By Kristen Hannum –
“I’ve often said there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse,” said President Ronald Reagan, and Colorado’s Westernaires seem to prove that’s also true for young people of both sexes.
On just about any Saturday of the year, whether there’s sunshine or snow, Fort Westernaire, next to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, bustles with horses, parents, instructors and kids. It feels a hundred miles from Denver, which is actually about only about 10 minutes east on Highway 6. Perhaps the distance is cultural.
More than a thousand kids call themselves Westernaires, from brand-new Tenderfoots to the elite Red Team, the very top echelon in this almost militarily regimented and proudly old-fashioned organization.
After seeing one of their shows, it’s hard to imagine how they could accomplish what they do without that discipline. An anything-goes attitude wouldn’t cut it. Those drills include dozens of horses racing from four point of the arena towards the center and across, missing each other by inches; trick riding, where the teens perform gymnastics on horseback: vaults, upside-down, sideways and suspended in air beside their galloping mount; and circus-like acts where more than a dozen “Riders of the Steppes” stand on two horses and on each other’s shoulders while cantering around the arena.
The live shows are thrilling in part because they’re not cleaned-up television skits where the only danger is scripted. Kids fall from their horses and audiences hold their collective breath, hoping that the young performers aren’t trampled.
“We talk a lot about safety, and I’ve been told by people who know that we have an enviable safety record,” says Glen Keller, director of the Westernaires since 1983 and Red Team instructor for 25 years. “Horses are 1,000-pound dumb animals, and you never know what they’re going to do. You have to be ready for it.”
“I think there’s risk with everything, but from what I can see safety comes first here,” says Carol Wall, mother of a beaming 12-year-old Westernaires rider, Julie. “I feel very safe with her riding here. There’s always a medic on duty, and she does wear a helmet.”
Julie agrees with her mom, but her vision of the Westernaires is about independence. “I love it that they let you ride by yourself; they don’t lead you around,” she says.
The two perfectly capture the dilemma of parenting. How do you let your children go so they can grow, and yet keep them safe?
The Westernaires has offered a good answer to that for 20,000 kids and counting since 1949. The Westernaires, then and now, is for kids whose parents or grandparents live in Jefferson County, parts of which are served by co-ops: United Power and Intermountain Rural Electric Association. These aren’t rich kids: membership is just $25 a year with $15 per Saturday ride for the many who don’t own their own horse. The Westernaires provide mounts for those kids with 208 mostly donated horses that are stabled at Fort Westernaire. Those low fees bring horseback riding into the range of the possible for most families.
The first part of learning those potentially dangerous drills happens in the classroom, where the Westernaires must memorize more than a thousand diagrams. They’ll be tested on the diagrams before moving to the next rank in the organization.
The kids who stick with it will take dozens of falls and spend virtually all their Saturdays at Fort Westernaire, not to mention much of their weekdays during the summer, studying those diagrams at home, selling tickets to shows, and needing to get their parents involved in the program.
The payoff, say Westernaires and their parents, is much bigger than learning to ride a horse. “I try to explain that the Westernaires is not just about riding fast and riding a drill,” says Shelly McDaniels, this year’s Red Team major. “We build a family out there and everyone looks out for each other.”
The varsity Big Red Team takes seriously its role in keeping the younger riders safe. “Our kids can go anywhere and do anything,” says Keller. “The young people we work with are people I trust with the future of our country. Our mission statement says, ‘The Westernaires is a youth organization that encourages leadership, responsibility and self-respect through horsemanship and family participation.’ And that’s what we do.”
Keller credits the group’s 350 volunteers (most of them parents), the kids, and the horses as being key to the Westernaires’ success. “I think there’s something about that bond between young people and horses that provides the glue that keeps everybody together,” he says.
Westernaires, both current and the alumni, say Keller, only the second director since the Westernaires’ creation 65 years ago, is in fact a big part of the reason that the Westernaires has flourished. “He likes to brag about us,” says McDaniel. “He’s really involved with our success, both in Westernaires and in school. He sets an example for the entire organization.”
Keller’s predecessor, Elmer Wyland, founded the group with just 26 kids at the request of the Lakewood Youth Council. Wyland instituted the strict rules for dress and behavior that the group still follows. Inspired by an old U.S. Army Cavalry training manual, he recreated Cavalry training as closely as possible for mid-twentieth-century students.
Glen Keller’s children joined in 1977, and both Keller and his wife got involved, as parents are expected to do.
By 1983, 600 kids were riding. The morning after Wyland’s death that year, his widow called the Kellers with a life-changing message for them. “Tell Glen it’s his” had been Wyland’s last words. Keller, a retired lawyer and bankruptcy judge, devotes himself full-time to the organization, as does his wife.
More than 20,000 young people have now been part of the Westernaires, although only a fraction of that number graduated from its ranks as part of the Red Team.
“I’m glad I stuck with it,” says McDaniel. A lot of riders don’t because of the time commitment, the challenges, and inevitable disappointments. “If a friend wants to hang out on Friday night, you have to say no because you know you’re going to be at the stables at 7 a.m. the next day,” she says. “Or if you want to play a competitive sport, you’ll have to choose. A lot of people give up competitive sports to stick with Westernaires. And it’s so frustrating if you’re stuck on a team when there aren’t enough slots on the next team. I’ve had a lot of riders get discouraged.”
That’s where leadership comes in. “I tell them it was just one time,” McDaniel says. “It’s worth it in the end, so work hard and show your instructors what you can do.”
Reme Shipley, a high school senior and another Red Team rider, says, “Once we get up in higher positions, it becomes obvious that younger kids look up to us. I feel responsible now to make sure I set a good example, to conduct myself in a way that people admire and want their kids to be like. To be a better person, really.”
McDaniels agrees. “You have to be a respectful person,” she says. “If you’re not respectful you’re not going to be in the arena because it’s not helpful.”
The older kids also take seriously their role in keeping the younger riders safe. Brian Davis, an alumnus, remembers the time when he was acting as a safety spotter for a girl whose foot slipped out of a strap that held her to her cantering horse as she did a back bend. She would have been dragged had Davis not raced out and grabbed the horse. The girl covered her head the way she’d been taught, he remembers. “It’s really rare, though, that something goes wrong like that,” he says.
Once, however, something went nightmarishly worse. On July 4, 1993, Katie Nielsen’s horse panicked and the girl was dragged to her death, her boot stuck in her stirrup. “That was one of the toughest times of my life,” says Keller.
Bill Scebbi, executive director of the Colorado Horse Council and a man who raised his own children with horses, believes the risk is worth it. “The Westernaires are doing what we all need to be doing as individuals, in assisting kids in being all they can be,” he says. “Every state should have a youth program like the Westernaires. Every county and every city. You wouldn’t need horse rescue organizations if you had more of these programs. It’s perfect for people who need a new home for their horse and it gives the benefits of a horse to kids whose families can’t own one.”
The kids do love the horses. They also make life-long friends with other humans.
The Precisionettes, the team just below the Red Team, performed at the Breckenridge Rodeo last summer. They were fully costumed, awaiting their grand entry, when the skies opened. Afterwards, they waited for their next event, a drill. “We were all soaking wet,” laughs Hollie Schuetz. “We really bonded over that.”
Davis, now a medical student at the University of Colorado, was best man recently at his best friend’s wedding. That was a friendship welded together through the Westernaires. The group changed his life in other ways as well, says Davis. “It builds character and self-confidence. You understand that you need to both take responsibility and rely on yourself and your horse, but also work as a team member.” Davis explains the Westernaires to people who aren’t familiar with the group by saying that it was like the high school sport—a sport that proved to be a winning subject for his essay for medical school admission.
Those who aren’t familiar with the Westernaires are almost certainly not from Colorado, or even from the West: the group is that well known. Hollywood even knows the Westernaires: they appeared in the television mini-series Centennial, and in the films How the West Was Won and Stagecoach. The Red Team performed for the Summit of Eight in 1997. President Clinton later said that the Westernaires were the highlight of the trip.
The group hasn’t since performed for the leaders of the Western World; their venues change annually with the exception of some standard, ongoing engagements — the National Western Stock Show, for instance, where they first performed in 1954, making this their sixtieth year.
For McDaniel, sometimes the smaller venues are the ones that mean the most. “Marcus, Iowa, saved up for three years to get us there, and the whole town treated us like royalty,” she says. “Not a lot of teenagers get to experience something like that.”
As in everything in life, some individuals get more out of the experience than others. Three hundred 9- and 10-year-olds are inducted into the organization every year. Only 40 or so will make it onto the Red Team, with another couple dozen graduating from the organization on other teams. The rest will leave. Laura Kapke, an alumna, remembers that some of the kids didn’t really care whether they moved up in the ranks.
Kapke is unusual in that she not only graduated but won a horse, Ace, through the Westernaires. “He’s my baby,” she says. “I got him when he was 3 and now he’s 13.”
The Westernaires Riders of the Steppes perform an inverted pyramid.Kapke won Ace early on in her career with the Westernaires, the year she sold the most tickets for the annual show, Horsecapades. She sold 1,020 tickets. It’s not too surprising that she was the Red Team’s major her senior year.
About one in six of the Westernaires’ volunteers is an alum. Some of them could be called super-volunteers. The October 2013 Horsecapades were dedicated to Bob Parson, for instance. He was inducted into the Westernaires in 1964, graduated in 1972, and has volunteered ever since, editing the Horsecapades program since 1971, coordinating the ticket sales, acting as chief operating officer for the group, and serving on the board.
Parson has an interesting take on the kids in the group: he thinks they’re getting better with every year. “Kids today are better than they were 50 years ago,” he says.
Some parents are alums.
Sonja Lawrence found out about Westernaires when her sister, Sheena, came home from school one day, clutching a Westernaires flyer and bawling. Sheena finally calmed down enough to tell her mother why she was crying. “I want to do this so bad but I know it will be too expensive,” she said. Westernaires shine in a glow-in-the-dark performance.
Smart girl: horses are expensive.
But their mother made the call and learned they didn’t have to own a horse and that the fees were affordable.
When Sheena made the elite Red Team, the girls’ father was dying. Both girls were, as Sonja Lawrence says, “distracted.” Lawrence was a good horsewoman, and was offered an early spot on the Red Team. “Mr. Keller was so good to us,” she says. “And I ended up being number one in the training class.”
Everyone hoped the girls’ dad would see his daughters ride in the 2000 Stock Show. Fate dictated otherwise; he died two days before their first performance.
“We were both crying during that performance,” Sonja Lawrence says. “The entire team was holding onto us, keeping us together.”
On a recent Saturday, Lawrence watched as her 11-year-old son Skylar rode a tall horse in a class full of boys whose horses were trotting and running first in one direction and then another. “Very different from girls,” she laughs. “Girls would all be in a neat line.”
Her 2-year-old, Colton, was collecting rocks at her feet, now and then watching as the horses and the boys on them wheeled by under the wide Colorado sky.
“I hope Colton will want to be part of the Westernaires too,” says Sonja. “Of course I do.”
Watch the Westernaires perform by clicking here.