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CH Sue Elegant

These horses have been honored with a donation to the American Saddlebred Horse and Breeders Association towards the technology upgrade, which will enhance the ASHBA website and help support the advancement of our breed.

The summer of 1991 was pretty typical for me. As I did most years, I spent the summer in Lexington with my adopted family, the Teaters. I would spend the months catch riding horses at the county fairs and hanging out at the barn, but it also meant that the search for a horse of my own would resume. That search had already been going on for two years and I was beginning to think I would never find, “the one.”

During Louisville that year, some friends of mine were watching horses work after the show one night. Nothing really exciting was working until Don Harris came in on a junior 3-gaited filly. They were smitten with her and raced over to my trainer, Don Bridges, and demanded he approach Mr. Harris and inquire about this horse for me. The very next morning I was walking into Don Harris’s aisle and meeting the horse that would be my friend and partner for the next 18 years, CH Sue Elegant.

“She’s awfully small,” said my always skeptical mother of the little brown horse. “She’s not small when she goes in the ring,” responded Mr. Harris—and how right he was. As soon as we hit the ring, the “Suzzie” seemed to double in size. Her head came up, her perfect ears came forward, and her extreme motion all came together to give the appearance of a horse twice her size.

My mother bought Suzzie as I was riding her back down Stopher Walk and two months later we were winning our first of many classes. But winning and showing was not the best parts about my partnership with Suzzie—it was the trail rides we took around the airport that neighbored Don Bridges’s barn in Houston; sitting on the tailboard in her stall for hours rubbing on her and trying to teach her tricks; eventually retiring her to our farm and breeding her; and finally, watching her offspring grow and mature, and the smile I get on my face when I run into a “Sue Baby” years later and I again, see Suzzie’s eye or her perfect ears.

Suzzie passed away in 2009 at our farm in Brenham, Texas.

Show ring photos are fine, but we would prefer personal photos along with a short story of 100 words or less about a favorite memory of your horse. Please email Kimberly Skipton to submit your photos and stories.

Make a tax deductible donation of $200 to ASHBA to honor YOUR special horse on the Wall of Honor, or print out the nomination form (pdf).