Susan lived in a regular neighborhood of houses and yards, so when Jack got there he tied the horse to her mother’s prized black cherry tree. Jack would rather not share all the details but his eventual success depended upon having a lariat, climbing a tree, and being able to land upright on a rope. A fair amount of that time was spent trying to get the horse across the first creek it had ever seen. The cross-town trip took three-and-a-half hours. Jack says it took a few weeks to get the horse where he could ride it, and then he set out for Susan’s house. Which went OK until a car stopped beside him and the horse kicked a door in. He found an unbroke one for $100 and, since he didn’t have a trailer, proceeded to walk it home. Jack told his mother he was going to get a horse and keep it at his grandmother’s farm. That’s when she told him, “You know, Jack, if you get rid of those friends of yours, sell that stock car and buy a horse, I might go out with you.” “4-H and babysitting was all I did,” she says.īut Jack was nothing if not determined, and after nearly a year had achieved a friendship of sorts with Susan. What Susan really cared about was the horse she had bought at age 13 after saving up $600 from fifty-cents-an-hour babysitting jobs. “When he’d come over to the house I’d pretend not to be home,” she says. Jack was cut from the classic bad boy mold and Susan didn’t like him at all. They lived on the “doctor/lawyer” side of town and it seemed she was fated for a doctor/lawyer husband. Susan was the daughter of a state engineer and Michigan’s first female property appraiser. “ I saw her and fell in love right away,” he remembers. In his second year there he laid eyes on freshman Susan Sexton for the first time, and that was all it took. The Catholic school Jack attended only went through 8 th grade so he had to switch to the larger public school as a high school freshman. But all that changed when he got to 10th grade and the horse bug bit him – or more accurately, the horse woman bug. He and a buddy were going to build a stock car and get into racing. Jack survived the ranch work with no major trauma but had no plans of making a career in horses or even having a horse of his own. “We would bring them up to the arena, put on a bosal and a cutting saddle with the horn cut off,” Jack says, “then climb on and ride them until they quit bucking.” Jack says he never came off, and if a horse laid down he just stayed on till it got up again. The boys broke two-year-old registered Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses that had never been touched. The family had no particular interest in horses although Jack did spend time in his early teens working with his cousin on the ranch of a man from Texas. was born into a large Catholic family in Ionia, Mich., and grew up on the “lower class, wrong side of the tracks.” His father died when Jack was 13, so he and five siblings were raised by their single mom, who also worked at a bank.
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