Cutting horse trainer and recent Zane Schulte award recipient J.B. McLamb is impatient to be out of the hospital and back in the saddle, following double knee replacement surgery, according to his wife Ginny. J.B.’s plight reminds me of a story that the late Ike Hamilton told on himself, when I visited him at his home in West Monroe, Louisiana in 2001.

Hamilton pitched everything from chickens to horses during his 50-year career as an auctioneer, but is best remembered for the memorable Quarter Horse sales that he conducted, with his lively banter and inexhaustible sense of humor.

In 1954, just as he was breaking into Quarter Horse sales for breeders such as B.F. Phillips and Gordon Howell, Hamilton had to have surgery to remove polyps from his vocal chords. The layoff didn’t sit well with the lively raconteur.

“I went thirty days without saying a word,” Hamilton told me. “Then I whispered for three or four weeks.”

In order to communicate with his wife, Shirley, Hamilton had a child’s vinyl etch and sketch pad, which gave him fits because his mind worked much faster than his fingers and he often had to rewrite messages for Shirley to be able to read them.

By the last week of his sentence of silence, Hamilton’s patience with the written word had worn thin. One day, after he handed his pad to Shirley and she shook her head for the umpteenth time and said, “I can’t read it,” Hamilton grabbed the pad back and painstakingly penned, “Go to hell. Can you read that?”

Then, of course, they both had a good laugh.

As an afterword, at the time that I visited Hamilton, Shirley was suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Hamilton took us both to lunch at their favorite restaurant in downtown West Monroe. Hamilton carried Shirley’s purse so that she wouldn’t misplace it, patiently reminded her of her favorite menu items, and reminisced about their many wonderful friends in the horse world. It was a lovely day.