Leonard's Red Fox

This book is a true story. No fiction When I was a boy, my dad would not buy me a pony. This was just after the Great Depression. Money was scarce. A man working in the Youngstown steel mills would make about $5.00 a week before taxes.

I needed $75.00 to buy a pony from Harry May's horse farm. The first $50.00 I earned was by painting a house for my uncle Beryl. This took most of the month of June. I was ten years old at that time. The white paint went on thick. With the $75.00 I raised, Dad took me to Harry May's farm. Harry let a palomino stallion breed all the mares. One was a boy shotland, more than forty-seven inches tall. She produced a filly I picked out of the herd. I called her Beauty. She was a crass in size and color and had a Buckskin color and a size of fifty-two inches tall.

I was a Boy Scout. I qualified to get a merit badge in horsemanship. When I sent in the information, the reply came back that I was the only scout that ever applied for the horsemanship badge. It would take a month to have the first and only badge ever made up. Just think - Ohio is the most popular state, and I was the only scout ever to get a horsemanship badge. I read about Arab horses. I bred Beauty to an Arab stallion and produced a beautiful buckskin filly. I later bred Beauty to a palomino, which produced a colt not a horse, but they were close to fourteen hands tall. This colt I called Blaze. The Loneranger stories were popular then. My friends asked why didn't I call him Silver. No, I'd rather use my own name. I trained Blaze to do tricks. Blaze was the first to rear up like Silver and do other tricks.