Liz Callar photo
We featured this photo in our most recent “Who Is This?” contest on FaceBook. We dropped the hint that our mystery horseman is a familiar figure in the hunting field and in the horse show world as well. Can you identify him?
Nick Greenwell from Bluemont, Virginia was the first with the correct answer, and he’ll receive a prize from Foxhunting Life. Apparently it was an easy puzzle. There was an immediate flood of correct answers—a testament to the popularity of….
….Tommy Lee Jones, huntsman since 1970 (that’s forty-two years!) of the Casanova Hunt (VA). The photo was taken by Liz Callar in 1977.
Tommy Lee grew up hunting with the Bull Run Hunt. He has known and hunted with all the legendary Virginia huntsmen of the period like Melvin and Albert Poe and Duke Leach. He showed hunters and jumpers seriously in his younger days, and today he manages the venerable Upperville Colt and Pony Show that harks back to 1853.
Horsemanship is in Tommy Lee’s genes. His father was a horse dealer, and you can bet that he was thrown up on every sort of horse imaginable—the good and the bad, the kind and the ornery, the generous and the rogues. Most horse dealer’s kids become pretty fair horsemen if they don’t flee the scene first!
Tommy Lee is also a skilled writer. He has written entertaining and informative articles for many of the well known horse journals, and he contributed a chapter in A Centennial View, the MFHA’s hundredth anniversary book published in 2007. In describing his early days whipping-in at Casanova, when the hounds were left without their huntsman for the summer, he wrote:
“None of us had any real kennel experience. I’d probably spent more time in a kennel than anyone, simply because a number of my family members worked for hunt clubs. Most of my experiences came from my cousin’s house, at the nearby Old Dominion kennels, where he and I would blow Melvin Poe’s old cow horn to see which one of us could make the hounds howl the most. Not exactly the most practical experience….”
Watch for a new “Who Is This?” puzzle and profile in the days to come.
Posted August 1, 2012