A very early photo of William Dayton Sumner, taken when he was, perhaps, age 2?

William Dayton Sumner was born on November 28, 1926, in Moorestown, NJ, to Edwin Roberts Sumner, an actuary, and Margaret Wilcox Robinson, a former teacher of Greek and Latin.

Little Billy’s lineage in Moorestown dated back to the small South Jersey town’s very origins; his ancestors, John and Sarah Roberts, founded the town in 1682. Billy’s paternal grandmother, Mary Roberts Sumner, ran a boarding house, “The Hazels,” in Moorestown on the site of what is now the Moorestown Community House. Billy’s mother, Margaret Robinson, had come from Springfield, MA, to teach at Moorestown Friends School and met Bill’s dad while living at Mary Roberts Sumner’s boarding house. Billy, named after his great-grandfather, William Dayton Slater (descendant of Mayflower doctor, Samuel Fuller, and inventor of the window envelope and the machinery to make them), was the next to last of six children. (The family might have had eight children, but twin boys, born between George and Peggy, had died in infancy of hemolytic jaundice.)

 

William Dayton Sumner's family, from left, Edwin Roberts Sumner Sr., Margaret Robinson Sumner, Elizabeth Knight Sumner, John Newman Sumner, George Robinson Sumner, Margaret Fuller Sumner, William Dayton Sumner, Edwin Roberts Sumner Jr.; seated, Mary Roberts Sumner and John Sumner Sheldon (son of Bill's sister, Betty).

A clear delineation existed between the three “Big Kids,” Betty, John, and George; and the three “Little Kids,” Peggy, Billy, and eventually Eddie, born in 1931. In retrospect, Bill said he was closest to Peggy growing up and later to Eddie. Also, in my late teens, I developed a considerable closeness to Betty," he said.

The three elder Sumner children grew up in relative affluence, while the three younger ones experienced more of the effects of the Depression. Billy attended more years of public school than any of his siblings. The older children had attended the private Moorestown Friends School, but the Depression dictated public school for Bill and Eddie when Bill was in 5th grade. By the time young Eddie was ready for high school, his eldest brother, John, taught at the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, so Eddie could attend for free. Billy said he didn’t mind going to public school (in fact, he said he chose to stay in public school when offered a chance to go back to Friends School midway through high school), and his early years were rich with music (piano and later trombone), acting, great literature (he said he read ravenously in those years), sports (Bill was a champion backstroker on the high-school swim team) and a generally privileged existence. The family had a married couple as live-in servants and a vacation cottage on Norwich Lake, Huntington, MA.

An event that punctuated Billy’s earliest years was his contracting of rheumatic fever at the age of 4, followed by a lengthy convalescence at the home of his maternal grandparents in Springfield, MA, where he received considerable attention. The illness caused him to start kindergarten later than his peers, and he had a bit of difficulty adjusting. Billy was also ill for two weeks at the beginning of second grade and fell behind in learning the multiplication tables. He once said that he spent the next dozen years or so believing he was no good at math. “It was a long time before I finally realized I had a reasonably good aptitude for math, but by then I was incurably verbally oriented instead,” he said.

Billy’s sister, Peggy, believed she may have been responsible for sparking Billy's lifelong passion for horses, having had riding lessons at summer camp and telling Billy of her wonderful adventure on horseback. Billy was somewhere between 8 and 10 when he had his first riding lesson with Samuel Roberts, who challenged Billy to get back on a horse after one stepped on his foot during the first lesson. For the privilege of riding, Billy would work long hours cleaning stalls and helping out, first three or four days a week for Mr. Roberts, and then after Roberts died in 1938, at racetracks and auction barns. Back in those days before horse trailers were commonly used, Bill rode a horse to his first horse show in 1937.

It was within this magical world of horses that Bill met Marjorie Ann Fenimore, who also was enflamed with a passion for horses. The love of horses tied the two together throughout Margie’s high-school years and beyond. Meanwhile, Bill graduated from Moorestown High School in 1944.

He enlisted in the Army in April 1944 but was discharged less than a year later because of his asthma. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania with the intention of becoming an equine veterinarian but found that he was not strong enough in math and science to pursue the veterinary profession. Instead, he majored in journalism (graduating in 1949), and his skill as a writer provided him with a steady day job for several decades until he was finally able to make a living as a horseman.

Bill married Margie on June 10, 1950, and they settled in Harrisburg, PA, where Bill was assistant editor and later managing editor of Popular Horseman magazine. The magazine’s publishers, Harold and Marilyn Childs, introduced Bill to Morgan horses, the breed to which Bill would devote most of his career. Bill and Margie’s first of four daughters, Elizabeth Neal Sumner, “Betsy,” was born on April 25, 1951.

Tragically, Betsy was killed when a neighbor backed her car into the toddler on March 28, 1953. Not long afterward, Popular Horseman folded, and Bill and Margie returned to the suburban Philadelphia area.

Bill took a job at Atlantic Refining Co. in 1953, where he edited a magazine for dealers of Atlantic gasoline (The Atlantic Dealer News) and for the next 18 years performed numerous other editorial and promotional functions, many of them acclaimed and unprecedented.

Bill was still deeply interested in horses, but the young family’s living arrangements did not accommodate horses at that time. One of Bill's major horse-related activities in those years was to introduce his daughters to riding. Katharine Hathaway Sumner (“Kathy”) had been born on March 27, 1954; Margaret Robinson Sumner (“Robin”) on October 27, 1956; and Carolynn Fenimore Sumner on May 10, 1958.

Bill bought a beautiful black Shetland pony, “Stormy,” for the girls, and taught them to ride. Bill accompanied all three girls in turn as they showed Stormy in the leadline class, amassing numerous trophies and ribbons.

In the summer of 1960, Bill and Margie were finally able to purchase a small (three-acre) farm where they could keep their own horses and train horses for others. The seven years at Daymar Farms (an obvious conflation of “Dayton” and “Marjorie”) in Moorestown, were both exciting and tumultuous for the young family.

Bill, who now used his middle name, Dayton, in horse-show circles, frequently traveled either on business or to show Morgans at horse shows. He also taught magazine writing one night a week at the Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism in Philadelphia. Despite his busy life, Dayton often dabbled in such areas of interest as playing chess, creating crossword puzzles, following the stock market, cooking, and doing carpentry work; he built the stalls in the barn at Daymar Farms. Margie generally stayed home with the girls, who were growing up and going to school. Drinking was an important part of the horse-show social scene, and Dayton was as caught up in that component as he was in many aspects of the horse world. Managing the farm while Dayton was on the road so much became too much for Margie, and the family decided to move into Moorestown, where they lived for a year during which Dayton took his last drink (on July 4, 1966; he remained sober for the last 30 years of his life) until Margie asked for a divorce. They were divorced after 18 years of marriage on June 11, 1968.

Ironically, it was after Dayton once again lived in a situation that could not accommodate horses on-premises that he acquired his first top-performing Morgan, Dalcrest Concerto, a son of the celebrated Waseeka’s Nocturne. Dayton showed the versatile gelding, dubbed “Hotshot,” with some success, while his middle daughter, Robin, excelled on Hotshot in equitation.

A year after the divorce, Dayton’s company, now Atlantic Richfield, transferred him to New York City. Here, he met Diane Burns, who was to become his second wife on February 26, 1972. Dayton left Atlantic Richfield, and he and Diane attempted to launch their own promotions firm. Given that they targeted oil companies as their main clients, they were victims of bad timing because the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was in full force, and customers no longer needed to be persuaded to buy scarce gasoline. A stint at McGraw-Hill followed.

It was around this time that Diane suggested to Dayton that they buy a horse, which they did, ultimately owning 12 while still living in New York City. The couple pulled up stakes and bought a large farm they called “Southerly” in the Maryland countryside near Baltimore. Here, Dayton enhanced his latest incarnation in the Morgan world, that of breeder. Although keeping their own horses at Southerly eventually proved to be too tough for them, Diane and Dayton bred a successful dynasty of Morgans beginning with Southerly Conowingo, which were shown by Dayton’s long-time friend, Mike Goebig. During this period, Dayton published his book, Breaking Your Horse’s Bad Habits.

For the first few Maryland years, Dayton worked for a medical publisher, but by 1980, he was able to leave that job and devote himself to judging (11 divisions and numerous breeds of horses) and managing horse shows and sales, adding to the hundreds of magazine articles he’d written about Morgans and other subjects, conducting judging seminars, and following the fortunes of the Southerly Morgans. He managed the New England Morgan Horse Show for 15 years, its Northampton site a scant 12 miles from the vacation cottage on Norwich Lake where Dayton had spent many childhood summers.

Upon his marriage to Diane, Dayton became stepfather to Joseph Burns and Elise Burns, who played important roles in his life. During the Maryland years, Dayton was less in touch with his own daughters. They were grown up and leading their own lives, so infrequent letters and visits formed the crux of his relationships with all three daughters for a number of years. It was when he became a grandfather on October 4, 1984, with the birth of Mary Hathaway Hansen (daughter of Katharine Sumner Hansen and Randall Hansen) that he and his daughters very gradually began to reach out to each other. Five more grandchildren would follow: Randall and Kathy’s son, John Randall Hansen (1987); Katharine Isabel Hughes Hood (1989) and Ian Alexander Hood (1992), children of Carolynn Sumner Hood and her husband Gavin Hood; and Samuel Bruce Souers and David Fenimore Souers (1993), twin sons of Robin Sumner Souers and her husband, Gary Souers.

Dayton was also step-grandfather to Mary Wilton Burns, daughter of Joseph Burns and his wife, Hannah. (Joseph and Hannah became parents of a second daughter, Hannah Diane Newton Burns, after Dayton’s death).

Diane became quite ill in the early 1990s, and although she made a full recovery, Dayton cut back his working schedule on the horse-show circuit, but never lost his passion for Morgans. He indulged other interests in art and computers, and became active on the Morganlist e-mail discussion group for Morgan enthusiasts. His computer fixation also proved a boon for his relationship with his daughters, who grew closer to him through e-mail.

In late December of 1996, Dayton and Diane received a visit from Kathy's family (without Kathy, who had stayed home in Florida). It was, by all accounts, a glorious visit marked with much bonding among in-laws grandparents and grandchildren. Observers of the photos taken of the visit can see, however, how tired and ill Dayton appeared.

Still, the events of the next two months would prove completely shocking and unexpected to those who loved him.

Some six weeks or so after that visit, Dayton was hospitalized with a viral infection that develop into pneumonia on top of emphysema. It must be said that Dayton was a life-long smoker who had ostensibly quit smoking in the early 1990s but who still smoked on occasion. Eventually a lung collapsed. Although Dayton had been expected to recover albeit perhaps to a life of some infirmity, he fell into a coma on March 6 and succumbed to massive cardiac arrest at about 12:30 p.m. on March 7, 1997. His death came just a little more than a week after the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Diane, who was his constant companion and beloved soulmate in the last quarter-century of his life.

He was buried on March 12, 1997. Some of his closest Morgan friends and his family, including his younger brother the Rev. Edwin R. Sumner Jr., who performed the service, were in attendance at his funeral. Tributes by members of the Morganlist who had never met him were shared at his funeral.

It would please William Dayton Sumner to know that his memory is being honored in cyberspace. As longtime friend Dr. Albert Lucine said in his eloquent obituary of Dayton, which appeared in the May 1997 Morgan Horse magazine, [link to come] Dayton will probably be best remembered for his ability to communicate and convey information in a friendly, accessible manner. It is hoped that this web page is an appropriate means to celebrate Dayton’s communication skills. He is very much missed by all who knew him.