What? Paris Hilton Not An Original?

    

This news comes as rather shocking considering Paris Hilton is associated with custom anything and everything.

However, is seems her most recent headline grabbing antics and the possibility that she just may have a not so custom suite in the LA Jail House Hilton Hotel … has, shockingly,  all been done decades before.   

The Los Angeles Times has had their fun reporting the court room details, as well as Hollywood’s “been there, done that” stories.

But columnist Patrick Mott tells it best in the Orange County Metro.  The story goes like this:

Bebe Daniels set the stage – OC had its own ‘Paris Hilton-goes-to-jail’ moment back in the early ’20s.

“As horribly as it makes my fingers cramp to type the words Palfisg Hlighet … Pwelgsil Hbugleq…Paris Hilton (thank God for muscle relaxants), and as much as making reference to the heiress’ recent legal adventures may seem like going brook trout fishing with hand grenades, I’m going to do it anyway.

Why? Because it’s fun.Actually, there’s another reason: whatshername’s approaching 45-day jail sentence gives me – and all of us who live in Orange County – yet another chance to one-up those jurisprudential sissies in L.A. who think they’ve just unleashed the biggest dog-and-pony show since O.J. They have obviously never heard of Bebe Daniels.

 

Bebe Daniels was a popular silent film actress who had starred opposite Harold Lloyd, and later been further promoted by Cecil B. DeMille. She was young, talented, charming and loved to drive her Marmon automobile as fast as possible.

She was doing just that in the spring of 1921, flogging the Marmon past 55 mph on a lonely road through south Santa Ana. In the car were her mother and Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight-boxing champion whom Daniels was dating. They were headed for San Diego.

 

She was pulled over by a pair of motorcycle policemen and cited. At the behest of her lawyers, she requested a trial by jury, believing her star power would win her a favorable verdict. 

Her lawyers pleaded for mercy for “this poor little girl who has been subjected to so much.” Instead, Judge John Belshazzar Cox, a genuine eccentric and a lover of the spotlight, who was apparently delighted with a courtroom packed with press and Hollywood hangers-on, sentenced her with a flourish to 10 days in the Orange County Jail.

 

Sheriff Theo “Budge” Lacy Jr. and movie star Bebe Daniels at the time of her 1921 arrest for speeding in Santa Ana.

Daniels was nonplused. “I suppose if you live in a small town you get like that,” she reportedly said after the sentencing. “I bet 56 miles per hour sounds awfully fast if you’ve never driven anything faster than a plow.”

What followed became early Orange County legend.

Almost immediately after Daniels checked in (there’s no other term for it) to her jail cell, movers from a local furniture store arrived to furnish it with rich carpeting, chintz curtains and a bedroom suite with bedding to match the curtains.  

Local florists sent vases of fresh-cut flowers daily.

The best Santa Ana restaurants and hotels competed with each other to deliver specially prepared meals directly to her cell, where she constantly received friends and visitors from Hollywood, including Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Her mother was also allowed to stay with her in the cell.   And at night Abe Lyman and his Coconut Grove Orchestra set up beneath her barred window and serenaded her with the “Rose Room Tango,” a specialty number she had once danced with Rudolph Valentino.

It wasn’t until her cell door was finally shut at the end of each day that she realized (as she later wrote) “how awful it was to be locked in a cell.”

Bebe Daniels was granted a day off for good behavior, and when she emerged from jail, glamorously dressed, she was met by none other than Judge Cox, who presented her with a bouquet of flowers.

She solemnly announced that she had learned her lesson, and immediately left for Hollywood, where she went straight to work on a new film, which was released that fall.

It was called The Speed Girl. ”  

~~

It’s going to be interesting to see how Paris follows this act.  Knowing Hollywood … they’ll come up with something.

Half Blind Horse Runs In Kentucky Derby

It’s a beautiful sight seeing the winning horse of the Kentucky Derby being wrapped in roses as everyone cheers wildly from the stands.

However, this year there was another horse, a winner in his own right that deserved cheers and at least one rose.   

His name … Storm in May.  Blind in one eye, he ran the course and finished 16th place out of 20 horses.

 

In the crowd at Church Hills Downs was Kent Hersman, a United States Army Officer on special leave from active duty in South Korea.  He came to watch the half-blind horse he had bred and was now running in the Kentucky Derby. This was an event worth traveling around the world to see.

Only twice in the past 25 years has a half blind horse made the Derby lineup, much less finished the race.

   

Columnist, Mike Hutsell, of the Jeffersonville, Indiana Evening News and Tribune wrote this about Storm in May: 

Still searching for that underdog pick that you can’t help but get behind and root for? Can’t quite find that “Little Engine that Could” for that tug at your heartstrings kind of selection that you can get behind this year on Kentucky Derby day.

In a sport that needs real feel-good flavor coming off the tragic heels of the Barbaro tale in 2006 — there’s one out there that conjures up the names of Rocky or Rudy or any David who dared tread in the land of Goliaths.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve finally got one.

Storm in May, trained by relative unknown trainer Bill Kaplan, is that underdog tale.

 

Writing from Louisville, Kentucky, the newspaper headline by Associated Press columnist, Jim Litke, said “Storm In May Made Derby Trip With One Eye” and further describes the remarkable feat of this horse. 

Cover your right eye. Now imagine being loaded into a starting gate alongside the best thoroughbreds in the land. The gate flings open and just ahead and to either side, 19 other horses are jostling for position as the first turn draws near. Then add 100,000 or so railbirds in full roar, throwing off as many decibels as a jet engine on takeoff.

That’s how Saturday’s Kentucky Derby looked and sounded to a long gray colt with one good eye named Storm in May.

 “He’s been that way since a week after his birth,” trainer Bill Kaplan said Friday morning as a thick mist blanketed the backstretch at Churchill Downs.

A few yards away, the colt bent over and nibbled at the grass, his right ear cocked to track nearby sounds like a radar.

Storm in May, a grandson of Storm Cat and a great-grandson of Triple Crown winner Secretariat, was born with a pedigree worthy of a Derby horse, but that wasn’t all.

A corneal ulcer in his right eye required an operation almost immediately after birth.That surgery went well enough, but several days later, a veterinarian trying to clear up a complication inadvertently punctured the eye.

The only consolation was that the vision in Storm in May’s left eye was perfect.

“And as long as he knows where the rail is,” Kaplan explained, “he won’t get pushed into it or jump it. The rest of the trip he can figure out for himself.

“The blessing is that he doesn’t know he’s different than anyone else,” Kaplan said.

“I’m one of those people who don’t believe anything happens by chance,” said Kent Hersman, a chief warrant officer in the U.S. Army who bred and trained Storm in May before selling him as a 2-year-old.

“So maybe there’s somebody out there that needs to see this horse do well.“

From time to time, everybody takes a bad hit in life.

Storm is that inspiration that says, ‘Get back up and give it your best shot.’ Because if nothing else,” Hersman added, “he’ll teach you to enjoy the trip.”

And it’s been a remarkable enough journey already.

Storm in May is one horse that deserves that rose.

Wild Horses Roped Into Border Patrol Duty

Descendants of the same horses that carried soldiers, prospectors, Plains Indians and Spanish conquistadors will be deployed next month by the federal government to help patrol the most rugged reaches of the northern border.

 

Billed as operation “Noble Mustang,” the U.S. Border Patrol believes this new team of wild horses will not only tighten security but also save taxpayer dollars.

Wild horses are uniquely suited for the backcountry mission, said Danielle Suarez, public information officer for the agency’s Spokane sector. After generations of living in the mountains of the West, the horses have developed unrivaled sure-footedness, musculature and the ability to endure harsh conditions.

“These legends will help us to defend our borders,” Suarez said. “We need horses physically capable of getting into remote and isolated areas.

“The mustangs are protected by an act of Congress as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” But with their population unchecked, the herds have faced starvation after overgrazing rangeland and wildlife habitat, especially during droughts.

The same mustangs that will be used to hunt drug runners, human traffickers and potential terrorists were trained by convicted criminals. Since 1986, inmates at the Skyline Correctional Center in Canon City, Colo., have broken and trained the captured horses.

Working with the horses is a special privilege at the state prison, Suarez said. The training requires extreme patience and trust, he said. “The horses actually help tame the prisoners.”

Most are between 3 and 4 years old and were rounded up in Wyoming late last year. Two are from Nevada, and another is from California. “They’re extremely, extremely tamed,” said Suarez, the agency spokeswoman.

Along with the training, the mustangs were given names by students. In early June, Sisko, Hidalgo, Spurs,
Okanogan, Kootenai, Ike, Chase and Slash will again find themselves roaming a rugged Western landscape.

Only this time, the mustangs will wear saddles, feed on oats and work for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Spokesman-Review, By James Hagengruber, May 17th, 2007

Actress Hotter Than Ever At Age 97

 SANTA MONICA, Calif.—Hollywood’s starmakers always are on the lookout for a fresh new face and they found one in Mae Laborde, albeit of the wrinkled variety. Standing 4-feet-10, with snow-white hair, rosy-red cheeks and a sweet-as-peaches-and-cream smile, she’s becoming TV’s ubiquitous grandma. 

Actress Mae Laborde poses at her Santa Monica, Calif., home on Feb 28. The 97-year-old Laborde is just four years into her acting career and hotter than ever.   

 

She was “Wheel of Fortune’s” Vanna White (40 years in the future) for a recent episode of “MADtv.” She was the stunned fiancee whose boyfriend finally gets around to proposing in a jewelry commercial. She faced down the Grim Reaper himself in a bit about elderly people without health insurance for “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

She’s also been a cheerleader on ESPN, appeared in a Lexus commercial, had a recurring role on Spike Feresten’s “Talkshow” and had a role in a JP Morgan Chase Bank commercial. “Now that one paid good!” says Laborde, eyes twinkling under knitted brows and behind rhinestone glasses. Then, lowering her voice conspiratorially, she adds, “I mean like a few hundred dollars.”

As she speaks, she sits perched on the living room couch of her small Southern California home, just a couple blocks from the beach. So what’s the secret to her late-blooming success? She never had any training and, until four years ago, the closest she came to show business was working as a bookkeeper in the late bandleader Lawrence Welk’s office.

“I’m just a natural,” she says with a broad smile as she heads to her dining room table to sift through some of her press clippings.

   

It’s not unheard of for actors to work well into their 90s, of course. Think George Burns and Bob Hope or, more recently, Gloria Stuart of “Titanic” fame. But all of them started in the business young, unlike Laborde who didn’t earn her Screen Actors Guild card until she was in her mid-90s.

Her acting career was started by a 2002 Los Angeles Times story, when columnist Steve Lopez, her former neighbor, decided to seek her out for some lighthearted driving tips.

In those days she was well known around Santa Monica as the little old lady who barreled up and down her neighborhood’s hilly streets and across the freeways in a gigantic 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Laborde, who only stopped driving last year, was so small, and the car so big, Lopez wrote, that behind the wheel she looked like a cricket driving a tank.   (See Simply Marvelous story -“At 93, she’s still going”)

His description caught the eye of Sherrie Spillane, the veteran L.A. talent agent and ex-wife of the late crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Spillane decided she had to meet Laborde. The two got together for a tea-leaf reading (Laborde’s hobby), and the next thing Spillane knew she had a new client.

“She’s got this way about her that’s so endearing that everybody falls in love with her,” Spillane says. “She’s got that cute little face and she’s very funny.”

Laborde also has nearly a century of experience to draw on when the director yells action.

She arrived in Los Angeles from her hometown of Fresno at the height of the Great Depression, meeting her husband when he was the conductor on L.A.‘s fabled old Red Car trolley line that she used to take home from work.

A few years later, her husband and baby daughter in tow, she moved into a tiny, straight-out-of-a-storybook house on a street so narrow that cars traveling in opposite directions can’t pass if someone has parked at the curb. It was back in the day when Santa Monica was just a quaint little California town of beach cottages.

Seventy years later, many of those cottages have been razed in favor of multimillion-dollar “McMansions.” Laborde’s remains unchanged. Even the orchid-colored tile the young mother picked out for her 1930s-era bathroom remains.

As the years passed, Laborde always kept working at one job or another, going on to outlive both her husband, Nicholas, and their only child, Shirley.

A Girl Scout leader for her daughter’s troop, she has kept in touch with most of her daughter’s friends. Now in their 70s, they’ll ask her for secrets to living a long life. She’ll tell them to never retire.

When she was 89 Laborde took a police training course just for fun, and she still cooks for herself, paints and raises tomatoes in her garden that she sells to a local restaurant.

But she’ll drop whatever she’s doing when there’s a call for an audition.

Recently she landed a small role in a forthcoming movie opposite Ben Stiller. She’ll be the grandmotherly lady sitting in a restaurant near Stiller and his girlfriend as they speculate what their lives will be like at that age.

“I don’t know anyone else her age that could keep up with her,” says Spillane, who has become both her agent and close friend.

“But then I don’t know anyone else her age,” Spillane adds with a laugh. 

The Associated Press, By John Rogers, AP Photos/Nick Ut

New Starting Gate for Inmates, Retired Race Horses

For ex-racehorses, new life; for the inmates, new skills.

The newest residents at Putnamville Correctional Facility aren’t there for bad behavior.

Prison officials this week brought in the first six of 50 retired racehorses that will take up residence at a neighboring farm, sparing them from likely death.

The Thoroughbreds will be made available for adoption. They also will be trained so they can be placed in riding programs for the handicapped and other therapeutic programs.

“It’s a win-win situation for the state, the horses and the offenders,” prison Superintendent Al Parke said Friday.

“We’ll be providing a viable alternative for horses that would otherwise be ending up in the slaughterhouse.”

What’s more, prisoners will be trained in how to care for horses.

At least initially, about 20 inmates will work with the horses, learning how to groom them and spot health problems. Eventually, more will participate.

Because the farm is across the highway from the prison, only nonviolent offenders cleared for off-site work will be allowed to participate.

Other states that have created similar programs have seen the good it does for prisoners, many of whom have never had another creature that depends on them, said Barbara Holcomb, the prison’s equine instructor.

“It will, I’m sure, fill some voids,” she said. “It’s going to make them feel like they’re worth something.

They’re giving back to some animal that wasn’t going to have a chance at life. They know how it feels to be given a second chance.”

Two of the six horses that arrived this week had been slated to be killed, she said.

Prisoners and prison staff jointly built the barns that will house the horses, mostly from lumber milled from trees on the prison grounds.

Prisoners who go through the program will learn not only how to care for horses, but also business skills required to run a stable, which could be a viable occupation for them once they’re released, Holcomb said.

Indianapolis Star, Andy Gammill

Sailor’s Stolen Wallet Found 56 years Later – To The Day

LEWISTON, Maine — On April 11, 1951, sailor Val Gregoire, 18, was hit over the head while on shore leave in Boston. When he came to, his wallet — and his pants — were gone.

Gregoire’s widow and five children were familiar with the story, which became part of family legend. But now they have proof.

The wallet was discovered by a demolition worker at Boston’s Paramount Theatre — 56 years to the day Gregoire lost it.

I was stunned,” said Jeannette Gregoire, 75, of Lewiston, who got a call from Kathy Bagen, the worker’s wife. “How could this have survived?”

Richard Bagen of East Weymouth, Mass., was tearing down a wall when the wallet spilled out, his wife said.

“There was no money in the wallet, but it contained Val’s Navy ID, a copy of his Augusta birth certificate and more than a dozen photos.

  An Armed Forces Liberty Pass was dated  April 11, 1951,” the same month and day Richard Bagen made his discovery.“

The date was what freaked me out,” Kathy Bagen told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. 

“Maybe it was meant to be found.” She managed to track down Jeannette Gregoire and mailed the wallet to her.

The wallet contained several pictures of Val, his mom, friends and a laminated photo of Jeannette, then his best girl.

The couple eventually married and was six months shy of their 50th wedding anniversary in 2003 when Val died following complications from a kidney transplant.

He was a retired firefighter in Lewiston.

SunJournal.com

Doggone! 45 Days Later, Pooch Back Home

 Peripatetic pooch returns to Alaskan family — and fetches the newspaper. 

 KENAI, Alaska – Chipper, a 3-year-old Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, wasn’t looking so chipper after 45 days on the lam.

His owner, Jim Butler, said the dog is normally a good listener but took off on a walk on Dec. 12.

Looking the worse for wear, he returned home Jan. 29, to the disbelief of his family.

“It’s the darndest thing,” Butler said.

Butler said Chipper normally walked attached to a 10-foot leash. Occasionally, the family would let the dog run free because he would come back when called.

“Something distracted him, though, and he booked it,” he said.

Butler said he didn’t think the dog would go far, especially since he was pulling a small plastic sled attached to his collar by a length of cord.

But after several hours of searching, Butler knew the situation was bad.“

We put up flyers at the pounds and veterinary clinics. We ran adds on Dog Gone News and in the newspapers. We did all the usual things,” he said.

Days turned to weeks and still there was no sign of Chipper. The family feared for the dog’s well-being, but never gave up hope.

“We never got rid of his bowl and cushion,” Butler said.

When Chipper returned home, he still had his collar and tags on. He was missing the sled.“

His hair was falling out in places and when he left he weighed 49 pounds, but was only 27 when he returned. He was a bag of bones,” Butler said.

They began giving Chipper water and small amounts of puppy food to help start the recovery process.

Butler said they weren’t sure he would make it through that first night, but in the morning Chipper he was back to his old routine.“

He loves fetching the paper and he brought it up that first day back,” he said.

Associated Press

Sheep Racing Includes a Stop To Graze

Each year, Rothschild Road in the little town of Emmaville, North South Wales is cleared for the sheep race, the income from which supports the town’s museum.

Approximately 100 sheep are entered into the one kilometre race. Each wears a coat with a number and the local people pay $5 a head to enter. First prize is $100.  

 

 The sheep charge down the street, chased by sheep dogs. Last year was a bit of a spine-tingler, because none of them wanted to cross the finish line.

The race is famous for its very slow pace and usually uncooperative sheep.

The whole town had a bet on the race and most of them were there to see the finish.

Fashions on the Field are restricted to the sheep. Past entries have included “Thorpeedo” (a sheep in a black speedo swim suit), numerous versions of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, The Runaway Bride, and rugby champions parading their favorite jumpers and colors.

The sheep are tempted to run for the finishing line by one of the organizers rattling feed in a bucket ahead of the flock.

Backers get caught up in the excitement as the race gets under way, cheering their sometimes reluctant choices to the line, although some sheep have been known to stop for a graze on the way.

ABC New England North West NSW

Woman, 95, to be Oldest College Graduate

Sitting on the front row in her college classes carefully taking notes, Nola Ochs is just as likely to answer questions as to ask them. That’s not the only thing distinguishing her from fellow students at Fort Hays State University. She’s 95, and when she graduates May 12, she’ll be what is believed to be the world’s oldest person to be awarded a college degree. 

 

She didn’t plan it that way. She just loved to learn as a teenager on a Hodgeman County farm, then as a teacher at a one-room school after graduating from high school and later as a farm wife and mother.

“That yearning for study was still there. I came here with no thought of it being an unusual thing at all,” she said. “It was something I wanted to do. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction. I like to study and learn.

“The record Ochs will break, according to Guinness World Records, belongs to Mozelle Richardson, who at age 90 in 2004 received a journalism degree from the University of
Oklahoma.

“We should all be so lucky and do such amazing things. Her achievement challenges us all to reach for our own goals and dreams,” said Tom Nelson, AARP chief operating officer in Washington.

She’s getting offers for television appearances, and reporters show up wanting to interview her. She acknowledges enjoying it.

“It brings attention to this college and this part of the state. Good people live here,” she said. “And I still wear the same size hat.

“But she added: “I don’t dwell on my age. It might limit what I can do. As long as I have my mind and health, it’s just a number.

“Ochs is proudest of being the matriarch of a family that includes three sons — a fourth died in 1995 — along with 13 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.

“They’re all such fine boys,” she said. “Our main crop is our children, and the farm is a good place to raise them.

“Ochs started taking classes at Dodge City Community College after her husband of 39 years, Vernon, died in 1972. A class here and there over the years, and she was close to having enough hours for an undergraduate degree.

Last fall, Ochs moved the 100 miles from her farm southwest of Jetmore to an apartment on campus to complete the final 30 hours to get a general studies degree with an emphasis on history.

At 5-foot-2, her white hair pulled into a bun, she walks purposely down hallways to classes with her books in a cloth tote bag. Students nod and smile; she’s described as witty, charming and down to earth.

“Everybody has accepted me, and I feel just like another student,” she said. “The students respect me.

“Coming out of a classroom, Skyla Foster, a junior majoring in history, sees Ochs and calls out to her. To everyone on campus, she’s “Nola,” not Mrs. Ochs — and that’s the way she wants it.

“She is pretty neat, a very interesting person and very knowledgeable,” Foster said.

Todd Leahy, history department chairman, wondered at first if Ochs could keep up with the other students. After her second week, all doubts were gone, as he discovered she could provide tidbits of history.

Leahy, who had Ochs in four classes, wants to record oral histories with her after she graduates.

“I can tell them about it, but to have Nola in class adds a dynamic that can’t be topped,” Leahy said. “It’s a firsthand perspective you seldom get.

” For instance, Ochs offered recollections of the 1930s
Midwest dust bowl, when skies were so dark that lamps were lit during the day and wet sheets were placed over windows to keep out dust that sounded like pelting sleet hitting the house.

During a discussion about World War II, Ochs told how she and her husband, along with other wheat farmers in the area, grew soybeans on some of their acres for the war effort.

“I would have never talked about that in class, but she brought it up and we talked about it,” Leahy said. “She often adds color to the face of history.

” Ochs hasn’t complained about the work, nor has she asked for special considerations.

In her one-bedroom apartment, books are open and papers and notes are within easy reach when she sits down at her computer to research and write.

“I came up here with that purpose. No, I never doubted it. Other people did it,” she said. “I came up here to work, and I enjoy it.

” Ochs said she has learned new things. She said she has attained a better understanding of Russian history and the role Dwight Eisenhower played in the D-Day invasion.

An added joy for Ochs is that her 21-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra Ochs, will graduate with her.

“How many people my age have a chance to hang out with their grandmothers? She’s really accepted by the other students,” Alexandra said. “They enjoy her, but probably not as much as I do.

” Ochs said she looks forward to getting home to help with the wheat harvest, as she has done every year for as long as she can remember. After harvest, she might travel or take more classes at a community college.

After that? “I’m going to seek employment on a cruise ship as a storyteller,” she said, smiling. The determined look in her eye leaves no doubt she’s serious.

CARL MANNING, Associated Press Writer   April 2007

Miniature Horse Works As Seeing Eye Guide

Sometimes It Takes a Miniature Horse to Do the Work of a Seeing Eye Dog 

  

As Delta Flight 192 lifts off for Atlanta, a small chestnut horse lies stretched across the floor in a bulkhead row. Her name is Cuddles, and she carries a heavy responsibility on her 2-foot-high shoulders.

Cuddles is a 55-pound miniature, one of more than 120,000 registered in the United States. But the words printed on a burgundy blanket fastened across her back reveal what makes her unique: “Service Animal In Training. Do Not Touch.”

Janet Burleson, who has trained 18-month-old Cuddles for the past seven months, says that she is the first horse to go into full-time service as a guide animal–and the first allowed to fly in the passenger cabin on Delta, perhaps on any airline.

Seated toe to horse in Row 20 are Burleson, her husband, Don, and Cuddles’ new owner, Dan Shaw. The 44-year-old Shaw, who owns a bait shop in Eastern Maine, has suffered from retinitis pigmentosa since he was 17. It has left him with pinhole vision. 

Shaw, Cuddles and the Burlesons, who own a ranch 30 miles north of Raleigh, face a busy day in Atlanta. They chose Atlanta because it is the closest city to Raleigh with a rapid rail system.

Shaw, a graduate of the Carroll School for the blind in Boston, often returns there to visit friends and family. He uses the subway and wants Cuddles to experience a similar environment. Besides riding on the subway, Cuddles will guide Shaw through the vast airport terminals and lead him onto elevators, escalators and people movers.

 

As Shaw moves along a concourse of Hartsfield International Airport, his left hand grasps the little horse’s reins and metal harness. People turn to stare. Cuddles looks straight ahead, sure-footed in the white leather baby shoes she wears for traction on the slippery floor. 

“Is that really a seeing-eye horse?” asks Sandy Feenstra from Cleveland.

“I haven’t seen any of those in Ohio. But hey, if it works, it works.”

The Burlesons are so convinced that horses can be a reliable alternative to dogs for the visually impaired that they have established the nonprofit Guide Horse Foundation www.guidehorse.org).  

Its mission is to deliver trained guide horses at no cost. They have more than 40 applicants on the waiting list who have given various reasons for preferring a horse to a guide dog: allergy to canines, fear of dogs, needing an animal with more stamina. One woman says she walks four miles to work each day, and the trek makes her dog’s paws bleed.

Shaw’s desire for a horse is purely emotional.

 “Horses live 35 to 40 years,” he says. “I’m an animal lover. To lose a dog after eight to 10 years, and then have another to train, and have to do that three or four times in my lifetime . . . that’s painful.” 

Last March, as Shaw’s wife, Ann, was filling out an application for his first guide dog, the television was tuned to “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” The show featured a segment on the Burlesons and a miniature horse named Twinkie, who was being trained to lead a blind woman. To Shaw, the timing was “divine providence.”

“I want one of them instead of a guide dog,” he remembers telling Ann. “I don’t know what it will take, or what it’s going to cost, but that’s the way I want to go.”

When Shaw located the Burlesons, however, he was disappointed to learn they had no horse to offer. They were still trying to raise money to buy some more miniatures, and then they would have to spend eight to 10 months to train them.  

To the Burlesons’ delight, Patricia Cornwell, the crime novelist, donated $30,000 to their effort. In an upcoming book, “Isle of Dogs,” Cornwell, who has visited the Burlesons’ ranch, includes a blind character led by a guide horse.  

The couple used the money to purchase six miniature horses from a breeder in South Carolina. One of them, Cuddles, soon was in training for Shaw. A second, Cricket, is destined for a blind woman in Gig Harbor, Wash.

Earlier this month, horse and master finally met in Raleigh, the closest city to the Burlesons’ ranch with an airport. “They seemed to have made an instant connection,” Janet Burleson says. “There was such joy in his face. He’s crying. Both of us are crying. Sometimes when I was doing the [training], I’d get frustrated. But when I saw the end result. . . .”

The Burlesons are proud of Cuddles. She knows basic leading and responds to 23 voice commands, including “wait” (not whoa) and “forward” (not giddyap). Just as important, she is housebroken. “She will absolutely let you know when she needs to go,” Janet Burleson says. “She’ll stand and stomp her foot and whinny. If she has to go really bad, she will stomp her foot and cross her back legs. I’m not kidding.”

Michele Pouliot, director of research and development for the San Rafael, Calif.-based Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc., has trained dogs for 26 years and owns two miniature horses. Although she’s never considered training the horses to guide, she is keeping an open mind: “Our take is, we don’t know what they are doing, so why criticize it? Maybe it’s great.”

The Burlesons, who have been invited this summer by two groups of guide dog users to demonstrate what their horses can do, say they aren’t out to replace guide dogs. “We love dogs,” Don Burleson explains. “We love dogs as guides. Our main thrust is . . . to give blind people more options.”

Evelyn B. Hanggi, president of the Equine Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, questions the suitability of horses as guides because of their natural instinct to spook or bolt. “Cuddles may turn out to be a great horse and never spook,” she says, “but sooner or later it will happen . . . Imagine a guide horse spooking in a busy intersection and either running off or barging into its owner.”

But Janet Burleson, a show horse trainer for 30 years, has no fear. “I teach them to more or less spook in place. They learn to accept the normal things of human life–loud noises, vehicles, balloons popping, fireworks, dogs barking.”

The idea of Cuddles bolting makes Shaw smile. The calm little horse that licked his nose when they met suddenly going mad and dragging him off? Not a chance, he says. In May, Shaw will return to the Burleson ranch for four more weeks of training with Cuddles. Then he and the Burlesons will load the little horse into a rented Winnebago for the long drive to her new home in Maine.

“I’ve always loved horses,” Shaw says, tearing up. “I never expected to own one. I never expected it to be my eyes, either.” 

Los Angeles Times, Edith Stanley, Times Staff Writer

Photographs: Cathleen MacDonald, Lisa Carpenter