Dayton Sumner managed his first New England Morgan Show in 1981. He doesn't think it is necessarily a better horse show than others, but he’s sure it is unique. He’ll tell you it’s the oldest Morgan show in the nation and he’s proud of the panorama of Morgan horse activity that has been achieved there.

“My career has not been exclusively with horses,” W. (for William) Dayton Sumner of Southerly in Phoenix, Maryland, explained in a recent interview, “but it colors my thinking a great deal about how to market horses.”

“We spend a lot of time being fond of our breed and wanting other people to join in our enthusiasm. We also want to expand our market. So we talk about promotion. I think most of the people who talk about promotion do so with an inherent ignorance of what promotion really means and of the economics of what they are talking about. The way the breed is today, a lot of people who have a horse think it would be a lot of fun to have a baby horse. So, a high percentage of Morgan owners are also sometime breeders. The trouble is, this year's customer becomes next year's competitor. We continue to expand the production at the same rate as we produce consumers. We can't tell the producers from the consumers.”

Renaissance Man of the Morgan world, Dayton is a rather inscrutable man in his mid-fifties [1985], with a quietly wry sense of humor overlaid with occasional benign sarcasm. One feels he has thought out his entire paragraph before he begins the first sentence.

Dayton judges ten divisions under AHSA auspices and has adjudicated every major Morgan show in the country at least once since he obtained a card in 1949.

“A very big part of my working life was involved in sales promotion and advertising,” Dayton said. “I spent a number of years doing marketing communications and edited a number of award winning publications. I was coordinator of what was, at the time, the largest identification program in the history of American industry when Atlantic, Richfield, and Sinclair merged and changed all of their service stations and products to the name ARCO. I conceived the "man on the ladder" sign that won the Point of Purchase Institute’s Award for that year for the best sign of its kind. I was involved in the creation of the promotional development system for ARCO that used a combination of experimentation and market research to develop better ways to promote sales.

“That was a fascinating challenge. Later the Arabs thought of an even better way to promote sales by creating a product shortage, and we no longer had to give away dishes at gas stations to sell gasoline.

“I spent a short period of time after I left Atlantic running an agency of my own in the business of developing promotions for oil companies. That company did well for a while but then the Arab oil embargo changed the economic picture and it became advantageous for me to do something else.

“During that period of time I proposed a program of direct mail solicitation for credit cards which produced, in market tests, a direct mail response of 25 percent! In the direct mail business, two percent is the usual and 12 percent is gangbusters,” Dayton said.

“I get frustrated with some of the people I work with on committees about what should be done to advertise and promote a horse show, a farm, or a breed of horse. So many people say ‘we ought to do this’ without thinking of the efficiency of what they are trying to do. I always remember the occasion when TV’s Ed Sullivan first brought the Beatles to the U.S. and somebody pointed out to me what great publicity Sullivan was getting by having such famous stars on his program. At that time the Ed Sullivan Show was sponsored by Mercury automobiles. I said, ‘the kids who watch the Beatles don’t buy Mercurys, they steal hub caps.’ I think that so many people need a little guidance in understanding that it is the demographics and quality of the audience you reach, as well as the number, that determines how effective your message is going to be.

“I really can’t remember when I didn’t like horses,” Dayton said, “but I can remember I started riding and being involved with horses in the summer of 1936 when I persuaded my mother to take me for a riding lesson. This was in Moorestown, New Jersey, where I grew up. An old gentleman named Samuel Roberts ran the place where I went to ride, and he gave me my first lesson. His system of giving riding lessons was to put me on a horse, then he’d get another horse, put a lead on my horse, and take me for a ride. He didn’t have a ring as they do today. He’d just take me for a ride and talk to me, then half way along he’d stop somewhere for refreshments.

“At that time it cost $1.00 for a riding lesson,” Dayton reminisced, “and it seemed to me that he spent at least half that on refreshments and the one hour lasted two hours. When we stopped for refreshments that first time, his horse stepped on my foot while Mr. Roberts was getting ice cream cones inside. At that point I really didn’t like riding that much; I hadn't enjoyed my first half hour on the horse. But when Mr. Roberts came out of the ice cream store and saw I had been stepped on, he said to somebody there that it demonstrated a lot of courage for a kid to come back after being stepped on during his first ride. So I said to myself, ‘I’m going to show this old geezer. I’m going to come back just once and that will be that.’ Of course, the next time I went riding I had a great time, and I’ve been at it ever since.

“I kept on with Mr. Roberts. He took me to my first horse show in the fall of 1937. I spent the summer of ‘38 working for him at the stable, but he died that September. He was a great teacher and at that age I was a great blotting pad so I could soak up an awful lot. I still find that when I think of something about horses – some bit of technique – I'll ask myself ‘Where did I learn that?’ And I realize I learned it from Mr. Roberts. After all these years I still find that a great deal of my information came from him.”

Mr. Roberts had a five-gaited stallion and, because of his approach to horses, Dayton found a natural orientation to saddle-type horses.

Dayton was the kind of kid who went to where the horses were. He would work just for the chance of an occasional ride. He spent summers at the race track, and he spent time with hunters and with jumpers. While he wasn’t being paid, he wasn’t paying to do it either. As his riding improved he became sort of a semi-professional, with people asking him to ride for them. But he always gravitated back to the saddle-type horse.

Dayton was attending the University of Pennsylvania when he began to do a good deal of writing. He found that he could write articles for magazines that had a heavy emphasis on horses. “I began writing a regular column for what was then Popular Horseman Magazine published in Harrisburg. When I graduated from Penn and was looking for a job, the magazine had an opening for an assistant editor and I took it. The editor was a lady named Marilyn Carlson who was soon to marry the prominent horse trainer, Harold Childs. Marilyn had a stable in Harrisburg and it was through her that I got to know Morgans. Best known of her horses was a stallion named Lippitt Mandate. I was soon helping to care for the Morgans and to show them, too.

“After several years of working at Popular Horseman,” Dayton said, “the magazine was an editorial success and a financial failure. After Marilyn left and I became editor, I used to say, I improved the financial performance 100 percent. We lost only half as much money. Eventually it came to the point where Popular Horseman was no longer a viable place to work, so I left and went to work writing training programs and then doing sales promotional work for the Atlantic Refining Company.”

Dayton was with Atlantic Refining a total of 18 years. It was during this time he acquired his home and stable in Moorestown and became a professional trainer. In the early 60s he phased out the saddle horses and concentrated only on Morgans. While he never had many horses at any one time, he had a great deal of success. Perhaps the most publicized horse that came from his barn was the handsome stallion Ranbunctious who became national pleasure champion.

All three of Dayton’s daughters rode as children during the mid-1960s. His middle daughter, Robin, who had a lot of natural talent, stayed with it the longest and still rides occasionally. Kathy, the oldest, tried very hard, while Carolyn, the youngest, had so many interests besides riding that she did very little actual showing. All three girls went to most of the horse shows and were very well liked by everyone for their enthusiasm and puppy-dog friendliness.

“My first marriage dissolved in the mid-60s,” Dayton explained. “One major contributing factor was that, along with all the time I spent with the horses, I enjoyed partying pretty well. I reached a point where I developed a fairly significant drinking problem. It took several years for me to realize that I really had a problem and to decide to do something about it. Now I haven’t had a drink in 19 years and find life infinitely better without it.”

When Dayton moved to New York City in 1969 with his job, he decided that if he was going to live in the city he was not going to commute. Owning horses did not seem practical. However, he did remain interested and continued to judge. It was at this time he met Diane, to whom he is now married, and introduced her to Morgans.

“One day I was sitting in my office-by this time I had left Atlantic Richfield and was working for McGraw Hill--and the phone rang. It was Diane and she said why couldn’t we have a horse? That morning I couldn’t think of any reason why we couldn’t have a horse. I’ve often said since then it would have saved us an awful lot of problems if I had thought of a reason. And that was the beginning of the Southerly breeding operation.”

They bought one pregnant mare that foaled three weeks later. John Lydon's daughter, Priscilla O’Connor, had helped them find the mare. The following weekend the Sumners went to Waseeka Farm in Massachusetts to see their acquisition. Priscilla led the mare out of the stall and said, “There you go, one horse going on 20,” (which, Dayton admits, wasn’t very far from the truth). The mare was the government-bred Phi who was by Melysses out of Corvette, who later produced Southerly Conowingo by Lord Appleton (Waseeka's Nocturne x Vigilmay). Southerly was on its way.

“We were primarily interested in breeding at this point,” Dayton said. “Chapter I, if that's what you want to call those previous years, had been showing and training with all the emphasis at that end. But since I’ve been married to Diane our focus is on the breeding side of it. We send our horses to horse shows because I think that a breeder needs to prove his point by going into competition and finding out if his breeding is any good or not. But I don’t need to go to horse shows for the same ego-satisfaction that I did when I was younger.

“I think I had been showing horses for 35 years and I remember I was getting a horse ready for a class one morning, bending down to blacken its feet. I stood up and said to myself, ‘What am I doing? Why do I need this anymore? I’ve done it for all these years. I’ve won all the major things I need to win.’  And ever since that day I still continue to enjoy horse shows but I don’t feel that compulsion to compete that I once had. I’m much more fascinated now with the satisfaction of planning the breeding; selecting the right mare and the right stallion, watching the foal arrive and watching it grow up and watching it develop, and hoping it will prove to be one of those ones that can be more than a little successful.

“I give a great deal of credit for the planning to my wife,” Dayton said. “Diane will be the first to tell you that she knew little or nothing about horses when we met 15 years ago, but she is possibly the fastest study I’ve ever encountered in that she, in no time at all, developed a mental picture of the kind of horse that both of us admire. Hers is based, not on the knowledge of the conformation of horses; it’s her orientation to art, actually. She has an aesthetic sense for what is pretty, and what she thinks is pretty in a horse is what I think is sound in a horse. We are both looking at the same picture for perhaps different reasons, but she very rapidly knew how to recognize a good horse – a superior horse – from seeing it.

“She also very rapidly became very knowledgeable about bloodlines. There are times when I become very frustrated with her when I get an inquiry about a horse that’s for sale; I’ll send out a standard four-generation pedigree and she’s not satisfied with that. She says, ‘People care about the fifth and sixth generation. People care about the fact that this horse is descended from Bennington or Ethan Allen III.’ I say, ‘Yes, but one-half the people I meet think if they can trace them all the way back to In Command, that’s about as far as they'll go.’ She, like me, is fascinated by old government bloodlines and the bloodlines that have made the Morgan what it is.”

After the Sumners accumulated a few more broodmares and a couple of crops of foals, they found themselves living on New York’s Park Avenue and boarding out ten horses. It seemed only feasible that they live where the horses were, so they decided on what they wanted, and on a trip through Maryland found a spot that fit that desire perfectly.

“We came here to Phoenix and began a new chapter that had our lives pretty well wrapped up in the horses,” Dayton said. “I left McGraw Hill in New York and worked for a while for a medical publisher in Baltimore. In 1980 it got to the point I was doing enough of managing shows, writing articles and consulting, buying and selling horses for people, that I didn’t need to work for anybody else anymore and could devote my full time to the horse activity, which I’ve been doing ever since.”

After a number of years judging Dayton was drawn into the management end of horse shows. He had been an active member of Mid-Atlantic's show committee for a number of years. At that point, in 1975, the show was located at Devon and was losing ground because of rapidly rising costs. The committee decided that things needed changing to rejuvenate the show, and they needed someone to do it.

“Once again, when they asked me, I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. So I said, ‘Okay, I'll manage it this year.’ I decided that if I would manage it for one year I’d probably end up managing it for two years.

“Well, I found it was fun to manage a horse show. It was rewarding to see a show that was kind of precarious come bouncing back up again, particularly the second year. The first year was chaos. We had moved back to Quentin, which pleased the exhibitors, and since I was doing an unfamiliar show in an unfamiliar place I did not fully foresee where all the problems were going to be. That’s where I learned Sumner’s rule number one for horse show managers: every time you take on a new horse show in a new location there are going to be problems and you won’t know where they are going to come from.

“You are always going to be hit with surprises and I had some major surprises that first year, although the show came off pretty well. I was able to come into the second year a little better prepared. I remember as the show went on, every time I looked into the ring I saw something pretty. I said to myself, ‘We must be doing something right.’ It wasn't just me but the team of people who worked well together.

“In those days, while Mid-A was not the biggest, it sure was one hell of a horse show. We had good horses from different areas of the country that never met anywhere else and we had a lot of fun doing it. So my two years stretched out into five, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity I had to work at the Mid-A Show. I think it was a marvelous horse show with a great group of people to work with. It was a great training ground for the shows I’ve managed since.”

Dayton stopped managing Mid-A to take on the New England show and the Grand National in 1981 and 1982. “I think the reason I took on New England was the challenge of a formerly great horse show that in my opinion was in trouble. I had attended the 1980 show because my horse was competing there, and I was appalled at what had happened to the old National Morgan show. It was, without any offense to the people who were doing it, a dirty, dull, tiring, boring horse show and there were many things about it I lamented. I wanted to see the old National Show back to what it had been and since I had some ideas about how to get it done, I talked to the show committee about becoming show manager. I’ve been managing it ever since. And the New England Show is once again the great, great show that is implied by Northampton. It is the oldest Morgan show in the world and is still, by a wide margin, the largest Morgan show in the world [1985]. It has a tradition, a charisma, no other horse show can achieve. It is not necessarily a better horse show, but it is a unique horse show.

“We have at the fairgrounds in Northampton an opportunity to do things that some other horse shows cannot do. We have enough areas of competition to have two or three things going on at the same time. We can produce a panorama of Morgan horse activity that can't be achieved anywhere else. While performance classes are going on in the main ring, at the same time there can be carriage competition in the infield and a dressage event in the dressage arena. It’s just a colorful atmosphere impossible within the confines of an indoor walled coliseum.

“As I said,” continued Dayton, “I managed the Grand Nationals the same year as New England and found it an impressive challenge. In the 12 or 13 years the Grand National has been in existence, it has become a truly national horse show. It is now accepted and respected by exhibitors coast to coast as the end-of-the-year-world-championship-show. It brings together a lovely competition that does not occur anywhere else. You get the best horses from all areas competing against each other in that one show. There are times when I think it has gained an importance that breeds’ national show must have but that people tend to blow out of proportion. It is an important show, but sometimes we make it too important. We put too much stress on the value of winning a class at one particular horse show when it is only a horse show with only one panel of judges putting their opinion on a class on a day. The horse who is good enough and lucky enough when he gets there and manages to win the big honor for that year, creates a big financial advantage for the people involved. The show has a great deal of impact.

“I feel,” Dayton stated, “the Grand National performs an important function and feel that we, as individuals, tend to take it a lot harder when we don't win than we do at other important horse shows, because we make it more important than it needs to be.”

Dayton managed the Grand National for two years, then decided, for personal reasons, to resign from the Grand National. He has been doing New England since then.

“New England is in the funny position that we just don't have any more room to grow,” Dayton said. “We had 1,129 Morgan horses in competition last year [1984] and I really don’t know where we could have put another horse if someone had brought it. We have used up all the available space. We have 850 permanent stalls, put up 150 temporary stalls and might squeeze in a few more tent stalls. But the cars, trucks, trailers and vans that come with these horses must be parked, show buggies and carts all take up square feet of space and we only have so many square feet of space.

“My hope is,” Dayton said, “that we can continue to improve the quality of the show in every possible way, continuing to make it the great traditional extravaganza it has been, until we can find a way to accommodate increasing numbers at Northampton.”

Last year a new departure was created with the institution of the East Coast Invitational Sale. It was conceived with the proposition that up until then most Morgan sales were notably unsuccessful. “People have generally felt that a Morgan horse sale was a place to get rid of a horse you couldn’t get rid of any other way. Typically, buyers just did not expect really good horses to be offered at public auction. Consequently, they didn’t bid very much for them. Obviously sellers were reluctant to put good horses into sales. It was a vicious circle,” Dayton said.

“We felt there was an inherent inefficiency in the horse industry. There are good horses being bred and trained all over the country, and there are potential buyers all over the country, but we don't have an efficient way to bring the two together. In order for the prospective buyer to find a horse to buy, first the person doing the selling has to advertise one way or another to attract the potential buyer, then the potential buyer has to drive or fly many miles to look at the horses. We wind up with dollars being spent for air fares, car rentals and motel bills that could be put toward purchasing the horse itself. We wouldn’t have to do all this scurrying about the country if the good horses were offered together in a preselected group. This is what we are trying to do. Have super market of top quality horses that have been picked up by a group of qualified judges. We bring them to a central point where a seller can expect to get a quality price for a quality horse and buyers can choose from the best available.

“We promoted that idea aggressively and it worked. Last year we set a record for the highest price ever paid for a two-year-old filly, the highest price ever paid for a pleasure horse and the highest average price for any Morgan sale in history.

“That was last year’s accomplishment at the first New England Invitational Sale and I don’t know how we are going to top that this year. I don't know what we can do for an encore. But we can and will.”

Dayton is also introducing the same concept in the West as manager of the Top of the Rockies Sale in Estes Park during the Circle J show.

This year’s New England show will be slightly expanded with the addition of a new feature. The show will start one night early with Monday evening being Breeder’s Night where the Breeders’ classes: futurity in hand classes, dam and produce, stallion and get, and series of stallion presentations aimed toward the breeding aspect of Morgan horses will be featured.

The hunter division, which has been expanding rapidly in the past few years, will have several more classes. There will be a modified combined training test involving jumping and dressage.

New England will also have a division similar to that of the St. Louis Challenge of the breeds that is held in the fall. The horses will compete in one trail class, one hunter class, one trotting race, one English pleasure class, and one barrel race. The high-point horse from this series will be a likely candidate for the competition St. Louis.

Dayton is a member of two American Horse Shows Association committees: the Licensed Officials Committee that reviews applications for judges and stewards and is involved with the overall policy of officials for horse shows, and the Show Standards Committee. This latter is concerned with badly managed shows and its members are mostly people oriented in hunter and jumper shows that have problems not found in Morgan, Arabian, and Saddlebred shows. Dayton sometimes finds himself at odds with these people since he cannot relate to their problems and finds that their proposed rule changes would often hamper show-horse shows. Dayton says, “Even though I am often the odd ball I am also able to protect the interests of the other kinds of horse shows.”

“In the AMHA I keep getting appointed to committees that never meet. I am a member of the Judging Standards Committee, the Seminars Committee, the Magazine Steering Committee, the Breed Promotion Committee and at least two current committees involved with the development of Morgan promotional films.

“I think I would like to do some market research before we go too far ahead with breed promotion,” Dayton said. “I think we need to know to whom we are going to sell Morgan horses and on what basis. I think we don’t know that right now, and that we ought to arm ourselves with information. I think right now the best prospects to buy Morgan horses are people who are statistically similar to people who already own Morgan horses. The best way to appeal to these people is with the same appeal that got the present people into the breed. I’d like to find how 200 people get into Morgans and synthesize from that same kind of idea how to go to people and say ‘You’d like to have Morgan horses, too.’”

Dayton consults with buyers and sellers of Morgans. That, along with some agenting is basically the major part of his present career. “I used to say that as I salesman I couldn’t sell bread in a famine,” Dayton said. “I’m a lot better at helping a prospective buyer find the right horse at a fair price than I am going out and huckstering a horse somebody has for sale. But I do represent sale horses as well as buyers. I’ve been called in by a number of breeding farms to appraise their operation, to give them some suggestions about how to improve their farm management, to improve their breeding program, how to improve their finances, and various things like that. It’s an interesting type of challenge.”

Dayton finds in the horse business that sentiment tends to have a seat on the board of directors and often sentiment clouds a wise decision. He admits to being as guilty as the rest. But since he is not emotionally involved with someone else’s horses, he can go in and say, as kindly as possible, which horses to keep and which to sell. Or he’ll just change a farm’s orientation. Some people he has worked with have instituted his suggestions and it has made a measurable difference in their operations. Then there are those who have thanked him for his recommendations and have kept on doing what they were doing before and their operations is no different than it was before. His recommendations are only as good as their utilization.

Breaking Your Horse’s Bad Habits is a book written by Dayton over a period of years. It all started when he wrote a series of feature articles for the Morgan Magazine to help give information on training horses. After a few issues, Dayton thought that if he collected those and added some more, he’d have enough material for a book. This project sat on his shelf for 12 years, then one winter while he was living in New York, Diane’s mother became ill and Diane had to spend some time in Florida. Dayton had a couple of months pretty well to himself, so every evening he would spend some time on it and in a concentrated period of about two months he added to the originals and fleshed out his outline. The satisfaction of completing such a project was appealing and Dayton figured if it was published and even made some money that would be even nicer. The completed book was published and this past winter another publisher released a new edition and the new copies are now in book stores.

Several years ago, Dayton decided there were a lot of things he could do with a computer. The one thing he doesn’t do is compute. He does very little with numbers. “I used the computer for a word processor, I use it for data-management and filing – it's a fascinating thing for me. There are lots of problems I didn’t know I could solve. It’s a whole different approach and changes the way I think about a lot of things,” Dayton said. “Last year I used it to work out a complete revision of the New England show’s time schedule. When I used to work on time tables for shows it used to involve little pieces of paper that I’d lay out on the dining room table and use color coding to avoid conflicts. I have not used that colored paper (or the dining room table) since I got my computer. It does the things for me that I used to do manually. I have what I think is the best mailing list of Morgan owners across the country because it includes not only names and addresses, but what organizations they belong to, whether or not they are involved in horse shows, which ones are professional trainers, how many horses they own, anyone within a certain state with a special interest – on and on. This mailing list is coded from 0 to 6 and I can characterize people by their rating number,” Dayton said.

“I use the computer a great deal in my show management work and now do all entry processing and class lists for the program. I did all this the easy way. The first horse show I processed was last year’s New England [1984] with its 1,129 entries. I found that with a few days’ intensive work and my intimate knowledge of what I needed to know, I could put together a better service than I had for horse shows in the past. I also did the Southern States Show and the three-judge scoring system for the National Paso Fino Show last year.

“My word processor has a spelling dictionary,” Dayton said, “that did not recognize words such as Nocturne, Justin Morgan, Fleetwing, so I put in a fairly sizable glossary of horse terms and I call it Morgan-speak.

“I have a pedigree research file that I programmed myself so I can do an extended pedigree on almost any horse alive today. After manually researching the first few generation, I can let the processor take it all the way back to Justin Morgan. A complete pedigree on my stallion is just under 500 pages.”

Whether you consider Dayton Sumner a horseman, trainer, breeder, show manager, editor, consultant, judge, author, instructor, computer operator, or historian or refer to his professional career as a promotion manager and advertising executive, he is certainly a combination of all, and his knowledge and experience honed in a keenly analytical mind have made him a true Renaissance Man and an asset to the modern Morgan world.

Note: Dayton continued as Manager of the New England Morgan Horse Show through 1996.