Born 1960

Hello Dolly

We had a horse [Hello Dolly] at one time. As girls, we were begging our parents for a horse. We didn’t have any experience with horses, but they did get a young, young filly who of course wasn’t broken. She was a mess when she came to us. I remember there was dung hanging from her long coat. We used to keep the horse up the street at the Adler’s house.

When my parents did get us the horse, we were expected to take care of the darn thing. Traffic was busy. During the summer if there was a truck going by, anything that would cause her to rear up, she was too powerful for us to really hold on to. I’ll never forget the day that I was walking her home at night, and she reared up on her back legs and came down on my leg. I seemed to have like a calcium deposit for years on the inside of my ankle.

We would use the pasture out in back of our house where Mr. Hart had a big wide open field. After he’d cut the hay for the last time during the season, he’d allow us to put our horse out there, stake her out. We tried lunging her daily. I mean we tried. We tried to break her. Many a time she got loose in the neighborhood. She was seen walking through our entryway one morning by my father who was in the bathroom. We didn’t have a riding helmet so we would use an old football helmet that came out of Boston College.

Based on an oral history interview with Maureen McKinnon Rego.

First published in “Remembering Adamsville” by the Little Compton Historical Society, 2013.

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