I Had Horses In My soul

Story by MARY ELLEN THOMPSON
Photography by PAUL NURNBERG

With her perfect equestrian posture, the only indication that Katherine Tandy Brown is more comfortable on the other side of the interviewing process is the constant motion of her foot; Katherine has been writing for several magazines and trade publications for the past 24 years. Enviably tall, thin and self-assured, Katherine has a story or two to tell about her days on the racetracks at Aqueduct and Saratoga Springs in NY, but we’ll probably have to wait for her book to come out before we hear them.
Southern by birth, Katherine has that easy going charm and ability to fit right into the heart of a matter, so when she hones in on something it gets her complete attention. Her lifelong passion for horses was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky when she was just a little girl, and she and her sister, Lindsay, would dress up in their cowgirl outfits and gallop around the house.  “I had horses in my soul.” Mentally cut to that scene in “National Velvet” where Elizabeth Taylor breaks off a reed as a crop and gallops herself over the bridge. Katherine recalls at age five and a half, her parents took her to Vermont to pick Lindsay up from summer camp where “I got to get on a snow white horse named Midnight. I never wanted to get off!” However, it was awhile before that dream was realized.
Years ago, Hopkinsville was the world’s largest producer of dark fire tobacco and Katherine’s grandfather owned a tobacco warehouse. She and Lindsay were raised on Main Street in a brick cottage that her grandfather had built in 1919. Their father was a physician and childhood was reasonably idyllic. Katherine remembers ping pong games on the front porch, running through the sprinklers, swimming in the pool at the country club and playing shadow tag under the street lights. “Hopkinsville was a neat place to grow up!” An athlete from the get go, Katherine loved swimming; a competitive swimmer, she and friends started a swim team in high school. But in those young days, her favorite activity was going to summer camp. “I would have stayed in summer camp all year if I could. I went to camps in Vermont, North Carolina and Virginia. I loved summer camp – the archery, riflery, swimming, riding and tennis.” However, those halcyon days ended when she was sixteen. Her parents divorced and Katherine moved to Mayfield, KY with her mother and sister.
Katherine spent one year at Murray State University then transferred to the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Horse Country. With her love of animals, Katherine “Majored in pre-vet but no one told me to re-think that, I wasn’t so great at science!” Still, Katherine was “hooked on horses.” “My first job was prepping Thoroughbred yearlings for the Keeneland horse sales. Though Thoroughbreds are difficult and skittish, I was delighted to be paid $1 an hour to do anything with horses.”
“I bought my first horse my junior year in college. A friend who had a horse farm took me to the stockyards where I found a green-broke horse from Oklahoma that was half quarter horse and half Thoroughbred. She cost $250 with a saddle and bridle but I didn’t have that much money. My step-father had been in a cavalry division of the Army and he lent me half. The next day I saddled and bridled her and got one foot in the stirrup before she bucked me off. She was named Gimlet Bay but I called her Mare-Mare; brown with a black mane and tail, she had big feet – kind of like pancakes! I trained her and taught her to jump.”
After graduating from the University of Kentucky with a Bachelor of Science degree, Katherine went to work for The Blood-Horse Magazine, which is akin to a bible for breeding and racing Thoroughbreds. After three years there proofreading and doing research, Katherine left for greener pastures, becoming one of five women hired by revered horseman John Bell III to break Thoroughbred yearlings. Jonabell Farm in Lexington was legendary for breeding, racing, selling and boarding champion horses. A forward thinking businessman, Bell knew women had a way with horses that enabled them to do the job well. Breaking Thoroughbreds is not a job for the lily-livered, Katherine concurs, “People said it was dangerous. I was in!” She explains, “The horses were brought into stalls for a couple of days and petted. Then a saddle pad was put on their back for them to feel the weight. Next, we got to ‘belly’ them, which meant we lay across their backs on pads, perpendicular to the horse on our bellies which resulted in some pretty spectacular bruises! We rode them in the stalls with a saddle and bridle for a week. The grooms then led us outside for a few days. Finally they unclipped the lead shanks and we rode from September through Christmas, every day in rain, sun, sleet or hail.”
“From Lexington, the horses got shipped to Aiken, SC for training. We stayed in Aiken for three months, rented a fabulous house on Whiskey Road, galloped three or four sets of horses a day.  W. C. “Mike” Freeman, the trainer, took the horses from Aiken to Aqueduct in NY and then onto Saratoga Springs, and we followed the horses there. I also ponied the horses on the track, i.e. led the horses to the starting gate. I was on the track in 1973 with Secretariat and saw the only race he ever lost. After three years I left the racetrack.”
“My father loved Vermont. After he died, I wanted to know why, so I lived there for a year working in a ski resort, teaching swimming and diving, waitressing.” After a subsequent trip to the Caribbean and a year in Princeton, NJ, Katherine found herself right back in Kentucky working in the media again for The Thoroughbred Record magazine and then Pedigree Associates.  In 1984, she developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder affecting the peripheral nervous system, and she had to quit her job at Pedigree Associates.
Concurrently a part time dream job presented itself when Katherine was hired to be the American representative for the prestigious Goffs Bloodstock in County Kildare, Ireland. Katherine marketed the idea to Americans of buying and selling their horses in Ireland. “When I opened the American office, the Irish Ambassador came over. I went to Dublin and Paris for the horse sales.” Unfortunately that chapter ended when the bottom fell out of the Thoroughbred market and the American office closed.
Undaunted, Katherine went to work for Joseph-Beth Booksellers, then a new bookstore in Lexington. As Director of Promotions, in about three years Katherine saw that independent bookstore become the largest bookstore in Kentucky. After five years of exhausting work, she decided “I needed to quit that job and be a writer myself. I’d seen a lot of books come and go.
“In 1991, I was on the Board of the Kentucky Women’s Writers Conference when I met Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Natalie wanted to see some Kentucky horse farms, so she climbed into a car with me and off we went.” One conversation led to another and Katherine was invited to Natalie’s writing workshop in Taos, NM.
After the workshop, Katherine quit her job at the bookstore, and for the next ten years, wrote book reviews for the Lexington Herald Leader. During that time, she took a course in writing for the magazine market and landed a job writing for Group Travel Leader, Inc. Her first assignment took her to Washington, DC for a week to scope out group travel possibilities and write a 12,000 word story. Now she writes for numerous publications, mostly about travel.
“I adore travel – anywhere, anytime!” Katherine exclaims. “One of my first big trips as a writer was to accompany a group going to Churchill, Manitoba in Canada to see beluga whales in the Hudson Bay. People also go there to see polar bears, who really just want to eat the people. It was a ten day trip culminating in one day in Churchill, there is no place to stay there, and no road that goes there; it was quite an experience.”
Travel writing was how Katherine found Beaufort. She was researching a story about the state of South Carolina and happened upon Beaufort where, she remembers “I loved Bay Street, the historic houses, the Spanish moss, and of course – the horse drawn carriages. I was getting tired of winters in Kentucky” and a seed was planted in her mind. Fate intervened in the form of a man she was dating who was refurbishing a sailboat in Rock Hall, MD for a trip down the inland waterway. Katherine, characteristically, went to the Annapolis Sailing School to prepare herself for the journey. They stopped in Beaufort on their way South and Katherine was again reminded of her affection for this town. In 2001, she could no longer find reason to winter in Kentucky so she edged closer and spent that winter in Aiken, SC.  For the next few years, she came to visit friends here and in 2006 finally succumbed to the charms of Beaufort and made it her home.
Katherine continues to travel, write and teach writing at TCL and USCB, but we’re holding our breath for her novel. “I’ve had the story in my heart since I was on the racetrack in my twenties, so I am using my experience to write about the track.” Once again, life comes full circle; Katherine’s love of horses combined with her expertise at writing will join forces to take us to places she has been, but the rest of us can hardly imagine.