June 24, 2015
New Market-Middletown Valley Widget Is Bryn Mawr Grand Champion
New Market-Middletown Valley huntsman Ally Storer shows Widget before judge Daphne Wood, MFH / Christine Cancelli photo
New Market-Middletown Valley Widget 2014 was judged Grand Champion of Show at the Bryn Mawr Hound Show held this year at the Radnor Hunt in Malvern, Pennsylvania on May 30, 2015.
Huntsman Alasdair Storer is banking on the beautiful tri-colored Crossbred foxhound and her sister Welcome to be the foundations of important female bloodlines for this Maryland pack to build upon. As Storer’s father—an experienced breeder of hounds in England—commented, “You couldn’t ask for a better pedigree.”
Starting with Widget and Welcome, Storer plans to breed one to an Elkridge-Harford Crossbred and the other to a Millbrook Penn-Marydel. This, he hopes, will give him two strong lines of disparate gene pools to keep his breeding options open.
Rupert Isaacson’s Horse boy
Rupert Isaacson is a horseman. He was an avid foxhunter until other life matters intruded. He is a gifted writer as well. But Rupert’s principal gift to humanity is a mind set that is constitutionally unable to accept limits on what is possible. No challenge, no matter the odds, is hopeless to Isaacson. Time and again he has tilted at the windmills of conventional wisdom and accomplished astonishing results.
Rupert was born in England and roamed the world as a travel and environmental writer, specializing in Africa. It was there that he came upon a cause that captured him totally—the displacement and removal of the Bushmen of the Kalahari from their traditional hunting grounds by their own government. He became a vigorous activist for the Bushmen, gave speeches, wrote a book about their plight, and arranged for the Bushmen to appear before the United Nations to plead their case. They won.
At about that time, Rupert and his wife, then living in Texas, discovered that their infant son Rowan was autistic. Conventional treatment protocols—and they tried many—were unable to improve the boy’s most troubling behavioral problems, and Rupert immersed himself into finding alternate solutions. He discovered that horseback riding while holding his son in front of him in the saddle was therapeutic for the boy. But only temporarily.
