Varianbook proof

by MARY KIRKMAN

Dedicated to those who not only dream, but now succeed ... because of Sheila Varian. And to the horses we wouldn’t have without her.

2 | Sheila Varian

It is tempting to believe that this story of Sheila Varian is being written because of her contributions to the Arabian horse industry, and there is plenty of evidence to support that she would deserve the attention. But a study of her life suggests that her significance reaches out to a wider audience: she was an ordinary person with an ordinary dream. She didn’t aspire to curing cancer, negotiating world peace or becoming a multi-millionaire. She just wanted to breed good horses, and she was willing to devote her life to it. What is impressive—inspiring for anyone—is that she made her dream come true, and as it matured, it turned golden. It benefited her, brought joy to others, and now, even after her death, it will go forward. The trick about studying a person’s life in order to better understand who they were is that you do it because you already know they were successful. But the real value is that when a story like this begins, whoever is living the life has no guarantee that they won’t be a crashing failure. That’s where courage and sheer blind faith come in, and that is what stirs the observer, because the lesson is that while big achievements aren’t easy, they are possible for those who care enough to try. That rates admiration. There were some turning points in Varian’s life that could have rewritten her proud history into one of forgettable mediocrity, but she went on single-mindedly, through the highs and lows, tasting the fear of defeat so many times when people around her didn’t realize that she had knots in her stomach. That was the price she paid for triumph—and the triumph, when it was carved in stone and she could hardly keep up with all the accolades that recognized it, was sweet. “She was human, just like any of us,” observes Sheila’s friend Kristin Reynolds. “What I think created the really amazing horses that she was breeding was her uniqueness. She put everything into those horses. Her sensitivity, her thoughtfulness, her sharing, everything that she reserved for mankind—she put into those horses. It was where she put her genius.”

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As of March 1, 2016, Sheila Varian was the breeder of nearly 1,300 registered Arabians and Half-Arabians, estimated to influence more than 70 percent of pedigrees today.

Sheila stories ... there is NO WAY only one!

s on rides that amazed me, There were so many times Sheila would do thing bled me. She rode with such hum all, above and intimidated me, educated me, ition of it actually. a quiet confidence, the original “Yahoo!” The defin but after many fun rides and Like everyone, I was in awe of her at the beginning,rable she was. An icon no doubt, vulne and soft how shoots together, I realized just ience great friendships! but Sheila was also just a girl who wanted to exper s reached to earn it! away I and ... it d earne She gave respect to those who ed to me when I told her my Sheila let me make art with her stallions, she listen“current” mattered to her, I loved crazy ideas and she asked for my opinions. Beingwas a buddy and a mother at the that about her! As I write this, I ache inside; sheof my life. same time, she enriched and altered the course a different flavor without her. My world, and the Arabian world, will forever beI miss her every day. it. in her g havin But both are rich and full from Photographer and friend, ~ April Visel

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SHEILA VARIAN Winner of U.S. and Canadian National championships in English, hunter, park, stock, western and halter Member of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame (A personal favorite, given her background.)

Arabian Horse Trust Breeder of the Year four times Arabian Professional & Amateur Horsemen’s Association Breeder of the Year four times Arabian Horse Breeders Association Lifetime Breeders Award Ellen Scripps Davis Memorial Award for breeding excellence, presented by the U.S. Equestrian Federation, addressing all breeds and disciplines USEF/Performance Horse Registry Leading Breeder Award Chosen by her peers as AHT Readers’ Choice Breeder of the Year three times Leading breeder at the U.S. Nationals and Scottsdale on numerous occasions Member of the APAHA Hall of Fame Arabian Horse Breeders Association Lifetime Ambassador Award Monty Roberts Equitarian Award for trainers in the western discipline who choose to train in the absence of pain and violence

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Our Horse Judy Well Dadd y and Joa n thought room on th they had a at big broa horse too, d b but there w a c k and left la for three o as never st. Lying f us and I always go with legs middle of c t r o th s sed over Ju ere first her back, dy’s withe open book lived the W r s o , n c h h in er rump s in the alter Farle waying a y Black S s into the bo s h e g ta r ll a zed I ion stories x canyon as “The Bla on the sec Throbreds r c e k t ” Is e land or ra scaped . I snoozed ced to victo or played comfortab r y o a u g t a c inst the hildhood f le back an antasies o d grew up I was 12 y n . Ju N d o y t ’s allowed to ears old w ride with a as fine wit anyway. s h a d m d e le . I couldn until Not into s ’t get a sa hoes, it wa above Judy d d le s a o n n Judy atural to s ’s knee, g tick my to rab her m up to her w e a n in e th a n e notch d shinny ithers, slid up her leg e down on feather in , c la to m h b e r back, sti er on to my hair ck the ever and our s present ilent adve ntures wo uld begin .

The words of Sheila Varian

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“Sheila had one foot in the old world, but it kept her solid,” notes Varian friend Kristin Reynolds. “She had Halcyon.” Sheila would have said the same thing. Any story about her begins on the central coast of California, in another place and time, and includes a family that was frankly incandescent as a foundation for a young girl growing up. Like many of her generation, she would observe cataclysmic change in her world over the years and learn to adjust and grow with it. But it is worthwhile to look at where she began, because the principles she learned there would govern her life. Nineteen-thirty-seven came late in the Great Depression, when the United States had just gone through the worst economic downturn in its history. The year opened with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration for his second term; the country had recovered to its pre-Crash financial levels, so controls were lifted—prematurely, it turned out, as the recovery promptly faltered. It would be 1938, with regulations reinstated, before the situation improved, so the overall feeling at the time was uncertain. The average salary then was almost $1,800 a year, which would be about $30,000 in 2016 dollars. Coffee ran 38 cents a pound (but no Starbucks or boutique brands), and a movie cost a quarter ($4.25 in today’s money). That was the average, though. Plenty of people managed to live on a lot less. Sheila’s family—her father Eric, mother, Wenonah, and sister Joan—probably fell below that line, but in Halcyon, where she grew up, bartering could fill in for money. At any rate, many people had gardens and Eric enjoyed hunting, so no one went hungry.

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In May, up the coast from where the Varian family lived, the Golden Gate Bridge opened, and in July, aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared. In September, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit hit bookstores on its first run, and in October, the New York Yankees won the World Series. It would be Lou Gehrig’s last Series at his best; within months ALS would begin to affect his abilities, but in that magical fall, he and young star Joe DiMaggio were hitting it out of the park. December ended with the premier of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature. And finally, for horse people, this was the year that California-based Seabiscuit captured the hearts of the public, on his way to defeating Triple Crown Champion War Admiral the following autumn.

learning—a characteristic that would be evident in Sheila Varian throughout her life—was strong in the town’s DNA, and residents were religiously tolerant. In fact, they were tolerant in general. The town’s name, which means “Place of Peace,” pretty much says it all. The Golden Rule, Sheila would later say, was an abiding tenet there. Halcyon was advanced in more ways than just its high ideals. The town also offered a fine library and a sanitarium that treated such problems as addiction, nervous disorders, and tuberculosis, all without regard to the patient’s ability to pay. Small, quiet and remote Halcyon may have been, but it was not unknown among the cognoscenti. The acclaimed photographer Ansel Adams became a family friend and stayed with the Varians when he traveled along the central coast.

Sheila was not the only well-known figure born in 1937. In fact, it was rather a stellar bunch, including such notables as Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell, and some of the most acclaimed actors in the world. Anthony Hopkins, Jane Fonda, Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson and Vanessa Redgrave all arrived in ’37, and Dustin Hoffman shared Sheila’s August 8 birthday.

“Some of the most interesting people in the world would come through there and are [sic] touched by the way it is,” Sheila said in a 1986 “Arabian Horse Times” interview. “It is just a little town that is caring and takes care of its own. But everyone is expected to make something, to be creative, to contribute.”

More than the climate of the times, however, her home and her family would shape her life. By 1937, Halcyon, California, a tiny utopian community, was more than three decades into its history. Located in the Arroyo Grande Valley about half an hour south of San Luis Obispo (at 1930s speed), it centered around the practice of theosophy, which Sheila described as a philosophy “combining the best of other religions.” It might be said that a devotion to

Except for one year of college in Missouri, Sheila never lived out of the area. Varian Ranch, her home for more than half a century, is less than four miles from the house where she grew up. “Halcyon allows you to live as you want to live,” she said in a 1995 AHT profile. “You may ruffle your feathers in any way you want. It’s a town that takes care of itself and its people.”

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The Varian home.

Sheila,Wenonah and friend.

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Eric, Joan and a friend.

1942: Sheila and her friend Mona Lee.

John Varian,gr andfather.

Not surprisingly, Sheila’s family played a large part in who she became—but probably in more ways than were evident in the early days when many Arabian owners became acquainted not only with her, but also with Eric and Wenonah Varian. Her “sire line,” the ones sporting the name, were an interesting crowd. The family, five strong, arrived in Halcyon around 1910. John and Agnes Varian, Sheila’s grandparents, had immigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1894 and lived in several locations, finally landing in California (Palo Alto at the time) for good just after the turn of the century. They had three sons; Russell was the oldest, born in 1898, followed by Sigurd in 1901, and Eric in 1904. John Varian earned a living as a masseuse, but had a more cerebral side: he was devoted to religion, music and the arts, served as a minister at the town’s Temple of the People, and established a reputation as a poet. His wife Agnes, the more pragmatic of the two, was the town’s postmistress. Their lifestyle was gregarious, warm and many times rather hand-tomouth; they were no strangers to poverty. But like most residents of Halcyon, they espoused social reform and responsibility, and rode out their varying fortunes with composure. Their home was always full of friends and relatives, and the children learned early on to be flexible.

The boys were extraordinarily close; Russell and Sigurd were known for their adventurous backyard scientific experiments, and Eric displayed natural mechanical ability. Even after they grew up and periodically left the area for school and work, they could be counted on to be there for one another (Agnes kept them up-to-date on everyone’s activities, exhorting them to write home often, “even if it’s only what the cat ate for dinner”). So, in the mid-1930s when Rus, a brainy physicist with a Stanford degree, and Sig, a Pan Am pilot in Mexico, returned to Halcyon to experiment on a new idea, Eric, who would become an electrical contractor but then was more a jack of all trades, was there to set up their shop and help them out. By that time, Agnes was terminally ill. She died in 1935, content that she had seen her sons’ future. Rus was going to invent something important and Sig would build it, and Eric was going to marry the nurse who was taking care of her, a young divorcee named Wenonah Wheeler Tallman. That all came true, with Eric and Wenonah the first step. They married that same year, and Eric became a father to Wenonah’s seven-year-old daughter, Joan. Two years later, on a Sunday in August, they welcomed their second girl, Sheila. As it turns out, right about that time, Rus and Sig had seen progress in their venture, but realizing that they needed more sophisticated facilities, were transferring to the physics laboratories at Stanford. So, as Sheila was moving in, they were moving out.

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Sheila, Judy and her dog Perky.

Fun with Sheila and Lou Roper.

Long story short, working at Stanford with colleague Bill Hansen, “the Varian boys” finally hit on what they were looking for—a type of vacuum tube called a klystron. By that time, World War II had begun in Europe, and Germany was menacing England in the air, bombing London and southern England, and at sea, sinking many of ships England relied on for supplies. Royal Air Force planes couldn’t carry enough gasoline to wait in the sky to intercept the Luftwaffe’s attacks, and there was no way to detect the U-boats in the shipping lanes. Until the klystron, which leveled the playing field. It facilitated radar, so that the German planes could be spotted miles out, and the English fighters could be airborne to meet them when they arrived. Within months, the Third Reich’s blitz was virtually over. And at sea, when the U-boats surfaced for their daily intake of oxygen, radar picked them up and the British military blazed into action. That was just the beginning of the klystron’s amazing contributions. A February 1941 Saturday Evening Post article described it this way: “Telephone engineers think that with [the klystron] they can shoot 600,000 conversations simultaneously through a six-inch cross-country pipe line and unscramble the talk at the other end as easily as you tune in your favorite radio program. Television engineers can do the same with pictures. Shot downward from an airliner, the klystron beam tells the pilot how far above the ground he is flying. Shot ahead, it warns him of hidden mountains in time to change his flight course.” As the years went on, the klystron also would contribute to radiation therapy, commercial air navigation, satellite communication and more.

Later, especially as Arabians in general became more expensive, there were whisperings that although Sheila’s farm was simple, she enjoyed some access to “the Varian fortune.” In fact, not only was she pretty self-sufficient, but also, when Rus died in 1959 and Sig in 1961, a substantial portion of their estates was left to philanthropic efforts. In any case, Sheila didn’t talk about it; those who were around her at the time could testify that she wasn’t receiving funding from the family or anyone else. If she had, they observed, certainly she would have enjoyed a higher standard of living and probably a more elaborate farm than she did. What was more important was her personal connection to her relatives. After the war, Rus and Sig returned to California and set up Varian Associates, one of the earliest residents of Silicon Valley, and in the summer of 1948, Sig’s son Jack was sent to Halcyon to live with her family while his parents were busy with the start up. He and Sheila became lifelong friends. One of her greatest pleasures, right down to the end, was gathering cattle with Jack and his family on their V6 Ranch in Parkfield, California. While Sheila Varian’s background was not “privileged” in the financial sense often associated with that word today, the truth is that she was very privileged to start life in a family of people who not only were intelligent and principled, but also knew hard work and—more importantly—how to pursue their dreams.

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Sheila called her childhood “idyllic,” but that didn’t mean it was perfect in the conventional sense. The security they shared had little to do with money or possessions. For example, their home was not insulated; its roof was just shingles, with no understructure. When it rained, the shingles swelled, and on sunny days, golden light seeped through chinks and imperfections. It wasn’t until years later, when she inherited the house, that a proper roof was installed. During her childhood, there was a furnace in the great room, but no heat in the bedrooms, and in the winter time, temperatures could drop to the low 40s. And during the holidays, they didn’t spend money on tinsel for the Christmas tree. They draped it in Spanish moss instead. More importantly, Sheila’s parents offered unquestionable love and support, as well as strict discipline. Conversation in their home challenged the mind, and she learned responsibility, honesty and fairness, all traits which would be mentioned throughout her life when associates described her. They were not, however, a very physical family when expressing their feelings; as her nephew, Bob Rowlands, recalls, there was little hugging and kissing. They had a more unique way of expressing their feelings, he says: they routinely wrote poems to each other, at Christmas time especially—not hard to imagine, given the Irish tradition of songs and story-telling that was strong in her grandparents’ generation.

long before her teenaged sister found other interests, and Judy really became Sheila’s. In the 1986 AHT profile, writer Marian Studer-Johnson (now Carpenter) observed that in Halcyon, “it was not unusual for neighbors to see [Sheila] going for nighttime walks with her horse, Judy, her cat, her dog and her duck—all walking along in the quiet darkness.” She doesn’t mention that at one time, a skunk was included in the menagerie, and that because it might one day want to return to the wild, the Varians didn’t have it de-scented. It made for rather careful living (“You didn’t want to piss it off,” Rowlands notes dryly), but apparently there were no accidents. Possessed with the idea of being a cowgirl, Sheila recalled taking to heart what some well-meaning friend had told her: to be a real cowgirl, she had to come off the horse at least three times, which she interpreted to mean as three times a day. So, dutifully, she began flinging herself off Judy. She didn’t get hurt, she said; the only inconvenience was that Judy, free of her rider, galloped off home. Things came to a head when Eric, out hunting one day, dismounted to fire his rifle, and Judy—as was by that time usual—departed for the barn. That pretty much ended her career in hunting. When her cousin Jack came to stay for the summer, he shared Sheila’s affinity for the outdoors. He was twelve or thirteen, she was turning eleven, and they roamed the countryside together. By then, as Jack recalls, she had two horses.

And there was Halcyon. “I was raised by a community,” Sheila once told a friend, and clearly not in a way that was dismissive of her family. Rowlands explained that thought when recalling his own childhood in Halcyon more than fifty years ago. “The community raised their children before ‘It Takes a Village’ was a modern day revelation,” he wrote. “That’s still the case for the children living in Halcyon today, educationally, environmentally, and culturally! I had a turtle (Mister Magoo) and he had a habit of going for walks around town, but a neighbor would always bring him back to me after crawling under their porch to get him.” After the war, in addition to her mother, father, Joan, and her neighbors, Sheila became close to some of her aunts, uncles and cousins as well. One aunt, Rus’s wife Dorothy, would play a pivotal role in Varian Arabians’ early history. In Halcyon, the air was clean, usually straight off the ocean and gently scented by the surrounding eucalyptus trees. Sheila could have as much outdoor life as she wanted, and she wanted a lot. From the beginning, she loved animals—all animals—and she loved to just sit and watch them, be with them, try to learn how they thought. Thanks to her sister and her father, she rode from the time she was eight. Joan wanted a horse, and Eric, who loved the outdoors, purchased a Morgan/Percheron to ride when he went hunting. In the off time, he must have rationalized, his daughters could satisfy their horse craziness with the mare, whose name was Judy.

“She gave me one [Judy] that used to dump me off once in a while,” he chuckles. “That summer I rode more than I ever had before.” As a rancher for more than sixty years, he’s now a very good rider, but back then, he reports, he wasn’t. Sheila, who had been riding “all the time,” thought it was hilarious when Judy, now very experienced at traveling home by herself, decided to go it alone. Still, their days sound as pleasant as Sheila remembered them. Often a neighbor boy accompanied them on rides to Oceano Beach, a couple of miles away. “We’d run the horses,” she said, “and do all the things that kids that age do.” Sheila, whose skill with horses up to that point was self-taught and borne of her love for animals, began her real education as a horsewoman and cowgirl at the age of thirteen or fourteen with Mary Forsyth “Sid” Spencer, a local rancher. To the end of her life, she never spoke of Spencer without admiration and respect evident in her voice. Sid, she said, did everything that men who owned land and livestock did—she could shoe, geld and train horses, as well as repair fences, bring in hay, and more—and she taught her young protégé to do it too. Sheila never knew why the somewhat reclusive rancher took so much time with her. The only theory that made sense was that Spencer recognized in her a kindred spirit not only when it came to horses, but to ranching and the western lifestyle as well. From her, Sheila learned the old vaquero style of training working cow horses.

“One thing they didn’t count on,” Sheila related in the 1995 AHT interview, “was that once I got my little talons into Judy’s mane, there was no room for anybody else.” That worked well because it wasn’t

12 | Sheila Varian

For Sheila Varian, the 1950s weren’t entirely about horses. In fact, although she ate, slept and breathed animals, she also made time for regular teenage activities like playing the trombone in her high school orchestra and, when she went off to Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri (chosen because it had the top equestrian program in the country), getting dressed up and going to dances. The other girls complained of it, she later remarked, but since she spent much of her time in the barn, she loved the girly-girl primping. In 1957, she moved back to the west coast to finish her education at the California Polytechnic State College San Luis Obispo, a member of what she remembered as the first class to admit women (it was actually the second since the legislature had barred females in 1930). “What was interesting,” she was quoted in the 1995 AHT article, “is that all of us never had a date, because the guys were all sure we’d be overrun with dates.” In looking at Sheila’s past, what may be most intriguing are Jack’s observations of her. By her own admission, she was shy as a child and felt most at home with animals, so it might be tempting, in view of her tall, lanky frame and angular look, to think that she was awkward in her teenage years, especially around boys. That wouldn’t be true; she later mentioned that she had always felt at ease with men, and Jack’s account of her in those days confirms it. “She was very confident, not shy about anything—always out there,” he says. “She was, you could see, a Carol Burnett. She was well spoken, but outspoken, and a person that got a lot of joy out of pranks and things like that. When we were at Cal Poly, she did a pantomime and it was Carol Burnett revisited. I always thought that if Carol Burnett ever got sick and couldn’t perform, Sheila could take her place. She had

that personality. If horses hadn’t grabbed her, the theater could have, but the basic love of the horses came first.” Nearly all who knew Varian well over the years comment on her love not only of learning, as was common in Halcyon, but also of teaching. So, it was no surprise that when she chose a profession, it was as a teacher. From her high school years on, she had been inspired by an instructor who would become a mentor: Mary Alice Mankins. In 1960, when Varian graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in physical education, she accepted a position at her old high school on staff with Mankins. What might have been most valuable about Mankins was that while she kept an eye on what Sheila was doing, she gave the newly-minted teacher great freedom to experiment with different approaches and make things fun for the students. With that kind of backing, Sheila developed her own style, based on what she said was the most important goal—that she “got kids educated.” Looking back, she would smile as she explained one of her best techniques for holding a class’s attention, which was to tell the truth seventy-five percent of the time and completely fib the other twenty-five percent. “They listened like little hawks,” she said, “because the ones that fell for the fibs had to do extra work.” By 1960, she had established her life. She had graduated from high school and college, and had taken a job. But her real life had been established as well, even if it was, on the surface, secondary, existing in the hours she didn’t spend at school. In 1952, the family had purchased a two-year-old Arabian filly named Farlotta, and in 1956, added another, a two-year-old called Ronteza. Three years later, at a Cow Palace auction, they daringly bought a two-year-old colt named Bay-Abi. Sheila Varian was going to breed Arabian horses.

College years.

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The words of Sheila Varian

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Registry records indicate that Varian Arabians owned two Arabian mares as far back as 1948 (although that may be misleading; applications for that time are no longer available, and the horses’ ownership dates in those days often were adjusted at registration). Rhamin was bred by General J.M. Dickinson, of the historic Travelers Rest Farm, which by that time had moved from Tennessee to the Santa Barbara area, and Nicka was bred by the U.S. Government. If there is anything notable about them, it is that their pedigrees reflect the same background as the other early Varian horses: Polish sire and domestic, mostly Crabbet, dam. A scan of their production records makes it reasonable to assume that they were purchased in the late 1950s to be bred to Bay-Abi. When recounting her history in Arabians, Varian always began her story with Farlotta. The little grey Farlotta was half-Polish, through her sire, *Lotnik, who had been imported after General Patton’s wartime rescue of Arabians from behind German lines. Her dam side was mostly Crabbet, but offered an extraordinary directory of early American breeding programs, including W.R. Brown, Harris, Borden, Dickinson, Kellogg and more. The pedigree would not figure in Sheila’s program, however; she and her family didn’t have a program when they purchased Farlotta. But she was already learning the attributes she liked, and noted that while *Lotnik was preferred by many at the time as an individual, *Witez II, who was also in the Patton shipment, turned out to be the better sire. More than anything, Farlotta, who had an abundance of personality, was the first horse to become more than a companion. For a young girl who was just finding her way in life, and whose best friends were animals, that was profound. In a lot of ways, she and Farlotta grew up together— certainly they grew into themselves together, and Sheila loved her mare.

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Farlotta

The Varian house was surrounded by an acre of land, which included a small corral for Farlotta but no perimeter fencing. Fortunately, they didn’t really need any. Farlotta, who had the run of the property most of the time, never tried to leave. When Sheila called to her, she would come at the gallop, and the two played fetch using twigs from the yard’s apricot tree, with Farlotta in the role of the dog. They rode to Oceano Beach often, and when Farlotta was old enough, Sheila began taking her to Sid Spencer’s, where they learned the vaquero style of riding and training together. By the time the mare was six, they were winning in western pleasure and advancing into reining (then called stock horse), where Farlotta showed promise as well. But Farlotta was a heartbreaker. Sheila Varian would love many horses in her life, but this nimble, willing creature with the big eyes and the endearing personality was the one who translated like very much, devoted to, value so much, into full-on, dependent, dangerous love. She would be the first one to leave too soon. The young mare became a textbook example of the cruelty of poor equine health care. Even after four restorative years with the Varians, Farlotta’s past neglect caught up with her. In those first two years, she had rarely (probably never) been de-wormed, and the insidious parasites had wreaked havoc on her system. She died in her corral, with her head in Sheila’s lap.

Years later, speaking of Farlotta, Sheila’s voice would halt, falter, and clearly reflect her sadness. “As far as she was concerned, I had been the one to save her from mistreatment,” Varian observed in one of her “Lifetime With Arabians” columns, “so it was always me that she attended to. She was simply mine, and I was hers. … I don’t think you ever get over the tragedy of the death of horses you love.” Sheila’s grief was so numbing that she barely noticed the other filly she owned, a young bay that had been acquired to follow Farlotta into training when she got old enough. Ronteza had always lived in Farlotta’s shadow, closer to her older grey mentor than to Sheila, and she had seen everything that had happened when Farlotta died. Now, bereft of her best buddy, she seemed to have lost her bearings. Her time, however, was coming. It would begin a month later, when Sheila came out of her depressed haze to notice her remaining mare standing in the corral, head down, clearly despondent. They both missed Farlotta, she realized, so partly as therapy and partly as just trying to move on, she began working with Ronteza.

Farlotta and Sheila working cattle.

16 | Sheila Varian

Ronteza’s story began in 1954, in Porterville, California, where she was bred by Donald Jones. Although little is heard about Jones now, he was a well known breeder in the Arabian industry in the mid-twentieth century, and served as a member of the Arabian Horse Registry Board of Directors. There is little evidence that Sheila was particularly concerned with the reach of Ronteza’s bloodlines at that point, as her mission was to find a second horse to train, and she routinely said that the attraction for Jones’ filly was that her dam had been an accomplished hackamore mare. Still, the filly was not just some generic Arabian, and over the next few years, as the Varians became more involved in breeding, her pedigree had the kind of substance that would be welcome in their broodmare band. Ronteza was by *Witez II, and out of the Faronek daughter Ronna. Faronek’s sire line was Crabbet, but his dam represented the program of Peter Bradley’s Hingham Stock Farm, one of the foundation Arabian breeding farms in the early twentieth century. (Bradley funded the 1906 Davenport expedition to the desert to import Arabian horses, sponsored by President Theodore Roosevelt, and was one of the founders of the Arabian Horse Club, which became the Registry.) Ronna’s dam, Kiswah, was an eclectic mix, part Crabbet through the Kellogg and Harris programs, but with a tail female line from Hingham.

Farlotta and her best friend, Sheila Varian.

Ronteza was priced at $750, which was at the top of the Varians’ budget, but Sheila and Wenonah must have bargained Jones down, because they agreed to a price of $450 for the mare. It was Sheila’s first equine purchase, and she was so nervous that she famously wrote the check for $4.50, a figure which was quickly amended but became part of Varian lore. So, Ronteza came home to Halcyon and grew up for the next year, liked but not loved, as Sheila focused on Farlotta and then dealt with her loss. Finally, she turned her attention to Ronteza and began working with her. Without an arena for practice, Sheila and Ronteza logged “a million miles” on Oceano Beach, building muscles, stamina and agility. They practiced their reining skills by weaving sinuously around the trees and bushes in their area, and worked on their slides along the sides of local roads. It wasn’t always pleasant; some months of the year, coastal California is foggy and cold, but that didn’t stop them. Sheila would later describe Ronteza as “conscientious,” and with her single minded dedication to her training, she clearly was as well. “It took me time to recognize who she was,” Sheila wrote in her “Lifetime” column. “As I started trailering her out to Sid’s and began to move cattle with her, I began to get a sense of who she was, which was just a very serious, kind and sweet horse that didn’t beg for treats and didn’t come when called.”

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She also began to appreciate Ronteza’s intelligence. Part of her training included working cattle on Spencer’s ranch, and before long, Ronteza understood the process well enough to anticipate her young rider’s signals. By the time she was four, she was ready to begin showing, and Sheila entered her in a few hackamore classes at Arabian shows, where she quickly dusted the competition. From then on, they faced Quarter Horses at open shows—not only open shows, but in open classes. They had learned what they knew in ranch work, instead of horse shows, so Sheila skipped the ladies’ classes and jumped in at the deep end, squaring off against the men, the toughest competition she could find. She would later say that she, as well as her filly, learned how to show in those hard-fought events. It was not only just riding the classes, she later pointed out. She also had to learn how to handle the stress as the importance of her titles escalated. She had to be confident that she would remember her course in the ring, so she lay in bed at night before shows, rehearsing her plans in her head, and sometimes even went to the ring and walked around in the dark, noting how she expected to ride in the daylight. After a while, Sheila and Ronteza got good enough that their show expenses could be paid out of the little mare’s winnings. Even more encouraging was that some of the veteran showmen began complimenting Ronteza. One that Sheila wrote about later was Jimmy Williams, whose expertise so spanned the equestrian world that he was later named a member of the National Reining and Cutting Horse

Hall of Fame as well as the American Horse Shows Association Show Jumping Hall of Fame. That was music to Sheila’s ears. From the time she had begun training Ronteza and first realized the filly’s talent, she had dreamed big—really big. In her world, that meant winning the Reined Cow Horse Championship at the Grand National Rodeo, held every October at the Cow Palace. She didn’t talk about it to others; in the beginning, it might have sounded delusional, or worse, arrogant. But she dreamed, and step by step, over a period of five years, she schooled Ronteza through the stages of her training and showing. And when she wasn’t competing, she slipped quietly into the stands to watch some of the masters of the art, many of whom either lived in California or showed there often, working their horses. As she recalled, she was too shy to speak to them. An interesting aside is that one friend from these years was Greg Ward, who was Jack Varian’s Cal Poly roommate when they were in college. He also was beginning as a horse trainer. An innovative thinker who appreciated a horse’s mind and spirit, he would go on to become one of the most celebrated reining trainers and breeders of all time, one of three original inductees into the National Reined Cow Horse Association Hall of Fame. But back then, he too was hungry for success. They would sit in the stands together, watching the famous trainers of their day working horses, analyzing what they saw and comparing their own experiences, unaware that in a few decades, they both would be marquee names in their breeds.

The Cow Palace 1961: Down ...but not out.

The classic sliding stop: George Axt’s iconic Cow Palace.

Ronteza was not to be denied. 18 | Sheila Varian

By October 1961, Sheila and Ronteza were ready. It is true that she was not particularly well known in the reining world at that time, but she was not unknown. Riders on the west coast circuit where she showed were aware of Ronteza, but probably the Cow Palace was not prepared for her. She was, after all, a girl and an amateur, and she was mounted on an Arabian mare, not a Quarter Horse. At best, she would have been a novelty—which is what attracted the newspapers and television crews, although they didn’t catch on until she won the Light Horse competition on Friday night. Sheila and her mother, who had driven up with her, were unaware of the hoopla. Their barebones, chilly and rather damp hotel room had no television, and at the arena during the day, they were in their own world. Sheila exercised and groomed Ronteza and battled nerves, and Wenonah simply kept her daughter company. Other competitors, Sheila later said, enjoyed the camaraderie of their world and they were perfectly nice to her, but overall, it was her first time in that atmosphere and she was too focused—strung too tightly—to think of anything but showing her mare. To keep them both calm, she would murmur nursery rhymes to Ronteza as they waited for their classes. The first competition came on Thursday morning, where she and Ronteza were up against about thirty other Light Weight entries to win one of five slots in Friday night’s final. So uninitiated was she that she did not realize that when her number was called first, it meant that her

mare had scored the highest of the five horses who moved on to the Friday class. Describing her emotions that opening day of competition—the moments when her tension transformed into a joy that resulted in a nearly flawless performance—she later wrote, “Riding a good bridle horse has always been like a song to me. The movements my horse and I make together are the melody that floats through the air.” On Friday, they were back, and Ronteza was sharper than ever, so tenacious as she battled her steer that when she hit a slick stretch of dirt and lost her footing, going down heavily on her side, she scrambled right back up and kept going. It was all so seamless that Sheila, who had been jolted up from the saddle, simply stood still and her mare rose under her, avoiding the automatic disqualification that would have resulted had she been thrown off. Again, she and Ronteza scored highest. That’s what put the press onto the hottest story at the Cow Palace: the tall, thin girl from nowhere, riding her spunky little Arab mare, was suddenly nose-to-nose with the best reining riders in the world. The final competition, where the top three horses from the Light Weight and three from the Heavy Weight division rode for the championship, a $1,000 prize and a Bill Maloy saddle, was almost anticlimactic. Before an audience of ten thousand people, Ronteza was so in the zone that for years afterward, photographer George Axt used a shot of her that afternoon as an example of a classic sliding stop.

The Cow Palace, Sunday afternoon: “Winning the World.”

The Cow Palace, Friday Night: winning the Light Weight Competition.

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One of the great moments of the whole experience came when Ronteza’s number was called out as the winner in Friday’s Light Weight class, and Sheila urged her forward to receive their trophy. A photo tells the story: the arena is dark, but clearly visible in the background are the horsemen who had finished below her in the standings—and they are all grinning. Clearly, they appreciated a good horse, and although Ronteza was an Arabian and Sheila was a newcomer to their ranks, that made no difference. The mare and her young rider had earned their way into the limelight. On Sunday, when they went on to win the championship, not only the crowd, but her competitors, were happy for her. “We received a wire from ‘Western Horseman’ that said, ‘Congratulations STOP Extraordinary win STOP,’ and so on,” Sheila later wrote in her “Lifetime” column. “Other good wishes poured in too, including a large bottle of Korbel champagne, which I have kept unopened to this day, a very tangible reminder of that time so long ago.”

horse world. (At the time, it did not especially resonate in the Arabian horse world, because the Reined Cow Horse classes then were more popular in the west and better known in the Quarter Horse breed.) In Scottsdale, however, a 13-year-old Gene LaCroix, not yet the household name in Arabians that he would become, heard it. “It was huge,” he remembers, and because she was riding an Arabian, it had special significance. “I identified with it.” In San Francisco that evening, the magnitude of the achievement had not yet set in for Sheila and Wenonah when they loaded up an exhausted Ronteza and headed down the coast for Halcyon. They didn’t know that there was a party going on that the winner traditionally attended, and where plenty of people were prepared to celebrate them, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. Sheila had to teach school the next morning, and what is a four-hour trip now was even longer then, particularly when pulling a horse trailer—a horse trailer with a horse in it who was worth the world to her young owner.

In reining parlance, scoring the highest in the Grand National Rodeo’s Reined Cow Horse Open Championship was called “Winning the World,” and the news about Sheila and Ronteza reverberated across the

Ronteza

20 | Sheila Varian

After the Cow Palace, Sheila turned Ronteza out. They had met their goal, and it would be months before she thought of another one. Then finally, realizing that there was one other major title in the reining world that was worth a go, she took aim on Salinas. And besides, she enjoyed competing on the mare, and Ronteza was always keen to prove who was boss to a cow. The open competition at the Salinas Rodeo included cutting, and although Ronteza had started her career in ranch work, that wasn’t the same as showing. Sheila didn’t feel it was enough to warrant challenging the top horses who could do both, so this time they entered the Ladies’ class, which would be no walk in the park, as it featured some of the best cowgirls of the day. She didn’t realize it then, but some of those women would become her friends and forty years later would share her membership in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. So, in the summer of 1963, Sheila Varian and Ronteza headed out to Salinas, California, located about 20 miles northeast of Monterey. Every year in July, the California Rodeo Salinas was held on the old race track at Sherwood Park. In those days, it wasn’t just the popularity of rodeos that filled the grandstands. It was the heyday of the television western, and not only were there knowledgeable ranchers and horse enthusiasts there, but also there was everyone who watched actors such as Clint Eastwood (“Rawhide”), Amanda Blake (“Gunsmoke”), and others, every week on TV. And those stars turned out to promote the Salinas Rodeo. More than eight thousand people made the grandstand standing room only. At Salinas, as at the Cow Palace, Ronteza owned the ring. When it was over, and the crowd had yelled and screamed itself hoarse, Sheila and Ronteza headed back down Highway 101 to Arroyo Grande. They had another championship on their record.

After Salinas, there wasn’t much left for Ronteza to win, and at any rate, Sheila wanted to get on with their breeding program. By that time, the family owned a stallion, Bay-Abi, and three promising mares from Poland, who already had begun breeding. But Ronteza—Ronteza, the mare who had put her on the map—had yet to be bred. So, unofficially and with no fanfare, she retired Ronteza to the broodmare band, and Bay-Abi covered her the following year. The mare conceived on the initial try and produced her first foal, a bay colt, in 1965. He was named Bay Event (“he was, as Ronteza’s first foal, a very big event,” she said). Ronteza’s second foal, another bay colt, came the following January and was named Atmandu. He was still at his dam’s side when Sheila, in response to an invitation from the Monterey Arabian Horse Association, brought the mare to the 1966 Monterey Arabian Horse Show for a formal retirement. “I was touched that other Arabian owners had become proud of her,” she related, “and was happy to haul her to the fairgrounds for the celebration.”

Ronteza’s retirement ceremony in Monterey, with Atmandu. Photo by Johnny Johnston.

What happened there became one of the most moving of the Ronteza chapters in Sheila’s life. First, she and Ronteza had their own private farewell to the show arena, and then there was the retirement itself. When she had accepted the Association’s invitation, Sheila had little idea of what was involved in a retirement ceremony, and was content to leave its planning to the club. And they did a fine job; they wrote a detailed script of Ronteza’s achievements and even included an original song about her.

The old diva who did what she pleased: Ronteza near the end of her life, with Sheila Varian.

What Sheila didn’t know was that word of the retirement had gone out not only to the Arabian community but to the horse world in general, which included the Quarter Horses folks who had been her main competition in open reining. Many of them decided to observe the tradition of their discipline: when a great horse is retired, you mark the occasion. They got in their cars and drove to Monterey. When Ronteza’s ceremony began, one by one, the great horsemen the mare had competed against filed into the arena to stand behind her as the announcer described her triumphs. For Sheila, it was entirely unexpected—an appropriately quiet tribute, but the most forceful one ever offered the little Arabian mare. “I was stunned,” she wrote later, “as I had no idea that trainers and riders I admired would be there, standing with Ronteza and me in her farewell.” After that, Ronteza really did live a quiet life. In total, she produced eleven foals, the last in 1976. Nine were by Bay-Abi and two by Bay El Bey, and two earned national titles. Bay-Event was twice U.S. National Champion Stock Horse, while Bay Teza scored two U.S. National Top Tens in mare halter and two in western pleasure open. Ronteza lived out her days at Varian Arabians, eventually given the run of the farm to amble around as she saw fit. In later years, her razor-sharp mind faded a bit and she now and then wandered down the driveway—but she was so beloved that someone always noticed and yelled, “Ronteza’s about to run away from home!” And someone would run to shepherd her back to the yard by the house, where she spent most of her time. She died in 1982, at the age of twenty-eight, and is buried in the memorial cemetery at Varian Arabians. Perhaps the ultimate tribute paid to Ronteza came several times over the years, when legendary horseman Johnny Brazil, a member of the National Reined Cow Horse Association Hall of Fame, would include her in recollections of his life. “The only horse I couldn’t beat,” Brazil would observe, “was that little bay Arab mare of Sheila Varian’s.”

Ronteza, at her Monterey retirement ceremony, with her foal Atmandu and Sheila Varian.

Ronteza ~ Magic In Monterey From “A Lifetime With Arabians, Ronteza Part IV,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES, March 2010. Ronteza’s Cinderella win at the Cow Palace is legitimately legendary, and as such, well known. Less well known, but beautiful on an intensely personal level for Varian, was an evening she shared with Ronteza before the mare’s retirement ceremony in Monterey, California. Atmandu, Ronteza’s second foal by Bay-Abi, accompanied them. “Amazingly, my most cherished memory from Ronteza’s retirement was not the ceremony—although it was very special—but the night before, when the show held its exhibitors dinner. Just about everyone went to the party, and I thought it would be a good time to take Ronteza to the arena and let Atmandu play. “The Monterey Fairgrounds is small, intimate and very pretty—the air off the ocean is crisp and clean, and the area is dotted with dark green cypress trees. I had shown in Monterey several times in the big open show. In fact, after winning the Light Weight class there the same year I won the Cow Palace, I had gone off pattern in the stake, consequently losing the $1,000 prize. “Since I had stopped showing Ronteza, I had not ridden her. I felt then and still do that horses who have achieved exceptional performance wins should not be asked to perform when they are not in the condition they were when showing, and I was never going to put Ronteza in the position of being less than her athletic best. “Monterey, typical of all the west coast towns, can become foggy and damp in the summer months, and it was that night. I didn’t saddle her; I put her bridle on, slid on bareback, and thought I’d just walk out to the arena and sit on her while Atmandu played. It was shadowy and silent when I rode into the ring. I thought we were alone, but I was told later by a few people who had stayed at the grounds that they were sitting in the stands, watching as all this unfolded. “Ronteza stood quietly, letting Atmandu play, which he did, not paying much attention to his mother. As I waited for him to finish playing, my mind was going over the times I had shown in that misty Monterey arena, watching the great open trainers of the day—Jimmy Williams, Clyde Kennedy, Barbara Worth, Don Dodge, Ray Hackworth—showing

hunters, jumpers and bridle horses. I dropped a rein against Ronteza’s neck, and like she always did, she lowered her head and stepped over in a perfect half-turn. She was so easy and natural and confident, and I found myself thinking, I’d forgotten how riding a really broke horse feels. I’d been riding colts, helping and guiding them, and here I was, sitting bareback on Ronteza, who at 12 knew all there was to know about life and competition. “I was so aware of the softness of her mouth—that old, immediate response I knew so well. In the mist, we were by ourselves; it was a little like being in a cocoon, just the two of us, she with her spade bit on, me on her bareback. It seemed like the most natural thing to do as Atmandu played: I leaned forward slightly and asked her to pick up a canter, and as she always had, she picked up a rhythmic, smooth canter. In our own quiet world, we made a circle. We came through the center, and as I had so many times before, I started to hum, and thought about making a change. As always, she followed my thought and flowed through a perfect change. Slowly, with no hurry, we cantered on around, coming back through the figure eight, and again, I thought about making a change. Once more, as always, she followed my thoughts. Neither of us paid any attention to Atmandu, who was entertaining himself at the other end of the arena. She cantered to the center, I picked up a rein and asked her, and she slid to a gentle stop. In the stillness of that atmospheric evening, there might have been no one else in the world but Ronteza and me, reliving those seven years of training and showing we had accomplished together.” She and Ronteza relived more of their past glory that atmospheric evening, until finally it was time to go in. “I stopped and for a moment relished her honest readiness, slid off that warm brown back, and gave her a tearful hug,” Sheila recalled. “In appreciation of just who she was, I pulled her bridle off and knew I would never ride her again. And other than the next night’s ceremony, when I led her to the retirement, she never again felt a rein against her neck or a bit in her mouth.”

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yees—The Courtis Girls The First Varian Emplo She was filled ng ourselves together. eri th ga re we we as ed Margaret arriv m the moment she enge and was a joy fro all ch y an eet m to ng with fun, willi catch and we ride anything we could ld cou us of o tw e th er arrived. Togeth ything. … could catch almost an led with me happy giggle was fil sa e th th wi , ret ga ar M would tell Janie, just as blond as garet, always the boss, ar M . ter sis r ge un yo e ” would fun but definitely th ing to ride. “That horse go re we we en wh ” rse Janie to go get “that ho would come hardest to catch. Janie e th d an re stu pa est side of always be in the furth n all over the mountain ru g vin ha , ced fa red into back 20 minutes later pong partnerships grew g pin r Ou .” rse ho at your partthe 16 acres to catch “th e this: No matter what am bec les ru e Th . ers was the protection for our partn er how stupid the act, it att m No r. he for up od er for the ner did wrong, you sto osedly reasonable answ pp su a up k in th to y partner’s responsibilit happening. garet and my mom th solemn reason. Mar wi er oth ch ea d de fen Janie and I de dad. med everything on my bla us of all d an e, m sa would do the The words of Sheila Varian

24 | Sheila Varian

As Ronteza was setting the stage for Sheila Varian as a public figure in the horse world, other horses were quietly laying the groundwork for her career as a breeder. In the 1940s and ’50s, Sheila’s primary interest in horses was her interaction with them, as she learned more from Sid Spencer about training and what made a good horse, no matter the breed. At the same time, her mother began studying Arabian pedigrees. As Sheila later told her friend Sherry Conrads, Wenonah actually was afraid of horses, but she was fascinated with the intellectual appeal of understanding their pedigrees. While Sheila set out to see and assess as many of the Arabians in California as possible (she estimated that by the time she was in her early twenties, she had a mental picture of most of them), her mother studied their bloodlines, and to learn more, joined a group of breeders that met regularly to compare notes. By the late 1950s, when the family began putting serious money behind Sheila’s passion, Wenonah Varian was very well informed. The first step in their breeding program came during Grand National Rodeo week in 1959, when they purchased a two-year-old stallion named Bay-Abi at an Arabian horse auction at the Cow Palace. Sheila pored over the sale catalog and walked the grounds, inspecting the horses and debating their attributes with her neighbor, horseman Jeff Wonnell. As she told it, the catalyst for her choice was that when she looked at Bay-Abi, she felt an instant connection—but that isn’t the whole story. She and her mother already had found his pedigree to their taste, having investigated his dam, Angyl, and grand-dam, the Polish mare *Wierna (a Patton rescue). In person, Sheila saw in him the essentials of what she liked: balanced conformation (he was a three-circle horse), beauty and a willing temperament.

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Bay-Abi

Sheila and Bay-Abi at the ranch. From family archives

Bay-Abi, like Ronteza and Farlotta, was a mix of Crabbet and solid old domestic lines with Polish blood. His sire, Errabi, descended from the desert-bred *Mirage, who was imported from Crabbet Park to be the senior sire at the historic Selby Stud. His dam, Angyl, whose quality would earn her a U.S. National Top Ten Mare title two years later, was by the Crabbet-bred *Raseyn, and out of the pure Polish mare *Wierna. A daughter of Ofir, *Wierna traced to the renowned Polish mares Elegantka and Gazella II. Bred by Loyd Silva, Bay-Abi had been purchased by Dr. Wes Hoskins as a weanling, and it was Hoskins who offered him for sale. He attracted the most money the Varians had yet offered for a horse; over the years Sheila’s memory said both $1,100 and $1,200, but either way, it was their biggest outlay yet. In the book Arabian Legends, written by Marian Carpenter and published by “Western Horseman,” Sheila recalled her introduction to the colt who would be her stallion. “Bay-Abi turned his head and looked at me with his small, tipped ears and quizzical expression. It was a look I grew to know intimately for the next twenty-five years of his life. Whatever the instinctive connection between the two of us was, I don’t know, but if I ever felt the pull towards something, I felt it towards Bay-Abi.” Sheila was in college at the time, but she and her mother both knew that Bay-Abi was just the beginning. Ronteza eventually would be bred, but in the meantime, they had to buy broodmares for when their young stallion was ready. It would take them two years to make their most critical purchases. In the meantime, they also were working on a farm. They had acquired the property, courtesy of Jack Varian’s marriage to Zera (“Zee”) Smith in 1958. As a wedding gift, his parents had given the young couple, who planned to raise cattle, thirteen acres and a house in Corbett Canyon worth $13,000. “Right off, I could tell that this wasn’t what I had in mind for a cattle operation,” Jack recalls. “But it was just the right size for Sheila’s horse operation. She and my Aunt Dorothy bought it from us.” He and Zee put the money down on a more suitable ranch.

Roping at Sid Spencer’s with Bay-Abi and apprentice Margaret Courtis. From family archives

By then, Joan had married and moved away to establish her own family, so Sheila, Eric and Wenonah dove into making enough improvements to keep horses there, including fencing and a barn, and in time constructed a home for themselves (the house original to the property is the one now occupied by Angela Alvarez and her family). “Our farm was built Halcyon’s way, which is simple,” Varian said in the 1986 AHT profile. “[We] built the buildings and fences ourselves.” It was primitive —for years, it would not have even an arena to work horses—but it was enough for Bay-Abi, Ronteza, the few other mares they owned by then, and the horses to come. More land would be added over time. In 1961, the future was getting ready to begin. After the 1945 importation of horses rescued by General Patton, breeders had become aware of the quality of horses from Poland, the Varians particularly through their experiences with Farlotta and Ronteza. In 1960, an article by British horsewoman Patricia Lindsay signaled that it was possible to purchase Arabians from Poland, even though it lay behind the Iron Curtain.

In the ring, at Santa Barbara, California with Bay-Abi.

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The ones Lindsay had bought were impressive enough to prompt several Americans to arrange for her to acquire bloodstock for them. The first ones to be imported from Poland since 1938 arrived in the United States in January 1961, and it was not long after that, that Wenonah wrote to Lindsay about helping them buy a mare. It was a big step for the family—not only the financial investment, but the fact that while Wenonah outlined their preferences for Lindsay (“We desire to breed beautiful athletes”), they had to rely on her to suggest a selection. Lindsay did not let them down. She sent photographs, and they were able to choose not one, but three mares. In the group were four-year-old *Bachantka, a grey mare from Albigowa Stud, by Wielki Szlem and out of Balalajka, by Amurath-Sahib; Nowy Dwor Stud’s *Naganka, a nine-year-old grey by Bad Afas, out of Najada, by Fetysz (Najada was a daughter of the celebrated Gazella II); and a five-year-old bay mare from Michalow Stud named *Ostroga, by Duch, out of Orda, by Omar II. It is interesting to note that *Bachantka’s dam, Balalajka, also produced *Bask and *Bandola—but when the Varians made their selection, *Bask had not yet been imported to the United States. No one had ever heard of him outside of Poland. In October 1961, as Ronteza was taking the Cow Palace by storm, Sheila and Wenonah also were counting off the days before their three mares would arrive. It was December by the time the boat docked, the three could be processed through customs, and vanned across the country to Arroyo Grande. As the new year opened, the Varians had their foundation in place.

Varian foundation mares in Poland, 1961: *Naganka (top), one of Patricia Lindsay’s notes to Wenonah Varian (middle) and *Bachantka (bottom).

*Ostroga and foal at Varian Arabians, 1961.

28 | Sheila Varian

The stallion class was arduous and competitive; forty-five horses showed for more than four hours before judges Bill Higgins, Bob Armstrong and Bill Burns handed out the awards. As Sheila had expected, many of the contenders were top names in the industry, including Fadjur (U.S. National Reserve Champion in 1960, and destined to be again in 1968) and Bolero (reserve in 1961).

If 1961 was a year known for its mares, 1962 was the one that introduced Bay-Abi to the Arabian community. With their fledgling broodmare band in place, Sheila turned her attention to building her stallion’s reputation: she took aim on the fifth annual U.S. National Championships, held at the Colorado All-Arabian Show in Estes Park on July fourth. She had shown Bay-Abi a few times, but because she chose to keep him lean and athletic (the sort of horse she preferred to ride), as opposed to the rather beefy look endorsed by other owners, first place often had eluded him. However, he usually placed highly, and a win at a Cow Palace show qualified him for Nationals. He was five. It was time to make his name. Off she and Wenonah headed to Colorado, with Bay-Abi in their old Miley trailer, just as Ronteza had ridden to San Francisco nine months before. The best way to describe their experience? Painful. Sheila was prepared for the competition; she was not prepared for the attitudes.

But she was ready for that. Bay-Abi was a world-class sleeper who could doze—or at least chill out into a zen-like trance—easily, and she had devised a game with him. When she whispered teasing little endearments, he would perk up and sparkle, and when she told him to go to sleep, he would completely relax. As some of the others wilted, he was fresh, his conformation, type and spirit apparent to horsemen. In the 1962 U.S. National Championship for stallion halter, the judges were not put off by Bay-Abi’s lean, muscular look. They handed him the first place trophy, a nearly three-foot affair that left no doubt about its significance. In fact, he won so convincingly that no scoring calculation was needed. He was the top name on all three officials’ cards. For several years, however, the judges’ cards were not posted and Sheila had no way of knowing that her stallion was unanimous. Perfectly willing to believe that Ronteza had won the world, she was not as confident this time. She heard the whispers that suggested all kinds of reasons Bay-Abi had been selected champion, none of them having to do with his quality, and her joy in his achievement died at birth.

The arrival of Varian Arabians foundation mares, December 1961: *Bachantka leading, then *Naganka and *Ostroga.

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*Bachantka leaving the van from the east coast, 1961.

Nearly fifty years later, relating the experience, her voice could catch. The snide comments were a slap not only at Bay-Abi, but at her as a horsewoman who would be building her new program with him. Eventually, when Bill Higgins casually informed her that he was proud to have been a part of the panel that selected Bay-Abi unanimous national champion, it was comforting validation—but just the icing on an ever-improving cake. By that time, the stallion had added U.S. National Top Tens in English and western pleasure to his record. Higgins’ comment played an important role in her development as a breeder, though. In the film, “The Legend of Sheila Varian,” her memory was clear: “I vowed to never again believe what I heard other people say about my horses. I would only believe what I saw.” For the rest of her life, however, when Varian talked about Bay-Abi, she usually focused on his personable temperament and luminous intelligence. His show career simply didn’t rate much of a place in her growing arsenal of stories to tell. And there were plenty of stories, usually centering around his sense of humor or astute mind. Her voice was warm with affection when she recounted one tale from when Bay-Abi was three, about how they went on a particularly long ride at Sid Spencer’s. It was too long, really, for a horse of his age, but they had gone to the top of a mountain and couldn’t find the right path home. There was nothing they could do but search and keep going, and Bay-Abi, trusting Sheila, walked on willingly, although as the day wore on, he clearly was beginning to doubt that he would ever be home safely. And he grew more thirsty as the hours passed and water was unavailable. Finally, they got down the mountain and Bay-Abi filled up at a stream like a car with an empty gas tank. But for the rest of his life, every time they went out for a ride, he paused for a sip whenever he saw water. Taking no chances, he stopped even for puddles of rain. It was also well known that with Bay-Abi on duty, Varian Arabians didn’t need a teasing stallion. By the early 1960s, the family had gathered four or five mares, and as the decade advanced, worked up to breeding about ten foals a year, a serious effort then as now. Sheila rode him through the pastures bareback, making teasing a game, and her boy was infallible at identifying the mares ready to breed. Actually, he was so professional that in the late 1960s, her nephew Bob, who had no experience handling horses during breeding, could help her. With the

Bay-Abi and Sheila Varian, playing in the pasture.

mares located in the front pastures, they routinely polished off the task before the eight o’clock school buses, full of curious children, rolled by. The truth was, for Bay-Abi, “personable temperament” doesn’t even begin to cover his character. He was clever, impish, devastatingly intelligent, playful, and very, very sensitive. He was so closely attuned to Sheila’s voice that he would droop when it hardened and practically dance when she praised him or joked with him. She shied away from calling horses “friends” because she loved them by their own code, not because of how nearly human they could be; with Bay-Abi, however, it might be fair to call them soulmates, their lines of communication ran so deep and true.

There were many ways that Sheila Varian’s mental strength, as well as her equine expertise, was tested in those early years. One of the most noticeable was the pressure to breed “pure Polish” bloodlines. It was particularly strong in the late 1970s and ’80s, when Polish horses commanded exorbitant price tags, but in her experience, it also was present early on. When she bred her three imported mares to Bay-Abi, she was criticized by others for not using pure Polish stallions. Coming on the heels of the prejudice she had encountered at the U.S. Nationals, that was a double blow to her confidence, and for a few years, she rationalized breeding the Polish mares to alternative stallions once every three years, but when Bay-Abi’s get clearly were superior to what she was getting with the “pure” sires, it was a lesson to trust her own judgment. She didn’t have to learn it twice. From then on, she bred them as she liked (and probably smiled secretly as she realized that the directors at Poland’s state studs did not hesitate to use stallions from other countries when they saw the need, so what “pure Polish” meant was questionable anyway). Over the years, Varian incorporated a variety of bloodlines in addition to the ones she owned, on occasion standing or leasing other stallions for stud duty. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but she nurtured a philosophical attitude. Not every foal had to be perfect; it simply had to contribute to the ongoing program. When sires did not meet expectations, she generally chose other directions for her mares, but she didn’t lose sleep over it.

Bay-Abi and Sheila Varian, July 1962: presentation as U.S. National Champion Stallion, Estes Park, Colorado.

One of her early outside acquisitions was the Egyptian colt El Hilal, purchased from Gleannloch Farm as a weanling. She test bred him to two mares, but before he turned three, he was recruited by a breeder in Washington who was a fan of Gleannloch stock, so while El Hilal would go on to significant success as a sire, he was not influential in the Varian program. The story was different in 1969, when she leased an up-and-coming young stallion named Khemosabi—before his national championships in stallion halter and western pleasure. Khemo’s year in Arroyo Grande was a key early success for her: bred to the *Bachantka daughter Baychatka, he sired Moska, beginning a line that continues to produce headliners even today, nearly half a century later. For example, in Western Pleasure, Diesel Smoke CBA, the 2016 U.S. National Champion; Zefyr, the 2013, 2014 and 2015 U.S. National Champion and 2016 Reserve; and the U.S. National Reserve Champions Onyx A (2014) and Monticello V (2015), all include her in their pedigree. Another 1970 foal from Khemosabi’s year with Varian was Kaiyoum (out of another *Bachantka daughter, Bayanka), who figures in the tail female line of multi-U.S. National Champion Stallion Pyro Thyme SA. In those years, Sheila also used *Bask. Of course, she had followed his career, as his dam was so closely related to *Bachantka. Gene LaCroix recalls that in 1965, the year after *Bask was crowned U.S. National Champion Stallion, Sheila came to Lasma to see him and study his foals. She must have liked what she saw, because she sent mares to Scottsdale to be bred to him. Some of the most successful Varian-related horses of the next fifty years, bred either by Sheila or others using her bloodlines, would result from the connection. For instance, the stallions Bey Shah (bred by Lester and Jennie Walton), and Barbary and Afire Bey V, both bred by Varian, were from *Bask daughters. Looking back now, it is clear that even that early in her career, she was demonstrating a sharp instinct for identifying stallions who would have an impact on the breed. Her biggest success, however, was standing in her own barn. Bay-Abi, who lived to age twenty-seven (he died in 1984), sired two-hundred-seventy-five registered foals, including twenty-six U.S. and/or Canadian national titlists. Five were national champions or reserves in halter; seven won national championships or reserves in performance, six in western disciplines and one, Mikado, in park. Together, they account for seven national championships and ten reserve national championships. Significantly, all showed before the era of extensive qualifying championship titles. The foundation Bay-Abi provided launched her program, which would be her most important contribution to the North American Arabian community. Appropriately, his line would prove to be a source of success in halter, English and western competition, and now would include the working western and hunter divisions as well. Today, that influence is worldwide.

Khemosabi, with owner Bert Husband. *Bask, in the ring with Gene LaCroix.

A Remarkable Rapport: Bay-Abi and Sheila Varian From “A Lifetime With Horses: Are Some Horses Funny? Or, The Idylls Of Bay-Abi,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES, March 2009.

Bay-Abi was more than just Sheila Varian’s foundation stallion; he was a companion in her life’s work. Their level of communication was instinctive for a quarter of a century, from the first time he looked her in the eye at the auction where she bought him, through his final days in the paddock that became his home at the farm. This excerpt from a Varian account in 2009 illustrates their unique relationship. “When Bay-Abi was young, I taught him to come when I called by using rocks (not boulders, folks, simple rocks). When I called ‘Bay,’ if he didn’t come, I’d flick a rock and pop him on his fanny. When he turned around to look at me, I would back away from him, which invites a horse to come to you. It didn’t take Bay long to learn to come when I called. I was insisting on speed, so when I called, I meant for him to come—right here, right now, this moment. (I was a very bossy young horse trainer.) And he would come a-dashing. “I started snapping my fingers to have him sidle over to me, which led to my climbing up on his pasture fence. I’d call him, and as he galloped up, I’d snap my fingers so that he was side-passing over to me as he arrived. Well, of course, there was no way not to grab his mane and jump on that shiny bay back. The train immediately left the station with all engines full throttle. Down the hill we would hurtle, jumping down the bank with me lying on his back, hanging on to his mane as he covered the acre of his field at the speed of light, then made the turn at the bottom of the hill and galloped back up to the gate. All aquiver with excitement, Bay would slide to a halt alongside the fence where I got on. I could get off and the game would be over, or stay on for another ride at supersonic speed around his field. “Always one to think of an easy way to do something, I decided this was a perfectly natural way to show Bay-Abi off to the visitors who came to see him. ‘Bay!’ I would yell, and clap my hands. Up the hill he would come galloping, slide to a halt snorting and blowing, tail over his back, huffing and puffing and definitely impressing the people as they all pedaled backwards in a hurry. I’d clap my hands again, and off down the hill he’d go, with his tail in the air, a grin on his face, and make another pass of his pasture.”

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Sheila Varian | 33

34 | Sheila Varian

In the Arabian business, Sheila’s star had risen quickly, and through the 1960s largely continued its ascent. The period was not without personal sorrows, though; in 1959, her uncle, Rus Varian, died of heart disease while on vacation in Alaska, and in 1961, Sig was killed during a night landing off Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. And in November 1961, her sister, Joan, died prematurely. A victim of bi-polar before it was well-known and diagnosed, she took her own life. To say that the late 1960s and much of the 1970s were not stressful— challenging in a deeply life-altering way—would be to ignore facts. Much of it could be described as traumatic for Sheila. For one thing, money had never been plentiful, and as the Varians slowly improved their ranch, the already-very-close family relied even more on each other. Both of Sheila’s parents were intimately involved in the venture. Perhaps it had begun as their support for her enthusiasm, but by that time, they had made it a life’s work. In The Inventor and the Pilot, by Dorothy Varian (Rus’s wife), the author lists Eric’s involvement in Arabians and his pride in Sheila’s achievements on a par with his brothers’ more famous accomplishments, noting that all three Varian boys had been successful in their lives’ dreams. However, Eric’s health, while he outlived his brothers, was not strong. He fought diabetes for years, which undermined his health, and a heart attack claimed his life in September 1969. His early death, at sixty-five, may have dimmed his memory in the Varian story; Wenonah, as Sheila’s companion in Arabians, gets more ink. But Eric, who appears to have been a giver all his life, played a central role. He always was the anchor for his family, and his wit and Irish humor flavored their lives. When Sig contracted tuberculosis in the 1920s, it was Eric who bolted off to Los Angeles to keep his brother’s spirits up, and when their parents aged, he was the one who oversaw most of their care. He was integral to the construction and maintenance of the farm, and with his daughter and a handful of college students, installed all the fencing. When Sheila and Wenonah departed for horse shows, he remained at home, managing the horses.

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Wenonah Varian From family archives

*Naganka

“He lived his whole life in Halcyon with, I’m sure, a satisfied mind,” says Jack Varian. “He was just a quiet man who loved to hunt and enjoy nature’s bounty. He had no desire for the faster pace of city life.” Even in his final days, Eric insisted that Sheila go to the U.S. Nationals, so she did. With his favorite Bay-Lynn, she scored U.S. National Top Ten in English Pleasure, and with Baychatka, a top ten in mare halter. A few days after she returned, Eric Varian died. As rough as that was, Sheila was facing a double blow: right around that time, Wenonah Varian was diagnosed with breast cancer. She would fight it for four years, longer than the doctors had given her, with the strength she had shown all her life. A published clipping Sheila kept, discovered after her death, records a tribute by breeders Janice and Frank Rust, of Halali Arabians.

It begins with a portrait of the family in better times. “… I found a family very alive with an insatiable quest for truth and integrity, and an overwhelming sense of humor,” Janice Rust wrote. “I treasure the long evenings spent mulling over pedigrees, exploring philosophy, and ‘cussing and discussing’ politics—Wenonah was never one to duck a good skirmish! Life at [the] Varians was always vital, and Wenonah was in the center of it all. Sheila’s eye for a horse enabled her to buy a two-year-old colt named Bay-Abi, and her skill helped develop him into one of the great sires of the breed, but Wenonah was always the driving force. She knew the pedigrees and had the business sense to keep the ranch on an even keel.” After the cancer verdict was issued, Rust continued, “… this remarkable woman refused to give in. She fought the disease and the attitude of defeat with an incredible tenacity. She always had one more crop of foals to see, and she stretched it into four. She went to the shows, visited her friends, and never complained of her increasing discomfort.”

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Those weren’t Sheila’s only struggles. As she cared for her mother, she also faced some of the most trying times in her horse operation. One of the earliest, in the fall of 1971, was the near loss of *Naganka to colic. Doug Herthel, DVM, who would become a lifelong friend and the veterinarian who worked wonders (literally) for the Varian herd, remembers the first time he met Sheila. It was on the day that *Naganka clung to life. A graduate of the University of California—Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Herthel was an intern at the time, and he and his wife, Sue were driving north after a few days off in Los Angeles. Despite their tight schedule—they were due back the next morning—they stopped to visit a friend, Dr. Woody Asbury. When they walked in, Asbury was on the phone with a woman in Arroyo Grande whose horse was colicking, and he turned to Doug: could he help out? That was Sheila’s lucky day. In those days, colic surgeries were almost never done; the condition was very often a death sentence. But Herthel had worked on several pioneering surgeries at the university, so he agreed. When they arrived at Varian Arabians, Sheila had been walking *Naganka for three or four days, and both were exhausted, but there was more to come. After examining the mare, the two veterinarians agreed that the only chance they had was surgery, and given the circumstances, that was a gamble. Sheila’s reaction was an insight into her that Doug and Sue Herthel never forgot. “It was how Sheila lived her whole life with her horses,” Sue says. “She wasn’t an owner who just wanted to put an animal down. Anything that could be done or new that could be tried, she wanted to try.”

*Naganka lay on her back in her stall, supported by a crowd of staff and friends, her abdomen numbed by a local anesthetic while Doug performed surgery to relieve the strangulation of her small colon. She was so weak and sick, they didn’t want to run the risk of using much anesthesia, which proved to be a good call. The operation was successful; she not only survived, but the foal she was carrying did too. In the end, the only casualties were Sheila’s two front teeth. Because Herthel lived in Davis, he had to consult by telephone for follow-up care. “Sheila was taking the sutures out two weeks later, and *Naganka kicked her in the mouth and wiped out her front teeth,” he reports. “That was a minimal side distraction for Sheila. Her main concern was taking care of the horse.” There were other incidents, the sort of shared challenges that cement friendships, during that star-crossed time in Sheila’s life. Two years after *Naganka’s colic, *Bachantka’s foal presented breach and she needed a caesarian section immediately. By then, the Herthels had moved to Los Olivos, but Alamo Pintado was still in their future; all they had was a rental house and, fortunately, anesthesia equipment. When Sheila rolled up with *Bachantka in the trailer, they operated on their front lawn, with Sue as the anesthetist and Sheila as Doug’s surgical assistant. The mare and her foal came through fine. That was another of Sheila’s attributes, they note. She didn’t wait around; when a horse was in distress, she hauled it for medical attention rather than wait to monitor the situation and take a chance on its deteriorating.

*Bachantka

Even more impressive, Sheila didn’t know the Herthels or Doug’s capability. In coming years, they would found Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center, one of the most highly-regarded veterinary clinics in the world, but back then, they were just another young couple, one of whom was beginning his career. She went on blind trust and desperation.

“She would never ever give up,” Doug observes. “If a horse had something wrong with it, it didn’t matter what it took. She was frugal with her own things, but when it came to her horses, there was no limit.” There also was the tale of Bay-Lynn’s baby, Yumm Yumm, who had become epileptic after being kicked in the head. To give her a chance in life, Sheila held her in her arms for hours, day after day, so that when the filly suffered a grand mal seizure, the effects were minimized. It was exhausting, but Yumm Yumm recovered.

Eric Varian

Early1970s:Wenonah Varian, with Arabian horse trainer Bruce Howard and friends. Foucher photo

In 1973 came the biggest loss of all, when Wenonah Varian died. First Joan, then Eric, then her mother; more than twenty years later, Sheila remembered how bereft she felt, how bleak. “It’s a tough thing to go alone,” she said in AHT’s 1995 profile. “That’s the hardest of anything. Family is everything.” It would be seven or eight years, she added, before she felt with certainty that the clouds were beginning to lift. Thankfully, even if sometimes, looking back, her overriding memory was of going on alone, there were good times too, fine horses and friendships that would last for the rest of her life. One was with the Herthels, as not every encounter centered around a veterinary catastrophe. Since they all were young and building their businesses, they had to work at finding free time to get together, but in odd hours they managed to share a lot of laughter. There was the time they all finished a work day and sped south to Anaheim, intent on visiting Disneyland—only to find the park twenty minutes from closing. Not to be deterred, they ran at breakneck speed to ride the boat in the “It’s a Small World” exhibit, the insanity of their poor planning a reliably funny memory. Or the time they drove north to Janice Garrard’s farm near Willits to see her Polish horses. Relating the tale now, Sue Herthel can’t recall the details of the trip; they weren’t due at Garrard’s until the next morning, but why didn’t they have a place to stay? Were they short on money, or were the hotels full? Whatever it was, they slept in the car—a miniscule Chevy Vega that was probably more suited to two Chihuahuas than to two women, especially one as tall as Sheila. Even so, that may have been more comfortable than Doug’s accommodations. He bunked on the car’s roof.

On a more serious—but positive—note, Sue remembers that through those years, Sheila had a tremendous staff, one that even that far back included such talented horsemen and women as Jenny Ligon, Doug McVicker, and others (and over the years would feature such familiar names today as Martha Murdock Rattner, Cindy Reich, Mitch Sperte, Steve Heathcott and more). There were also friends in the neighborhood who stepped up whenever there was an emergency. Dave Bishop, Duane Scudder, Dr. and Mrs. Eugene Juel, Jeff Wonnell, Jay Stream and many other Arabian owners helped in crises, just because they cared about the horses. Through some of Sheila’s worst times, that strong support network was what got her through.

There was also her success in the show ring. As she went to the U.S. Nationals and Scottsdale year after year, she consistently came home with titles, which fueled interest in her breeding program. In the same fall of 1971 that *Naganka nearly died, Sheila rode the mare’s son, Mikado, to the U.S. National Championship in Park, and Ronteza’s son, Bay-Event, to his first U.S. National Championship in Stock Horse. Both Mikado, who also was an accomplished sire, and BayEvent, were by Bay-Abi. Bay-Event, however, also would play a role in another of Sheila’s most daunting episodes. As she had with Ronteza, she had trained him over several years and ridden him through a succession of open shows, where he defeated Quarter Horses, until he was ready for the Nationals. That year, in Oklahoma City, he won unanimously. Then he came home, and as a reward was given the winter off to run in the nearby hills—a break that ended in disaster. Pacific Gas & Electric had put crews in

38 | Sheila Varian

*Naganka

Sheila Varian | 39

the area to work on their equipment, and they had moved a fence on Varian property. One night in the rain, as Bay-Event trotted down a sloping path that he knew well, he slid into the unexpected fence and went down. By the time they found him the next morning, he was in shock, surrounded by spools of wire, with one wrapped tightly around his hind leg. “It had lacerated the major artery and vein, and he nearly bled to death,” Dr. Herthel recalls. “He also cut his flexor tendons and the suspensory ligament,” Once again, the veterinarian was called upon to work a miracle. “Sheila never gave up. There was no option to put him down.” They gave Bay-Event transfusions—as Sheila recalled, they were unable even to match blood types on the first one, the situation was so dire—and then Herthel transplanted tendons from a front leg to repair the damage. Bay-Event was in a full leg cast, all the way to the stifle, for six weeks.

Bay-Event

Because of the distance between Arroyo Grande and Los Olivos, Varian Arabians was often Herthel’s last stop of the day, and he recalls that it was nearly midnight on the evening he realized that he needed to remove the gelding’s cast. His cast cutter, though, was at Alamo Pintado, the new clinic he and Sue had just built, forty-five miles away. “We borrowed Doug McVicker’s grinding machine,” he says now, shaking his head at the memory. “It made so much noise and dust that it was unbelievable.” The only thing keeping Bay-Event rooted to Earth during the procedure—other than his own even temperament— was Sheila, who stood next to him, her arm draped over his shoulder, stroking him quietly. “Bay-Event just stood there, motionless, while we did it,” says Herthel. “He was really a great guy.” Still, no one ever expected the gelding to go back to work—but that is what he did. He recovered so well that years later, in 1976, Sheila took him to Louisville to win his second U.S. National Championship in Stock Horse. Again he was unanimous, defeating nineteen other horses. After that, she never showed him again. When he became bored with his retirement, he went to live with her friend Gracie Quartermaine, in her backyard, lapping up the attention and keeping in shape with trail rides. He died in his late twenties, well loved to the end.

Mikado, Winning the 1971 U.S. National Championship in Park and at home, with Sheila.

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In the familiar pattern of highs and lows, the same year that Bay-Event was injured, there were other interesting developments for Sheila. A mutual interest in Polish horses had inspired a friendship with theatre and film director Mike Nichols, and they determined to go into partnership on a stallion if the right one could be located. She traveled to Sweden and selected two candidates, along with a few mares that she needed for her program. One of the stallions, *Essaul, was to share with Nichols.

Sheila’s friend Mike Nichols, and (lower) Barbary, not long before Nichols saw him for the first time in 1973.

However, Nichols apparently was underwhelmed with *Essaul, and since Sheila really wanted to keep him, they agreed that he would choose a horse from her program for his part of the deal. Walking the pastures, he was enchanted with Balalinka’s baby, a cocky youngster from just the second crop of the Bay-Abi son, Bay El Bey. Around the farm, they called him “Polynesian,” although he had yet to be registered. “How about if I trade my half of *Essaul for that colt?” Nichols proposed. That met with her approval. Word has it that the colt was not that well regarded at the farm, and he didn’t rate much with Nichols’ trainer at the time, Jim Taasas, either. But before long, Taasas was followed by Nichols’ new partner Don DeLongpré. DeLongpré definitely did like the colt, who by that time Nichols had christened “Barbary,” following the tradition of repeating the first letter of the dam’s name. It may sound as though losing Barbary, who became a phenomenally successful stallion, was a setback for Varian, but in fact it was not. Different horses fit best with different people, and just as Bay-Abi was very much Sheila’s horse, Barbary was meant for Nichols and DeLongpré. Associated with them, he flourished—and his success reflected well on his sire, Bay El Bey. And if ever there was a bright spot in the 1970s, it was Bay El Bey. A foal of 1969, he grew into himself over the next decade, and proved that he was the next step in the Bay-Abi—the Varian—line.

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Sheila with the next step in her program, Bay El Bey.

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In the forty-five years of their friendship, Doug and Sue Herthel went through several harrowing experiences with Sheila and her horses, something that comes with the territory of raising animals. One stands out in their minds, particularly in light of the success and influence Varian Arabians would enjoy later. It happened in the early 1970s, when Doug was called to attend a mare at Elaine Williams’ Arabian farm in Buellton. The mare had been at Varian ranch to foal out, but sixty days after having her baby, she suddenly was exhibiting symptoms of hepatic coma, a severe form of serum hepatitis. “She was trying to walk through the walls and chew through the concrete,” Herthel recalls. “That mare died very quickly. The fatality rate on hepatic encephalopathy and serum hepatitis in the horse is almost one hundred percent.”

Escaping Tragedy: How Varian Arabians Nearly Ended In Its First Generation

When they investigated, they learned that a local pharmacy had sold Varian tetanus antitoxin serum, used to prevent tetanus. Each mare at the farm had been given the serum, which actually should have been given to the foals, not the mares (the only one who escaped was *Bachantka, who had recently undergone a C-section on the Herthels’ front lawn). Likely it was an error by a staff member, but the antitoxin had carried no warning of the danger of its use on mares. Two days after the first mare died, the ranch called Alamo Pintado: they had a mare who was in the same situation. “It was the most frightening time of my career, I think, before or since,” Dr. Herthel says now. “I realized that most of Sheila’s band was going to have it. We were looking at seventeen or eighteen mares who were at high risk of succumbing to serum hepatitis, and we had to come up with something.” Fortunately, Herthel had done a lot of work at Davis on serum hepatitis, so he was not without background. “It was relatively not uncommon in those days,” he says, “because it was due to an anti-serum that was not labeled with the possibility that it could cause serum hepatitis. So, horses could get sick and die across the state, and usually people didn’t even know what the diagnosis was except that the horse had died suddenly.”

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At Varian, the only answer was all-hands-on-deck, not just the staff, but every friend, associate and live body in the equine community who could help. Not only did the mares have to be monitored and cared for, but since the condition usually struck sixty days after foaling, every mare had a foal at side. “We started blood testing, doing special serum SDHs (sorbitol dehydrogenase testing), and working with Davis,” Herthel says. “We sent probably seven hundred SDHs overall, monitoring the horses every day, twenty-four/seven, because we found that that enzyme would elevate three days before the horse showed symptoms.” That meant one or two humans in every stall practically all the time, one to manage the mare and another to hold the foal, who might otherwise tear out its mother’s IV tube. Because of the number of mares and tests, the crew began manufacturing their own catheters to keep up with the sheer volume necessary. They also put all the horses on beet pulp and administered oral antibiotics and corticosteroids. “The idea of the low protein diet, corticosteroids and oral antibiotics was all new and was developed for this situation,” Herthel notes. “Even though I’d been working with hepatitis at UC Davis, we were all on new ground. The whole idea of the beet pulp was so that there was less ammonia production; the oral antibiotics were to decrease bacterial production of ammonia, and the corticosteroids were to decrease liver inflammation. Like I said, this was all new ground—but the alternative of not doing something new and different was losing every one of them.” Arabian breeders came in from all over the area, spelling each other to care for the horses. One, Ed Fitzsimmons, had a plane, and when they ran low on the fluids every mare needed, he flew up and down the coast, delivering fresh supplies. Incredibly, they kept it up around the clock for sixty days. “We had a few horses founder,” Herthel recalls, “but we got them over that. Basically, we saved ninety percent of the horses.” To make it all worse, this was going on while Wenonah Varian was dying. Sheila was fragile to begin with, in little shape to weather what was coming. In fact, no one wanted to say out loud what was

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happening: it would be too much for anyone to handle. “But she knew,” Sue Herthel says quietly, the gravity of the situation a clear memory even after so many years. “You could see it in her eyes.”It was so rough that Doug put in a call to Mike Nichols and told him what was happening. “‘I’m getting her on a plane and getting her out of there,’” they recall Nichols responding. The few days’ respite gave Sheila a chance to regain her energy for the coming ordeal. What followed, after it was all over and the herd was safe, spoke to the Herthels of their friend’s character. Sheila did not let the matter end there; she recruited a friend who was an attorney, with the goal of forcing the drug company to label the risk on the antiserum. “She said, ‘I’m not going to sue these people, but I’m going to go to court,’” Sue remembers. “It was a long procedure, but she got them to put an insert in the packaging that told people how to administer it and what not to do.” What happened at Varian Arabians had a much broader significance than just for Sheila or simply for the Arabian industry. It was important in the equine community as a whole. “This was a band of mares who were involved,” Doug Herthel explains. “Typically, when a horse got hepatitis, it was one horse at one farm. Many horses died suddenly, but no one knew the diagnosis. With the Varian outbreak, it became obvious that this serum was very dangerous—and it was being sold to horse owners in feed stores and pharmacies. But because it showed up sixty days after the antiserum was given, there had been very little connection between [the inoculation and the hepatitis]. As a result of what happened at Varian, serum hepatitis is almost nonexistent now.” Through the years, Doug and Sue Herthel remained silent about what had happened, but with Sheila gone, their perspective has changed. It was a major event, both for the danger it presented to horses and the exceptional dedication that saved them. “Scientifically and historically, it was important,” Doug observes. “It was such a scary, traumatic episode that the three of us could hardly talk about it,” Sue reflects. “Her dream of having such a wonderful herd, and doing what she ended up doing, would have been …” Her voice trails off. “Can you imagine?”

sure he had been Mikado the trailer, he was of t ou d ki y tr nds, that coun pounds on my ha 0 00 1, When I unloaded e n sa in had an r planet. Since I that nothing shipped to anothe rationalize to him to d ie tr d an l al us in a st ind occurred, so I locked the two of . No change of m as w it d ce n vi n he was co ing Champion could be as bad as stall with my com ed os cl e th in ht d all nig Since both I spent all day an ly to keep me fed. al on si ca oc in h o or a sandwic ing about Mikad kl in an while mom threw d ha y od l, nob from e locked in a stal dding! Getting ki ou y Mikado and I wer re A . ... rs his ea rned. ainly didn’t clip far as I was conce as t who he was. I cert en hm is pl m acco ena would be the the stalls to the ar with g and prancing n ti or sn m hi d le dI ium ass was called an e arena, pandemon th to When Mikado’s cl in at co er lv s si ’s lips. le sparkling on hi ords on everybody w e every black dapp th e er w T” A TH the crowd. “WHO IS en came back into th d went through the an s as cl g in o won his qualify he was and it By the time Mikad erybody knew who ev , ip sh on pi am ll” tallion Ch about my “colt hi rs ea y ring to win the S 30 st la e th r g I have received fo started the kiddin hidden. own treasures are kn un e th l al re he w The words of Sheila Varian

46 | Sheila Varian

If Bay-Abi was the foundation of Sheila’s program, Bay El Bey was its acceleration. His influence took Varian Arabians to a height in the industry from which there was no looking back. It is hard to compare the breeding careers of sires then to those of today; until the late 1980s, using natural cover, they were mated with far fewer mares. In his day, Bay-Abi bred from eight to twenty-five mares a year, and by the time he got Bay El Bey, he already had thrown one very successful show horse—Mikado, in his second crop—who would go on to sire seven national titlists (all but one of whom were in the English division, six of them national champions, some repeatedly). However, none of Bay-Abi’s other sons came close to the stretchy bay colt born in 1969 from *Naganka. Sheila had a goal in mind. She wanted to increase the size and stretchiness of the foals she was producing, which was not uncommon at the time. The introduction of the Polish horses had expanded the picture for many American breeders, who were used to the slightly shorter, rounder look of the Crabbet-based Arabians they had known for so long. Longer necks were becoming a priority, and for Sheila, a personal non-negotiable was that she maintain Bay-Abi’s visual balance and lovely temperament. Bay El Bey provided all of that. The problem was, Sheila was so immersed in dealing with her parents’ illnesses that she was not as attuned to her foal crops as she typically would have been; she didn’t closely examine the babies of 1969 who were sent out to Colt Hill, the terrain-challenging pasture where her young males developed not only muscle but mentality. That year, she didn’t re-evaluate them on a regular basis, so, essentially, she had no idea of what she had in *Naganka’s youngster.

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Bay El Bey

Bay El Bey Winning in English Pleasure with S heila Varian.

And as always, she needed the money the ranch brought in from sales when breeder Gene Turner, of Sagamore Park Arabians, in Indianapolis, approached her two years later to buy a stallion prospect. Her recollections of the event have varied as the years passed. In 1999, she is quoted in Marian Carpenter’s Arabian Legends as saying that Mr. Turner and his trainer, Victor Kerr, visited the farm and made the offer, with delivery to come at Scottsdale, assuming the horse was sound. In her own “Lifetime with Arabians” account, she said that the deal was struck “sight unseen.” She also listed $12,500 and $15,000 as the price, both reasonable quotes in that era, but negligible today for the horse Bay El Bey would become. One thing is for sure: when she brought the colt in from the pasture and had him body-clipped, she realized that she had made a mistake. At fifteen-two, he offered the kind of height she was looking for, a long, well-shaped neck, smoothly-composed conformation, and her cherished temperament. Even more, his neck culminated in a poll that lent elasticity to how he used it—how, conceivably, his get would use theirs. She was crestfallen at what she was letting go. Thankfully,

when the day for exchange came, the picture had changed. Bay El Bey emerged from his stall dead lame, which rendered him unsound. He was diagnosed with an infected tendon (probably the result of a puncture wound, as she sometimes said). At any rate, by her account, his being unsound led to his sale being invalidated when the buyer rejected him. What Sheila couldn’t know was that Mr. Turner was never sure exactly what shape Bay El Bey was in. At least one member of his family didn’t believe the story and advocated pursuing the purchase in any case. What was important for the Varian program was that Gene Turner told the family that if Bay El Bey was that necessary to Sheila’s program, he was not going to insist on anything. There would be other stallions. Three days of antibiotics cleared the problem, and the colt was sound again—and hers. That was one of a few scary occasions in the early history of Varian Arabians that was make-or-break, and when the penny dropped, it hit right side up.

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Sheila’s next job was to get her colt in the show ring, because he would need accolades to put him on the public’s radar as a sire. Two years later, when he was four, she took him to Scottsdale; just months before Wenonah Varian died, she was able to watch as he was named the show’s champion stallion. Then it was on to the first of eight appearances in the national show ring, beginning at the 1973 Canadian Nationals, where he earned a top ten in the stallion class. (Interestingly, another top ten in the class was Bay Image, a 1966 son of Bay-Abi, out of *Ostroga, bred by Varian Arabians and then sold.) Over six years, Bay El Bey would score one national championship, two reserves and five top tens. Looking back, his biggest obstacles in halter were probably his head; he was handsome, but not dishy-pretty, and his slightly sloping croup, which was excellent for performance but not especially appreciated in the halter ring. Still, when he was named 1977 Canadian National Champion Stallion, he defeated quite a few horses who would be well-supported sires. Amurath Bandolero, who would be 1978 U.S. National Champion, was reserve to him, and in the top ten were, among others, Jora Honey Ku (1978 Canadian National Champion Stallion) and Kaborr (later Canadian National Champion Stallion and U.S. National Reserve Champion to Gai-Parada and *Aladdinn). Also named top ten was his son, Barbary, who would make his name in the English division but was beautiful enough for stallion halter as well. Bay El Bey’s two national reserve championships in stallion halter came in the United States, in 1974 to Gai Adventure and 1976 to *El Paso. It is worth noting that he was a successful English Pleasure contender as well; in 1976 and 1977, he earned the Scottsdale Reserve Championship in the discipline. Sheila always laughed that her fitness routine to prepare Bay El Bey for his shows (which worked equally well for halter and performance), was unique. The two of them, along with her dog Amber, would go for a ride out on the ranch, and at a particular rock meet a rabbit—who, it became obvious over time, waited there for them by choice. The rabbit would bolt, Amber would run after him (or her), and Sheila and Bay El Bey would follow for a good twenty-minute run that kept his muscles strong and his agility—honed by avoiding stones, rabbit holes and other hidden dangers—at peak. By the time they left for a show, he was rock solid. And his temperament was so even that he rode to that stellar Canadian Nationals of 1977 cross-tied in the luggage area of the farm’s trailer because all the stalls were full of other contenders. She called him a gentle soul, and that extended to the show ring. “He never pulled on the halter, pushed or stepped on me,” she wrote in her “Lifetime” article about him. “He preferred to put his head in my arms and let the rest of the world go by.”

Bay El Bey, the combination of conformation and performance ability. Photo by Gregg Cobarr

Bay El Bey’s sons Bey Shah (below) and Barbary with Don DeLongpre (right).

By far, Bay El Bey’s biggest role at Varian Arabians was as a sire, particularly of stallions. His three most famous sons—Huckleberry Bey, Barbary and Bey Shah—had a profound impact on the breed in both halter and performance from the 1980s through today’s show ring, at first directly in some of the most successful competitors of all time, and now as strong pedigree influences. Sheila called him “The Kingmaker.” Barbary, the colt for whom Mike Nichols traded his interest in *Essaul, came first, a member of Bay El Bey’s second foal crop, out of Balalinka, the 1968 daughter of *Bachantka, by *Bask. After he was weaned, the youngster was shipped to Nichols’ farm in Connecticut to grow up, where he remained for two years until Nichols’ partner, Don DeLongpré, arrived. “When I got back there and started training him, I had him trained in three months and to a show where he went champion in driving and English,” DeLongpré remembers. “That is just how that guy was—he was unbelievably trainable and his babies were all that same way.”

driving and formal driving. And he went on to an impressive career at stud. “When we moved back to California,” DeLongpré remembers, “I had him syndicated over the phone in three days.” Barbary sired seven hundred and sixty get, including an array of national champions. One of them was NDL Pericles, whose record of thirty national championships earned him the acclamation of “winningest national champion of all time,” a record which stood until 2016. Meanwhile, Barbary’s son Baybary, long topped the Half-Arabian list of horses with the most national championships. The second in the triumvirate of stallions who put Bay El Bey’s name up in lights was Bey Shah, whose story is known for its chance beginning. Lester and Jennie Walton, who owned the *Bask daughter Star of Ofir, did not start out planning to breed to Bay El Bey. In fact, they drove in at Varian Arabians to ask for directions when they got lost looking for another farm, where they were taking their mare to be bred to another stallion. Sheila invited them to inspect Bay El Bey, and in no time, they were walking Star Of Ofir off the trailer.

For the rest of his life, Barbary would be DeLongpré’s favorite. “To me he was more like a dog than a horse,” the trainer muses. It’s clear that he means it as a tribute to the stallion’s endearing personality. “A lot of horses don’t care about you, but not Barbary. In the last days before he died, I would turn him loose and go out and garden, and he would just follow me around. Mares would come to the fence, and he wouldn’t even look up. It was like, ‘C’mon, I’m out here with dad, working.’”

Bey Shah was born in 1976. Like Barbary’s dam, Balalinka, Star Of Ofir was a *Bask daughter, but the similarities ended in the bottom quarter of his pedigree, where the names were all of respected old domestic stock, such as Ga’Zi and Abu Farwa. The combination produced a striking youngster whose good looks made him popular in the show ring. In 1979, he scored a top ten at the U.S. Nationals in stallion halter, and in 1980, was U.S. National Reserve Champion Stallion. In 1981, he closed his national career with another top ten in Canada. However, there is more to that record that meets a cursory glance. In the U.S. in 1979, he lost to a young sensation named *Aladdinn, and the following year was reserve to the highly-regarded Russian import, *Muscat. In Canada in 1981, he was behind a budding phenomenon named *Padron.

Barbary was successful at just about everything he did. In the show ring, he was a multi-national titlist who scored two top tens in stallion halter, as well as in the English division, where he was a national reserve champion in park and top ten in English pleasure, pleasure

More importantly for history, Bay Shah bred on. He sired nine hundred eighty-six registered foals, including more than three hundred champions, a third of whom were national champions. In 1987, he enjoyed the honor of siring both the U.S. National Champion Stallion, Fame VF,

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At ease in the world: Barbary.

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and the U.S. National Champion Mare, Shahteyna, in the same year. The real value, though, is that many of his sons and daughters also were successful as sires and dams. Fame VF, who died prematurely, sired five hundred thirty-six foals, including several standout breeding stallions and, like Bey Shah, broodmares (for example, the dam of the multi-national champion and globally-celebrated halter sire Marwan Al Shaqab was a national champion daughter of Fame VF). At the close of the twentieth century, Bey Shah was called the leading living sire of U.S. and Canadian National halter winners of all time. His influence was so strong that he remains one of the most desirable influences in halter pedigrees today. And finally, there was Huckleberry Bey, the next step in the Varian breeding program and one of the most successful and influential sires in the Arabian English Pleasure division today. The charismatic bay was foaled in 1976, the same year as Bey Shah, and his accomplishments are covered in his own chapter in this book. It might be surprising that with all of that going on, Sheila leased out Bay El Bey twice—but again, no one then had any idea of the overwhelming impact he would have. In the early 1970s, he lived at Lasma for a year, in trade for her having the *Bask son, Hask, and in 1984 and ’85, he went to Rohara, in Orange Lake, Florida. Rohara’s Roxann Hart remembers the day Sheila Varian made her an offer. Preparing to move her operation to the Ocala area, she was still in Miami at the time, and took the call in the barn aisle. “I got off the phone and kind of sat down,” she says. “I was like ‘wow.’ For her to pick out Rohara was a pretty big deal. I was both humbled and excited about it.” Rohara was just establishing its national reputation at the time, she explains. Her headline stallion, Ivanhoe Tsultan, had seen his daughter Rohara Tsultress named U.S. National Champion Mare in 1981, so Sheila’s selection was a noteworthy endorsement. “I think she was promoting Huckleberry Bey,” Hart says, looking back. “That was Bay El Bey’s big son at the time, coming on, and moving him to a different side of the country would give Huck more exposure. Back then, people came to the farms to see the stallions and sent their mares to the farm. We didn’t have shipped semen when I had him.”

Huckleberry Bey, with Sheila Varian.

With two satellite operations at the time, Hart recalls that she was “busier than a one-armed fandancer,” but even so, some memories remain as clear in her mind as the day they happened. “We had a wonderful party, eleven hundred people or more, at the Ocala Jockey Club,” she says. “The Jockey Club had a pond, and on the far side was a big berm where we showed the stallions. There was the most beautiful sunset that evening, and Bay El Bey was on the left, Ivanhoe Tsultan on the right. A band was playing and we marched those two horses toward one another and it was a sight you will never, ever forget. It was like, ‘Hey, guys, this is the Arabian breed. Just look at those two horses.’ It was a special moment.”

Bay El Bey & The Blind Boy From “A Lifetime With Arabians: Bay El Bey, The Kingmaker,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES April 2009. Bay El Bey, who anchors the sire line between two especially colorful figures, Bay-Abi and Huckleberry Bey, seemed to possess a much less vivid temperament. But this would be an erroneous conclusion; he just marched to the beat of his own drum. He was a good citizen—a remarkably sentient, steady fellow, dependable in his character as well as his outstanding ability at stud. Here is one unforgettable moment. “We were at the Nationals—I think in Louisville, so it was probably 1978—when Bay El Bey was nine years old. After the championship class, the champion, reserve and top ten stallions were always kept in the ring, and the audience was invited to come down and see the horses close up, which was a wonderful opportunity for people to seriously look at the winners. You might be in the arena for an hour, as people moved from one horse to another, and it was a long time for a horse to stand up. In those days, the halter classes were reasonably long to begin with. Going through all the cuts, you’d be up against forty or fifty horses in stallion halter, since there were no junior or futurity classes. “Bay El Bey was standing up and I was standing at the end of his lead, about ten feet away. He was an imposing stallion; he would stand with this very regal air that was him to his soul. People crowded around and looked at him as they went from horse to horse in the ring. I saw this young man—a kid really, about eighteen or twenty years old, with very refined features—walk slowly up to Bay El Bey. Another man was close by, obviously with the young man, but just apart. Bay El Bey was standing up with a big pose, very tall at his fifteen-two, with that wonderful swan neck that he has given to the breed, looking out over everyone. “When the boy reached up to touch Bay El Bey’s nose, I realized suddenly that there was something different going on here. Bay El Bey slowly, gently, dropped his head to the boy’s level, and the boy started tracing my stallion’s nostrils inside and out, then sliding his fingers slowly up into and around his eyes. Bay El Bey was standing absolutely stock-still, with his head lowered, his eyes half-shut, as the kid’s fingers searched his face, going up his forehead, around the edges of his ears and then inside. With his touch, the boy traced forever the memory of Bay El Bey. Bay never moved a muscle. “The crowd around Bay El Bey at this point also perceived that something very, very special was happening and silently stepped back. It became obvious that the kid was blind. Quietly, very much alone, he traced every bit of Bay El Bey’s face. It was as though a light was shining down on my wonderful brown horse and this young man; all the rest of us were on the periphery of the light—just horse lovers on the outside, looking in on a horse that instinctively knew what people often miss. It was no longer a horse show, but rather, a very touching moment. Everyone close stopped moving, looking and talking, and silently let the magic of a horse and a blind boy happen. “When the young man moved away, Bay El Bey lifted his head and resumed his show horse pose, and those of us on the outside stood entranced with what we had been a part of. Remembering it still makes me catch my breath.”

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On a more personal note, she laughs. “I remember Sheila said Bay El Bey was easy to breed. I was the one who bred a lot of our horses, so I thought, ‘Okay, well, today we’re breeding Bay El Bey,’ and he was a gentleman—somewhat. By the time I got to the breeding shed and he saw the mare over behind the wall, I thought I had a ten-story building. I told Sheila, ‘I have never seen anything grow so big!’” Bay El Bey returned to California in 1986, his same, pleasant self. Angela Alvarez, general manager at Varian, remembers using him to tease his own mares, just as his sire had done, although she led him rather than rode him, as Sheila had Bay-Abi. He was retired from breeding in 1988, but never lost his popularity. He liked to greet visitors from his doorway, standing majestically, his hooves planted on the door sill, lowering his head for his pets. Sheila usually stood a dozen or more feet away, enjoying watching the exchange. Even with his willingness, however, Bay El Bey did not register as cuddly on the spectrum of Varian temperaments, Alvarez notes. The “regal, reserved, elegant” description was most accurate. “He was my favorite,” she says, “but he was very serious.” As his age advanced, Bay El Bey grew less comfortable in the stallion barn, so Sheila moved him to the breeding shed, where he could have his own paddock. Later, when his son Huckleberry Bey became ill, they shared a pasture until Huck died. Then the older stallion moved back to his own field for the rest of his life. He died at age twenty eight on November 25, 1996, and is buried in the cemetery on the farm.

Bay El Bey, for all his importance to the Varian breeding program, was not the only story of the 1970s. There were other horses as well; many of the mares were champions, but best known were Mikado and his son, Comment. It is worthwhile to note that both Mikado and Comment spent time in training with other horsemen. Jeff Wonnell worked many of Sheila’s early English horses, including Mikado, a 1963 son of Bay-Abi that he called “wicked talented,” and *Essaul. And Sheila and Gene LaCroix on occasion traded training services; she worked some of his western horses, while he schooled Bay El Bey and Comment in English. Sheila rode Mikado, who was out of *Naganka, to the 1971 U.S. National Championship in Park, and stood him at stud until 1982, when he was sold. He sired several national champions, but the most famous was Comment, who was out of *Ostroga. That Comment had potential was no secret to Sheila—the only question was potential what? She told her friend Sherry Conrads that when it was time to break him to saddle, she started in his stall because she figured that if he reared up, she could grab the roof truss. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary.

There was more to the 1970s than just breeding horses and hard work, as one iconic photo from that era proves. It’s iconic because it is of Gene LaCroix and Sheila Varian, two of the best-known people in the history of the Arabian breed, being silly at a horse show. It happened at the Ohio Buckeye in May 1977.

Fun & Games

“My brother Raymond had just gotten married, so he couldn’t be there,” LaCroix remembers. “Sheila came with me to be my assistant, which was obviously fun, and we entered a horse called Bomarc in the versatility class. I think you had to do five different disciplines—I did jumping, and probably western pleasure, English pleasure, park, whatever. You had to change your attire—tack on the horse and your attire—in the ring. So, for fun, Sheila brought a hula hoop and fixed a cloth around it like a curtain, and I’d get in the middle and pretend like I was changing clothes.” (For the record, no one stripped in the ring; it was all an illusion, as chaps covered jods, western shirts were camouflaged under formal coats, and hats were quickly donned or discarded.) He chuckles. “We hammed it up! There were probably a lot of people there who had heard of Sheila Varian, but had never seen her, and that was their introduction.” It’s fair to wonder what the Buckeye crowd, which in those days was huge and hailed from all over the east and Midwest, thought of that first exposure. If nothing else, they learned that while she was a serious breeder, she clearly had a great sense of humor.

Comment was a story all his own and would be talked about more now had he left his own legacy, but as a gelding, his contributions came in the show ring. In a nearly decade-long show career, he won the 1978 U.S. National Championship in English Pleasure, a year after he had finished reserve behind the lovely Featurette. In 1980 and 1984, he added the U.S. National Reserve Championship in Park, the first time to Pro-Fire and the second to the leg-waving Orans Adagio. There also were several top tens, including one at the U.S. Nationals in Informal Combination. Martha Murdock Rattner, who worked for Sheila as a trainer late in Comment’s career, remembers being in Louisville with the gelding in 1984. He was fifteen, and they were taking careful notice of his feet, which had seen a lot of miles. She still smiles when she recalls a remark by one of the farriers in the test barn after the national championship class. “Huck, Sweet Inspiration V and Comment had all gone reserve,” she recalls. “They all wore ten-ounce plates, and he was saying, ‘Maybe she wouldn’t keep on being reserve if she’d put some shoes on these horses!’ “Comment was so explosive in his animation, like a big Saddlebred,” Rattner says. “Rattle a can, and he dropped his butt. I’ve never seen a purebred Arabian do that like he did—and you could really tell it when he was hooked to a cart. One day I had him jogging in the outdoor arena, just to get him fit, when the shavings guy came and

Comment [reacted by elevating his motion]. That horse had the most amazing hindquarters and hind leg angulation; it was perfection, like a Hackney. His hocks pointed to the ground, and he lifted up—it was like looking up a ladder—and his head came up and his hind end went down, and away that cart went. I thought, ‘I’m never going to get him to stop!’ And, of course, he’s just trotting. “His anatomy was perfect,” she adds. “He had great cannons, great knees, great feet, these great big baseball eyes, and a kind of boxy muzzle with that big pink nose. But those eyes! He had *Ostroga eyes, and no other horse had eyes like *Ostroga’s babies.” And so Varian Arabians cruised on in its third generation. Bay-Abi had launched the program with authority, but his sons and daughters were carrying it on with even greater strength. Unlike many programs which fade when the star-power of their original horses dims, Varian’s momentum was ramping up. Looking back, Roxann Hart remembers Bay El Bey’s contribution to the breed. “He represented so many things that the industry needed so desperately at that time,” she observes. “We needed the length of leg, the set to the neck, the ability to perform, and he gave us that. And he was the head of a trilogy of three horses that could not have been more different—Barbary, Bey Shah and Huckleberry Bey—and yet each one carried on his own genetic line. It was a true dynasty, and it is still current today.”

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In his lifetime, Huckleberry Bey was a memorable horse, both for the public and for those who knew him well. For horse show audiences, he lit up the ring in halter, English pleasure and liberty; to his crew at home, he was a character, an amiable fellow whose brain was always humming, finding fun in the smallest things (he loved catching a jacket zipper in his teeth and running it up and down). It was after his death that he became a phenomenon: as a sire, he carved out his place in history, delivering a legacy with the same full-power, home run accuracy as Bay El Bey. Or, perhaps, more. As may sound typical with the stories of Varian horses, Huck’s origins were a little serendipitous. In 1971, his dam, Taffona, was available at the attractive price of $3,000 because she wouldn’t accept her first foal. That didn’t deter Sheila; she was focusing on the five-year-old mare’s bloodlines. Her sire was 1965 U.S. National Champion Stallion Raffon, and her dam was Waneta, whose pedigree recalled some of the early Varian mares, from families of some of the best old breeding programs in America. The heritage was largely Crabbet, with bolts of intriguing Polish influence— interesting because the names were not the usual suspects (some came through Germany or from before World War II). Selby, Harris, Brown and Babson all played a role in the young mare’s genetic history, but even with the less well-known horses, Varian would have been familiar with their pedigrees and what they would do. All she had to do was overcome Taffona’s aversion to her foals. In her “Lifetime” column, Sheila detailed how the root of the mare’s problem was mostly physical. “When Taffona foaled, her bag was very tight and hot, so every three to four hours I gave her a little bit of diuretic to take away the pain,” she explained. “In twenty-four hours she loved her baby, and from then on, she was a good, solid-producing mare.” Undoubtedly that occurred, but employees from the time recalled that it was not quite as overnight as it might have sounded, and breeding manager Marnie Sperry also worked with Taffona for three years to ensure that she was safe with her foals.

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Huckleberry Bey

Huckleberry Bey was the mare’s fourth foal for Varian, born March 19, 1976, and he was a standout from the start. “With all of his curves, his tail and his expression, he looked like one of the beautiful horses on a carousel,” Sheila recalled in her “Lifetime” column. When it came time to name the flashy youngster, the decision was easy. “The picture that kept running through my mind as I thought of this cheerful, happy, curious, clever, long-legged, little bay colt was of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, floating down a river in his denim shorts torn off at the knees, chewing on a straw, eating berries, and watching the world go by,” she wrote. “That’s how I came up with ‘Huckleberry,’ and the ‘Bey’ was for his dad.” As she recorded, the colt found endless entertainment in mischief, but it was sunny, good-humored mischief; he was not mean or difficult, and he made everyone smile. He was also astoundingly pretty—almost, in the early years, feminine, before he grew into his full stallion persona. His earliest experiences in the show ring were in halter, where he finished third in his classes at Scottsdale as a two- and three-year-old. By late 1979, however, when he went to the U.S. Nationals, he was coming into himself enough to be named U.S. National Reserve Champion Futurity Colt. The only entry in front of him was the popular Egyptian-bred, Ruminaja Ali.

Huckleberry Bey as a yearling.

At that time, Varian Arabians was known for its apprentice program, wherein young horse enthusiasts who wanted to learn more about their trade worked in exchange for room and board. Looking back, Sheila never was sure whether she was the first one to ride Huckleberry Bey or apprentice Bill Haven was, but they both worked the stallion through the winter of 1980, and in May, she accompanied him into the show ring. At Red Bluff, they aced the English Pleasure junior horse competition, and then went on to win most, but not all, of their championship classes that summer. The U.S. Nationals open class was a different story, however: there, Huck ran into the legendary FF Summer Storm, who many horsemen still call the definition of English pleasure. She won the championship that year, but to be in the top ten behind her as a four-year-old, as Huckleberry Bey was, was rated an admirable accomplishment. The next year would be busy as well, the big difference being that he returned to stallion halter and earned the title of U.S. National Top Ten Stallion at Albuquerque. Then, just four months later, he won the 1982 Scottsdale Championship in English Pleasure. From then on, his career was in the English division; in 1982 and ’83, he logged national top tens before finishing off his career with the U.S. National Reserve Championship in 1984, second to Gai-Argosy and Bob Battaglia. In an era that saw some of the great names of English pleasure, Huckleberry Bey and Sheila Varian more than held their own—not only in performance, but also in halter.

Huckleberry Bey, 1979 Cal Bred Futurity Champion Colt.

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Tracing Varian history, the appearance of Bay El Bey and his son in English, which even then had become a distinct specialty, might seem unusual for a woman who had grown up in the western world. In the 1960s, it was not uncommon to see horses participate in both disciplines, but by the mid-1970s, that habit was disappearing rapidly. Sheila’s shift into English was not just because she had horses who were suited to it, but also because from a marketing standpoint, English was becoming more required, a side effect of the trend to Polish horses. “If it was going to be an English horse, everything was pure Polish,” she wrote, “and at that time in the performance world, English horses were important and western horses were definitely not important.” That had a bearing on Huckleberry Bey’s career at stud; when he began, at the opening of the 1980s, performance sires that weren’t pure Polish faced an uphill battle. “I had my own band of mares,” she noted, “and thank heavens I did, because those were the good mares that Huck got for the first twelve years of his life.” That may be true, but perhaps a little overstated, as among others, the very successful Hucklebey Berry was foaled in 1984 at the height of Polish mania. Bred by Mrs. Leland Mekeel and her daughter, Linda Mekeel Madsen, he was out of the Mekeels’ well-regarded Miz Bask, a *Bask daughter who was 1975 U.S. National Champion in Park AOTR. Her pedigree included a tail female line of classic, proven domestic lines. No matter who his partners were, though, Huckleberry Bey was remarkably successful at stud. In the previous two decades, it had not been uncommon for show ring announcers at the Nationals to look down an English line-up in center ring and point out to the audience that half or more of the horses were by *Bask. By the mid-1990s, they were saying that about Huckleberry Bey.

It was quite an achievement, a testament to the Varian breeding program, and it had happened during one of the most tempestuous times in the history of the Arabian breed in North America. Sheila lived through it all with her stallion, but he was not the only story in her life at the time.

Sheila once commented that it took her seven or eight years to overcome the desolation that followed her mother’s death—the sense of loneliness that made her solitary responsibility for the ranch, its horses and its people, seem extra heavy. By the early 1980s, as Huckleberry Bey was coming on, she felt that she was doing better, even though the current craze for “pure this or straight that” defied her belief that a good horse was more important than a fashionable pedigree. It is unlikely that she ever realized how the demanding years affected her temperament. By the early 1980s, several people who worked with her commented on the many sides of her personality at the time. They saw the warm, cheerful side that so many in her youth had observed, but in the space of an instant, it could dissolve into chilly unpredictability. Or there was the shy side that found her uncomfortable in one-on-one conversations—a stark contrast to her at-ease, effective public identity that could deliver speeches to crowds. It was perplexing and sometimes disheartening for them, because in difficult situations, even good work could result in dismissal. (As one commented, when something went wrong, she had to have someone to blame, even if whatever happened was unavoidable.) It is worth mentioning, however, that at no time did anyone speaking now diminish the thorough nature of her horsemanship; that was a steady anchor for everyone throughout the period.

Huckleberry Bey, U.S. National Top Ten in English Pleasure 1983.

Huckleberry Bey, U.S. National Top Ten in English Pleasure 1982.

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Huckleberry Bey and Sheila Varian, 1984 U.S. National Reserve Champions in English Pleasure.

Huckleberry Bey

Taken in the context of her life, the most appropriate explanation of her unpredictability might be the pressure of running the ranch on a shoestring. She always was open about the fact that in those days, it had to pay for itself, which was not easy; horses are notoriously more active in the debit column than the credit unless they are show stars. Sheila had her share of stars, and even, to discerning horsemen, superstars, but not always the kind who would command big bucks. Combine that with her dream for her program, and the weight of her mission was heavy. At any rate, she carried on. The ranch was growing, becoming more complicated than it had been starting out. By the 1980s, she was hiring trainers: among others still active in the industry today, Mitch Sperte was one, as well as Martha Murdock Rattner and Steve Heathcott. Noted horse show judge and breeding specialist Cindy Reich worked in the breeding division, and Mark Wharton, of Peregrine Arabians, was there during that period as well. Rattner remembers the ranch’s unique circumstances. She and Wharton had transferred in from Nichols-DeLongpré in 1982, and found a different world from the luxury one they left. Sheila’s horses were top drawer, but as one friend of hers had observed, she basically held the place together with “chewing gum and baling wire.” “We had an old, old, silver and black trailer that had been turned over,” Martha recalls of transporting horses. “It blew tires all the time. And we had an old BMW, a sports car that was basically the farm car that went to horse shows. I think she got that in a trade for a bill.” Then, in the early 1980s, Sheila hit a stable period, and tired of the constant scrimping and personal denial, decided to treat herself to an admittedly “girly” bedroom. Her old enjoyment of beauty and femininity, relegated to a backburner while she kept the ranch going, was still in her. When a contractor friend suggested that Don Severa, who had left a successful Orange County architectural practice to live on a self-sufficient ranch in the area, could help, she was game. And in the process of renovating her bedroom and bath, she and Severa began a life together that would span twenty years. What attracted them to each other? Severa can offer only his point of view. “Her intelligence,” he says. “We did lots of talking. And her drive to achieve—that was always a huge lure for her.” Sheila was more vocal on what it wasn’t, and that was her culinary ability. “I cooked for Don once, and that was it,” she said dryly.

Whether she had had other relationships since her more social college days, only she could have said. What is known is that for her and Severa, the commitment ran deep, although they did not live together. Her life was at Varian ranch and his remained centered at his own property forty miles away, but he came and went through the week and she spent weekends with him. “We were inseparable,” he remembers. “We spoke by phone several times a day. And on weekends we herded cattle during the day and enjoyed a barbeque and margaritas in the evening. Every decision, no matter how large or small, we made together.” Early on, he got involved in management of Varian Arabians, a development that was critical to Sheila’s future. She was an expert in horses and not bad at business where common sense was involved, but from Don, she would learn more sophisticated techniques. He helped reorganize her staff, taking advantage of the talent she had on hand and weeding out some who were not good fits. Then he addressed marketing. As he recalls, the real wake-up call for both of them was the 1982 sale that Varian did in conjunction with her friend, Mike Nichols. By that time, Nichols owned a ranch in San Marcos Pass, just south of Santa Ynez on the road to Santa Barbara, and the property was spectacular —California live oaks dotted spreading fields of golden grass, and mission-style adobe barns posed before a backdrop of mountains and a lake. It was a showplace. At the Varian ranch, there were maybe three trees on the property, and one was in Bay-Abi’s paddock. (That fact was not unobserved by others; Rattner remembers bringing plants and bushes home from their show set-ups to improve the Varian look, and Scott Trees once requested that they rent trees to create ambiance for a photography session.)

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Inspired by the “Nichols-DeLongpré Sale III, with Varian Arabians,” Severa designed a new Varian ranch entrance, using red rock and adding an electric iron gate, landscaping and lighting. A van driver servicing the operation at the time later commented, not unkindly, that the gate was the only thing at Varian Arabians which was as first class as its horses; the rest was just a working ranch. Standing in the way of any further renovation, however, was the property’s distribution of water. “Sheila had wells, but she needed a storage tank,” Severa remembers (the staff’s only way to water plants was with a hose). From his own ranch, he knew that the tank needed to be located at a certain elevation so that there would be enough water pressure to serve the facility below. “I borrowed a survey instrument and Sheila and I started at the valley floor, at ranch level,” he says. “She held the surveying rod and I looked through the scope. There’s a way you can create elevation; you just keep changing the location of the tripod and rod, and keep swinging your way up the mountain. She had a high mountain on one side of the ranch and we worked our way up there until we had seventy-five pounds of water pressure at the ranch floor. That’s where we built a water tank.” After that, with irrigation, they had grass growing year-round and they began planting trees. Where did they get the money to do it? “I have no idea, we were both so broke,” he chuckles. He was good at bidding projects, though, a skill from his old days as an architect. Their next project was a barn. Sheila, who had judged the Polish Nationals in 1981, loved Janow Podlaski’s clock tower barn, and Don set out to create one for her. Near her house was a structure—poles with a roof—that she had used as a shed for assorted ranch junk; that would be the beginning. Under the roof, they plotted the width (twenty-four feet) and length (seventy-two feet) of an aisle, and on either side, installed twelve by twelve-foot stalls in prefabricated panels. Then Don put in studs and dressed up the appearance with redwood siding and sliding doors. To reference Poland, he’d acquired a Herman Miller clock wholesale and put it in a metal surround to prevent rust; that was added to the project. And, in keeping with the fancy, exotic appearance of other Arabian operations of the time, a giant chandelier was suspended in the middle of it all. It still wasn’t enough, he determined. The barn needed something spectacular at the end of the aisle, and he had an idea. Sheila had only recently begun to add “V” to her horses’ names, and at the sale she and Mike had done, Mike’s theatrical set had included both the NDL and Varian logos. Severa sent ranch workers to Nichols-DeLongpré to pick up the leftover large “V.” Sheila’s new barn, the showpiece of her property, was finished. It has changed little since. “It started to look more profitable,” Don said, “more typical of Arabian ranches at the time.” It would be a worthy setting for their stepped-up marketing campaigns to come. One of their earliest efforts was the syndication of Huckleberry Bey. It was 1983, and everyone was syndicating stallions; why not capitalize on what was Sheila’s biggest asset?

Clock Barn at Varian Arabians.

Syndicating Huck facilitated the next step at Varian Arabians. Sheila had beautiful horses, Don says, and her ideas for a beautiful ranch were beginning to happen—but she needed cash flow. All around them in the business, stallions were being syndicated. The first step was to draw up a syndicate agreement, and for that, Sheila’s network of contacts was useful. (She chose an attorney who had helped her years before when she’d bought a stallion who turned out to be sterile and the seller had refused to refund her money. As Sheila told the story to Don, the catch was that the seller lived down the street from a member of the mafia and might very well be one himself. “‘This guy could shoot us,’” he remembers Sheila saying she warned the attorney. “The lawyer pulled a .38 out of her desk drawer and said, ‘Stick close to me and let ’em come. We’ll shoot back.’”) No such problems resulted from the syndication, and armed with their new agreement, Sheila and Don embarked on what they called a traveling dog and pony show. In the end, it would not only generate revenue and boost Huckleberry Bey’s career, but more importantly, expand the horizons of Varian Arabians. While other stallions’ owners cherry-picked among the industry’s wealthiest owners, Sheila called people she knew all over the country, who organized local meetings of from twenty to fifty people. Then she and Don traveled from town to town with a briefcase of paperwork and a one-two punch of speeches: she talked about Huckleberry Bey and Don about the financials. The price was $60,000 for two breedings per year, which later was revised to $30,000 for one. The most important term was that Sheila would never lose control of Huck. They sold shares … and sold and sold. In the summer, the Huckleberry Bey Syndicate held its first meeting at the Varian ranch. It was perhaps the most visible sign of how far Sheila had come since her early days; a table was set up down the center aisle of the new barn and laid with linen, china and crystal. Waiters dressed in tuxedos were hired, and Don’s daughter recruited college friends, wearing French maid outfits, to help. To say that Varian Arabians had never seen anything like it before would be an understatement, but in the end, it served a larger purpose. It became the first Summer Spectacular (later Jubilee). As it turned out, they weren’t just throwing a syndicate meeting; they also were selling horses, because many of their members wanted to purchase mares to breed to Huckleberry Bey. “Mostly, Sheila had her own mares that she needed to keep,” Don recalls, “so she had to go on the road looking for mares to sell. She found the mares and I did the bargaining to keep the price down.” Over time, as they both realized the potential of the gathering, she began breeding for its sales as well. They also invested in new sales techniques, such as hosting a skybox at Louisville for their customers (available for the first time in 1984, due to Freedom Hall’s restructuring), and adding video equipment to create their own marketing materials. It was just coming together in 1986 when tax reforms rocked the breed, and all around them, big operations and affluent buyers either cut back their equine involvement or declared bankruptcy.

The famous “V” logo.The letter that will forever stamp the legend.

Varian Arabians didn’t have to do either. “We had talked to everyone, regardless of status,” Don explains, a careful way of saying “not just the heavy-duty investors.” “Our people were less vulnerable to tax reforms, pyramid schemes and so forth. The syndicate shares had a tax deduction, of course, so several had to prove they were making money in the event the IRS noticed, but it wasn’t as big a problem for us as it was others.” Overall, the Huckleberry Bey Syndicate chugged along, for the most part unscathed. The stallion was still in the ownership of the Syndicate when he died prematurely, at the age of sixteen, in 1992. “Finally, by his last year as a breeding stallion, the Polish craze was ending,” Sheila wrote in her “Lifetime” column. “Bey Aperitif V, Keepsake V, Hucklebey Berry, Huck’s Prowletta V, Afire Bey V, Desperado V and AA Apollo Bey had all started to attract attention, and suddenly people were flocking to Huckleberry Bey with their Polish mares.” And then he was diagnosed with Cushings disease. “Back then,” she observed, “we didn’t have the ability to do for the disease what we do now.” They did everything they could, monitoring him closely, trying anything that might help. But nothing did. Huckleberry Bey lived the rest of his life, less than a year, in a paddock with his sire before passing away on December 27, 1992. Evie Tubbs Sweeney, who worked closely with Sheila and studied her life during the making of “The Legacy of Sheila Varian” film, noticed a pattern in how closely Varian and her principal stallions mirrored each other through her life. First, Sweeney says, there was Bay-Abi, who was sensitive, enthusiastic, and cheerful at a time in her life when she was the same. And then there was Bay El Bey, who was serious, calculated and trying hard just as she was too. And finally, Huckleberry Bey was carefree, happy, and playful—at a time when she was overcoming past stress and flexing the muscles of her enjoyment. “Losing him was a huge blow for all it represented to her,” Sweeney reflects, “not to mention how much she cherished him personally.”

In his lifetime, Huckleberry Bey sired nearly seven hundred foals, among them many champions. Three especially stand out: Hucklebey Berry as an English show horse, Afire Bey V as an English sire, and Desperado V as the sire who would take Varian Arabians into a future in western. Both Hucklebey Berry and Afire Bey V came with benefits; they were related to Sheila’s friendship with Tim and Marty Shea. In the mid-1980s, as Scottsdale approached, Don was injured in a fall from a horse, and when Sheila elected to remain at home in California to care for him, they needed a trainer to take their horses. Her choice was Tim Shea, a young horseman she had met at the previous Nationals. Shea was just making his name, having recently ridden JK Jedi to the U.S. and Canadian National Championships in English Pleasure and EW Ultima to the Canadian National Park Championship. “She said she had always admired the way Tim could put a hind leg up under a horse,” says Marty Shea, who became a dear friend for the rest of Sheila’s life. “She had Bey Aperitif, Keepsake V and a couple of others, and would we work them? It was a wonderful experience.” After that, Sheila kept on sending the Sheas horses, and one of them was a bright chestnut colt named Hucklebey Berry. Tim developed and rode him to two U.S. National Championships in English Pleasure before he was sold out of the barn—but not out of the limelight. He would go on to another national championship with Gene LaCroix and an amateur title with Marla Ruscitto, a client of Bob Battaglia’s, as well as a solid career at stud. That might have been enough for any relationship, but Varian and the Sheas were just getting started. In the late 1980s, Sheila sent them a colt named Afire Bey V, who so impressed Shea clients Dave and Gail Liniger that they made an offer. “Dave saw him on an autumn day and it was love at first sight,” Marty smiles. The rest is history. In his lifetime, Afire Bey V was the leading sire of halter and performance winners at the U.S. Nationals an incredible sixteen times, and performance winners at the Canadian Nationals eleven times. As of 2016, no one has yet to touch him—and the most promising candidates are Afire Bey V sons.

Leading Sire of National Champions Afire Bey V.

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At Varian Arabians, the 1980s also was a time of transition. The “old guard” was passing away. *Naganka had been the earliest to go, at twenty, in 1972. Ronteza had gone in 1982, and two years later, *Bachantka followed at twenty-seven and *Ostroga at twenty-eight. And that year, Sheila’s treasured Bay-Abi, like his “girls,” passed on. It was the end of an era.

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The Impish Huckleberry Bey From “A Lifetime With Arabians: Huckleberry Bey,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES, June 2009.

There weren’t enough adjectives in the dictionary to describe Huckleberry Bey’s multi-faceted personality. The quickest and most accurate way is simply to cite the origin of his name: he was Mark Twain’s Huck Finn in equine form. Varian’s memories of the laughter he inspired could light up a room. Here’s one of them. “Sweet horse that Huckleberry Bey was, he never embarrassed me in public. Well, now that I think of it … “I was having an activity at the ranch, and at that time I didn’t have the show arena or the trees that I do now. We just had the front of the show barn for presenting horses. I had very little help at the time, and I was hustling around, doing the talking and presenting the horses. People were gathered in front of the show barn, and I had to run through the barn, jump on Huck, and dash around the end of the barn to give this demonstration on my English horse. Of course, I hadn’t been riding Huck lately because I’d been doing everything else. My agenda that day didn’t give him time to play around before we went to work, so we dashed around the barn, and I trotted right up in front of the people, stopped, and opened my mouth to give my wonderful statement. “And Huck stood cheerfully up on his hind legs, looking around. There I am, standing in the stirrups, holding onto his mane so I won’t slide off his back, and trying to chat to my audience as if no one would notice. But the problem is, I’m tickled at his antics, and I’m laughing. “‘Sometimes when Huckleberry Bey …’ I start, and he’s still standing there. The people are standing with their mouths open, wondering what is to happen next. Fortunately when he reared up, he was not erratic or aggressive. He just wandered around, and the people stood there, staring at him. “When he was through, about five or six seconds later—which is a long time when you’re hanging onto the mane, standing in the stirrups on a horse who is walking upright—he came down to terra firma and I just said, ‘Sometimes my horse likes to play.’ “Then we went on with our seminar, and Huck was as happy as can be. He never took advantage of me and tried any of his bright ideas in the show ring, thank heavens.”

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Desperado V faced a unique challenge from the day Sheila and Don realized that he would be the next lead sire at Varian Arabians. As an individual, what would his personality be in the lineup of memorable Varian stallions? Bay-Abi, Bay El Bey, and Huckleberry Bey all had exhibited definite character traits beyond the willing, workable temperament Sheila favored, but who would Desperado be? As he matured, it became clear: he was similar to his predecessors only in quality and depth; beyond that, he was different in look and very much his own individual. Up close and personal, he was a little nippy and bold when he was young, but a real sweetheart as he aged, and his typey, exotic face made its own contribution to the Varian breeding program. Most importantly, his special talents would return Sheila to her western heritage. Desperado V was foaled on Sunday, February 23, 1986, which was not the best time to enter the Arabian horse world in the United States. Tax reforms passed in 1985 were due to take effect in ’86, and the expected impact on the horse industry was not promising. In mid-February, at the Arabian auctions in Scottsdale, prices dropped sharply. At the time, Sheila and Don could not be sure that their customers would be any more immune than others to the consequences of the reforms, so they faced the same worries that everyone else did. And more immediately, Sheila also was concerned about Bay El Bey, whose abilities at stud were beginning to diminish. When Daraska’s foal by Huckleberry Bey was born, he became Don’s special project, and looking back now, Severa says that even then, he knew it was a lifelong commitment. Daraska, although she was registered to both Varian and Severa, was actually Don’s mare; in those days, when he acquired Arabians, he usually registered them jointly. This one, recommended by Sheila for use with his Huckleberry Bey Syndicate breeding, was a lot like many other Varian mares: an intelligent cross of Polish bloodlines with domestic or Crabbet. Her sire, *Dar, had been imported for Patterson Arabians, a pure Polish operation best known now as the breeders of Monogramm and Negatraz. Her dam, Holly Bask, was by an old familiar name in Varian pedigrees, *Bask. An explanation for Desperado’s different appearance can be found in Holly Bask, Severa says. Photographs confirm a strong family resemblance. But since Desperado packed all the genetic punch of the Varian program, he fit neatly into the ranch’s future.

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Desperado V

“We never look back, they might be gaining on us.” Photo by Scott Tress

Sheila was willing to trust my vision and my ideas. On Desperado V, I wanted to try something different that I had not done before, which was a blurred motion shot. Shot with film, it wasn’t possible to look immediately and see if I got the effect I wanted, but I was delighted to see the idea worked, and it turned out to be a shot that Sheila used for many years in her farm promotions. ~Photographer and friend, Scott Trees

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For a little while, though, the future might not have been apparent. The colt spent the early months of his life out in the pasture with his dam, until Don, having reluctantly agreed to show two of “his” colts to a prospective buyer, brought him in to be prepared for presentation. And incredibly, his little favorite nearly fell into the same situation that had happened with Bay El Bey. Relieved of his “scruffy winter coat,” he offered so much potential that Sheila and Don wilted silently as their visitor checked him out. The buyer didn’t say much, but clearly liked him—and then thankfully decided to think about it. As she drove away a few minutes later, Sheila and Don peered anxiously through the blinds in the ranch office window until the car passed through the front gates. As of that moment, Desperado V was off the market.

Early on, one light-hearted promotional effort was the creation of “The Desperettes,” a group of young female fans who appeared at Arabian events wearing cropped tee shirts or purple satin jackets emblazoned with the stallion’s name. Their enthusiasm kept him on breeders’ minds, but it wasn’t long before Desperado’s sons and daughters were creating his reputation. In one year, Don says, he bred one-hundred-sixty-one booked mares.

Desperado grew up well. By the time he was two, he was ready for Scottsdale, where he placed first in his section and third overall. “Throngs of people gathered and followed us back to his stall,” Sheila later wrote. “He had the black bay color, four low white socks, and he thought … that he was the handsomest, sexiest stallion in town.” They had planned to limit his two-year-old book to thirty mares; Don sold twenty-seven breedings at Scottsdale alone.

The stallion’s specialty, and the talent that was becoming clear in many of his foals, worked neatly with Varian advertising. “We used a very western, laid back, ‘Everyman’s horse’ sort of philosophy for promoting him, and it took off like wildfire,” Don says. “He delivered for us.”

Steve Heathcott, who was training for Varian at the time, was as high on the colt as Don was. They loved showing him off. “Since every day he was told by two men he was the sexiest horse in the world, he of course believed it,” Sheila wrote. “Consequently, he was getting so thrilled with himself that at two, he thought he was the head breeding stallion of Varian Arabians. Being in the barn was not helping calm his youthful energy, so one fall day I said, ‘Okay, this is it. Desperado is going to Colt Hill.’”

“Desperado, as if by magic, came along right as we lost Huck to Cushings,” Severa remembers. “There were big shoes to fill: as I used to say, better shape up or ship out. And he did his part in carrying on his responsibility. He bred over nine hundred mares in his career.”

Although Don managed Desperado’s book and promotion, it was a team effort. As they had with Huckleberry Bey, both Sheila and Don played roles, and they capitalized on Sheila’s ability as a speaker. “She had a way of speaking to people that they all loved,” he remembers. “Sometimes before she went out, she would ask what she needed to talk about, and because she was so clever on her feet, I’d just say, ‘Make them laugh or cry.’ And she had a way of doing that.”

The trick was, having not been out in the rough-and-tumble of the colt pasture for months, they weren’t sure he would know how to behave, and they didn’t want him injured while he figured it out. To level the playing field, they chased all the colts, including Desperado, up and down the hill until everyone was exhausted and no one had much energy for contesting the newcomer’s arrival. As Sheila wrote, “after the third run up and down, they were all tired, gentle little guys, standing there with their tongues hanging out, as calm as could be.” She started Desperado under saddle as a three-year-old. His show career, which was limited, included a win in junior western pleasure at Scottsdale in 1990, but not a lot else for the simple reason that he didn’t need it. His natural beauty and presence drew a crowd of fans, and his pedigree and physical credentials attracted breeders. Don launched an innovative advertising campaign for him that would span years, but as he observed, “Without [Sheila’s] wonderful mares to give him a foundation, [Desperado’s success] probably wouldn’t have happened. My promotional methods were unusual in a way that generated a lot of breedings, but he had to do the job.”

Desperado V and Jaime Hernandez.

Explaining their success with Huck and Desperado also explains, to some extent, how Varian Arabians avoided the worst of the difficulties that beset the industry after the tax reforms. “We would talk to you if you had one mare, or if you had a whole stable full of horses,” Don says. “It was all the same. In those days we didn’t have computers. We had telephones, and I can recall spending most of every evening talking on the phone with people about their mares to breed to Desperado.” Probably the most memorable advertising campaign in Desperado’s career, and the signature one for Varian Arabians at the time, was based on the “We never look back, they might be gaining on us” photo which Scott Trees shot in a pasture that doubled as a minefield. “Sheila was so wonderful,” Don, who came up with the concept and directed the shoot, notes. “I said, ‘You’re going to have to ride Desperado wide open across the field,’ and at the time, she had terrible rotator cuff trouble going on in her shoulder. She could barely lift her arm. But she put on all of her western gear, and had a coil of catch rope in her right hand and the reins in her left hand. I said, ‘You’ve got to raise that coil of rope up in the air like you’re going hell bent for leather for something.’ And she did, and Scott shot it perfectly. It all worked like magic—it was a miracle.”

When Trees shot the photograph so that the stallion’s run was blurred to emphasize its headlong speed, the collaboration was complete. The image they created would be iconic in the Arabian industry. Sheila, who had to have been in pain for the whole shoot, remembered what was paramount in her mind: she never doubted her horse. “I galloped him across the field as fast as he could run ten or twelve times, and even though it was full of gopher holes, it never made me nervous,” she wrote in her “Lifetime” column. “I knew for sure no hole was big enough or deep enough to knock Desperado off his feet.” On another occasion she explained, “Desperado was so powerful, with a leg on each corner, that going off his feet was never a worry. I knew I wasn’t going to gallop Huckleberry Bey through a pasture of gopher holes without possibly hurting him, but with Desperado, no problem. In fact, it was a fun challenge. Squirrel holes, badger holes—it wasn’t going to matter. Since I had ridden out on a ranch a lot, I recognized a horse that was ‘trip-able’ and one that was not, and you simply could not knock Desperado off his feet. “The first time I rode Desperado in the arena, I trotted him into a lope and ‘serpentined’ him down the middle of the arena, and every time I changed directions, he changed leads fore and aft. That’s how solid he was on his feet.” Not only changed leads, she clarified for one railbird, but did it naturally. Desperado was beautiful, steady (“capable,” she would say), and macho in an attractive, snorty, stallion-ish way. As time went on, she also would write of his personality: “One thing I’ve learned over the years—mostly through working with Desperado V youngsters—is that while Desperado is so big and bold and powerful, those thin, thin fluttery nostrils are a clue to the truth. He is a sensitive horse. The machismo of his youth was true, but so is his sensitivity. I believe we didn’t always understand the two went together. If correction is too

Desperado V with Mike Nichols up, and (right) at home in Arroyo Grande.

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Sheila and Don Severa at the Scottsdale Show.

harsh, a horse hardens to it. The lesson learned is ‘less is better than too much.’ It becomes the handler’s job to understand just how much of anything is the right amount; that would be the difference between a horseman and a horse handler, I believe.” As to his role in her life, she added, “He has been a huge influence on bringing me back into the western world where I began. An important principle of Varian Arabians has always been to breed horses who are truly sturdy, with good, clean, strong, flat bone, not coarse. And Desperado is such a beautiful horse to top it off.” During the 1970s and ’80s, as she had explained, Varian Arabians had become known for its English horses because they were what was valued—and, especially through Bay El Bey’s son Barbary and Huckleberry Bey’s son Afire Bey V, the farm’s English line remains strong and highly marketable. But in the late 1980s, a passion for western riding was sweeping through the equine industry at large, and western horses, especially of the sort Desperado sired, earned their own value in the Arabian marketplace. At the first opportunity, the stallion’s get established their records in the show ring, winning in both halter and performance, knocking down awards at Scottsdale and the national shows. As soon as there were enough foals competing, he was routinely listed on the leading sires tabulations. More importantly, in the tradition of his ancestors, his stock “bred on.” His son Maclintock V, out of Marigold V (by Bay El Bey, out of Moska), enjoyed success, and when crossed with the DA Major Afire daughter Majors Tiffany GA, he rewarded his breeder with the promising Major Mac V. The most productive of Desperado’s sons, however, is Sundance Kid V, who in his five years at stud for the farm sired, among others, multi-national champions Zefyr and Melody V. Largely in an effort to broaden the genepool of mares for his intensely-Varian pedigree, he was sold to Sara and Frank Chisholm, at Palmetto Arabians, where the story has continued. Among the prominent names that have resulted are multi-national champion Onyx A, national champion Diesel Smoke CBA, and national titlist PA Kid Khan, now junior stallion to his sire at Palmetto. In fact, in the six years between 2011 and 2016, the U.S. National Championship in Western Pleasure has been won five times by Sundance Kid V sons. In two of those years, another of his sons finished reserve.

Palmetto Arabians’ Sundance Kid V, Desperado V’s heir apparent.

Desperado even got Sheila and Don into Arabian racing, when his daughter Morning Starr V, out of Marigold V, won for them at Los Alamitos. Sold to the United Arab Emirates, she produced the filly Delphine, who won the prestigious Daughters of the Desert Oaks. Finally, after the 2003 breeding season, Desperado V was retired from active service. He didn’t retire from life, however; he continued to greet visitors and appear at the ranch’s Spring Fling and Summer Jubilee gatherings. He occupied one of the same paddocks used by his sire, grandsire and great-grandsire in the waning years of their lives, and generally enjoyed himself until, at last, colic claimed his life on January 13, 2014. “Desperado was the biggest part of my whole reason for living,” Don reflects. “For twenty years during his heyday, I was that committed emotionally, physically, financially, you name it.” Although Sheila always had been her stallions’ closest confidants, she was supportive of Don’s close association with Desperado. For one thing, no matter what, the dark bay stallion’s success represented her breeding program, and for another, Don’s work was attuned primarily to the public. She maintained her own relationship with Desperado, and over the years, that never dimmed.

As Desperado V’s career bloomed through the 1990s, Sheila achieved a new peace. “I have to say that this is the best time of my life,” she observed in AHT’s 1995 profile. “I’ve had struggles—not just physical struggles, but emotional struggles—and worries, because although I knew what I was going to do, I didn’t know if I would survive financially. But I’m a person who puts one foot in front of the other.” The steps were coming more easily for her then. In the face of all the “you’re not breeding pure Polish!” criticism a decade earlier, she had emerged triumphant. Her horses were in demand, her horsemanship respected, and her bank account was in better shape than ever. She remained frugal because it was both wise and her habit, but she didn’t lose sleep worrying or deny herself small treats. Best of all, there was someone to share it with. On top of all that, new doors were opening. If 1986 was noteworthy for Desperado’s birth, it also marked a turning point in Varian Arabians because it introduced Angela Alvarez to the ranch. Talented and attuned to how Sheila wanted things done, Alvarez gave Varian, who hardly ever was off the ranch except to attend horse shows and industry events, the freedom to travel for pleasure.

Desperado dressed his fancy western attire. Desperado V , dressed inV,his fancyinwestern attire. 74 | Sheila Varian

Severa photo Severa photo

offers. “One thing that sticks in my mind—we were somewhere where they had a little waterfall, where the water comes over the edge of a level formation like a sheet, and flows into a lower pool. She said, ‘That’s so beautiful.’” Reaching back into his architectural career, he told her it was called a weir, and afterward heard her enthusiastically pointing it out to friends. “She was attracted to things like art, architecture, music and nature, and when something caught her attention, she had to share it with others.” And then there was the biggest open door of all: the Pacific Ocean. Over time, Sheila and Don would acquire a condominium on Kauai, but once they went farther, to secluded, primitive hideaways in French Polynesia. “It was adventure and romance in a perfect setting,” he says. “Away from the business world.” Once in a while, when pressed, and probably with a Cheshire cat grin, he’ll admit that he means “going native” literally—but that’s where the story ends. What is apparent is that in those years, after so many when the survival of her dream was the only reward for her hard work, Sheila Varian was able to spread her wings.

Sheila and Don, sharing a love of the west.

Even so, like her thrift, some habits were hard to lose; Sheila and Don didn’t often take off for longer than a weekend or a few days, often snatched on the way somewhere else for business. They loved riding at the V6 with Jack and his family, or trail riding in Soldier Meadows, or on the western side of the Sierras or the Hunewill Ranch on the east side. They saw the Grand Canyon, and annually attended the cowboy poetry gathering in Elko, Nevada. And at a Snake River Canyon bridge in Idaho, they learned that Sheila had vertigo (“you couldn’t have pried her off the fence with a blow torch,” in Don’s words). Severa called the exploits their “off campus activities,” and there were many more, usually centered around the west and its history. To learn more about General George Custer, they explored the Little Big Horn Battlefield, and on the same trip booked into the old Irma Hotel, founded by Buffalo Bill (where, like travelers a century ago, they trekked down the hall to the bathroom). On their way to Albuquerque, they always made time to shop at the historic Hubbell Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation. They stopped at Glacier National Park, drove Route 66, followed the Oregon Trail, and generally took every side road in the southwest that their limited schedule allowed. “We loved traveling together,” Don says now, a little wistfully. A constant delight, he found, was Sheila’s insatiable curiosity, that love of learning that was bred into her. “She wanted to learn,” he

Sadly, as the millennium came and went, and Desperado V ended his breeding career, Sheila and Don’s relationship wound down as well. Looking back, there were several explanations. In the end, maybe the best is simply that it had run its course. Severa became increasingly restless, aware that although he loved horses and the Arabian community, his life lay elsewhere. And for Sheila, horses were her life: her dream, her commitment, the beginning and the end of each day and all the sun and clouds in between. She enjoyed many things that were not about horses, but for her, her horses were a way of life. Still, even with its ending, their relationship had been markedly positive. When he’d met her, she was a talented horsewoman; when they parted, she was a sharp businesswoman as well, confident of her abilities. For Sheila, after Don was gone, there was little comfort. However, she had one set of skills that she could count on. She was sixty-six years old at the time, and she’d been running Varian Arabians for more than forty years. She’d overcome its hardest times, and even in her most desolate moments, she knew that she had it in her to recover. Before, when she’d been solely responsible for the ranch, its horses and its people, she had had little time to develop deep friendships. There were a few, like Sue and Doug Herthel, who went way back with her, but they didn’t live nearby; day-to-day, speak-of-anything, spill-yourfeelings friendships had eluded her. Then she’d had Don, and little need for anyone else. This time, she took a different approach. She knew a few women in the horse business that she trusted, and she’d recently joined a book club with other women who rode. She reached out to her friends and asked for help. It would open a new chapter in her life.

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The Unshakeable Desperado V From “A Lifetime With Arabians: Desperado V,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES, July 2009. “One of my favorite Desperado stories occurred one afternoon when

head in our direction. They picked up a trot, and then a canter, and

I walked down to the show barn after lunch. I have a big, oval arena,

then they were galloping, as they do every day when they come up for

with a fence that is about three-and-a-half feet high. A 25-acre mare

water. Knowing Desperado, I sidled over to the arena gate and closed

pasture runs out from the arena, and at particular times of the day,

it before he could see all the mares galloping up to the arena—and was

coming in to feed or go to water, the mares gallop all the way from the

thinking, ‘This is going to be exciting.’

back of the pasture around the arena to the front. Sometimes that’s quite a group, 10 or 15 head. That afternoon, when I went out to the

“Desperado lifted his head as the mares approached. I stood at the gate,

arena, to my surprise, I saw Jaime Hernandez standing up on Desperado,

since that’s where Desperado was going to come when he headed for

spinning his rope and doing rope tricks.

the mares and Jaime fell off—except

I said to myself, ‘Oh, my—I love this!’ I

Desperado continued to stand there,

had told Jaime I wanted him to be able

and Jaime continued to spin the rope.

to rope off Desperado, so to get him used

Desperado’s ears perked up, he got a very

to a rope. Jaime, who is a good roper and

interested look on his face, and he slowly

pretty good trick roper, had been playing

turned his head to follow the mares as

with Desperado, roping bushes, fence

they came by the end of the arena. He

posts, whatever. Just about anything that

didn’t snort or whistle or move. He stood

walked by got roped.

very still and watched them go by. My mind immediately said, ‘This is great.’

“So there Jaime was at the end of the arena, standing up on the saddle, doing

“And with that, I put it into our

rope tricks over Desperado’s head. The

Summer Jubilee, and for several years

bridle reins were lying around the saddle

Jaime dressed up in a charro outfit we

horn, and Desperado was standing there

borrowed from Katy Comacho and rode

very patiently, looking around, quite

Desperado, doing lead changes and

unconcerned. Desperado was/is a really

spins to Mexican music, and as a finale

macho stallion, always sure he is king of

standing up on the saddle, doing his rope

the wind and king over all other horses,

tricks, spinning the rope over his head

so I was watching and thinking, ‘H’m,

and Desperado’s head. The crowd went

this could be good.’ Then I saw the

wild, Desperado stood, Jaime grinned

mares at the far end of the field start to

and I cheered.”

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The last major event that Sheila and Don Severa attended together was her 2003 induction to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, and it was a big deal. Of all her many awards—and by the end of her life, she could have decorated a room with them—it was probably the one that made her proudest. It recognized a way of life that had been important to her since the days when she was throwing herself off of Judy. Despite the term “cowgirl,” the Hall of Fame is not about just the ability to ride western, or win rodeos, herd cattle or ranch; among its requirements are lifetime achievements, national ranking, contributions to their field, and historical significance in an inductee’s endeavors. Their lives had to “exemplify the courage, resilience, and independence that helped shape the American West, and foster an appreciation of the ideals and spirit of self-reliance they inspire.” Given Sheila’s experiences, that might have been written for her. So, she and Don, Doug and Sue Herthel, her book club friends and others were in Fort Worth, Texas, for her induction ceremony on November 14, 2003. She glowed; there is hardly a picture that doesn’t record a wide smile on her face. Her cowboy hat is authentic, and her beautiful western blouse is a mass of lace, an artistic pairing with her soft, caramel-colored leather skirt. This was her crowd. Not long after that, however, life took another direction, as she and Don agreed to go their separate ways. Suddenly, she had a lot more than her award or her ranch or even her breeding program on her mind; she had to get back on her feet emotionally. Through the occasional times that Sheila had gotten hurt in riding accidents, friends had commented on her ability to gather cattle or show or work horses all day, through soreness, stiffness and pain. She just always had gone on with things. “If she got hurt, you didn’t hear about it,” Marty Shea once observed. “She was very much a ranch mentality: what happens at the ranch stays at the ranch.”

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Shiela at her induction to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Courtesy of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth,Texas Photo by Rhonda Hole.

But this was different. Her longtime friend Sue Herthel, in a heartfelt conversation, told her that what she needed was girlfriends—people that you get together with just because you want to, with whom you can laugh or cry, share secrets and talk—something Sheila quickly confirmed for herself during a brief escape to South Carolina. Secure that Angela could handle the ranch, she spent a few days with Frank and Sara Chisholm, and they filled the hours with conversation— especially she and Sara talked, long discussions about life and priorities. By the time Sheila got on a plane to come home—after a few more days of girl time with Sara, Frank’s mother Judy Chisholm, and horsewoman Michelle Watson—she knew that she wanted more of it.

conversations about the book or society or religion or beliefs or ourselves or whatever. We all traded off picking books, and I remember when we read Life of Pi. Sheila and I took it literally, and it wasn’t until about the last chapter that we said, ‘Oh, I get it! It’s really isn’t about a boy in a boat!” She giggles, because Varian was so Varian, so practical. “Then it became a good book. Before then, Sheila was saying, ‘This is just the stupidest book—that boy wouldn’t have survived a day with that tiger!’” She recalls that when she first met Sheila, she wasn’t aware of her role in the industry, and anyhow, they didn’t know much about Arabians. “We had this opinion of them—skinny, white, high-headed, high-tailed, dingbat horses. Well, the first time we went riding on one of the ranches, she rode out on Murietta, this beautiful, big boned, glossy, perfect horse. And just the way she sat on him and how she carried herself, I was impressed right away. But I didn’t know she was as well known as she was.

So, she turned to a book club she’d recently joined: Audrey Griffin, Kristin Reynolds, Lisa Thompson, and at the time, Anna Lisa Thomas, Paula Hunsiker and “Western Horseman” writer Ronda Quaid. (Over time, Anna Lisa would move away, Paula would leave and Ronda would pass away, but the others remained close until the end of her life.) They were all horsewomen, but none of them were in Arabians; although they knew she had some stature in the breed, they didn’t pay much attention to it. For them, Sheila was a pleasant friend who could ride like a banshee and had interesting points of view on the books they read. And because they knew she Pictured above, left to right: Good friends Michelle Watson, Sheila, needed them, they were there Vicki Watson, Melissa Bradshaw, Sara Chisholm and Frank Chisholm. for her. “Sheila called us up and said, ‘I have to meet with you; we have to get together,’” Kristin Reynolds says, and chuckles. That was enough out of character and sounded so dire that they were worried she might be horribly sick—but when they met, she informed them of the shift in her love life. “We said, ‘Thank God that’s all there is! Okay, we need to ride some more.’” She pauses thoughtfully and adds, “It was Sheila’s life raft. It was Sheila making a connection out of total despair.” For some time after that, Varian retreated to Reynolds’ guest house on weekends, getting away from the farm and back on her feet. “She discovered other people,” Kristin says, “and how you develop friendships. What do you do with your friends? How do you share? What do you bring to the day? Sheila was learning, and we learned a lot along with her. Now that I look at it today, I don’t think she had finished learning [when she died].” “I’ve never had girlfriends before,” Varian admitted to one acquaintance during that first rocky year, her voice fragile with emotion. “I have girlfriends now. I don’t know what I would have done without them.” “We were all like minded,” Lisa Thompson observes. “We would ride, and we would read these books and then we would have the best

“Then getting to know her, my thoughts were that she was very much an individual, unique in the way her mind worked. Logical, analytical, really, really strong, but also really delicate. Not emotionally, but a little naïve, kind of joyous, like a little girl. But she would motivate us all to do things, like, ‘C’mon girls, let’s go to Texas,’ or Montana or New York City, or here, there, or wherever. She was one to make things happen, and we all had so much fun together.” And they all remember what she had to learn to function not as a diva, but as a normal member of the group. “We would have potlucks,” Kristin says, “and in the beginning, we had to tell her that meant you have to bring a dish.” Except for chicken and broccoli at home, Sheila didn’t cook—didn’t want to. For the potlucks, she usually brought something that the others had to prepare, until finally, at one get-together, she showed up with a ham and they ordered her to the kitchen. She survived and the ham made it to the table. “After that, she would go out of her way to make an hors d’oeuvre that was absolutely delicious,” remembers Audrey Griffin, “but not cooked. Assembled.” The only time the book club girls let her off the hook was around Christmas, when she received lovely gourmet food gifts from people in the Arabian horse industry. “Once Mike Nichols sent little bundt cakes from New York City that were delicious,” Kristin laughs, “and we sat around gobbling them up!”

California Cowgirls: Martina Svennungsen, Audrey Griffin, Sheila, Lisa Thompson.

“She went to the trouble of fitting in,” Griffin says, “and she mellowed because we were such good friends. When she was with us, she was just Sheila, no matter who she was in any other world.” About this time, the many facets of Sheila Varian became especially noticeable. For the book club girls, there was what Kristin Reynolds calls “the persona” (how Sheila was seen in her industry, where she was celebrated and admired) and “the person,” the human being they knew, which had little to do with her work. And for those who had known Varian over a period of years, there was a visible difference in the way she treated many of her associates. “She became a much more caring, compassionate person,” Marty Shea says, and she’s not the only one. But nearly everyone who commented on Sheila’s changed demeanor clarifies that they’re not diminishing her friendships before then; it was about how much more accessible she became. “She truly evolved more as a caring person,” Shea explains. “She always cared about animals, but she hadn’t always connected well with people.” Kristin Reynolds, thinking back on it now, offers an example of how it could be when Sheila decided to correct something someone (often a friend) was doing with a horse. “That voice of ‘No, you can’t do that! Be softer on your horse’—that insistent voice, that ‘I don’t care if you

like me when we finish this conversation, you are going to be better’— that’s Sheila. If she got it right for the horse but the human came out a little bruised up, so much the better for it. That’s just what came out of her mouth.” On the other hand, she was remarkably relaxed about other things. “She had the ability to talk with people who thought very differently from her,” says Lisa, and offers a few examples. “She was pretty much an agnostic, and yet she was able to speak with [more spiritual people] straight, and it was the same with politics and a lot of things that people don’t usually talk about. It was the same with horse trainers and clinicians; if she thought you knew your stuff, she was open-minded. She would listen, think and then either accept it or not, but she was not judgmental at all—and just about everybody is a little bit judgmental.” It was almost, she adds, as if Varian had no energy for arguing over things like that. She just took what she liked from the conversation and moved on. “She told us so many times how we rounded out her life and made her so happy,” Audrey says. “We feel as if she grew during that time.

Book Club friend and fellow member of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Audrey Griffin.

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“We were doing a lot together, and you know, she always had everything done for her. She probably hadn’t washed a horse since she was a kid till she got to Montana [on a trip with the girls], where she had to do it herself, and it took her, like, two hours to wash her horse! “We helped her understand friendship and love with girlfriends,” she continues. “It really was very beautiful. Everything was normal and natural in how we treat our girlfriends, and she was kind of quiet at first because she didn’t know how to be a girlfriend. In order to get, you have to give in this life, and it’s the same way with girlfriends: you have to give a lot. We all have to give a lot.” Now, years after their friendship began, Griffin sees a special benefit that remains with them. Sheila’s store of what she could offer was different from most people’s, but she gave of herself without fail. “When we rode, a lot of times we’d pick her brain,” Audrey says. “We’d see her do something and ask her how to do it, and she would show us and we’d do it. I have so many ‘Sheila-isms’ I learned that make my horses so nice to ride.”

give him credit for that. But they emailed to the end. He didn’t come to the ranch, and they didn’t speak.” Part of her recovery was a reasonable prudence. The first Summer Jubilee she gave alone, she called the book club girls with a request: “Please come. I just need you to be there.” Then, as Thompson notes, “She did great.” “When she lost Don, she was really broken,” Audrey Griffin says. “She told me she didn’t know if she could go on, he was such an integral part of her business. I said, ‘You think you can’t right now, but when you get over this heartache, you’re going to run this business and be glad that he’s not even in it anymore. He might have helped you with it, but it’s your business.’ And after a while, when the pain went away, she would say, ‘You were right, and I’m just fine.’ And she had Angela to count on too.” Those who knew Sheila well report that her love for Don never waned. “She would never talk to him, but in her heart, she loved him,” says Marty Shea.

Gradually, Sheila began to Audrey Griffin and Sheila Varian, keeping up appearances while sorting cattle. emerge from her pain. She even got to the point of “Sheila loved him until the day reminiscing about her time with Don, sometimes musing, “I should she died,” Sheila’s friend Sherry Conrads nods. “And, she always gave have stuck up for myself more.” But however much she had torn down him credit for making the ranch successful both financially and some of the protective walls that had formed over the years—since esthetically. He was the love of her life, that’s for sure.” before Don—she was still careful to take reasonable precautions. And she had to, because their business had become intertwined over the Melissa Stamey and her husband, cowboy poet and singer Dave years. They owned horses together, had investments and other Stamey, came to know Sheila well when they met at cowboy functions, involvements that necessitated staying in touch. and they remained friends for the rest of Sheila’s life. Stamey remembers Varian’s happy days with Don, her heartbreak and her “She didn’t hold grudges,” Thompson says. “She wished him well. embrace of a new outlook. “She said later that she thought it was Once done, she moved on to other experiences—but she did not want actually one of the best things that happened to her, that Don went to see him. She thought that would be too painful. She wasn’t afraid off,” Stamey remembers. “She said, ‘Now I’ve been having the time of that if she saw him she would want to take him back; she just thought my life.’ Somebody would call up and say, ‘Do you want to’ and she’d it would be uncomfortable. She understood him better when she was say, ‘Yep!’ She wouldn’t even let you finish what you were calling away from him. Once it was over, it was totally over.” about. ‘Yeah, when are we leaving, what are we doing?’ And had a wonderful time. A whole world opened up there, and she grabbed it.” “She was always fair,” Marty Shea recalls. “He was a big part of that whole situation and she in no way would ever have excluded him from that. It would have been wrong; it would have been unfair in her eyes. And when he left, she had a formula for success, and she would always

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At home on the range.

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Jullyen El Jamaal

Even before Desperado’s career at stud began to wind down, Sheila was very aware that, now in her fourth generation of stallions, she needed to find an outcross sire. It was 2002 before she made her selection: Jullyen El Jamaal. She went so far outside her usual paradigm for him that she faced the skepticism of other horsemen. He was, they said, a halter stallion. But she knew her bloodlines, and anyhow, even with the specialization in competition, she had never quit breeding for beauty.

people saying that. It’s not that I was so sure I was always right, and it’s not that they didn’t hurt my feelings with that kind of comment, especially early on, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“If you simply know what a good horse is made of, and he can be trained and perform and be easily handled, then you know this is a good idea,” she said at the time. “This works. It’s not that I haven’t made mistakes; it’s not that I didn’t incorporate stallions who didn’t work, but they were all an education.”

All the fuss and notice, of course, was because not only were Jullyen’s bloodlines primarily associated with halter, but half of his pedigree was Egyptian-bred. By the 1990 U.S. National Champion Stallion Ali Jamaal, he was out of Haras Meia Lua’s Jullye El Ludjin, a granddaughter of Ali Jamaal. (That made two crosses not only to Ali Jamaal, but also to his sire, Ruminaja Ali, who had finished ahead of Huckleberry Bey in the 1979 U.S. National Championship for Futurity Colts).

Jullyen wasn’t her first attempt to introduce new blood, she later would point out; he was just the most successful. “People have been saying, ‘What in the world have you done?’ from when I bred the Polish mares to Bay-Abi and was told that I wasn’t a real breeder. I’ve always had

In the beginning, Severa was a partner in Jullyen, but that changed with his departure, and by 2004, the then eight-year-old stallion was solely owned by Varian Arabians.

One of the most important attractions to Jullyen, Varian said, was that his dam was considered one of the most beautiful mares in the world.

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And, as would become more obvious in later stallions who were used in the Varian program but not bred at the ranch, Jullyen El Jamaal was not a total outcross: he offered a line of Varian blood, through Bey Shah to Bay El Bey. “I chose Jullyen El Jamaal because he phenotypically would blend with my mares and stallions,” she explained in an AHT article, “and I believed, after watching him move under saddle (although he was only slightly trained), that we could school him to excel in the western field.” At the 2004 Golden Jubilee, she said, Bob Hart Jr. came to agree with her. Although Jullyen had no specialized training, Sheila suggested that Hart, who was conducting a clinic there, take the stallion out for a spin. Initially skeptical—the horse was well broken to ride, but with only basic skills—Hart became a believer as the bay stallion answered each of his requests willingly. In 2005, Jullyen, with Hart up, won Maiden Western Pleasure at Scottsdale. In comparison with the other senior Varian sires, Jullyen’s temperament was standoffish, but Varian believed that much of that was related to his earlier upbringing. He had arrived at the ranch when he was six, and had not been raised as her horses were, with a priority on their interaction with people. “You didn’t go in his stall and wrap your arms around him,” Angela Alvarez notes. “He was a stallion all the way, no doubt about that, and in the beginning it was a test for all of us, just how to handle him. But as he got used to us and we got used to him, he molded into a Varian stallion.” In his career, Jullyen El Jamaal sired more than four hundred foals, several of them very successful, including multi-national champions and titlists Monticello V, Anthem V, Jake Jamaal JCA, A Jakarta, Always A Jullyen V, Monaco Jullyen V and more. At the 2016 U.S. Nationals, his get and grand-get scored high in halter and were especially effective in western pleasure—often second only to that of the Desperado son Sundance Kid V. He also has proven to be a strong broodmare sire, cited by Alvarez as the source of many of Varian’s best producers. The records being written now indicate that Jullyen’s star is more on the rise than ever before, but unfortunately, like Huckleberry Bey, he did not live to the ripe old age that some other Varian sires achieved. Jullyen El Jamaal, with his singular combination of modern, national-level beauty and remarkable performance ability, died at the age of eighteen on September 2, 2014.

Jullyen El Jamaal with Bob Hart Jr. at the Summer Jubilee.

“You’re So Lucky To Know Me”

The Laugh Was On Her

One benefit that Sheila enjoyed with the book club girls was travel, and while there was almost no place they wouldn’t go, some destinations were more luxurious than others. One year, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame scheduled a meeting at the award-winning Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, Montana, and members were allowed to invite guests. Sheila asked Lisa Thompson and Audrey Griffin to accompany her. Because the Paws Up is not only highly regarded as a western getaway, but also for its stunning surroundings and world class accommodations, Varian was bubbling with anticipation for days before they arrived. So, when they opened the front door to the two-bedroom house where they would stay, she was overwhelmed by the panoramic views of horses grazing in the lush meadows around them. Sure that her friends were too, she turned to Audrey, and pointing her finger straight at her friend’s face, burst out, “You’re so lucky to know me!” As Audrey recalls, she murmured, “You’re right, I am,” but she was thinking, “I can do something with that.” “So, that evening I spread the word among the cowgirls that after they introduced themselves, to say, ‘And I’m so lucky to know Sheila Varian!’” she chuckles. “Everybody got up and did it—and she was beside herself.” Sheila did think it was funny, but she swiftly explained the circumstances … only to find that everyone kept giggling anyhow. “Every time we did something or went somewhere, I’d say, ‘Oh, Sheila, I’m so lucky to know you,’” Audrey grins, and she wasn’t the only one. At last, to mark the memorable occasion, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame sent Sheila a knockout gift: one thousand fortune cookies, all bearing the message, “I’m so lucky to know Sheila Varian.”

Sheila Varian a nd Audrey Griffin.

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“How will you have your burger, with or without dents?” Riding at Jack and Zee Varian’s V6 Ranch could work up an appetite, so one time on the way home from an outing with her pals Kathie Hart and Marty Shea, Sheila pulled into an In-N-Out Burger, a fast food chain which transcends its category (wildly popular, it earns raves even from culinary celebrities). The only problem was that the three friends were pulling a trailer, a four-horse rig large enough to sport living accommodations, which was a definite handicap when Sheila aimed for the drive-through. “Sheila was so self-assured—she was so sure she could get through,” recalls Marty Shea. In the back seat, Kathie Hart, who doesn’t even eat meat, was thinking, “This isn’t going to be pretty,” and she agrees, “Sheila was a very determined lady.” It was a two-lane approach, but even that didn’t save them, as the sound of a worrisome metallic crunch indicated. “We cut this lady off and I think we put a few dents in her car,” Shea says. “Kathie and I got out and were trying to direct Sheila, and she got mad at us and made us get back in the car. It was all Kathie and I could do to keep a straight face, the situation was so ludicrous. I didn’t even know what happened, because we just kept going.” In fact, drove right out of the In-N-Out Burger. They never got their sandwiches, so down the road, they pulled in at the Madonna Inn and sat down for lunch. But their little adventure wasn’t over. “By the time we got there,” Shea chuckles, “Angela called. She’d heard from the police; Sheila had been reported for something like hit-and-run.” Kathie Hart and Marty Shea

It all would get settled later, no repercussions, but even at the time, Sheila was unruffled. She was hungry, and that was the end of the story.

“Lunch Is On Me” “She was tight as Dick’s hatband when it came to money,” remembers Frank Chisholm, and cites one trip that his wife, Sara, and his mother went on with Sheila to the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. “They’re walking around and it’s about one or one-thirty, and my mom and Sara were starving. Sheila said, ‘Well, girls, it’s about time for lunch,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, we’re hungry, let’s find some place to eat.’ So Sheila said, ‘Let’s go down to this hotel. They have the best hamburgers in Fort Worth! Lunch is on me today.’ “I know Sara and my mom looked at each other thinking—‘Wow, Sheila’s paying? That’s great.’ So, they walked in and sat down and Sheila tells them, ‘No need for menus, I’ll order for us today.’ The waitress came over to take the order and Sheila says, ‘We’ll have one hamburger, split three ways.’ Sara and my mom about fell out of their chairs because they were starving. I asked Sara what they did, and she said, ‘Well, thank God she ordered French fries with it!’” This is only one incarnation of the story. As it turns out, it had a familiar ring for several Varian cohorts.

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Jullyen El Jamaal was not Sheila’s only “outside” addition to her breeding program. As Desperado V aged, Varian depended on a handful of his sons and Huckleberry Bey’s, but she could foresee needing a new face, an outcross, in the coming generation to cross with Jullyen daughters. One name that came to mind was a grey stallion named Audacious PS, who had been standing at Midcrest Arabians in 2001, when she’d bred the Bravado Bey V daughter Misti V to him. The resulting foal, a filly named Misti Morn V, was a promising broodmare in the Varian band. By the time Sheila decided to examine him for purchase, however, he was under new ownership and living in Kentucky. She absolutely hated to fly, but she boarded a plane, flew east, spent a day with him—and promptly signed a year’s lease with an option to purchase. “Sheila had always wanted a white stallion with big, big eyes,” says Angela Alvarez. “We loved our Misti Morn so much that she did her homework and found him. It opened up a new world for us and for him.” As with Jullyen, Audacious PS reflected a line of Varian blood—in his case, his sire, Fame VF, a son of Bey Shah. His dam, HAL Flirtatious, offered half-Polish and half Egyptian/domestic lines. In his relatively limited show career, he had scored a top ten at the Nationals in Breeders Sweepstakes Yearling competition, and as a three-year-old, added a U.S. National Reserve Championship in Futurity Colts. He was fifteen years old when Varian got him, but she determined that a couple of appearances in the aged stallion class at Scottsdale would remind breeders of his quality. Showing with Jeff Schall in 2009, he finished second to Magnum Psyche in Stallions Eight and Older, and attracted such attention that many horsemen made a point of telling Sheila he was the crowd favorite. That memorable presentation launched his career with his new owner. The following year at Scottsdale, he won the class, and his book hit an average of between forty and sixty mares a year. With his first Varian-era foals just hitting their prime in the show ring, Audacious’s record as a sire is growing. The most prominent so far have been U.S. National Reserve Champion Art Dekko TT and Canadian National Reserve Champion The Magician V, and at the 2016 U.S. Nationals, he added top tens in both halter (senior stallions, Tempezst and Santino V) and performance (western pleasure open, PA Magellan, and junior horse, Sheer Audacity V). Sheila Varian | 89

Audacious PS

Sanadik El Shaklan

Sheila, of course, had checked out Audacious’s performance ability, and been satisfied; he had been trained under saddle and won a few country pleasure classes in the Pacific Northwest, but at a time when his breeding career was more important, that pursuit went no further. And he met the Varian temperament requirements effortlessly. “Audacious is a wonderful, charismatic horse,” Alvarez smiles, “a lot like Huck, cheerful, loves people and loves to show off—gentle, kind, I love him. He has wonderful expression; he’s so playful, and I think that’s what’s so wonderful about him. To this day, every time we get him out of his stall to show someone, he puts his tail over his back and prances around, ears up. You don’t have to do anything. He just knows when someone’s watching him. And you can definitely tell which babies are Audacious’s—they all have their tails up over their backs.” Audacious PS, now the senior sire at the farm, is in the fifth generation in the Varian sire line, a contemporary of Sundance Kid V. With the high profile of the Varian line stallions over the years, others who have stood at the farm, or the outside sires that Varian patronized to diversify her bloodlines, have received less print. None made as big a contribution as the descendants of Bay-Abi, but many played important roles, especially through the broodmares they contributed. Khemosabi is the most notable of those temporarily in residence early on, and *Bask heads the list of those who lived elsewhere. One whose influence is seen these days was Sanadik El Shaklan, the El Shaklan son bred and owned by Om El Arab International, and co-owned by Varian for thirteen years. Some of the top broodmares in today’s generation are his daughters and granddaughters. As Varian always said, not every stallion needed to be a Bay-Abi, Bay El Bey or Huckleberry Bey in her program; if they contributed just one horse, or a few, they had done their job. Sanadik El Shaklan more than did his. A glance at the pedigrees of some of the top broodmares in the Varian band late in Sheila’s career offers an interesting look at the way she wove together bloodlines, often using linebreeding with careful infusions of outcross blood. The Desperado V daughter Khantina Girl V, who has been a particularly successful cross with Jullyen El Jamaal, was out of a Huckleberry Bey line mare; the Audacious PS daughter Misti Morn V is out of Misti V, a Bravado Bey V mare who reflects three crosses to Bay El Bey five generations back. One of the go-to mares today, Sweet Klassique V, is an interesting example of Varian redoubling two outcross lines that have played a role in her breeding program, El Shaklan and Ali Jamaal, but through different stallions from the ones she routinely used (El Shaklan through Fairview Klassique and Ali Jamaal directly). Sweet Klassique’s dam, Sweet Shalimar V, who was bred in 1990, is likely the first evidence of Varian’s interest in the Ali Jamaal influence she later would access in Jullyen. She is the dam of Sundance Kid V and a host of other successful Varian horses, and traces to *Bachantka through the Khema/Moska-line. It can easily get overwhelming, but the message is that the quality of the broodmare band is deep and complicated, a classic representation of an experienced breeder at work. Into the second decade of the twenty-first century, Sheila Varian was set up for the future, cognizant of adding new bloodlines but capitalizing on her own horses’ proven history.

Sweet Shalimar V

Audacious PS with Sheila at the Summer Jubilee. Brandon Bessey photo

At the same time that she bred horses capable not only of show careers, but also of being trail companions, she moved away from the show ring in her personal pursuits. She had given up training responsibility years before; Jaime Hernandez, who had joined the crew in 1991, took care of performance training, while Ismael “Mike” Perez handled halter work. She taught both of them, so she knew that their procedures and work ethics were as she preferred. That made it easier for her to oversee the ranch’s operations as a whole, and to do more of what she had loved all her life, which was to ride out and work on the ranches of friends and family. Whenever her cousin Jack Varian sorted cattle on the V6 and she had time, it was a given that she would load up Murietta V or Jubilation V, her two ranch horses, and head out to help. They were long, demanding days, but like life’s blood to her. An extra bonus was that her book club friends enjoyed it and were good at it, so she spent many days in the dust and the heat, working just as cowboys had more than a century earlier.

As time went on, she subtly strengthened the ranch’s mission away from the show ring. While her horses continued to compete and she advertised not only their success, but that of other horses with her bloodlines, she also stepped up her approach to the casual riding public. For high end show operations, that segment of the equine industry usually functioned as a market for horses who didn’t meet show standards. Sheila, however, always had enjoyed a following among the “smaller” breeders, and she recognized that there were other members of the equine community who were important as well: the people whose aspirations did not involve the show ring, who just wanted to own and ride beautiful, capable horses, and enjoy their companionship. Whether Varian’s perception was based on her own enjoyment of horses outside of the show ring, or she just read the tea leaves at a time when the “natural horsemanship” movement was gaining traction, only she would know, but it was insightful.

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And in those years, she traveled—glorious, fun trips with her friends and often her horses. The book club girls frequently were on hand, or photographer Sherry Conrads, who had grown close since her husband had given her the Varian mare Breathless V for her birthday. Or there were old pals Dave and Melissa Stamey, Marty Shea and Kathie Hart, and others from the Arabian breed, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and all of her other worlds as well. When Cowgirl Hall of Fame friend Vicki Bass invited Sheila and Audrey Griffin to her birthday party, they happily accepted—and spent three days on the tundra of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, studying polar bears. When “War Horse” was taking Broadway by storm, Sheila, Audrey, Kristin, and Lisa and her husband, David, took off for New York. They saw the city’s sights and not only attended the sold-out play, but also examined the giant equine puppet with its operator (friends with connections helped!). With Sheila’s old friend Audrey Fisher, of Dunromin’ Arabians, they dined at the 21 Club, and were given a private tour of its legendary cellar, where well-heeled New Yorkers had ridden out Prohibition in style. She loved it all.

Eitan Beth-Halachmy and his demonsration of Cowboy Dressage on a soft rein.

So, in an era when many Arabian horse operations were reporting decreased sales figures, Sheila was augmenting her bottom line with “small owner” sales. Many, she reported, were buying horses they intended to keep for the rest of their lives—choosing individuals that would become part of their family, integral parts of their lives. Varian always had bred for willing temperaments, and it was a natural segue to prepare not just good show horses for sale, but also others equipped with the skills to satisfy most owners and the manners to ensure good treatment. At the Spring Fling and Summer Jubilee, which offered clinics by top horsemen (including herself), she cultivated a market. What attracted the attention of observers was that she wasn’t “giving the horses away”; she priced them reasonably but substantially, and people paid. At the same time, Varian enjoyed expanding her own experiences. Her old love of learning was alive and well, and clearly, even with all she knew about horsemanship, she always felt there was more to absorb. In one holiday newsletter, she recounted a visit with her longtime friend, Quarter Horse elder statesman Jack Brainard. “What was so terrific to me was many of the things Jack had us doing I had done before, but not as specifically or in the order that allows a horse to understand what was wanted and the rider to be developing their own skills,” she wrote. “We rode all day for two days, moving from one step to the next, and I loved it, as you would expect. [W]e are now adding all of this information to our horses, which will continue to make even better horses for the people that purchase them in the future, and I continue to get enamored with learning more all the time.” Brainard, she would write, had joined with star Cowboy Dressage practitioner Eitan Beth-Halachmy to “[establish] the Cowboy Dressage organization with the idea that dressage on a soft rein could open many doors to people that desire to acquire more expertise in a soft manner with their horses.” She was so intrigued that she booked Beth-Halachmy to conduct a clinic at the 2011 Summer Jubilee, one of a series over the coming years. It was classic Sheila: her priority was to help people strengthen their relationships with their horses by improving their communication.

In the summer of 2012, she and the book club girls headed out to visit Anna Lisa Thomas, a member when Sheila joined who had shared the camaraderie until her move to Mexico. For five days, Audrey, Kristin, Sheila, and Lisa and her husband David visited Thomas in San Miguel de Allende, and for Sheila, it was heaven; she fairly sparkled with her enthusiasm for the culture, the new sights and sounds. And, as she would write in one of her newsletters of the friendship: “We read and we ride and our friendships are the kind of friendships that are total, complete, always there for one another, trusting, no arguing, always supporting, happy for each other’s success and quietly standing beside when there is a problem.”

That is how it was a year later, as Thanksgiving 2013 approached. The only shadow on Sheila’s horizon was a creeping fatigue; she got home from a weekend at a cowboy dressage competition in Sacramento and didn’t bounce back with her usual resilience. Plus, after a lifetime of a board-flat stomach, she was annoyed to notice a bulge that wouldn’t go away. Neither did her energy return. In fact, the situation continued to deteriorate, which finally convinced her that a visit to the doctor was in order. The news was worse than expected: she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage four. It was nothing to fool around with. In early December, accompanied by Lisa, and Doug and Sue Herthel, she headed to the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center for a consultation with Dr. Lynda Roman, one of the top specialists in the field and a member of the staff at the Keck Medical School of the University of Southern California. There was bad news and good news: the bad news was that her cancer had spread to her liver; the good news was that Dr. Roman was, as her friends all testified, “fantastic.” She mixed reality and spirit—more positive than optimistic probably, they recall, but that was enough for them. So began a tough six months, familiar to many who embark on a war with cancer, where chemotherapy took center stage, with its attendant nausea, hair loss, and worst of all, its ongoing debilitation. Sheila weathered it with fortitude. She had often described herself as “just putting one foot in front of the other,” and that is what she did, day in and day out, for three sequences of chemo—not just the procedures, but

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Audacious PS Sheila Varian | 93

also the three-and-a-half hour drives to Los Angeles for most of them. Sometimes her friends—the book club girls, the Herthels, and others— would hand her off like a football, one driving her to L.A. and part of the way back, another ferrying her for the next leg, and Angela meeting them in Santa Ynez for the final drive to the ranch. Routinely, three or four of them would accompany her to the meetings with Dr. Roman to evaluate progress. At home, Alvarez was what everyone called an “angel.” She kept the house radiantly clean, periodically stocked it with cheerful flowers, met Sheila’s needs, and ran the ranch at the same time. Much of Sheila’s life had to take place in the BBC (the big brown chair), but wherever she was, there was the comfort of her dog and cats (Nurse Libby and the Napcats, Boy Kitty and Girl Kitty) who remained by her side. Friends called as often as she had the energy to receive them. It was as if she simply set her mind with such determination that, like Desperado, she wasn’t going to be knocked down by the frightening uncertainty of it all. Some days she felt almost normal and some days awful. A Caring Bridge page was opened for her on the internet, where reports could be issued about how things were going, usually by Lisa Thompson, but sometimes by Sheila or others. Its tone was determinedly cheerful and upbeat, but honest and detailed. It was clear that Sheila was not on an easy road. “She put on a pretty good face when she was going through it,” Kristin Reynolds says. “But I think it horrified her; she was human.” One of Sheila’s coping mechanisms at that stage, many agree, was not to think too deeply about the cancer, but just to deal with it. “She didn’t accept it,” says Marty Shea, who was keeping up by telephone. “It was a bump in the road and she never gave into it.” The trouble was, it would never go away. She was, naturally, showered with cards. In January, when she was confined to the house, unable even to walk out to see the horses, came one of the most touching of all: her boys at the barn put it together themselves. “Us guys wanted to give you some words of encouragement letting you know that we support you, and we are here for you,” one wrote. “We miss you out in your farm riding your horses, waving hello with a smile …” “I hope that God blesses you with strength, health, and happiness,” another added. “So you can keep seeing every beautiful day as it comes. Hope you can overcome this stressful situation. Don’t worry, be happy.”

For the most part, as the months went on, she got good reports. She was able to take some of her maintenance treatments closer to home, in San Luis Obispo, where the continuity of her life—those long, deep roots—was apparent. Her physician, Dr. Frank Collie, had worked with her mother during her cancer bout in the early 1970s; he consulted with her medical team, and helped her deal with the chemo’s unpleasant side effects. At the end of the day, there was just her dogged resolve. Barbara Varian had been close to Sheila for about a decade when the cancer was discovered, and was part of her support network, responsible for much of the taxi service when Sheila’s treatments took place in San Luis Obispo. She recalled once on the way home from the doctor, when they made a stop. “There Sheila’d been in a cancer treatment for two hours, and she got her cart and literally lapped me in the grocery store!” she says with a chuckle. “I swear, every day, every moment, was lived with this intention and this purpose that we all kind of want. I was amazed at how fast her legs moved—there was such purpose in everything she did.” Through the winter and spring of 2014, life was an up-and-down affair for Varian. “During her illness, we rode a lot together,” Audrey Griffin recalls. “She wanted to get in all the rides she could. Sometimes she was too weak to get on the horse, and that was really hard for her, but the following week she’d be better.” Finally, near the end of May, Sheila completed her chemotherapy. Like a bird freed of its cage, she was off to Santa Ynez to participate in the Light Hands Horsemanship clinic, one of her favorite events of the year. She was glad to be back to what she saw as her new version of normal: her regular activities, but conducted a little more carefully (to regain her strength), while paying attention to her body (because it still harbored cancer, her adversary), and with a special awareness of how precious her life and her friends were to her. “She really had realized the importance of friends,” Sherry Conrads observes. “She truly became a much better friend; she learned to say thank you more, to tell you what was in her heart more. I think her illness was what made that happen. She suffered, but she discovered a lot about friendship and about herself.” The timing for the end of chemo was fortuitous. Approaching the sixtieth anniversary of Varian Arabians, which Sheila planned to recognize at the Summer Jubilee, media specialist Evie Tubbs Sweeney was producing a film on Varian’s life. They worked through the winter, but principal filming was scheduled for late June, and by conserving energy between shoots, Sheila was able to do her part. One weekend was reserved to record video clips from an array of her friends who flew

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Marty Shea, Kathie Hart and Sheila riding at Hearst Castle.

in from around the country, and the al fresco luncheon that hosted them turned into an unforgettable celebration of her life. Sherry Conrads had stepped up to lead a fundraising effort that ensured top production values for the effort, and “V: The Legacy of Sheila Varian” was so first-rate that it earned Mike Nichols’ approval. It debuted to enthusiastic reviews at the Clark Center in Arroyo Grande on August 2, 2014. Less than six months later, Nichols was gone, the victim of a heart attack at age eighty-three. Sudden and unexpected, it was a special blow for Sheila; they had been close for fifty years, as she detailed in a beautiful tribute to him that recalled their long association. “I have been to most of his movie premiers, and he always made sure I was treated like I was special,” she wrote. “… On the movies he thought I would enjoy, he invited me to a day of shooting, with a chair beside him. He’d introduce me to the cast as ‘Sheila,’ leaving it to everyone’s imagination on how important I must certainly be to be sitting beside Mike. Every once in a while, he’d lean over and ask me in all sincerity how I thought the filming was going … I, who didn’t have a clue, would solemnly nod and say very thoughtfully, ‘I think it is going quite well.’ Mike never mentioned the hoax, nor did I. I left for home with the stars believing they had just met a very important person … they just didn’t know what for!” There and in recollections to friends, she recalled the unique experiences of the world he opened to her. One of the best, she would marvel, was the time she sat on the steps of his summer home with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and talked horses, just as if they’d been two riders hanging out at a horse show. “[W]hen with me, he never made me feel I should try to be anything other than who I was,” she wrote, “... and I consider myself pretty much of a hay seed. … Of all the people I have known, Mike has brought more new and interesting moments into my life than anyone.” As time went by, the months fading into 2015, it appeared that she was returning almost to real normal. She adhered to a schedule of maintenance chemotherapy in San Luis Obispo, which seemed manageable, and carried on. “It’s been so long since you have heard from me that you thought I died, didn’t you?” she teased on the Caring Bridge. “That doesn’t seem to be the case, and in truth I’m feeling pretty darn good.” “Good” was relative, but no one pointed that out; it was heartening to see her frisky and content with life as she knew it.

On one memorable occasion, Kathie Hart and Marty Shea came out to ride with her, as they had so many times in the past. That overcast morning, hosted by manager/trainer Bill Flemion, they explored the hills of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, with its breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. Even on a grey day, its sense of grandeur was unmistakable. As August approached, Sheila was focused on the Summer Jubilee, where her friend Lester Buckley was booked as clinician. That was a high point for her; she had met him at one of the Light Hands Horsemanship clinics (he was a founder) a decade earlier, and found that his principles of horsemanship matched hers. By this time, she was trusting him to work with Major Mac V, a young son of Maclintock V and, it was becoming apparent, the culmination of Varian’s dreams as a breeder.

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Lester Buckley aboard Major Mac V at the Summer Jubilee. Mary Buckley photo

It wasn’t just Major Mac that made her day at the Jubilee. Around this time she commented on how she felt about what they were accomplishing: “I am always thrilled our quality is so high we can offer fifteen to twenty horses that have not been offered before, each beautiful, problem free and very good at some particular discipline,” she wrote. “Makes me proud of what we do.” A week later, she mounted up for the Santa Barbara Fiesta Parade, where she and Kristin Reynolds were outriders for the KEYT-TV float. “I love riding in this parade and imagining one hundred years ago, when there were no cars, what it must have been like to ride your horse up State Street in beautiful Santa Barbara,” she wrote. “There are no motorized vehicles in this parade, all horses or floats pulled by horses. I like having a job. The outriders’ job is to take care of the horses pulling the wagons in case of any problems.” And then, rather hilariously because she was an old hand who took stuff like this in stride, she related what happened. “The team of horses (two) pulling our wagon were a bit iffy to say the least. … One of the horses had a yearning to lay down in harness every time we stopped, or tried to keep right on going by its self … Our KEYT-TV folks had no clue they weren’t in the best situation, fortunately they had a lovely time waving to the folks.” Some one hundred thousand folks, she added. Not long after, she jauntily set off with Lisa Thompson on Amtrak to attend a wedding in San Diego. Repeatedly, through the more-or-less year and a half that she felt she had cancer backed into a corner, she declared that “life was good.” But in this time, the first serious cloud appeared on the horizon: a “blip in her cancer numbers.” Her solution? Keep going. She and Lisa rode out on the Biddle Ranch, next door to the Varian property, and she wrote that an El Niño season would be welcome; they needed rain. And a little later, she, Audrey and Kristin ventured north to Truckee, California, to visit Sherry Conrads. “Summer, feeling so good,” she wrote. As she had noted earlier, “The latest news hot off the press is … Life is good and I am busy.”

By that time, the U.S. Nationals was on the calendar, and Sheila and Lisa had their tickets. “Have you heard about the effort to make the U.S. Nationals an American bred and owned show?” Varian wrote on the Caring Bridge. “It use to be that way back when. I would love to have the door opened back up to just American bred and owned rather than horses flown in from another country. … Don’t get nervous please. … All the other shows could welcome anyone from anywhere.” Her schedule, looked at in light of her disease, was packed. After Tulsa came the fortieth-year celebration of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and then a stop in Las Vegas with Audrey (who by then was also a member of the Hall of Fame) as the guests of Olivia Newton John. She was making plans for Scottsdale when her skies darkened. “The not so good news is that I am back getting chemo twice a month,” she wrote for her followers on the Caring Bridge. She was still planning for Scottsdale, but that was not to be. Melissa Stamey spoke for everyone when she observed, “When she got sick, you couldn’t believe it at first. You’d think, ‘This is a very determined person. She is going to beat it.’ And the first go-round, she did; she started looking better and feeling better. But then it came back.” The days were hard—in and out of the hospital, with a spiraling deterioration of strength. She was failing, and probably everyone could see it, but in the face of her own rugged determination, everyone else just went forward too, one day at a time. In late January, during one hospital lay-up, her friends brought her dog to see her, and when she heard the little Papillion’s toenails clicking on the floor, her voice was thin but delighted. “Is that my Libby? Is my Libby here?” “I don’t think she ever thought she was going to die,” reflects Marty Shea. “I think she believed that she would keep putting one foot in front of the other and it would go on that way. She addressed death in terms of getting treatment, but I think her optimism is what kept her alive for as long as she lived.”

“The last month or two of her life, we never really left her alone,” says Audrey Griffin. (And the book club girls weren’t the only ones; Sherry Conrads and Barbara Varian were there faithfully, spelled by a few others, including Sara Chisholm, who came out from South Carolina.) “We’d have really good talks and laugh a lot. Angela would say, ‘What are you guys talking about? You were laughing in there!’ Sheila always felt she was going to get well, so there was never any negativity—no crying. It was like nothing was wrong. She didn’t think she was dying until about a week before she did.”

breaks. “It was really hard for me to get through it. But I got the result I wanted, that people truly felt the importance, because the generations coming up won’t know.”

When Sheila did begin to accept that the end was nearing, she reacted characteristically. “As usual, she started focusing on getting everything squared away,” says Melissa Stamey. “She organized it—like, ‘If I’m not going to make it, then I want to make sure that this will be happening and that will be happening.’ She was completely realistic.”

“When I walked out of the ring, my phone rang and it was Sheila,” Jerome says, regaining his composure. “She said, ‘Larry, that was really, really good. You know, we have to use that in our program.’” He can’t help laughing. “Merchandising and marketing down to the last second!”

By February, the realization that Sheila might be succumbing to her cancer, that she might not beat it this time, had spread through the Arabian horse world. “[Before] Scottsdale, people were saying ‘somebody needs to do something,’” says Wisconsin breeder Larry Jerome, who had known Varian for years. After chatting with trainer Brett Becker, he decided to put it in motion, rounding up input from a broad array of Varian associates. Then he wrote a script, which, he says, was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do. “I knew what I wanted to say,” Larry remembers, “but I had to figure out how I was going to do it, to move people to understand the significance of what she had done and how things truly affect all of us.

After Scottsdale, he flew to California to spend the afternoon with her, and as the hours waned, he asked if he should stay. “No, Larry, you have to go,” she said. “I have to go and you have to go.”

“I laid awake I don’t know how many nights, and I kept rewriting this thing in my head,” he says, and then his breath catches and his voice

And there were still a few more to come.

All the way from the preparation to the performance in the ring, everyone rose to the occasion for a special presentation at Scottsdale, called “The Power of the V.” Gene LaCroix and Tim and Marty Shea joined Jerome for the tribute, which was carried on Arabian Horse Global’s internet live feed and posted on Facebook.

On February 18, the first foal of the season had been born, a bay colt by Audacious PS and out of Sweet Silk V who would be named Silkwood V, after one of Mike Nichols’ old movies. And not long after, a steady, delicious rain began to fall, breaking the long dry spell. Lisa Thompson recorded Sheila’s reaction on the Caring Bridge: “‘It’s raining? Open up all the windows! Rain! Happy, happy, happy!’ [She was] always grateful for every tasty morsel of life.”

Lester Buckley and Major Mac V. Mary Buckley photo

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Lester Buckley and Major Mac V.

100 | Sheila Varian

This time, her voice was weak, but matter-of-fact. When he came, she said, she wanted him to take Major Mac V out in a hackamore: “Get him out of the arena, out of the snaffle bit, in a hackamore, out on the Biddle. Go up and down the hills, get his mind ready.” Call Angela to set it up, she added. When Buckley did, Angela told him that if he wanted to see Sheila, he needed to come now, so within forty-eight hours, he was in California. Major Mac was new to the hackamore (in this case, a vintage creation by a revered artisan who no longer braided), but Buckley gave him a couple of sessions in the ring as an introduction, and the colt adapted quickly. (As Lisa Thompson observes, “It’s just the right way to do it, and it shows respect for the horse, which is specifically just what Lester is all about.”) Sheila was excited, but Buckley could see a little desperation there too, and he realized then how important it was to her to see her prize colt at home in the hackamore, with the skills to be a working horse. So, late one afternoon, he and Major Mac V went to the Biddle Ranch, along with Lisa Thompson, Jaime Hernandez and Sara Chisholm. Photographer Brandon Bessey and Angela Alvarez, armed with video equipment, followed on foot. As Buckley and Major Mac enjoyed the clean latewinter air, Angela videoed the ride and Bessey snapped shot after shot, recording it all in the extra-brilliant glow of sundown. Surrounded by sloping meadows of green grass, Lester encouraged Sheila’s young stallion through a long lope, feeling him respond to the hackamore, careful to support his confidence, loving his ready balance.

That Sheila felt terrible was clear, he says, but there was a sense of peace about her. He took her hand, and said, “Don’t reckon I’m going to see you again, am I?” Like so many before him with similar stories, his voice breaks when he tells it. “‘No, don’t reckon so,’ she said, ‘but let me tell you something: what you did, getting that horse out on the ranch, getting him out to where he’s free, you did for me. What you did for that horse, you did for me personally.’” He couldn’t stop the tears, and she was crying too. “She didn’t do it easily,” he says. “She wanted to know everything—she was like a young girl again. This stallion she’s got all these hopes and dreams for—she wanted to know every detail, what I did, how he handled the hills and the rocks and the creeks … ” He pauses. “After a while, she said, ‘I wanted something that was clean and pure and honest for him.’ And it dawned on me, that’s pretty much what she was trying to do all along.” The next day, she seemed stronger again. “But you could see that she was ready to wrap things up after that,” he remembers. “It was bittersweet to see, but she had a peace about it then. She was ready to move on.”

Sheila’s last ride on the Biddle Ranch.

“I wanted to do right by this horse and Sheila,” Lester recalls, “but there were tons of ground squirrel holes out there and he was barefoot, and he’s in this hackamore that probably should have been in a museum. So, I was trying to keep him safe and also not ruin the hackamore.” As he realized that everything was going to go well, however, his anxiety faded and the enjoyment of being on such a promising young horse washed over him. “Once you actually get on a horse and start riding, you forget about the cares of the world,” he says. “I rode Major Mac for the moment— everything wasn’t so much about that one day as it was setting him up to be a champion, to be successful moment by moment, so that we could do it again and again, and he’d grow over time.” When they came home, Sheila watched the video repeatedly, silently absorbing it. And over the next few days, accompanied by Sheila’s friends, Buckley took the colt back to the Biddle, angling higher into the terrain and farther back into the hills, Major Mac becoming more sure of himself, more capable, with every ride. That was her last wish, really, the one thing that gave her the freedom to leave. By that time, the parade of friends coming to say goodbye had been steady for days, so Buckley began looking for a moment when they could say a personal farewell. One evening, he found it; Sara Chisholm was in the next room, and Lisa Thompson was close by, but later, Lester would say that their presence helped him handle what happened.

As the end neared, Barbara Varian remembered a day from months before, when Varian was waiting for a chemo treatment. “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just not ready,” she had remarked. “She wasn’t,” Barbara observes. “She had so much more to do, and all the way, you saw that. There was no idle time in her life. Watching Major Mac V, picking Lester Buckley to go out and ride him on the ranch—she wanted to see it all happen to the end.”

It wasn’t long before, as Sheila told “her girls,” it was “time to get this over with.” For a few mornings, Sherry Conrads reports, she would begin the day with a calm, “When will it be?” On March 6, early in the morning, she passed away. Ten days after her death, Sheila Varian was laid to rest with her family in Halcyon’s small cemetery. There was a simple private ceremony first, limited because the little town’s Temple of the People, where it was held, was not large. Then everyone walked to the cemetery, out through a field, quiet and peaceful, to the old graveyard reserved for people who had lived in Halcyon. “What choked us up at the funeral was that her guys from the ranch dug the grave,” Melissa Stamey remembers. “Her boys. Then they lowered the casket in and everyone threw in shovelfuls of dust and the boys did the rest of it. It was like, yeah, that’s the way it should be.” In an unforgettable atmosphere, Dave Stamey sang “The Vaquero Song.” He had composed it nearly two decades earlier as a tribute to the vaquero way of life, but it might have been written for Sheila Varian: “I am still here, todavía estoy aquí … My soul is dancing in the moonlight … And I mingle with each grain of sand in the land of my birthright.”

For Sheila’s friends and relatives, memories, observations and opinions have come flooding back. Some speak of her significance, some of the impact she had on them, and some just remember her dedication, skill, occasional crankiness, and fundamental good humor. The all-time greatest image of Sheila Varian before she became a well-known figure in the equine community comes from her nephew, Bob Rowlands, who recalls his earliest memory of her, from the mid-1950s. He was five or six and she was college age, and they drove around the countryside in a rattling-old Model A Ford, singing, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats, and liddle lamzy divey, a kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?” Nonsense, yes, until translated to: “Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?” Okay, still nonsense, but fun. That was Sheila then, he says, a happy-go-lucky girl, and others from that era say pretty much the same thing.

Sheila and Sherry’s computer generated chicken under saddle photo sent to Johanna Ullström.

That silliness, which might here and there have gone under a cloud, nevertheless remained alive and well until the end. During her illness, when she especially took pleasure in having chickens, Sheila and Swedish-born horsewoman Johanna Ullström engaged in a long distance, hilarious competition over who was the best chicken trainer. It was all done digitally, with Sherry Conrads translating Sheila’s ideas visually on the computer. “Back and forth the videos and commentary went,” Conrads smiles, “until Sheila sent this photo [of a chicken in a western saddle], explaining that she had broken White Chicken to the saddle, and wondering how Johanna was doing? Johanna gave up.” The Varian-Ullström friendship was an understandable match from the beginning: both had won at the top of their game, and both trained with a deep understanding of each horse as an individual. For Sheila’s cousin Jack Varian, her humor remains his favorite description of her, although not the only one. “She had a good sense of humor,” he says. “She saw the funny side of a lot of situations that someone else might see as dark or scary, or whatever else. Sheila never lost her sense of humor; she was fun to be around. People gravitated to her because she was easy to be around, and yet, when there was a horse involved that maybe needed care, she could come down on a person. “I remember an incident on an Arabian ride. A fellow brought a little, dinky horse and threw it a little flake of hay that wouldn’t have fed three squirrels. She went over and got a bale of hay and stuck it by his stall and threw a bunch of it in for his horse. That was her way of saying, ‘Hey, you’re not feeding your horse, and you can’t do that.’ It was not acceptable. And she did it while he was there, without saying a word.” Just knowing Sheila sometimes changed her friends’ lives. Doug and Sue Herthel had no idea what they were getting into when they met Sheila that day in 1971. “At that time, I barely knew what an Arabian horse was,” Doug admits. “They weren’t a common breed at UC Davis Veterinary Clinic then.”

Doug Herthel and Bey Juan (by Bay El Bey) in the Tevis Cup.

Through Sheila, the Herthels became so acquainted with Arabians that they owned them and bred a few. “Number one, they have the will to survive, and they’re so multi-faceted,” Sue explains. “They can be beautiful in the show ring at halter, but they can go to a hundred mile endurance ride and look ahead at the next fifty and say, ‘Why quit here? Let’s keep going.’ And you meet the most wonderful people. What a gift, huh?” In fact, one of their goals had been to ride in the Tevis Cup, and in the 1980s, they both did, Doug aboard their homebred Bay El Bey son, Bey Juan. “We finished in excellent time,” he reports. “He went one hundred miles over the high Sierras as if he’d never even thought about it, he was in such good shape and so durable. Two days after the race, the Reagan ranch needed a horse for some maneuvers the Secret Service was doing when Ronald Reagan was there, so we took him up there and he was as fresh as he could be. That was kind of a testimony to the durability and endurance of her bloodlines.” In later days, when they drove Sheila to Los Angeles for her treatments, they saw the same determination in her. “She seemed to be at ease,” Sue relates. “She was just so inwardly driven.” But there was still that sense of humor and her optimism. “She always used to say, ‘Susan, we need to be a cheerful earful.’” And she was still saying it, even then, when the word “cheerful” had to have been a challenge for her.

Renowned horseman Gene LaCroix remembers the early 1960s, when he and Varian became acquainted. “We all wanted to compete, and certainly, we all wanted to win,” he notes. “But there was a certain aspect to Sheila. She wanted to get better. And she was a great custodian of her horses: she cared about their happiness and their comfort.” In the decades of their association, much changed for both of them in the ups and downs of the horse industry, but LaCroix recalls with special gratitude that even years later, Sheila’s friendship was genuine. “In 1990, when things in my world were falling apart, she sent me horses,” he says. “[She] had her definite convictions about her breeding program,” he continues. “The last time I was at the ranch, in 2011, we walked through the herds as we had previously. Now we’re into ten or more generations of breeding, and she’s injected some lines that maybe I wouldn’t have, but she made it work for herself and she produced really good horses. It reminded me of going to Poland when you could see generation after generation of horses, and they may have changed in type, but they didn’t lose structural integrity. She was breeding for the

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Dave Stamey entertaining the crowd.

Kristin Reynolds

market, and there is nothing wrong with that, but she did not compromise good, basic conformation. If something was going to take her in that direction, she wouldn’t do it. She’d stop using it in her program. She produced a beautiful horse, and obviously, the record speaks for itself.” “I think her legacy was to create the Varian Arabian just like Lady Anne Blunt bred the Crabbet Arabian and the EAO breeds the Egyptian Arabian,” reflects Sherry Conrads. “I think we can credit Sheila with developing a sub-strain of Arabian horses that are the Varian Arabians. The idea that this ranch is her legacy is not all there is—her legacy is all over the world in the bloodlines she created.” “She inspired you to do things beyond what you thought you could do,” offers Marty Shea. “I loved her. And she was a total critter lover—all critters, kitties, dogs, horses, she truly connected with animals. If I had a problem I couldn’t solve, she was the go-to person. She had so much kindness; she was such a natural person with animals.” “Sheila was a very, very bright gal,” says Kathie Hart. “She could be as serious as anybody when she needed to, but could also be so much fun. She lived a very simple existence, but she was very involved and very engaged—and she could blend into many lifestyles. She was as comfortable having dinner with Mike Nichols as she would be with cowhands gathering cattle in the pasture. In her mind, they were all equals.”

“You understand Sheila a little better when you see where she came from, where she grew up,” Frank Chisholm observes. “She wasn’t particularly a religious person, but she always had a goodness about her, and a fairness. She was always about being fair—I bought horses from her all the time and she was never deceitful.” He grins and adds, “Although I learned I had to ask the right questions. But she never told me a falsehood.” Martha Murdock Rattner was in her early twenties when she left Nichols-DeLongpré for the opportunity to train at Varian Arabians, and she didn’t know Sheila all that well when she arrived. “The reason I always thought that what she had was extraordinary was that Mike [Nichols] liked her so much,” she says. “Mike made his living by making really quick judgments about people and he was seldom wrong; he made millions doing that with the actors he chose for the roles he needed them to do. I’m assuming he made a judgment about Sheila in much the same way, and boy, was he flippin’ right. She was a star that Mike discovered and only the horse people knew about her. He believed in her. He used to say, ‘When you are fortunate enough to have talent for what you have a passion for, you owe it to yourself to work as hard as you can everyday, till you are so tired that you can’t keep one foot in front of the other, and success is inevitable. I think he knew all along that Sheila was never going to turn away from a challenge, and she was going to end up on top.”

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That mix of talent and passion was an attraction for Dave and Melissa Stamey when they met Sheila at one of Dave’s concerts in the 1990s. “I think it was one of those relationships where somebody who is passionate about one thing sees somebody who is passionate about another,” Dave offers. “They may not be the same thing, but they can relate.”

After the laughter, Dave, serious again, observes, “Her honesty was vast and indefatigable. The thing about it was, if you wanted to know [something], ask her; if you didn’t want to know, don’t ask her, because she was going to tell you. She was absolutely as blunt-honest as anybody I have ever known, in the best kind of way.

The friendship that began then would last nearly a quarter of a century, and include everything from demanding pack trips into the mountains to quiet, casual get-togethers, to, for many years, Dave’s regular performances at Varian events.

“She was ageless,” he continues. “She had an integrity that towered above the average human being. What I always found admirable was, here was somebody who knew what she was put on this earth to do. She knew her business, she knew her world, and she was comfortable in it. She knew her own heart and she followed it. There was never any hesitation.”

He remembers one Sheila moment. “We all started riding together, just going across country, having the camaraderie of the horses,” he says. “We were Quarter Horse people and she found that amusing—gave us no end of a hard time any time she could. ‘We’re going to go straight down this hill,’ she once said, ‘You Quarter Horse people may want to zigzag.’” (Significantly, she never mentioned to them that once, in the words of an associate, “She rode off the edge of the mountain and like to killed herself.” She hobbled around for days, but never let anyone see her sweat over it.) That’s a side Melissa remembers. “Sheila was one tough lady. When she made up her mind that she was going to do something, by God, she’d do it. And she made you want to do it too—quickly! ‘All right, that’s enough of whining! C’mon, let’s go.’ You’d do things that you’d be thinking, ‘Oh-my-god, I’m going to die.’”

Over the nearly sixty years that Sheila Varian was on the public stage in the horse business, she built a reputation for herself and her horses that crossed breed lines. Christy Egan was reminded of that when she got word that Sheila had passed away. She was at a reining show in Scottsdale, with mostly Quarter Horses. She was standing at the in-gate as the news sank in, and turning to the ring man standing next to her, she couldn’t help speaking. “Did you know Sheila Varian?” she said, even though she knew the guy’s background wasn’t Arabians. Tears were beginning to stream down her cheeks. “She just died.” More than half a century after Sheila and Ronteza won the world, that horseman in Scottsdale responded, “Oh, sure! She was the one who rode that mare who won at the Cow Palace!”

Angela Alverez

Lisa Thompson

Dan Lynch

With Gene LaCroix Sheila Varian | 105

The Essence Of Varian That Sheila Varian had skill with horses has been demonstrated

That day, Dorrance began teaching her methods that he had developed

throughout her life—about seven decades of skill, beginning with when

after watching horses in the wild, a “soft approach” that was based on his

she hooked her toes in Judy’s elbow, swung

observations of their body language and herd

herself up on the mare’s back and began

behavior. When he left, he said, “See you in a

exploring the countryside. What was most

year,” as she recalled, and that was about right.

important, however, is that she studied

“It took me about a year, but I learned all sorts

horsemanship all her life, and although she

of things about relaxation and suppling, and

would later say that many techniques com-

stuff I use today.” It was the first of many such

monly used in the old days were not

consultations, and they would be dear friends

acceptable to her as the years went on, she

until his death in 2003.

always addressed each horse as an individual. That was her habit with all animals.

Over the past twenty-five years, she has passed that knowledge on to Jaime Hernandez, who

“Probably the most fascinating thing to

is now Varian Arabians’ head performance

me about animals is their language,” she

trainer, known for his soft hands and ability to

commented in a 1995 AHT article. “I was a

turn out horses with good mouths and willing

shy kid who was always good with animals,

attitudes. “Horses, to me, are like people,” he

so I spent tremendous amounts of time with

says. “Some are very smart and some are little

them. I find them ultimately fascinating. I

slower learning, and some don’t want to learn.

understand: I can look into their faces, can

If I have a horse in my hands and I see that

look at their ears, at how their bodies move

he’s [going to be] a little hard work, I have to

… I really enjoy that. I never look at an

find a way in my head to teach him to

animal that I don’t see some little sign in its

understand what I want.

behavior, and in my subconscious I’ll say, ‘Oh, I never noticed that before, oh, I get what it means!’”

“We try to teach the horses, we don’t try to train them,” he explains. “Training forces. We try to put everything in the horse’s

It is not surprising that one of her most profound mentors in horses was

brain step by step, and not be in a hurry. To work with a horse, you have

Tom Dorrance, the legendary practitioner of natural horsemanship (Sheila

to have patience. We make the horse think, and wait for him to ‘get it.’ If

said he would never have identified much with that term or “horse

you ask and he doesn’t get it, you have to ask again. Slowly. You feel when

whisperer,” but his unique ability contributed to both). She was one of his

he says, ‘Okay, okay, I got it.’ If you ask him and he doesn’t do it and you

earliest followers, beginning with when he drove down her driveway to

punish him, you will make that horse nervous, and the next time when

tell her he’d seen her in the ring and she had great potential. Over time,

you ask him, he will be nervous, thinking you are going to punish him.

Sheila’s memory grew a little fuzzy as to whether that happened right after

It’s all little by little, and the next day they are happy, and they think,

the Cow Palace or Salinas, but either way, it was early in her career.

‘I know what he wants.’”

Sheila Varian a nd Audrey Griffin.

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Sheila Varian | 107

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When Lester Buckley returned to California in May, Sheila’s words echoed in his mind. “She said, ‘I want Major Mac to have a chance to be an honest horse,’” he recalls. By that, he knew, she meant capable of doing a job. The first step, then, was to continue what they’d begun on the Biddle, right before Sheila’s death. So, on a Thursday morning, Buckley loaded the colt up and drove him two hours to the V6 Ranch, where he was scheduled to give a cow horse clinic that weekend. That was the farthest Major Mac had ever been from home, but he settled into his temporary stall comfortably, and for the next four days, on a diet of just hay and water, he worked a full schedule at the clinic. And—this was the important part—he had his first experiences with cattle. “I didn’t know how strong he’d be,” Buckley says, “but I rode him two or three hours in the morning, to go out and find the cattle. Then I gave him maybe an hour off for lunch, and in the afternoon, I might saddle him at one and not be done till seven—that’s a five-and-a-half or six hour ride. He never lost a pound, he ate and drank, happy as a lark, and he was resilient and tough, not fragile at all.” He smiles. Those afternoons had been spent gathering and sorting cattle. Once, he’d heard two women who were watching observe, “If Sheila’s seeing this, she’s smiling …” Inside, Lester was practically singing, and even months later, his voice vibrates with remembered joy. “I’d be, like, ‘I rode you all day,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go again!’ Man, was he game! He was so strong, and real courageous on a cow. “And I was thinking, ‘Sheila would be so happy.’”

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For Varian, reality was settling in. Her friends rotated nights of staying with her, so that she was never alone, and as time closed in, she had intimate conversations with each. She presented each one with a gift— something special from her life, a memento between the two of them. “She gave everybody something of hers,” Audrey Griffin notes. “She gave away what she wanted us to have of hers.” For some, there were “assignments.” “As a person who got back involved with Arabians when I was older, I think I’ve learned more in the last six years than I had in my life, because Sheila taught me so much by example,” Sherry Conrads says. “Taught me about pedigrees and encouraged me, giving me [research projects] so that she would learn and I would learn as well. The night Sheila gave me my assignment for life after she was gone, she said, ‘Sherry, I want you to continue breeding horses. You’re ready … you don’t need me anymore.’” At the end of February, Lester Buckley called to let Sheila know that in May, he’d be in California for a clinic and he’d come to see her. She always looked forward to his visits; ever since they had met, she had admired his horsemanship, and one day at a Light Hands Horsemanship clinic, she’d put him to the test. As the long shadows slanted across the ring at the end of the day, she’d asked him to ride Jubilation V and let her know what was wrong with him, because something was off. It was a ruse; she knew Jubilation’s problem. She just wanted to hear Lester’s answer. His opinion was identical to hers, and from then on, she offered not only her friendship, but her complete confidence: she often asked him to take her horses for use in his clinics, and when the time came, she trusted him with Major Mac.

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by CHRISTY EGAN Though Varian Arabians has officially owned registered Arabian horses since 1948, when Sheila Varian was 11, the major ingredient in their breeding program arrived in 1961. These three foundation Arabian mares, imported from Poland for Varian’s by Patricia Lindsay, were *Naganka 1952 Grey Mare (Bad Afas x Najada by Fetysz); *Bachantka 1957 Grey Mare (Wielki Szlem x Balalajka by Amurath Sahib), 15/16ths-sister to *Bask++; and *Ostroga 1956 Bay Mare (Duch x Orda by Omar II). Each of the mares brought something different to the Varian breeding mix, but between them, under the guiding wisdom of Sheila Varian, they orchestrated the Varian Arabian horse and effectively changed the American Arabian show horse forever.

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*Naganka

*NAGANKA was the most desert bred of the three and seemed the most like an Arabian “war horse.” She could be considered the most important as well, since she is the great progenitor of the famous Varian stallions, though, of course, she did so with the assistance of Sheila’s beloved U.S. National Champion, Bay Abi++. They produced several nationalw innersto gether.

Mikado++

Bay El Bey (Bay Abi++ x *Naganka) Undeniably *Naganka’s greatest gift to the breed, Bay El Bey was the sire of almost 450 offspring. Foaled in 1969, he showed consistently from 1972 through 1978 in Stallion Halter and English Pleasure. He was Scottsdale Champion Stallion in 1973, then Canadian and U.S. National Top Ten in Stallion Halter seven times. Over the course of his 16 years as a breeding stallion, Bay El Bey++ sired over a hundred Class A Champions and some of the industry’s best producing breeding stock.

Motife++ (Zelamat x *Naganka) Motife++ (by Zelamat) was U.S. National Top Ten Gelding, and as a stallion was the sire of 11 foals, including Santife, dam of the Canadian National Top Ten English Pleasure Junior Horse and U.S. National Top Ten English Pleasure AOTR 18 & Over HHH Showbiz.

Mikado++ (Bay Abi++ x *Naganka) Mikado++, 1971 U.S. National Champion Park and three-time U.S. National Top Ten Park. Mikado sired several national winners, including: eight-time National Champion Pleasure Driving, Open and Amateur, BRA Quintara (x Quintina); her sister, BRA Quintessence, Canadian National Champion and U.S. Reserve National Champion Park AOTR; Montecito Storm+/ (x Raffadja), Canadian National Champion English Pleasure AOTR 18 & Over; and the magnificent Comment+// (x *Ostroga), U.S. National Champion and National Reserve Champion English Pleasure, and two-time U.S. National Reserve Champion Park. Mikado++ is also the sire of the great Half-Arabian show horse, Nejmeh Mikar+/, U.S. National Champion and Reserve Half-Arabian Ladies Side Saddle Western, and U.S. Reserve National Champion Half-Arabian Western Pleasure AAOTR 18-39.

Mignonette (*Bask++ x *Naganka) Mignonette, dam of the 1978 Top Ten Western Pleasure horse, Aflame++/, along with champions: Kanon (by Kanani), Windy Isle V (by Fire Wind) and Mimosa V (by Traditio).

Bay El Bey

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“The King Maker” (Bay Abi++ x *Naganka) The sire of almost 450 offspring, Bay El Bey++ was initially a well-known show horse for Sheila Varian. Foaled in 1969, he showed consistently from 1972 through 1978 in Stallion Halter and English Pleasure. He was Scottsdale Champion Stallion in 1973, then Canadian and U.S. National Top Ten in Stallion Halter seven times. At Scottsdale in 1977, Bay El Bey++ was Reserve Champion English Pleasure in a class of 51 horses. Finally the stars aligned and he was named the 1977 Canadian National Champion Stallion. He was a large, handsome horse, but certainly not a pretty Arabian and though he had a great hip, his croup sloped dramatically, leading Sheila to label them “working croups.” He was a good natured stallion and travelled to and from the Canadian National Show, where he won his title, cross-tied in the trailer in the storage area in front of the stalls. Over the course of his 16 years as a breeding stallion, Bay El Bey++ sired over a hundred Class A Champions and several dozen national winners. His second foal crop produced:

Barbary+++ (Bay El Bey x Balalinka)

Bey Shah (Bay El Bey x Star Of Ofir)

Huckleberry Bey (Bay El Bey x Taffona)

Barbary+++ was a National Top Ten seven times in Park, Formal Driving, Stallion Halter, Pleasure Driving and English Pleasure. He was the 1979 Canadian National Reserve Champion Park Horse. Barbary was a small Arabian, but he showed larger than life in the ring and most people in the audience never even noticed his size. Most certainly his heart was large and his talent dynamic, as was his Arabian character.

Born in Bay El Bey++’s fifth foal crop was Bey Shah+.

Yet, perhaps the best was yet to come. Born just two weeks after Bey Shah+ was the horse that would change forever the English-type Arabian, Huckleberry Bey++, sired by Bay El Bey++ and out of Taffona, daughter of U.S. National Champion Halter and English Pleasure, Raffon++.

As a sire, Barbary+++ registered 760 offspring, well over 80 of them national winners, including national champions and reserves in Halter, Pleasure Driving, Formal Driving, English Pleasure, Country English Pleasure, Park, Ladies Side Saddle, Informal Combination, Hunter Pleasure, Western Pleasure, and Native Costume. Barbary+++ daughters quickly became priceless as broodmares, featuring prominently in the tail-female bloodlines of national winners sired by stallions like Afire Bey V.

The son of Star Of Ofir, a *Bask++ daughter out of a Ga’zi daughter, Bey Shah+ was an immediate sensation in the Arabian breed. He was Regional Reserve Champion at two and three, and was a Top Ten Stallion at the U.S. Nationals that same year. At four he went to Scottsdale and there was Reserve Champion Stallion, then Pacific Slope Champion and finally, the 1980 U.S. Reserve National Champion Stallion. Like Barbary+++, Bey Shah+ was a far larger sensation as a breeding sire, registering just a few short of 1,000 offspring in his years of producing and becoming the preeminent Arabian halter sire in the United States, then in South America and then globally. His record was extraordinary.

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Huckleberry Bey++ was completely different from Bey Shah+ and Barbary+++. Sheila was enchanted with him. She thought that he looked like a carousel horse, something out of a fairy tale. At three he was U.S. National Reserve Champion Futurity Stallion and five years later he was the U.S. National Reserve Champion English Pleasure Horse. Huckleberry Bey sired 699 registered Arabian and Half-Arabian offspring between 1979 and 1994.

AA Apollo Bey (Huckleberry Bey++ x April Charm)

Hucklebey Berry (Huckleberry Bey++ x Miz Bask)

Desperado V (Huckleberry Bey++ x Daraska)

Sons like AA Apollo Bey became national or national reserve champions, created their own dynasties and sired extraordinary national champions, like his multi-national champion Park horse son, Apollopalooza. These horses also became sires and sired national winners.

The Huckleberry Bey++ son, Hucklebey Berry+/, four-time U.S. National Champion English Pleasure open and amateur, is the sire of 490 offspring, many of them national winners.

The Huckleberry Bey++ son Desperado V sired 878 offspring, including Sundance Kid V, who currently has 421 registered offspring. As of the end of 2015, Sundance Kid V had sired 83 national winners, most of them in the Western Pleasure divisions.

Apollopalooza

In addition to being an exceptional show horse, Hucklebey Berry+/ was a great sire, crossing well within a very diverse group of pedigrees, and able to sire national winning purebreds and Half-Arabians equally well. Like Barbary+++, Hucklebey Berry+/ is particularly noted as a sire of daughters, many of them now important, national producing broodmares. He was also very good at siring broodmares able to pass on his motion, soundness and beauty. In his first foal crop he produced Sirah Bey, Canadian Reserve National Champion English Pleasure Jr. Horse and the dam of 14-time National Champion and Reserve Sir Magni Feke+//. In his 1991 foal crop came Colorado Sage+/, Canadian National Champion English Pleasure Amateur and the dam of Expressly Bella, not only an 8-time National Champion and Reserve, but also the dam of HA California Sage, 2015 U.S. National Champion Country English Futurity. A 1992 HBB daughter, SF Georgia+/, is a 3-time National Champion and Reserve and the dam of 3-time National Champion and Reserve, Kharmel BR, who is herself the dam of 3-time National Champion Kharisma M. That’s just the first half-dozen breeding years. This is a bloodline that predictably goes on and on.

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Sundance Kid V

Afire Bey V (Huckleberry Bey++ x Autumn Fire)

Bay El Bey x Taffona At this point the impact of the Varian breeding program becomes increasingly voluminous. Huckleberry Bey++ sired well over 100 national winners, a great many of them national champions and reserves in halter and in all of the English divisions, including Show Hack and Hunter Pleasure. As the Varian-bred horses have dominated division after division in the American show ring, the emergence of the ultimate Arabian show horse sire was practically inevitable. He appeared from one of the best of the Varian Arabian crosses, Huckleberry Bey++ and the *Bask++ daughter Autumn Fire.

Autumn Fire was arguably the best cross with Huckleberry Bey++. Of her 16 foals, 15 were sired by Huckleberry Bey++ and 13 were champions. Nine were national top ten horses; four of them national champions and/or reserves. Right in the middle of that family was Afire Bey V, a U.S. National Top Ten Park Horse and the horse that became the Leading Arabian Sire of our lifetime. As of September 15, 2016, he has 1,362 offspring. At his passing, he had sired 762 champions, among them 375 national winners, 217 national champions and/or reserves. No other Arabian stallion in our time, standing at public stud to a group of mares numbering 500 or more, has a better percentage of champions to number of get. His is 56 percent. His percentage of offspring that have won their national awards in English-type competition is 85 percent, with the balance winning percentages almost evenly divided between halter (seven percent) and other performance classes (eight percent). In the year that he died (2015), 49 Afire Bey V sons and daughters competed successfully at the U.S. National Championships, winning 94 national awards. The strongest competition for the Afire Bey V get at this level now comes from the offspring of his sons, great sires like Baske Afire and Afires Heir, and from IXL Noble Express+/, siring champions with Afire Bey V daughters.

Leading sire Baske Afire (Afire Bey V x Mac Baske)

4 Time Unanimous National Champion and leading sire Afires Heir (Afire Bey V x Brassmis)

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The beautiful grey mare *Bachantka was a 15/16 sister to *Bask++, a notable relationship. She was the dam of 15 foals, eight by Bay-Abi++, two by the Comet son *Essaul, one by Bay El Bey++, one each by the Gdansk sons, Fortune SK and Traditio, one by *Bask++ and one by his son Ariston. With the exception of Bay Abi++ and Bay El Bey++, all of the stallions this mare was bred to were pure Polish Arabians. *Bachantka produced two national winners, Baychatka++, U.S. National Top Ten Halter Mare, and Bay El Sahib++ (Bay-Abi++), Canadian National Top Ten Native Costume.

Bayanka (Bay Abi++ x *Bachantka)

Baychatka++ (Bay Abi++ x *Bachantka)

Balalinka (*Bask++ x *Bachantka)

Scott Trees photo of Sheila with Bayanka, Baychatka and next generation Moska and Spinning Song.

Bayanka is the dam of eight foals, among them national winners, Ravon (Raffon++), Canadian National Champion and U.S. Reserve National Champion English Pleasure AOTR, and the great Kaiyoum++ (Khemosabi++++//), Canadian Reserve National Champion Halter Stallion and U.S. National Top Ten. Kaiyoum++ sired seven national winners, including the 1986 Canadian National Champion Futurity Colt, Flashdans.

Baychatka++ (Bay Abi++) was the dam of 13 foals.

Kaiyoum++

Baychatka++’s third offspring was U.S. National Reserve Champion Futurity Filly and twice Canadian National Top Ten Mare Halter, Kaliki+.

Her first offspring was Moska (Khemosabi++++//), dam of 16 foals including several national winners, among them the beautiful Moonstone Bey V (Bay El Bey++), Canadian National Reserve Champion Stallion and Futurity Colt, and Mosketan V, Canadian National Champion and U.S. National Reserve Champion Stallion AAOTH.

Moska

For *Bachantka’s fifth foal, Sheila decided to breed her to *Bask++, an important and controversial move as the two horses are almost full siblings. Incest breeding is always a delicate balancing act between great possibilities and great problems. The resulting mare was a good one, with Balalinka giving the breed multi-National winner and sire, Barbary+++, as well as Balajkar Bey V+/, U.S. and Canadian National Top Ten English Pleasure Amateur, Pleasure Driving Amateur and Native Costume. Though *Bachantka produced both a son and a daughter with *Essaul, it remained for her daughter Balalinka to produce a national top ten daughter with that stallion. That was Balesselle and she won her top ten ribbon in English Pleasure AOTR 18 & Over. Barbary+++

It was, however, as a sire of outstanding broodmares that Kaiyoum++ won much notoriety. For example, several of National Champion Fame VF+’s finest national winners were out of daughters of Kaiyoum++, including Fames Fax, 1993 Canadian National Champion Halter Mare; Ffames, 1998 Brazilian National Reserve Champion Halter Stallion, and Showkayce+, four-time U.S. and Canadian National Top Ten Halter Stallion.

Moonstone Bey V

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*Bachantka

Bachista V (Ariston x *Bachantka)

*Bachantka’s last foal, Bachista V, was sired by the pure Polish *Bask++ son Ariston. Bachista V is one more example of the magnitude of the Varian influence on the American Arabian horse. The dam of 16 foals, Bachista V’s second foal was Bucharest V (Huckleberry Bey++), U.S. National Champion and Reserve Pleasure Driving, U.S. National Champion Informal Milleniun LOA Combination and Canadian National Reserve Champion Native Costume. Of his 84 registered offspring, Bucharest V sired 17 national winners, among them the Canadian National Champion Park Horse, Canadian Reserve National Champion English Pleasure and U.S. National Champion English Pleasure Junior Horse, HF Mister Chips+; U.S. and Canadian National Champion Stallion and Scottsdale Champion Stallion, Millennium LOA+, and national champions: Show Mme The Money, Captain Courageous PA, EQ Escalade+//, The Whole Shebang+//, SA Kappuccino, and Hotrod Hewey++++//. Both HF Mister Chips+ and Millennium LOA have their own lists of national winning offspring.

Bizmark V+ (Sundance Kid V), and two-time Canadian Reserve National Champion and two-time U.S. National Top Ten, Bouncer V+/ (Ballience V).

Bachista V’s sixth foal was U.S. National Top Ten English PleasureOpen and Junior Horse, Bravado Bey V (Huckleberry Bey++). The sire of 163 registered offspring, Bravado Bey V sired multiple champions and national winners, including: La Paz V+//, eight-time National Champion and Reserve; RS Drakkar+//, nine-time U.S., Canadian and Youth National Champion and Reserve; Maestro D+//, four-time U.S. and Canadian National Champion and Reserve; and Santa Bravo V+/, two-time U.S. National Champion, just to highlight a few. Bravado Bey V

Bachista V’s oldest daughter, Baychelsea V (Huckleberry Bey++) is the dam of Youth and Canadian National Top Ten Baskin Bey V+ (Alada Baskin); U.S. National Top Ten Bay Dancer V+/ (Sundance Kid V); Sheila Varian | 117

The last of the three mares imported from Poland for the Varians was the bay *Ostroga. Patricia Lindsay found her at Michalow Stud and described her as “delicate and refined with a grand trot.” She produced 15 foals for Sheila Varian. Of them, two stallions and two mares left a lasting mark on the Arabian horse and industry we know today.

Khema (Khemosabi++++// x *Ostroga) Khema is the dam of three national winners: Slam Dunk (Zodiac Matador), U.S. Reserve National Champion Park AAOTR; Love Of Wisdom (Wisdom), Canadian National Top Ten English Pleasure;

First Class

Bay Image++ (Bay-Abi+ x *Ostroga) The first was *Ostroga’s fourth foal, Bay Image++, a Canadian National Top Ten Stallion. Bay Image is the sire of: Artundra (x Ganjy), a U.S. National Reserve Champion Futurity Stallion and Canadian National Top Ten Show Hack and Ladies Side Saddle English; Legacys Zarif (x Haifa Sue), Canadian Reserve National Champion Half-Arabian Pleasure Driving; Mi Gay Adventure U.S. National Top Ten Half-Arabian Gelding. On the surface, this is not impressive until you dig deeper. Bay Image++’s first purebred daughter, Serbaya is the dam of National Champion Park, Miss Cognac (Cognac), who is the dam of: Energy (Euros), Scottsdale multi-Champion and Youth National Champion TC Miyake (Zodiac Matador), U.S. National Top Ten English Pleasure Junior Horse.

First Class (*Bask++), U.S. National Top Ten Park and Formal Driving. First Class was syndicated, and like many of the stories we’ve told in this woven Varian fabric of breeding and champions, First Class was a better sire of broodmares than show horses. For example, his daughter Ebonee (x Esprit Jolie) was a premier broodmare for R O Lervick Arabians for a decade. She did very well with their *Bask++ grandson, Cytosk+++/, producing: National Top Ten Socyety Girl, multi-National Reserve Champions, ROL Exceptional+ and ROL Code Red+//, and National Champion Cyty Slicker+.

Comment+/

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Comment+/ (Mikado++ x *Ostroga) The second son of *Ostroga that made such a show ring impact is Comment+/ (Mikado++). Winner of 12 national awards, Comment was twice National Reserve Champion Park and the U.S. National Champion English Pleasure Horse in 1978. Sheila was extremely proud of this third generation of Varian national champions (Bay Abi+ … Mikado … Comment) and she personally rode Comment to the roses. Comment was a gelding, but he was a great horse, an exceptional athlete and one of the best remembered of Sheila’s show horses in the 1970s.

Ophelia V (Traditio x *Ostroga) *Ostroga’s last daughter, Ophelia V (Traditio) produced nine foals. She is the dam of National Top Ten The Olymphian, and grand dam to the National Champion and multi-National Top Ten, Olympian Bey V+/.

*Ostroga and foal.

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The relevance of the great 20th century Arabian horse breeders comes down to modern times in a variety of ways. Some are very visible, like the LaCroixes contribution of *Bask++ and that horse’s presence throughout the pedigrees of modern Arabian performance horses. Most are much more subtle. Many only include a generation or two, and even those with 40 or 50 years of breeding may only contribute one or possibly two very special horses. The Varian Arabians impact on modern day Arabians across the board is stunning, and probably unsurpassed. Consider Riverwatch (Baywatch V++ x Dana Cheyenne, by Bacardi Afire). Bred by Dale and Wyona Worthington, Riverwatch was a 7-year-old when he was ridden by Jeremy Reynolds to win the Tevis Cup Endurance Race in 2011. Riverwatch is sired by the Varian-bred stallion, Baywatch V++, 2003 Canadian National Champion Junior Stallion. Baywatch V++ is a Sundance Kid V (Desperado V x Sweet Shalimar V to Moska) son, out of Berryantka V (Huckleberry Bey++ x Balalinka to *Bachantka).

This is not a story with a close. Like the strongest of life’s stories, it has taken on a life of its own. The Varian breeding program has become a vast tapestry. It weaves and creates. Sheila Varian once said to me that she believed the Arabian horse was so exceptional, so extraordinary, that it would live on well beyond this time, this place and these people. She just wished that it could be a bit more because of us … instead of in spite of us. What she has left to the world is the best of the American Arabian horse in our lifetime. We can face tomorrow’s Arabian horse and its admirers with our heads held just a bit higher because of her.

Riverwatch and his rider won both the Tevis Cup and the Haggin Cup for Best Condition, something very rarely accomplished in the Tevis Cup’s 60 year history (only eight times). The Tevis Cup is recognized by the AERC as the founding ride of Endurance Riding competition. It is 100 miles in 24 hours over merciless terrain, and is like no other race of its kind on earth. Riverwatch has 17 crosses to Varian-bred horses in the first five generations of his pedigree.

Spinning Song (*Bask x Moska)

Marigold V (Bay El Bey++ x Moska)

Consider the influence of one simple, Varian-bred mare, Moska (Khemosabi++++// x Baychatka++) (16 foals).

Consider Moska’s sixth daughter, Marigold V (Bay El Bey++), (16 foals).

Start with her first daughter, Spinning Song (*Bask++) (9 foals), dam of the Canadian National Top Ten Mare, SweetinspirationV (Huckleberry Bey++), dam of the Ali Jamaal daughter, Sweet Shalimar V (12 foals), dam of Sundance Kid V (Desperado V) (sire of 421 foals). Sundance Kid V is also the sire of over 80 national winners, including: multi-National Champions and Reserves like: VJ Berryance, Rakhassa Bey++++//, Mojave Kid++++//, Agracie Girl V+++//, Zefyr+//, Melody V+//, Sunsational Kid+//, and Onyx A.

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Start with her first daughter, Magdalena V (Sanadik El Shaklan) (18 foals). Magdalena V produced Misti V (Bravado Bey V), the dam of multi-National Champion Mirage V++++//, and of Misti Morn V (Audacious PS), the dam of several siblings by Jullyen El Jamaal: U.S. National Top Ten Futurity Filly, Morning Glory V; Master Jullyen V, 2013 U.S. National Top Ten Stallion; and Monaco Jullyen V, U.S. and Canadian National Champion Western Pleasure Junior Horse.

Marigold V is also the dam of The Marshall V (Desperado V), Canadian Reserve National Champion Working Cow Horse, and of Maclintock V (Desperado V), (sire of 116 foals), among them 10 national winners. All of this information quickly becomes confusing and mind boggling. If you take the statistics in this relatively short article and multiply it by about 100, you might have some idea of the scope of the Varian Arabians breeding program.

Pictured top to bottom,Western Pleasure National Champions personifying the Varian bloodstock and its prevalence today. Zefyr (Sundance Kid V) Melodie V (Sundance Kid V) Jake Jamaal JCA (Jullyen El Jamaal) Onyx A (Sundance Kid V) Monaco Jullyen V (Jullyen El Jamaal) Monticello V (Jullyen El Jamaal) Anthem V (Jullyen El Jamaal)

Starting about fifteen years ago, Sheila and I discussed creating a complete record of her horses, their get and their championships. When I calculated the numbers and quoted the job, she was surprised at the massive scope of the Varian influence. Never one to spend too much money on research or advertising, she opted instead to simply calculate the figures from a U.S. Nationals or a Scottsdale show here and there. Eventually, a project encompassing the entire Varian breeding program became so gargantuan, that doing it correctly will take many, many months, possibly a year. It has become the size of an actual history book. There were a number of times during the course of this research project that I thought about calling Sheila and asking her what she thought about something. I was looking at Balalinka and thinking about her decision to breed to *Bask++ with that horse’s 15/16 sister, *Bachantka. I wondered what certain horses looked like or the finer details of their quality or disposition and trainability. I always enjoyed the times when I needed to call Sheila in regards to research or simply to talk. Any excuse was a good one. She called me as well. Never one to try to guess about horses, she would call and talk about horses we had in common, like Heritage Montoya, Ruminaja Ali and Heritage Memory (the sire and dam of Ali Jamaal), *Hal Gazal and others. She and I would talk openly about faults, qualities and assets. Several times in the last few months I actually reached for the phone to call her; that’s when the impact of Sheila’s passing finally, finally came home. I cried more than once. She is not there with her distinctive voice and laugh, and her strong, wise opinions. I really miss her.

“Perhaps each of us remembers something different about Sheila and how she impacted our lives. I remember that in the early 1970’s she was not necessarily well respected by the Arabian community. She was certainly never one of the ‘elite breeders’. They laughed and looked down on her. She was very different from other, better ‘heeled’ Arabian breeders. She struggled with finances. She fought for every acre of land and worked hard to construct shrewd deals because it was absolutely necessary for her survival. There were times at shows where she slept in her truck or her horse trailer stalls and carried her food with her. Through her entire life she bought cheap and sold dear, but I never knew her to be pretentious or to look down on anyone. And here’s the thing … she personally grew in stature right along with her business. Her self-confidence and her growth as a horseman were a daily, consistent activity in her life. She learned from everyone she knew and from everything she did, and I believe this was so up until the day she died. At a time in our world when everything, literally everything around us leans toward façade, with very little behind the satin curtains, she was foundation and bone and courage and standards, just like her horses. Sheila once said to me that she believed the Arabian horse was so extraordinary, that it would always go on in this world. She just wished it could be a little more ‘because of us’ instead of ‘in spite of us’. That is the truth and the voice that I miss the most.” ~ Christy Egan Sheila Varian | 121

Vaquero Training: Understanding The Terminology From “A Lifetime With Arabians,” by Sheila Varian, ARABIAN HORSE TIMES December 2009

The Vaquero style of training dates to the 1700s, and is attributed to the early Spanish horsemen of California. Like every other method of training, it was once more harsh than it is now. Traditionally, it is a slow process that when done well results in a horse so finely trained and attuned to its rider that the term

slowly and easily, and just take the time you need. The hackamore is not a tool for arena training; it is a training method for riding out on long rides with occasional moments of use and then relaxing the horse to a long, loose rein again. The Two-Rein: In the two-rein, a set of mecate reins is attached to the bosal, and rawhide reins to the bit. From the shanked bit, rein chains run usually eight to 10 inches before attaching to the rawhide reins; this allows your horse to drink at creeks and water troughs without getting your reins wet.

‘you become one with your horse’ really applies. For those less familiar with vaquero training, following is a background. THE EQUIPMENT Hackamore: In traditional vaquero training, the horse may be started in a snaffle for a short time and then go to the “jacuima” (hackamore). Hackamores are made of braided rawhide and come in

It also has to do with the balance of the bit. I start with a small, 3/8-inch bosal, 10 inches inside measurement, under a bridle, and use a shanked half-breed or low-port bit. Light mecate reins run to the bosal and rawhide reins to the bit. When you begin the tworein phase, the horse is already well-trained in the hackamore and is being given time

different diameters. I start a horse with a 3/4 or 5/8 sized hackamore with a 10- to 11-inch inside-of-nose piece to inside-ofheel-knot length, which is much shorter than a lot of the hackamores you see today in classes other than the reined cow horse classes. Mecate reins are used. Bosal: The bosal is similar to a hackamore, but fits under the bridle and is about 1/2-inch in diameter. Its use

Murietta V in the Hackamore.

begins with the two-rein stage. The bridle and shanked bit is introduced with the bosal offering an alternative but familiar means of communication for the transition to the new bit. Mecate reins are attached to the bosal, while the bridle uses the rawhide reins. Mecate: Reins made of twisted mane hair which are used for both the hackamore and the two-rein, but in different sizes. With the bosal, the mecate reins are much lighter than the mecate reins used on the hackamore. Mecate reins are 22 feet in length, which gives you rein and length to lead your horse by. Spade Bit: I like a shanked bit—usually a Santa Barbara cheek of moderate length—with a loose jaw that allows the shank to move back and forth softly, and a 5-inch mouth piece that includes a cricket for the horse to roll to keep his mouth moist. That bit can be either a halfbreed (curb) or a spade bit, depending on which bit the horse likes best. A spade bit is not used for more control; it is used when a horse is completely comfortable with his training. When the reins are picked up, he senses what he will be asked to do. This is a comfortable, secure horse. THE THREE-PHASE PROCESS The Hackamore: Depending on how much you work your horse, the hackamore phase can take a year or two or three years; the rule is to go

to become familiar with the shanked bit. At first, you use the bosal reins primarily, and just let the horse carry the bridle; over time, you shift focus to the bridle as the horse

becomes more comfortable and balanced with it. The two-rein process generally lasts a year or more—but again, take however long it is necessary for the horse to become comfortable with the equipment and what you are asking. “Straight up in the bridle” is how we describe a horse that is working comfortably in a curb or spade bit; the bosal no longer has mecate reins attached. Straight up in the bridle usually comes when the horse is about 6 or 7 years old, if you assume a year or two in each phase of training. By this time, the horse is fully trained. He is comfortable in his job and he has carried the bit for a year and a half, maybe two years, which has enabled his neck muscles to adjust to the set of his neck. He totally reins without help, and is comfortable and secure with whatever he is asked to do. He likes the cricket in the bit, which he rolls to keep his mouth moist. When I pick up my hands, it signals down the rawhide reins and rein chains, up the shank of the bit and through the loose jaw that something is coming—before the port ever makes a change in the horse’s mouth. And P.S., I like a silver engraved overlay on a bit with the port and inside shank rusted, because it is tastier to a horse than the hard finish of stainless steel. Why would you want to go to the trouble of vaquero training? Get on a horse who is straight up in the bridle and you’ll know. The time spent on this kind of work can turn a ride in a Model A into a cruise in a Rolls Royce.

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Lightly Bey V “Straight Up In The Bridle.”

Murietta V i n the Two-Rein.

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Pictured right: Huckleberry Bey.This was my first shoot with Sheila and a very important session for my then early career. I was a bit intimidated. Sheila was gracious and welcoming, however, and looking for new images of Huckleberry Bey.This shoot ended up with one of the classic all-time action shots of Huck and the one that was used to make his Breyer® statue.

From photographer and friend, Scott Trees

Sheila’s great broodmares … and a difficult shot in terms of getting them all to look with their ears up at the same moment. In a final desperate effort, I had a tractor with a bucket raised high with a large tarp flapping come flying around the corner of the barn.This briefly startled the mares, they all looked up, I got my shot, and right after I took it, they broke position, but I had what I wanted. Sheila gave me some important career enhancing opportunities to photograph some exceptional horses and was instrumental in helping my career move forward and grow. I was always forever grateful to her for those opportunities, and more importantly, for her friendship. She was a talented horsewoman, one of the true exceptional breeders in the Arabian horse industry, and she will be greatly missed by many. ~ S cott Trees

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Pictured above: Dave & Gail Liniger, Afire Bey V (Huckleberry Bey x Autumn Fire) Tim Shea, Allen Zeller, Sheila and Marty Shea.

I had just gotten off the plane and headed over to Sheila’s farm to ride four horses I was going to use in a clinic the following day. I get on the first one, and it’s wild. I mean, I’m having a serious time coping. I ride about five minutes; Sheila tells me to get off. I get on the next one; it’s even wilder. She gives me five minutes, tells me to get off. The next two, it’s the same deal. I’m in serious fear of my life. At this point, I’m having serio us concerns; here I am, a supposed big-time horse trainer from the East … now a dude-horse trainer from the East. I’m extremely worried about getting dumped the next day, thinking all the cowboys and cowgirls will love to see this. A little while later, the groom tells me those horses hadn’t been ridden in five days. The moral of the story ... Sheil a didn’t care if they were perfect, she just wanted them to be beautiful.

If any of you knew Sheila, she was like a lot of ranch girls; she didn’t throw money around and she could stretch a buck as far as anyone I knew. One day, Marty and I were out at the farm, and we went into town for lunch. We drove this big four-door Mercedes into town to get sandwiches, and after getting them, we drove another 10 or 15 minutes to the other side of town because we could save 25 cents on each can of pop. This Mercedes was a big gas-guzzling vehicle, and probably burned $2 worth of gas to save that 75 cents on pop. ~ Tim Shea

MAROON FIRE ARABIANS & SHEA STABLE

for Tim and their lives, and been great in le p eo p t n had porta dividuals. We a few really im Everyone has as definitely one of these in history, but our personal se nw I, Sheila Varia ce stepping into Arabian hor ed at her ranch during a p n si op s st er e h w of d it was the when fans se that day, an arted in 1986 relationship st . Of course, we bought a hor at changed our lives. tion ip th California vaca an association and friendsh of g in n n fairytale begi tic. Hers was a mplished en th au is er h co ibes her lap. She ac d that so descr To us, the wor use anything was dropped in a reminder for us all. y— beca story, but not emendous effort and tenacit tr h it w l al it e, and I am horsewoman w orse and d n ou ar lal g in kh orld class stoc most outstand Sheila was the ave ever known. From her w s in the English and Park ip ,h sure all of you her National Championsh ved and did it all. to lo e k, or Sh . w d t le bi e lle spad unpara is la ei Sh s, n io divis e horses qualities of th ped e th e se to as from her w ude that hel gs we learned e It was this attit One of the thin ed by their imperfections. e history of our industry. Sh d in th e bl in th be er d on ot ee n and er took tial br them. If you ev e most influen d her become th horses and saw the best in e well aware that she wante er ad h m d e truly love e, you wer of acquiring on EST FOR THEM! responsibility the B ories sitting s have our mem good points ay w al ill w e W out all of the osed minded. She was not cl se show, hearing her talk ab open mindedness, that a hor her next to her at ’s horses. It was because of her program. She figured of other people many different bloodlines to requisites: trainability, so r pre she brought in ose individuals had her fou bian type. It seemed that ra th A of d h an ic h ion breed her out w und conformat center and allowed her to so , ty ili ab c ti to le ath close a that kept her around horse. was the mantr alll hope for new life, we al to the greatest gs in br ar ye of t e While this tim ok. Foals that are a testamen lo n Varia all time. foals with that horsewoman of emories. tunities and m or p op , es m ti eat for so many gr e you proud. Sheila, thanks will work diligently to mak We ~ Marty Shea

Gail & David Liniger Tim & Marty Shea St. Clair, MI Sheila Varian | 125

When you think of Varian Arabians, it is Sheila who comes to mind and all of the amazing horses she has bred. It does not matter if it is a halter, saddle seat, western, hunt, or working western horse, in some way or form, the Varian name is in the pedigree, and we have been lucky to have some of her breeding program in our pedigrees at Cedar Ridge. Credit must be given to Sheila for all of the years that she has contributed to the Arabian horse breed. Some people come and go, but Sheila was always consistent. She had a product that she believed in and so did others—when she spoke, you listened.

We wish Angela Alvarez the best of luck in carrying on the Varian tradition. There is no one better who knew how Sheila would want to continue. Sheila, we hope the Arabian community does you proud, and the “V” is carried on for years to come. Love, Dick, Lollie & Lara Ames

CEDAR RIDGE FARM

Dick, Lollie & Lara Ames Jordan, MN

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egionals. y $150 horse at R m g in d ri d an I was 13 ... Yup, 13 id: m up ring and sa ar w e th in e m y rb de b Sheila Varian ro that horse I might tighten his cu e on th as n, tightened “I think if I w .� I climbed dow e ring. I placed a ch ot n e on p u n chai in th ck up and went chain, climbed ba Pleasure. ish Top Five in Engl over ndship that grew ie fr a of g in in eg That was the b er stopped learning from her! ev decades. And I n ons she she bred, the less ngle s se or h e th r fo l Every si So thankfu ories we shared. em m e th d an t gh tau one of them! ~ Brett Becker

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Lightning Strike V with Marjie (Audacious PS x Lalique V)

Prairie Juell V with Hayden (Jullyen El Jamaal x Precious V)

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BECKER STABLES

Brett & Marjie Becker Grass Valley, CA

Justin Mac V with Brett (Maclintock V x Jortalia V)

MONACO JULLYEN V (Jullyen El Jamaal x Misti Morn V) 2015 U.S. & Canadian National Champion Western Pleasure Junior Horse with Joe Reser.

schatzberg photo

Owned by Shamrock Farms Castle Rock, CO

To have these two incredible stallions in our lives, takes it beyond all expectations. Their incredible quality, ability and personalities make them horses we are not only proud of, but horses we are honored to own. They are special, and we thank you, Sheila, for breeding true to your standards two stallions we know will continue to carry your “V” around the ring and beyond. ~ Carolyn Lesley & Leslie Doran Sommer

MONTICELLO V (Jullyen El Jamaal x Mosquerade V) Multi-National Champion Western Pleasure with Joe Reser & Carolyn Lesley Owned by Lesley Farms Ashland, OR

janson photo

Being a part of the Varian dynasty would be a pinnacle in any Arabian horse lover’s experience.

Agracie Girl V +++// with Nan Walden, Multi National and Scottsdale Champion in Western and English Trail, USEF Champion Working Western Arab Horse of the Year and more importantly, a treasured and beloved member of our family. She has been our ambassador to thousands at our events ranging from ranch tours for school kids to the annual Pecan Festival at our farm attracting 25,000 visitors.

d made a our expectations, an Walden. d se as rp su ve ha es ck rs All of our Varian ho formerly loyal Quarter Horse man, Diour Arabians, loyal Arabian fan of e his fellow ranchers by roping off of at the Dick loves to surprisRanch Trail Competition and Halter rses and polo winning ribbons in es, and out-striding their Quarter Ho Rancheros Visitadorrides in the hills! ponies on long trail rse, and buy my first ho the chance to select breeder in the world d ha y all fin I e, lif ly the only When late in for his u. You were probab I was lucky to find yoinced Dick Walden to buy an Arabians another nv wa co na ve me to Arizo that could ha ging Kay Pasa V ho e learned greenhorn wife. Brinth. We were amazed at how quickly sh rn, that is the bo lea d us ul entually wo education for conformation was to please. We ev and how eager she Arabians, in addition to their glorious n ria Va hallmark of and athleticism. d Regional titles many Scottsdale an d an er, lat s on pi 20 National Cham g more fun than kids! to boot, we are havin med us from the ateful that you welco and the business of gr en be s ay alw ve d ha t the bree Dick and I little we knew abou Jaime, Mike, very start, given howand showing. Your staff, Angela, Riyah, u are always Yo g o. in to in us kind to breeding, tra rahim, have been so Micki, Israel and Aber time of day or night. there for us, whatev r training methods, consistently to bette to the horses, and teach ed rk wo ve ha u yo are kind We know the freely out techniques that spread the word abneed to be turned out and treated like es rs ho at people th d made them to be. moving animals Go eved true ur dreams and achi and tough times. yo of ss pa m co e th You have followed stayed the course through the good ber most of all excellence. You have ve achieved are well deserved. Rememwho share our The accolades you hagiven to us, the owners, and to those the delight you have horses with us. ain in our hearts dinaire. You will rem or tra ex irl wg co a, Thank you, Sheil ever! and in our horses for rd Love, e Rancho Soñado He Nan and Dick & th

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Dick and Nan Walden with Romance V (Maclintock V x Ravven’s Skylark) and Agracie Girl V (Sundance Kid V x Amazing Grace V)

RANCHO SOÑADO

Dick & Nan Walden Amado, AZ & Santa Ynez, CA

Sara and I first met Sheila at the 1998 Scottsdale show. We were looking to get into the Arabian horse world and knew very little about how to start. We visited one barn of a prominent breeder and told them that we were looking to buy an Arabian horse. They obviously didn’t know us and didn’t give us the time of day. Fortunately the next barn we went to was Varian’s. Sheila couldn’t have been more welcoming and informative. She spent 2 hours w/ Sara and I. We didn’t buy a horse from her at Scottsdale, but set up a trip to her Spring Fling event 6 weeks later. At the Spring Fling we bought 3 horses from Sheila and bought 3 more at her Summer Spectacular in August. We developed a lasting relationship that went from client to dear friends. Sheila, more than anyone, is responsible for getting us into Arabian horses and advising and mentoring us thru every step of our wonderful journey. Decades later, there has still been no one more instrumental. Continued ...

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PA Lucchese Always (Always A Jullyen V x Lily Dancer V, by Sundance Kid V) and PA Dream Dancer (Sundance Kid V x Dreams Of Gold)

PALMETTO ARABIANS

Frank & Sara Chisholm Breeding Manager Melissa Bradshaw Timmonsville, SC

ferrara

Always A Jullyen V (Jullyen El Jamaal x Amazing Grace V by Huckleberry Bey)

ALWAYS A JULLYEN V Jullyen El Jamaal x Amazing Grace V by Huckleberry Bey Sire of National Champions

Sheila at the Cow Palace with Ronteza.

Sheila was the most amazing person we’ve ever had the honor of knowing. Everything she did, she did with a passion and a never-give-up attitude. Her accomplishments in Arabian horse breeding are legendary in their results. However what I admired the most, was the way she took the road less traveled and blazed new trails.

Sheila with Huckleberry Bey

Starting with Bay-Abi, then going to the dangerous lengths she did to bring in the 6 Polish mares as her foundation mares is not just noteworthy, but incredible! She went new and different directions. Huckleberry Bey was a different type of breeding stallion that didn’t have a lot of popularity until later in his life, but Sheila stuck with him and he took her program in a new direction. She made a 180 degree swing with Desperado V. He became a major breeding stallion with little to no show record. Not an easy task. I had many talks with her about the next direction of Varian Arabians as Desperado V was aging, but was shocked ( as most others were) when she chose Jullyen El Jamal. Again Sheila was right and had a vision beyond where most people would go. Sheila decided to take Ronteza to the Cow Palace to compete for the World Championship against all of the professional rodeo riders. How many people would have the guts to even try this? The results are a big part of her legacy- 1st person to Win The World riding an Arabian horse and the 1st woman to ever win the World Championship. This would put her in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. ~ continued

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May Dancer V (Sundance Kid V x Magdalena V by Sanadik El Shaklan) 2004 U.S. National Champion Western Pleasure Futurity with Rob Bick

PALMETTO ARABIANS

Frank & Sara Chisholm Breeding Manager Melissa Bradshaw Timmonsville, SC Frank Chisholm with Always A Jullyen V and Sara Chisholm with May Dancer V

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SUNDANCE KID V Desperado V x Sweet Shalimar V by Ali Jamaal Leading sire of western pleasure show horses

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PA Kid Khan (Sundance Kid V x Kharrea PGA by Khadraj NA)

~ continued

When Sheila decided to bring in Polish blood into her breeding program, she went to Europe and crossed the border into communist Poland hidden in the trunk of a car. Most people would be proud to have accomplished just one of the above things in their life. Sheila went places and did things that other may have just thought about. She’s been known as an incredible story teller. Those aren’t just stories. She’s lived it! Sheila, not only introduced us to an Arabian horse life, but to a friendship and experience we had never imagined. Now, all of us breeders are on our own, and thankful for her example. We have based our breeding program on the legendary V horses and what they stand for, and we can only hope we’ve learned enough to make her proud. Frank and Sara Chisholm

PALMETTO ARABIANS

Frank & Sara Chisholm Breeding Manager Melissa Bradshaw Timmonsville, SC

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Sundance Kid V pictured at 20 years young, standing proudly at his home at Palmetto Arabians with owners Sara and Frank Chisholm, and breeding manager Melissa Bradshaw.

Yvonne Scott

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Pictured top to bottom Full siblings from the golden cross of the Varian blood and Jerland’s Khadraj NA

KHAJA J BROKEN PROMISES PGA PROMISA J

Sheila Varian’s extraordinary influence on the Jerland breeding program through the mare Promise V (Huckleberry Bey ++ x Pavane V by Khemosabi++++//) is one for which I will always be grateful. As one of our aristocratic mares, Promise V has successfully been crossed with Khadraj NA+++/ many times, creating memorableshow horses like Broken Promises PGA, Promisa J, and our newest rising star, and next breeding stallion Khaja J. These siblings’ beauty, athletic ability, and accomplishments portray the strength of the Varian/Jerland program cross at its very best. I thank Sheila for the opportunity to acquire and blend her “V” program with my own, and I thank her for the opportunity she has shown so many others to do the same. All those who have known her, admired her, and respected her, would agree that she has created a legendary program whose influence in the Arabian breed will not soon be matched. We can only strive to walk beside her footsteps in our journey to create a better Arabian with each breeding generation. I will miss my friend Sheila, and I am thankful to have the horses who will continue her spirit for generations to come. ~ Larry Jerome

JERLAND FARM

Lawrence Jerome Barron, WI

A friendship of respect, gratitude, and admiration.

Larry Jerome, Indira Van Handel & Sheila Varian with National Champion Promise V (Huckleberry Bey x Pavane V) receiving her Broodmare Elite Honors.

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SAN JACINTO JULLYEN V (*Jullyen El Jamaal x Sweet Klassique V) with Gary Ferguson up

The Sheila Varian Legacy Sheila was an individual who knew ‌ What she wanted to do, When to do it and How to do it. And then, she did it! Her life has been and will continue to be beneficial to all of us. ~ Eleanor Hamilton

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SAN JACINTO JULLYEN V (*Jullyen El Jamaal x Sweet Klassique V by *Fairview Klassique) 2012 bay stallion, pictured with Sheila and Eleanor.

ELEANOR’S ARABIANS Eleanor Hamilton Trainer, Gary Ferguson Rogers, MN

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VICTORIA ARABIANS

Cliff McCurdy & Michelle Watson Ocala, FL

SEVENTH SON V (Huckleberry Bey x Sweet Sanadika V) Pictured with Michelle Watson. Photo by Cliff McCurdy

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Haras Meia Lua, Brazil in 2010

High Sierra Ride in 2012

at Victoria Arabians over 20 years ago. The Varian horses entered our breeding program success. We are proud to say we have The Varian horses have been a huge part of our see “THE TEN COMMANDMENTS had 10 V horses in our barn. And, in our barn you Varian. Sheila had one primary comFOR BREEDING ARABIAN HORSES” by Sheila for the breed as a whole. We share the mandment - take into account what will be good Arabian horse. same belief as breeders and ambassadors for the

MIZ MARGEAUX V (Huckleberry Bey x Miz Bask) Pictured with Michelle Watson.

whether showing, riding or just looking We shared so many wonderful times together , the High Sierra ride in 2012 and at horses. Some of our favorite trips: Brazil in 2010 talk and ride, and we meant RIDE. always – riding the hills in California. We’d just when you can come our way, Sheila would always say “love to see you, let me know ~ WE WILL RIDE.” , her love for animals and We will forever remember Sheila’s wonderful smile and to us personally. the many true gifts she leaves to the Arabian breed Love, Michelle & Cliff

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Sweet Shalimar V (Ali Jamaal x Sweetinspirationv) Hennessey Arabians is proud to have been given the honor of caregiver to the legendary dam of Sundance Kid V. She retains her royal status in our pastures and inspires us daily.

The mission statement of the Hennessey breeding program is to “Breed a Better Tomorrow…” With an over 5 decade run of excellence, the Varian program has helped us strive for exactly that. With over 70% of the show horses winning today carrying Varian blood, our inclusion of Audacious PS, Jullyen El Jamaal, and Sundance Kid V has been paramount. Our second generations of these horses are instrumental in the quality we’ve been fortunate to see consistently. Sheila took the Varian breeding program to a place every breeder holds as THE example; truly the pinnacle of breeding success. She has lead by example, and we thank you, Sheila, for giving us all this incredible gift. ~ Frank & George

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H ALLURE H (Jullyen el Jamaal x Alegoria) with H Alouette H, her 2016 filly by Jaipur el Perseus.

HENNESSEY ARABIANS

Frank & Carol Hennessey Manager George Z Ocala, FL

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THE MAGICIAN V Audacious PS x Maya V by Sanadik El Shaklan 2009 Stallion Canadian Reserve National Champion Las Vegas World Cup Reserve Champion

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TAOPHINA MCX (The Magician V x Princess Grace C) 2015 Filly

A Bit of History ...

I was a novice in the Arabian horse world when I came upon Varian Arabians. I had been “researching” Arabians online as a novelty with no intent on acquiring a horse, just interested in keeping occupied during the winter months on our farm. After viewing as many websites online as possible, Varian Arabians was at the top for various reasons—clarity of her philosophy, the Varian history, videos and photos. I had previously researched purebred dog breeds that I was interested in and ultimately owned, which allowed me to develop a clear vision on what to look for online. It was clear that Sheila had been in Arabians for many years and that she ran a larger operation, but other than that, I had no clue how important her contribution to the Arabian horse was or had been. Yes, Sheila had decades of show wins, important, but to have a real vision in how to assess and breed a beautiful versatile Arabian was her gift.

I signed up for the Varian newsletter and one day The Magician V was featured and being offered for sale. My interest was perked and I started researching his pedigree, going back as many generations as possible and finding as many photos of his ancestors as I could, having no clue who they were but realizing the beauty and quality of most. The Magician V’s pedigree was like a finely composed symphony. As a lark, I printed this photo onto photo paper showing it to my friends, stating, “See what I just bought!” As time passed by, this lark started to turn into a possible reality.

I eventually contacted Varian Arabians. Sheila, Angela and myself had several long conversations about Magician, owning a stallion and this novice’s interest in possibly purchasing him. Sheila and I both, were hesitant for this first-time horse owner taking on a stallion. We worked together to ensure that if I purchased The Magician V, that he would have the best life going forward, and the rest is history. Anyone who knew Sheila, knew how humble, kind, intelligent and witty she was, as well as an astute businesswoman. Sheila was encouraging and very supportive; her phone calls always giving deft and at times, humorous advice.

After purchasing The Magician V, my personal education continued into the Arabian horse and only then did I start to realize the depth of importance Sheila contributed. Her foresight with her breeding program was exemplary, such as recognizing Khemosabi as a two year old and leasing him; her purchase of Sanadik El Shaklan and her kindness selling him back to Om El Arabians; her re-discovering Audacious PS. Integrating these stellar Arabians into her program with her foundation of Bay-Abi, Bay el Bey, Baychatka and Naganka created a beautiful Arabian, The Magician V. It was Sheila’s courage—all Master Breeders like Sheila have to be courageous—of going in different directions while staying true to her principals, and her continuing to expand her knowledge that has allowed newcomers to the breed to have the opportunity to breed forward further generations of beautiful, versatile Arabian horses. I know the privilege and responsibility I have with The Magician V and he is breeding true to his pedigree that Sheila Varian created. Thank you, Sheila, for your generosity. We miss you. I will be skidding in sideways shouting, ‘WOW, WHAT A RIDE!’ when we meet again … The Magician V – MCX Inc. CEO Leslie Bartlett and CFO Richard Bartlett

THE MAGICIAN V — MCX INC

Leslie Bartlett Calgary, AB

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Photographer and friend Sherry Conrads & Sheila

Sheila and I had a robust friendship. She was my mentor and teacher. I was her photographer and researcher.We complemented each other’s strengths and mitigated each other’s weaknesses.We were true soul sisters. Sheila shared Breathless V with me 6 years ago, and ever since then, she encouraged me and taught me about breeding and training Arabian horses.This was a priceless gift and one that I will never underestimate or take for granted. In the middle of the night, just days before Sheila died, she called me to her bedside and said to me, “Sherry, I want you to continue breeding horses … you’re ready … you don’t need me anymore.” The reader can only imagine the host of emotions that flooded over me. I’ve taken her wish to heart, because who could have had a better teacher to get me ready, nor better breeding stock to work with? I sorely miss my dear friend and sister. I feel her presence every day and will do my very best to carry on what she started with me—breeding the finest Arabian horses I possibly can. I’ll not compromise on my breeding decisions. I’ll not lie to others or to myself about the quality of my foals. I’ll make sure they are started and trained with respect, knowledge and experience. I’ll make sure I share them with worthy people who will cherish them, as they deserve to be cherished. I can’t think of a better way to honor the memory of Sheila Varian. ~ Sherry Conrads

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MM Sariina (Bravado Bey V x Sabriina by JJ Saber+) with Sheila and young friends

Thank you for all of your help over the years, for taking extraordinary care of our horses, for breeding and marketing advice, for entrusting us with your insurance needs, but most of all, for your unconditional friendship and kindness. We miss you so very much. ~ Mary

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SYPOLT INSURANCE SERVICES, INC.

Mary Blincoe Sypolt Gold River, CA

National Champion Mare Keepsake V (Huckleberry Bey++ x Khemadera by Khemosabi++++) ories are My two favorite memSheila when et m I the first time d then the I was 11 years old, an ty years for r he w last time I sa e her passing. later, one day befor end and fri r, to en She was a m family to me. ~Steve Heathcott

I first met Sheila, much like I meet most people, been assigned a magazine over the phone. It was 20 Varian. So I called her up photo shoot on Bridle Horses with this gal na 04 and I had med Sheila guest at her home and my; struck up a conversation; and a couple of weeks life was changed forever. later I was a To say I loved hearing Sh understatement; I could eila’s stories of past horses and people would be things about Sheila were listen to her for hours and never tire! Some oth an but not necessarily havin honesty, dependability, and keeping the thing er important from her childhood and g a lot of ‘stuff.’ I personally valued that Sheila s that worked, horse that was dull with that her favorite belt buckle was the small one kept the bits with the reining wear since her youth. She was totally at home loved on a daily basis; anin the saddle, adored her life, loved what she ha I never got to speak with d took immense pride in adding to her chosen d; used what she where one left off, the othAngela much, you knew that these two were pe breed. And while as in er one picked up, and I fee in excellent hands. l the ranch and breed are a pod— both Happy Trails, Miss Sheila . ~ Photographer & friend Sharon Fibelkorn

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After news of Sheila’s cancer got out, plenty of people were asking, “But what will happen to Varian Arabians if Sheila goes?” Fortunately, Varian had had the same thoughts, but a lot earlier, and she had a few aces in her pocket. One was her cousin, Jack Varian, who helped her figure out how to ensure that her property remained ranchland forever, and four more were Frank and Sara Chisholm and Doug and Sue Herthel, who agreed to be trustees of Varian Arabians after her death. Frank and Doug are the principals now, but should anything happen to either of them, Sara or Sue can pick up the reins. The first priority was Sheila’s property on the central coast of California, where values can endanger open land. From Jack, Sheila learned about the California Rangeland Trust; he was working with it to preserve the future of the V6 Ranch. The Rangeland Trust was formed in 1998 to counter the spread of development, and through it, ranchers can secure conservation easements which severely limit how their property can be used. That means that it always will be ranchland, never subdivided and developed.

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Frank Chisholm explains how the California Rangeland Trust affiliation works. “When you sell a piece of property, you sell it for its highest and best use, based on what you can do with the property. When you put a conservation easement on a piece of property like Sheila’s two hundred acres, it devalues the property from its highest and best use. What the Rangeland Trust does is: an estate usually gets a tax credit for the devaluation of the land for the amount that it is, or the Rangeland Trust raises money and purchases the easement from (in Sheila’s case) the ranch. An appraiser came out and determined that Sheila’s land would be devalued by $2.5 million by putting that easement on, so they’re doing a capital campaign to raise the $2.5 million to preserve Varian Arabians. That will mean that it will stay a ranch for eternity and will never be developed, which is what Sheila wanted.” “Their vision for land management, I think, is the way to go,” says Jack. “Keeping the ranches from splitting up is healthy for family and family unity. Sheila didn’t have heirs, but her ranch was her legacy. Besides her horses, she loved her place. She’d spent most of her life there and she’d seen what developers do to places like hers, and she didn’t want that. She wanted the horse breeding program to be ongoing, and she wanted to make sure that the ranch that she loved didn’t get divided.” And finally, Sheila had another ace—the one that let her know that her dream could go on without her, and that was Angela Alvarez. “For the last ten years or so, Sheila had turned more and more over to Angela, as far as making decisions goes,” says Chisholm. “She and Angela would talk, and Angela made everything happen. Sheila trusted her to take things and run with them; she knew that Angela would do things the way she wanted them done. That comes from working with someone over time, someone you trust and have confidence in, and someone that grows in the job, which Angela did. Turning the ranch over to Angela was a no-brainer, once Sheila realized what was going on.” The property was one thing; the breeding program is another. “As far as the breeding and the horses, it’ll keep running along,” Chisholm says. “Doug’s and my job is to support Angela as much as possible, and to take care of the things that need to be done for the ranch so that it stays in good repair, and Angela has the horses she needs and all that. Sheila has money in her estate for us to achieve that, so at the moment, we’re focusing on securing the easements that will guarantee the land’s future as a ranch.” “Change is difficult for a lot of people,” observes Jack Varian, “and yet I think change is inevitable. And I think Sheila realized that with her horses. She was always looking for that new type and I was always looking for a better way to grow grass, basically. It takes confidence of character—and that’s something Sheila had plenty of.”

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Sheila Varian: Personal Memoirs of a Legend Sheila Varian will be remembered as one of the greatest icons in equine history. But she was an equally well-known – and gifted – storyteller. Her writings have been revered as “intoxicating,” “engaging.” Over the years – and to our good fortune – she kept a journal of short stories from her most poignant life moments, including: Meeting Farlotta Farlotta & Ronteza Codes of the West In the Show Ring The Polish Importation Bay-Abi & Estes Park Ronteza and the Cow Palace And more! We are pleased to announce that her very own journal entries, “Sheila Varian: Personal Memoirs of a Legend,” will be available Fall 2017. For up-to-date information on the book’s release, please visit www.VarianArabians.com.

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Produced by Arabian Horse Times Publisher Lara Ames Editor Charlene Deyle Production Manager Jody Thompson Writer M. A. Kirkman Designer Jenn Trickey Designer Cat McKenna Reasearch Christy Egan

Copyright Š 2016 AHT, Inc. dba Arabian Horse Times

bessey photo

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Special thanks to Frank and Sara Chisholm for their unwavering support of Sheila, Angela and the preservation of the Varian bloodstock.

Gratitude to the following talented photographers, who through their lenses have allowed us images of Sheila Varian that we can enjoy forever. Your capture of her incredible moments are treasures we all will share. Thank you for your contributions to this book. April Visel Bill Paquin Brandon Bessey Christy Egan Don Severa Dyana Duer Gregg Cobarr Howard Schatzberg Javan Schaller Jeff Janson Jenny Ligon Jerry Sparagowski Johnny Johnston Judith Lynch

Judith Wagner Mary Buckley Mike Ferrara Potter Rick Osteen Rob Hess Romney Maupin Scott Trees Sharon Fibelkorn Sherry Conrads Stuart Vesty Suzanne Sturgill Yvonne Scott Zita Strother

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Many thanks to Marian Carpenter for writing Arabian Legends, a study of twenty-five major names from the past. Marian is a former editor of “Arabian Horse Times” (in the 1980s), knew everyone and their horses, and basically presented everything you need to know to understand why these horses were important. Published in 1999 by “Western Horseman,” Arabian Legends is out of print, but usually available on Abebooks or Amazon.

As is apparent, Sheila’s “book club girls,” Audrey Griffin, Kristin Reynolds and Lisa Thompson, were invaluable troupers. It wasn’t easy for them, and their love for her was apparent. The same can be said for photographer Sherry Conrads, a close friend in the later years of Varian’s life, and for Barbara Varian, who married into the unique Varian clan and appreciates them for the extraordinary people they are.

Sheila and her talented friend and photographer Sherry Conrads. 166 | Sheila Varian

Thanks very, very much to all of Sheila’s friends who raided their memories and often opened their hearts when speaking about her. There were more stories than space allowed us to use—but they were wonderful to hear. A special nod is offered to some whose comments don’t appear in this book, but who provided critical background on the sights and sounds of the Arabian business and Sheila’s role in it through the years.

Special thanks also go to Doug and Sue Herthel, who were generous with amazingly clear and accurate memories of some critical times in Sheila’s life. They went the extra mile for her—and for us too. Thanks as well to Evie Tubbs Sweeney, who produced the film “V: The Legacy of Sheila Varian,” and was very supportive with background.

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And of course, a book like this couldn’t be done without Angela Alvarez, who carries on Sheila’s dream at Varian Arabians. Varian’s friends call her an angel. They’re right.

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