Don't miss from Lex Herald-Leader: 90yo horseman Gene Carter

[Kasept]

At 90, horseman who once sat on Man o’ War, is working at Kentucky Horse Park
BY LINDA BLACKFORD
lblackford@herald-leader.com

http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/c...form=hootsuite

As a boy, Gene Carter’s school bus took him from Maddoxtown in northern Fayette County to the segregated Douglass School on Price Road. He’d pass acres of tobacco and corn, just like his father grew, and the storied horse farms where he could see boys his age exercising Thoroughbreds along the fence lines.

“That’s what I want to do,” he decided, and he would practice on his mother’s kitchen chairs, imitating the bent legs and crouched backs of the boys he saw. By the time he was 15, he’d broken three or four chairs, Carter said, and his mother was so mad that she didn’t even mind when he told her he was leaving school to learn to ride.

It was 1941 when he made his way to the nearby farm where trainer Cy White broke and conditioned racehorses for the Ogden Phipps stables in New York.

“I would go up there and watch these boys ride,” Carter said earlier this month, just two weeks after his 90th birthday. “I said, ‘Mr. White, you mind if I ride a horse?’ and he said, ‘Gene, you ever been on a horse?’ And I said, ‘No, but I’m not afraid of them.’”

White’s farm manager was a deacon at Maddoxtown Baptist, where Carter and his family went to church every Sunday, and he vouched for Carter as a “church boy, from a good family.” A late exercise rider gave Carter his chance one morning. Suddenly, there he was, sitting on the back of a horse just as he’d always practiced. Although horses were not like chairs, riding horses came easily to him; he could read them from the flicks of their ears and the feel of their mouths on the bit.

“The man said I was a natural: ‘He’s got a hell of a seat, that’s boy’s a natural, he’s going to be OK,’” Carter said.

Carter was a natural, all of 5 foot 3, a lithe exercise rider who could quiet the most high-strung of a nervous breed. He traveled from stables to racetracks from Lexington to Hot Springs, Ark., to Aiken, S.C., riding and handling horses on the backside of tracks all over the country.

If he’d been born a century earlier, Carter’s talent probably would have taken him off the backside and into the winners’ circles dominated by black jockeys. Jockeys Oliver Lewis, Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield won the nation’s top races; 13 of the 15 jockeys in the first Kentucky Derby were black, and they rode 15 of the first 28 Derby winners. By the 1880s, black jockeys, owners and trainers were gone. By the time Carter started riding, racing and everything else was gripped by legal segregation, and black men were confined to their roles as grooms and exercise riders.

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