The Morgan Horse [TMH]: Let’s talk about your early days, how you got involved with the Morgan breed.

Dayton: When I graduated from college, my first job was at Popular Horseman magazine. The editor there was a woman named Marilyn Carlson, she later became Marilyn Childs. She introduced me to Morgans, and I began to get involved with Morgans in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area.

TMH: A lot of people think of you as a scholar of Morgan breeding. How did that come about?

Dayton: Well, I’ve been close to horses for a long time and I’ve learned the bloodlines by exposure. That led me to being curious about the background of the horses that we would see in the show ring and at breeding farms, and that led me to do more and more research.

TMH: Was it a hobby or a professional interest?

Dayton: There was a fascination about the whole thing, but I don’t really know which was the chicken and which was the egg.

TMH: Talk about bloodlines, significant families, those which were significant to you at certain times.

Dayton: If you’re looking at the twentieth century, you have to begin with the government farm. That was the one strong continuing influence. No matter how bad times were for the economy and the breed and everyone else, the government stayed in business and kept on breeding Morgan horses.

TMH: Provided a continuity...?

Dayton: Provided a continuity for the breed. Not that all the horses they bred were ideal Morgans. They bred a lot of horses that weren’t good Morgans. There was a considerable period of time when the parties who ran the government farm didn’t really care about Morgan type. They were following their own stars. But they did keep the breed alive, and without their influence I don’t know that there would be a Morgan breed today. Most of the foundations on which you have to figure the twentieth century breed are anchored in the government farm.

TMH: When you talk about these families, how significant are they today? Are we breeding a different kind of horse today?

Dayton: The horses are more refined and in many cases more beautiful than they were, say 30 years ago. They have some of the same qualities. There is a persistent thread which continues in the breed. But the horses of today don’t look like the horses of yesterday.

TMH: Tell me about the horses you’ve bred.

Dayton: Well, there weren’t that many of them. We started out to breed a few horses. And we made a statement of purpose. We said we hoped to breed a few good horses that would be a credit to the breed and to the Southerly prefix. Because we were small, we figured we had to be pretty careful about the crosses that we used, the selections we made. So we started out, basically, with a Government and Nocturne mix. Those are the two primary bloodlines that we have worked with and the horses we have bred.

TMH: Tell me about Waseeka’s Nocturne.

Dayton: The first time I ever saw Nocturne he was a two-year-old. He about knocked my socks off. He was, at that time, the most impressive Morgan horse I had seen. I knew him well throughout his life and I admired him as an individual. He was just an awfully nice damn horse. He was a pretty horse, a mannered horse, a performing horse. He had all the qualities that I thought a good Morgan horse ought to have.

TMH: How did he differ actually?

Dayton: He was prettier. He was finer. His uncle, Upwey Ben Don, was of a similar type, and some of the Upwey Ben Don stock also had this new prettiness that you had not seen in the Morgans of the 1940s and 1950s.

TMH: You’re very strict on the responsibility aspects of breeding horses. What’s the horse breeder’s criteria, in your opinion?

Dayton: First, you have to know what you’re trying to accomplish. You need to have some kind of goal in mind, some reason for doing it. The person who I criticize most is the person who on an early spring morning says, “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a baby horse! Let’s breed old Shep and see what we get.” I think there’s been too much of that. I think there have been too many people who have bred on whim, with no real thought as to whether or not their horses were breeding stock.

TMH: As a judge, what kinds of horses do you see out there? How’s the breed holding up?

Dayton: Well, some of the shows I judge aren’t the greatest horse shows. I see some horses that I wouldn’t want to have to support. I see some nice horses. I guess one of the reasons that I keep on judging is that every once in a while, I’ll see a real star, a really marvelous horse. And, as a friend of mine -- a fellow judge – said, “We judge horses for that exciting opportunity. But when you search for that charming prince you have to kiss a lot of toads.”

TMH: Okay. But what do you see out there in the in-hand classes or performance classes. You know what I’m getting at.

Dayton: Well, of course I have to temper what I see in the shows. I judge against what I see in other shows as well. When I judge, people expect me to like a certain kind of horse and so that’s what they bring. They leave home the other ones.

TMH: Is that bad?

Dayton: I don’t know. It tends to be a self-fulfilling prediction. They say, “Well, he likes Nocturnes, so we’ll take Nocturnes to the show.” Now if that’s all that’s out there, of course I’ll tie them because there’s nobody else. And they’ll say, “See, I told you he likes Nocturnes!” I remember a couple of times when I wound up placing horses in halter classes when I wished I would have had something better to work with. People had brought what they thought I’d like and I actually would have liked something else better.

TMH: What do you see that makes you question the breed’s directions?

Dayton: I’m somewhat puzzled by the way that we have taken all the park horses out of the park classes and put them into the pleasure classes. Our park classes are not as strong as they should be and our pleasure classes are overloaded. I think part of the reason is that you can get a horse ready to be competitive in pleasure in less time than it takes to prepare a park horse, so people are taking the shortcut route, trying to win prizes for the owners, more quickly if they can, by going into a different division.

TMH: Is that a breeding trend? Are we breeding hotter pleasure horses?

Dayton: I think we’re breeding park horses and selling them as pleasure horses, to some extent. Basically, we’re taking a horse and trying to find the place where he can be a star. Now if he’s going to be a third-place park horse and a first-place pleasure horse, we’re going to make the option to try for that first place. I think that’s it.

TMH: Every year I hear people complaining that we’re pinning grand champion stallions that are too young. Is that a valid argument?

Dayton: Well, to some extent I think it must be, because I see that more and more of the older age group in-hand classes are not filling. I think that in the good old days, when I was young and active, we went to a horse show and we entered the same horse in a number of classes. It was sort of like “pitch ‘til you win” at the carnival. If he didn’t win in one class you kept at it until he won in another. Nowadays the horses are all more specialized. They go for one particular class. If the horse is not going to be grand champion stallions, nobody wants to be second of third in the senior stallion class. So by the time a horse is four of five years old, you know whether he’s an in-hand champion or not. We used to get 20 or 30 horses in a mature stallion class, now we get five, six, or seven.

TMH: Tell me about the shows you judge.

Dayton: I judge 11 different divisions and some other things besides that. I judge Arabians, Morgans, Saddlebreds, Hackneys, Roadsters, Paso Finos, National Horse Shows, Western, and all three seats of equitation. And that’s pretty much all over the county. I’ve been to the West Coast three times this year. I’m also judging everything from little shows to great big shows.

TMH: Having judged over the years, what kinds of changes have you seen in the breed?

Dayton: I think that I need to remind myself from time to time that the Morgan breed is so much, much larger today than it was when I first started to judge horse shows. There are many more horses and many more good horses. I tend to think that I’m still operating in a world that is 20 years ago. My frame of reference needs to be updated from time to time. The fact is, there are a lot more good horses to choose from in the shows today.

TMH: Does that make your job tougher?

Dayton: Not really. It’s always easier to judge a large class of good horses than it is to judge a class of horses where you have to pick the least worst. The reason is that there’s been a lot of selective breeding.

TMH: Do you feel that the qualification procedures for today’s judges are tough enough?

Dayton: Probably not. But the overall system takes care of that. There are people who get judge cards who are probably marginal in their qualifications, but they won’t get asked to judge too many horse shows. And every couple of years they have to reapply for their licenses, and eventually they fall by the wayside.

TMH: Do they do any damage in the meantime?

Dayton: They can judge a single show and do it badly, which is of minimal damage to the people who spent money to got to it, but I don’t think it has any long-lasting effect.

TMH: Okay, but should people without significant experience be judging major horse shows?

Dayton: I’m sure there are probably some of them who don’t have the maturity to be judging. I think it’s more often a case of personal maturity than of experience. Most of the people getting judge cards have been around horse shows long enough to know a good horse and to know how to judge. I’m just not sure they have the emotional maturity and stability to handle the pressures that go with the job. They may be afraid that people won’t like them, or they won’t be respected if they follow one course of action or another. Some of them may be reluctant to make a choice between two closely matched horses -- bite the bullet and say, “I’ll pick this one.”

TMH: Is this as big a deal as people make it out to be?

Dayton: You’ve got to understand that I’m inside the tent, and so I think we’re all cozy in here. I don’t think there are the abuses that some exhibitors say there are, like one judge doing favors for other judges because they’re going to be judging him next week. I don’t think that happens. I think a lot of the negativism originates when people say, “If my horse doesn't win, there must be a reason. It can’t be the case that my horse is inferior, therefore it must be that the judge is stupid or crooked.”

TMH: Let’s change subjects again and talk about your book, Breaking Your Horse’s Bad Habits, and the many articles you’ve written.

Dayton: The book is a project which started as an outgrowth of several “How To” articles I wrote for The Morgan Horse many years ago. After I’d written two or three articles I thought that if I collected them, gave them some structure, I could make a book of them. Then I sat on it for about 12 years. It was published originally by one publisher who kept it a pretty good secret from the book trade. It was not easy to find a copy of it; I never saw it in a bookstore! But he let it go out of print and another publisher approached me. He’s done a fine job with it. It’s going great guns. In fact, they tell me that I’m their second best-seller.

TMH: You’ve written a number of magazine articles, too.

Dayton: Hundreds of them. I don’t know how many. For most of the horse magazines, Sports Illustrated, and others. There was also a misbegotten time in my youth when I sold some fiction to the then-existing pulp and science fiction magazines.

TMH: No kidding? Are you still writing that amount of material?

Dayton: No, I’m writing very little. Suzy [Lucine] contacts me every once in a while to do something for The Morgan Horse, and given the pressure of a deadline, I can get it done. But I rarely dream something up on my own anymore and propose it. I have outlines for a couple more books in my file, and I very carefully avoid opening that file.

TMH: What are the books about, can we tempt the readers?

Dayton: Well, the easiest thing for me to do would be to create some new history of the Morgan breed, detail the history on the modern Morgan horse. I can’t convince myself that there’s a broad enough market for that to make it worth doing. I don’t think it’s going to alter anyone’s life very much whether I do it or not.

TMH: Earlier, when you talked about Dalcrest Concerto, it sounded like the testimonial for the “versatile family horse.” You don’t hear too many of those today. Has the breed become too specialized?

Dayton: I will qualify “too specialized.” We’re a lot more specialized. We are specialized, but the levels of competition have dictated that we pretty much have to be specialized. In order to compete successfully most horses have to pick one thing and practice that.

TMH: And that’s okay?

Dayton: Well there again, I think in terms of the years when I had a horse who could do more than one thing and I thought that was good. I may just be being sentimental if I think of that as being better than what we have today, so I’m not sure that it was better. I know that the best of the horses that we had probably could not compete successfully with the best of the specialists that we have now. For example, one of the horses I trained was a horse named Ran-Bunctious. When he went to the Mid-Atlantic Show he was third in the pleasure stake and third in the park stake [shown by Polly Dalrymple] in the same night, wearing the same shoes. At that same show, I won the park saddle stake with a horse named Lord Linsley who also won the pleasure driving class at that show.

TMH: Okay, nobody tells those stories anymore.

Dayton: Well in those days we were also aided by the fact that for a period of time, park horses and pleasure horses all had the same shoeing limits.

TMH: So I’ll ask you again, is it okay that today’s Morgans are specialized and in the “old days” you could show them the way you’ve just described?

Dayton: I suppose so. I guess it is.

TMH: What I’m getting at is, for years we’ve promoted this breed as a family horse. But what you’re saying is that the only way this breed can really be versatile is if the family buys five or six different kinds of horses.

Dayton: We could have a versatile horse if that’s where the payoff was. I don’t know how to backtrack to the point where the versatile individual could hold its own in the kind of competition we have today. There was a time when the breed was smaller and there was a place for that. We needed to fill the classes and there weren’t enough horses to do it with. Now there are lots of horses and the best of them are a lot more exciting at what they do. I think there’s a charisma or glamour that attaches itself to the show ring stars. From time to time I’ll judge the smaller Arabian shows where people tend to show the same horses several different ways at the same show. They may be having fun. I hope that they are. But they sure aren’t producing something that’s very interesting to look at.

TMH: Okay, then, as a person with a rich promotional background, is the Morgan community promoting the wrong kind of image about this breed? Is there a polarity here between the image we seem to promote and what’s really happening?

Dayton: There are people who seem to be attracted into the breed in a continuing flow -- it’s a revolving door. They come in, stay awhile, and they leave. But they come in because they are attracted to the competitive aspects of shows – “Let’s win something.” Now, their idea of recreation for a period of a few years is to get a better horse than their neighbor has, put him with the best trainer they can find, and go out and try to win prizes. Our major horse shows are built around this group of people who want to play the horse show game, the way it exists today. Up until now it seems to be a self-reinforcing thing. I mean nobody has had to create any massive promotion program to bring it about, it has developed by itself, and it perpetuates itself and most efforts to change it meet with failure. But along the way, there’s a fallout of people who say, “I don’t like the pressure, the emphasis on winning, the money it takes, and I’m going to opt for something different.” So they go into the sport horse disciplines or they say. “to hell with it. I’m going to buy a boat.”

TMH: You said “up until now” that cycle has been effective.

Dayton: I think it’s fine to have the A show circuit as it exists, let it go its own way, let the professionals and the people who go to them do ass they want to do. But let’s have some alternative horse recreation available. Now, the sport horse disciplines are part of that, but I think there are other things which could exist in these terms.

TMH: For example?

Dayton: An alternative circuit of shows. I judge a number of Arabian amateur shows. There are people who say, “I don’t want to go to horse shows that last a week, that are 1,000 miles away from home, that cost more money than I can afford. I want to go out and have fun with my horse and come home the same night.” Now those are here and there in the Morgan circuit but they haven’t formed the kind of circuit that I envision as a possibility.

TMH: You mentioned this to me a few years ago. Why doesn’t it catch on?

Dayton: I’m not sure why. Running this kind of show requires committees -- groups of volunteers -- to make them happen. Right now we’re finding a shortage of people, volunteers, who will do anything with any kind of horse shows. We’re scratching to find people to serve on show committees and do the kind of work it takes to make horse shows really successful.

TMH: Are horse shows losing popularity? AHSA doesn’t say so, but everyone I talk to says otherwise.

Dayton: Well, all kinds of horse shows are suffering a slump in population and demographics. The post-war baby boom passed its crest several years ago and there are fewer younger families now looking for new recreational opportunities. There are fewer young kids going into shows, and entries are down at shows all over the place.

TMH: What does that say about the Morgan breed, when you consider that its most visible aspect of promotion is in decline?

Dayton: The figures I’ve been seeing indicate that the combination of some years of over-production by breeders, followed by the tax reform laws of 1986, has caused us to produce fewer foals for several years. That, I think, is going to at least help with the supply and demand problem we were experiencing in the middle 1980s. I think we have brought foal production back to a point where we are serving the needs of the reduced growth market that we have today, and the projections are that the growth should come back. The projected enrollment in colleges is due for a turnaround in the next couple of years and when that happens I think we’ll begin to see show participation and sales increase again.

TMH: But we’re not out of the woods, are we? We could get right back there.

Dayton: My platform for a long time has been that there’s a certain percentage of the breeding that is “recreational,” people who don’t have anything else to do with their mares so they breed them. If we could get them interesting in doing something else with their mare, in stead of breeding her, then we might have a period where supply and demand stay in balance. One way to do that is to increase the recreational options. If we can come up with a unique margin of difference, so that if you own a Morgan you’ve got more thing that you can do to have fun than if you own an Arabian or a Quarter Horse.

TMH: Is enough of that breed promotion being done?

Dayton: No. Breed promotion is defined by most people as, “Somebody come sell my horse for me.” Breed promotion in the past has been, “I am a breeder, therefore we need to promote Morgans and produce new customers.” But one year’s new customer was always next year’s competitor because he becomes a breeder as soon as he gets into it. As far as I’m concerned, breed information means producing recreational opportunities for horses other than we have today.

TMH: Is there too much PR emphasis placed on horse shows in terms of drawing the general public into the breed?

Dayton: Horse shows are not a spectator sport. The things that you’d have to do to make them appeal to uninitiated spectators make them no fun for the people who are currently paying the bills. Nor do I really think you could make a pleasure horse class into something that’s going to be at all interesting to a spectator who paid $5 or $10 to come and watch. It’s a participant sport and anything short of grand prix jumping isn’t going to excite the public. In OKC, to some extent, and in Northampton, to perhaps a larger extent, there are some people who will take an evening and go watch the Morgan horses show. Out of a few who do that, a few will maybe buy a horse. I don’t think that that’s effective marketing.

TMH: What makes a successful horse show successful?

Dayton: I think a large part of it is that if you set the conditions properly, and then step aside and let the exhibitors put on the show, they’ll do a pretty good job of it. You can’t let one group of exhibitors take advantage of another group. You have to know and observe the rules. I think one of the things which helps is that I’ve been through all the various things that go into a horse show. I’ve been an exhibitor, a judge, all the other things. So I have some knowledge of what they need.

TMH: What’s the hardest part of managing something like the New England Show?

Dayton: One of the annual agonies is trying to figure out how to put 1,000 horses into 850 stalls.

TMH: But what makes it unique?

Dayton: Well, it’s old and has some built-in traditions, which means you kind of have to live with the expectations of many of the people involved in it. It’s diverse, it’s spread out. We have sometimes three areas of competition running at the same time. It takes place at the oldest agricultural fairgrounds in the United States and many of the buildings, I think, were built when they first built the place. The place is falling down, we have to rebuild it every year. There’s actually a lot about the show that is the antithesis of the Southern States Show where everything works and everything is modern and in beautiful condition. Northampton takes some working with.

TMH: Is that part of the charm and appeal of the show?

Dayton: Sure. They go hand-in-hand. Also it’s in the center of a population of Morgan horses. Last time I did an analysis of it, approximately 50 percent of the entries at New England came from the state of Massachusetts.

TMH: There are some people who still regard the “Eastern National” as the true national of the Morgan show circuit. How do you feel about that?

Dayton: The two shows are completely different. I’ve managed both of them and I don’t see that one is in competition with the other. They’re entirely different shows. I know there are some people who feel that to really prove yourself you have to win the same thing at both New England and Oklahoma. That’s probably all very healthy. The late John Lyndon had a solution to the problem. He just called it “The Morgan Show.” But they’re very different shows. They’ve gotten very close to one another in size and the Grand National can raise more money and now distributes more prize money than New England. But prize money doesn’t motivate exhibitors all that much anyway.

TMH: Oh really?

Dayton: No. People are in it for the satisfaction or ego or something. As one professional trainer put it, it cost him $6,000 to go to a horse show and to win it back $50 at a time takes a long time.

TMH: In many ways, you are a professional, among amateurs, in that when you sit on a committee you do so primarily as a business person. How do you rate the idea of volunteerism on which so much of this industry is based?

Dayton: I think that on committees, and in general in the horse industry, there are people who are sound, successful businessmen, who would go broke if they ran their businesses the way they run their horse activities. They don’t seem to have a keen business sense about the way they run their horse activities. When I do consulting, I often make the statement, “Sentiment seems to have a seat on the board of directors at many horse operations.” It sure seems to out-vote common sense or business sense in these operations.

TMH: Where will the Morgan breed be in five years? Forecast the future.

Dayton: I don’t think that there’s any one thing which can move the momentum of the breed in any one direction very rapidly. We’re moving one way and we have a certain amount of momentum in that direction. But barring some cataclysmic outside influence, I don’t think it will change very rapidly. I don’t know if that’s bad. You have to trade off opportunity versus stability.

TMH: What advice do you give to newcomers who think they might want to own and breed a few Morgans?

Dayton: Don’t expect to make a profit. And concentrate on quality, not numbers. Open your eyes and look to where there are people who seem to be doing well. And ask questions. I sometimes remind myself of the experience of watching Mike Goebig grow up. As a little kid, he spent his time hanging around the professional trainers and asking them what they were doing, how they did this and that. I think that’s one of the reasons why he’s as good today as he is. He was very good at looking for information and asking questions that other young men would have been too proud to admit they didn’t know, but instead tried to admit that they knew it all -- tried to fake it. There’s no substitute for going to the knowledgeable people.

TMH: You’ve mentioned a few names during these talks, and that was a very nice reflection about Mike and how various people have influenced him. But who are some of the people who’ve influenced you?

Dayton: Johnny [Lydon], of course, and Mrs. Power. John was the kind of person who made his living largely out of buying and selling horses. If you bought a horse from John and the horse wasn’t what he was supposed to be, you didn’t own him. John would take back any horse that didn’t suit the buyer. He had an integrity that a lot of people perhaps didn’t know about.

TMH: A good friend...?

Dayton: Yes. A long period of time would go by and I wouldn’t see or hear from him, until something would go wrong at my farm – a horse died or something like that. The phone would ring within hours and it’d be John. He’d say, “I hear you’ve got troubles, how can I help?” I don’t know how he’d learned about it, but it happened a couple of times. He was in touch with a lot of people and he would hear something and immediately offer help. He was also one of the few people who knew a great, great deal about training and would share his secrets with young trainers. He was a remarkable personality.

TMH: And Mrs. Power?

Dayton: Mrs. Power was a dedicated breeder. She may not have always been right, but she tried to be. She had integrity.

TMH: People with integrity always get branded as being outspoken. You can be pretty outspoken at times. I remember a few years back you quoted for an article I did on geldings. You said, “If there were 2,500 stud colts born in a given year, it would be a lot if five of them were of the quality to be breeding horses.” I got lots of letters over that one. Do you remember that?

Dayton: Yeah.

TMH: Has your willingness to call things as you see them ever caused you any flack or earned you a reputation?

Dayton: Sometimes. I’ve often wished that I hadn’t said things publicly that I’ve said. Or sometimes I wish I hadn’t said them in the way I did. But I get impatient. Or I want to show off or something.

TMH: Dayton, I think we’ve almost finished with this interview. You know one of the things that I keep running into as we’re talking here is that I’m afraid I’ve asked you some of these questions before, and I don’t want you to think that I haven’t done my homework by asking you the same things over again.

Dayton: Well, I’m glad you didn’t ask me the same questions because I may not remember the answers I gave last time and I may come up with something different!

TMH: Why don’t I just send off these tapes and let the magazine print everything verbatim. How about that?

Dayton: I don’t think that would be a very good idea. I don’t think the Morgan world is ready for that much of Dayton Sumner.