in the course of those two horses working. CR: But it’s a unique thing that he does. Most people will do what’s called coning their horses, where, the other horse will follow behind you. The other horse is in front of him, and it’s pretty amazing to watch. If I can get a video of it I’ll send it to you. LR: Okay, that’d be great. I’d love to see that. So, how long does it take, on average, to train a horse for a reining competition? JR: For the reining, you’re looking at about a year, but to get them where they’re ready to be showed, basically that takes another six months. You’re looking about a year to get a good solid reining horse. The rodeo horses, they have just a short job, to do, and it’s just one job, chase something, stop, and your done. The reining horse has to look at you, not be distracted, and pay attention to all your signals and do the maneuvers on you. He can’t memorize it. The barrel racing horses have a pattern memorized, bulldogging, memorized. Roping, run out there, rope the calf, back up, memorized. It’s pretty much the same thing over and over. The reining horse has to have twelve rein patterns, each one is different, and then each pre-show has different patterns. So it’s not like you can 19 go practice the one and have them work the pattern. They have to listen to you and listen to your signals and be guided to your signals. LR: That is just amazing. Okay, are you training the horses for other riders? JR: Yes, we get customers that will leave their horses with us and we’ll use them for breeding stock or something, or customers that tell us that they want to show themselves. So, I’ll show the horses myself, or have the clients show. We had this little girl named Brenda, I can’t remember her last name now, but she had a little mare that she was riding, and she, got qualified for the world show. She went there when she was like twenty-one and she didn’t do very well at the world show, but she had a nice run. She said that I can do it next year and show the mare at the world show. We showed her and we won a bronze trophy on her for our customer. We showed her in Denver, we won the novice award up on her. She was not a reining bred horse, she was more of a what would be called a pleasure or riding horse, so she was kind of a little freak. We took another little mare named Early Arrival two, and she was actually a racehorse breeding, and they bought her at an auction and brought her to me. I said, “oh, no way.” So we brought that colt, and they wanted me to train her to halter, but she wasn’t a halter horse. We’d put her in the arena and she’d run around and she’d slide, like she’d come around and come again and slide, ride into your face. She was just a little bitty thing, but she had a lot of heart, a lot of personality, and we showed her like thirty nine times, and we was second three times on her. The rest of the times she won. 20 LR: Okay, that’s really cool. I’m, trying really hard to understand the whole thing. Are you there with the horse when it’s competing, or is there someone else doing that? JR: So, these are horses that we compete on. We haul them, we take care of them, and we show them at the fairgrounds. We were at Rock Springs, and we had two horses to show in one day, and so we prepared them an hour or so before. The next day we had two horses that we showed and we competed on them. LR: Okay. So can I ask an unfair question? Is there a horse that you loved more than the others, or that you had the most fun working with? JR: Yeah, there’s been a couple. Carrie always liked studs. CR: I don’t know why, but I did. JR: Of course, they were nice-mannered horses, but probably the two that were my favorite were a horse called Early Arrival two, she was a little mare, and then a horse called G.R. Kip Crystal Holt. We called Ollie, we got up and started riding him, and the first part of his year as a three-year-old, we were getting ready for the maturities, and we competed on him at the maturities, and after that they wanted to keep showing him. So we showed him on halter, we showed him in the rein, the working cow horse, we roped head and heel, the speedy events, barrels, and we got a performance champion, which is not that common anymore. Basically, what they used to do was they raced and got so many points, and then they’d give a handful of points in the performance arena. This horse was strictly all performance. He never raced, we showed him in the reins. Really 21 talented horse. Early Arrival mare, she was like the cutest, I didn’t use spurs with her, she was so responsive I never had to use spurs on her. One day I was on her with a pair of spurs, and I tapped her, and man oh man I got overreacted, because she’d never been spurred, and it surprised her and she startled me. I showed her, I trained on her bare heels, she was just responsive. We would have judges, at the end of the show, tell me that they had marked her seventy-five, I marked her seventy-four, which is pretty high, average being seventy. LR: Okay. That’s just cool. I feel like I’m learning so much about reining and training. We’ve been doing this for about an hour, so what I’d like to do is, unless you have any other stories that you’d like to share. I’d like to finish with a final question. You’re both welcome to answer it, if you’d like, but the question is, what do you hope that your legacy is? JR: Well, I do a lot of horse reining because it’s mechanic. The horses work mechanically, and I like to think that I change my approach for every, horse, whatever they need the most. We had a horse one time, he came here, and his name was Cowboy Vincky. He had been with another trainer, and they would ride him for two or three hours to prepare to train on him. He was just so hyperactive, a lot of go, go, go. So I knew that was what they were doing, but when I got him, I said, ‘No I’m not going to ride him for two hours.” I would just ride him for ten minutes, get off and leave him tied up, work on another horse, come back, ride him for ten minutes, ride another horse, and ride him for ten minutes. That was his day. So he had about thirty minutes of training on him, but it was done over the course of maybe five or six hours. We had to change our 22 approach for him because of that. I would think that we’re willing to change our approach, not mechanical, it’s not the same with every horse. There are people that do the same thing, it’s all a box, square boxes, or triangle box, really just the same thing over and over again. We changed, and we had that mule, and we had to do different things on him. He was seventeen hands high, really tall for a horse, probably close to eighty inches tall. He just wasn’t figuring out how to do the spins, so then one day, rather than trying to turn around, he just fell down. I get up on him, and I chastise him, and after that day, he learned how to do it, he’d spin around just perfectly every time. So you gotta be willing to find something that you need for each unique horse. JR: That’s what I like to say, I always think that the people bringing us horses, they know that we treat the horse on an individual basis, they’re not just going into a mol. CR: One thing also, Joe’s very unconventional. He’s always doing things out of the box, and people that bring him horses to train know that he’s going to be the one that’s doing the training. Other trainers have a system, and a lot of those horses never even get rode by the trainers, and so he tried to make it so that we feel like we’re doing a fair job for what we’re being paid to do. The legacy I would like to leave is to feel like we have made a difference in the horse industry, as far as the industry itself, but mostly to have a positive influence on other people. As far as helping them to know that they can achieve, helping them to work through problems, to feel good about themselves and their horses. To be able to, have a 23 positive influence on people’s lives. It’s been fun to see the reining horse association grow so much, and to have a part in that. LR: Yeah, I can imagine. Alright. Well, thank you guys so much for your time, I know you’re super busy, so I appreciate the fact that you took some time out to sit and talk with me today. 24