The article I wrote on September 8, about the high-selling yearling at this year’s Ruidoso Select Quarter Horse Yearling Sale, sent me looking back through interviews I’ve saved over the years. In 1991, I talked with Art Pollard, who owned the Lightning A Ranch near Tuscon, AZ and owned Lightning Bar and Spotted Bull (TB), two sires who have had a profound influence on the Quarter Horse. Here are a few excerpts from that interview with Pollard:

I was one of the first to breed to Three Bars, for a cool $100. He was a very shy breeder, but he was a typey, typey little guy.If he’d had Quarter Horse papers and you’d led him into a Quarter Horse stallion class, he’d have been right at the top – high in the ribbons.

He had Quarter Horse conformation. He was only about 15.1 and he had beautiful, big doe eyes and a short muzzle. He was just a sprinting fool and had no distance, but, boy, when they bred him over on Quarter Horses, it was a new ballgame.

Doc Bar (by Lightning Bar by Three Bars) took after (his dam) Dandy Doll. She was a little apple-rumped, tight-twisted mare like so many of the Texas Dandy’s. But Doc Bar was the cutest little thing. You wanted to put him on a watch fob.

He ran one race. The gate opened and he broke and ran about fifty yards and came in last, way back in the dust. His owners came to me and asked me if I’d give $1,000 for him. That’s what they had in him with the stud fee and raising him and this one race.

I said, “I wouldn’t give my pocket knife. He’s not my type, the little dumpling-assed thing.”

So two fools met – they fool enough to offer him and me fool enough to refuse him.