An Unusually Silent Anvil: Ron Dyer ("The Horseshoer")

 I learned tonight, completely by accident while researching something on the web, that Ron Dyer the Horseshoer (as he called himself) died on April 23, just shy of his 84th birthday. I don't have much information, perhaps other people have already announced his passing, but I had no idea.

When I knocked on the door of the farrier profession, I immediately noticed that people tended to cluster around certain individuals. Were they hoping to pick up some sage advice? Not really, they were more likely souvenir story collectors. These people stood close enough to listen, memorize and then go home and re-tell the best stories, again and again, until the stories became legends. And the people who originated those stories along with them

Ron Dyer The Horseshoer 1927-2011

Ron Dyer, a.k.a. Ron Dyer The Horseshoer was one of those people whose stories were and still are re-told.  Here was someone who'd been there, done that and definitely had an opinion about it that he didn't mind sharing. People were a little timid around him; some might use the word "gruff" to describe him, but I also saw him be generous and kind and help people.

Ron was a horseshoer, all right. According to his obituary, he worked for the Budweiser Clydesdales, he worked on the midwestern harness racetracks of the Grand Circuit, he traveled with the circus, he was part of The Great Milwaukee Circus Parade...he did it all.

To hear him talk, he might have been around to shoe Dan Patch or Man 'o War. He pulled history out of the past and made it sound like he'd been there. I never could tell if he was giving me a history lesson or telling me about something he'd seen with his own eyes.

Case in point: The Galesburg, Illinois horse sale barns were one of the biggest horse yards in America in the early 20th century. It was right there in Ron Dyer's hometown that the French military, and then the British, came to buy artillery horses and mules for the First World War. Thousands of them. Reading the history of the sale barn tonight in Ron's honor, I realized it closed seven years before Ron was born. But he told stories about it as if he'd be there.

"By 1910, (the Galesburg Horse Sale) was receiving 25 carloads of horses a week and the same number of 25 cars would be shipped out—making a total carload business for the two railroads of 50 cars per week.  The sale employed 25 regular men. and always had 40 to 50 extra men for Friday and Saturday. Five hundred horses per week consumed about all the hay and straw raised in the adjacent counties. Five hundred horses per week  had to have 500 new halters. Each horse had to have two shoes on his front feet, which made a total of 1,000 horse shoes per week. From 7 to 10 blacksmiths were busy the week around making the shoes." (From Galesburg's Mighty Horse Market by Cornelia Thompson and Fred Dunbar)

I found a story about Ron Dyer in the archives of the Chicago Tribune. It included this gem: Once--possibly many more times than just  this once--Ron Dyer was judging a horseshoeing competition. The anxious competitors awaited their precise instructions of what the esteemed judge would be looking for in their work. Ron told them simply, "I want to see a commercial job; something you can charge for." End of subject. 

Farrier Henry Heymering, the visionary founder of the American Farriers Journal and my colleague in our early years of publishing that magazine, offered a few memories of Ron, who was also an author of articles in that magazine in its early days. Thanks, Henry:

• Ron left quite an impression on me. Florida formed a farrier's association and started a certification test before the AFA. When Ron took the Florida test he made four shoes and shod the horse with them in about 40 minutes, and did a damn nice job!
• Ron said the Illinois association was started after a shoer had a heart attack. Two farriers worked in the same barn, but they (as was the custom then) worked at opposite ends of the barn and wouldn't talk to each other. One day one of the farriers collapsed under a horse. The other farrier went up to the owner to tell him there was a problem.
• When Florida started having contests, Ron was so good he won most everything. Other farriers before signing up would ask if Ron was going to be there and if he was, they would't compete. Ron got wind of this and stopped competing. He would only judge and/or demonstrate, and help the others improve.
• Ron was too young for the French remounts, but I bet his father and grandfather worked on them. I believe Ron was a 4th generation farrier.

Probably Ron Dyer never wrote down any of his stories, and probably no one ever tape-recorded them for him, either. Like so much of the history of the horseshoeing profession, it's just going away with him. Horseshoers wear their stories well. Maybe if he'd written his life down, no one would have believed it anyway.

Except those of us who knew Ron Dyer The Horseshoer.

To learn more: Ron Dyer's obituary in the Galesburg Planet

and

Funeral home page and guest book for Ron Dyer

If you have a favorite memory of Ron Dyer, click the comments button below and share it with the rest of us or email it to blog@hoofcare.com and I will post it for you.

 © Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.  
 

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Vampires for Elephants: Robert Pattinson's Laminitis Experience in Film?

His most famous role was as a teenage vampire and now Hollywood's made Robert Pattinson into a Cornell vet student with a foundered horse to fix. Publicity photo from the Water for Elephants film.

 The horse world is due to get a shot in the arm--if not a bite in the neck--as production continues in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee on the film adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. The star of the movie is Twilight vampire heart throb Robert Pattinson, and this photo is from the movie's blog. Notice he is leading what appears to be either a Friesian or a Percheron from a circus train car.

Hollywood's Reese Witherspoon plays the role of the circus equestrian star and has an Oscar-worthy wardrobe. The horse and elephant scenes were shot in California; the train scenes are in production now in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This photo from California is from a series published in the Daily Mail from Great Britain.

Any film that is heavy on horses is good for all of us; it's good for horse sales, horse lessons, and our horse industry futures, especially when it stars the hottest celebrity in Hollywood. But this one makes me especially curious. It's a great story: Jacob, a vet student at Cornell during the Depression, succumbs to stress and suddenly walks out just before finals and wanders off into the night. On impulse, he hops a passing freight train. What he doesn't know is that it's no ordinary freight train, but a down-and-out circus train. He throws in his lot with the midgets and the clowns and the roustabouts but most of all with the draft horses ("baggage stock" in circus language), the Arabians and one special elephant when he is hired as the caretaker for the menagerie because of skills he claimed he learned in vet school.

One of the first challenges the management throws at him to earn his keep is a horse with laminitis. Can he fix him? In the book, the description of the horse's hoof looks and how the horse stands and what Jacob does to try to help it is very well done. Will laminitis make the silver screen or will it fall to the cutting room floor? Or did it make the script at all? Can they train a horse to act like it is foundered? Even a minute of laminitis awareness in a film like this would be great for public awareness of the disease. And yes, there are farriers in the book, too.

For those of you who haven't read the book: do it. Better yet, get to your library or local independently-owned bookstore and borrow or buy the cd-rom version and listen to the book, as it is very well read. You'll find yourself sitting in your driveway listening to just a little more...

Someone on YouTube.com made a slide show of old circus images to go with the soundtrack of the prologue from the cd-rom. I hope it hooks you, although this is just the first few pages of the book--the rest of it explains how Jacob got to that point of circus mayhem. And what happened next. What you're hearing is Jacob at age 90--or is it 93? he's not sure--in a nursing home, finally telling what happened that day. He'd kept someone's terrible secret for 70 years.

Water for Elephants, the film, is scheduled to be released on April 15, 2011.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

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The Circus Farrier

Check out this detail from an old photo for sale on eBay this week. It's from a collection of photos of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The credit is given to a photographer in Chicago.

The entire image includes a performer perched on the horse's back while he's being trimmed!