As it turns out, once you hear the story, you realize either version is watered-down, so to speak.
This past September, Emily and her husband Jason were at the Delaware County Fairgrounds for the Little Brown Jug, the fabled harness racing event with the Midwest-meets-Mardi Gras feel. That’s especially the case on the track’s backside – which is where the Mercer County couple were.
“We were having a good time and throughout the day my husband kept slipping into this one horse’s stall to use as a restroom,” she said with a shrug. “Each time he’d come out, he’d pet the horse in there and finally one time he goes, ‘Whose horse is this anyway?’”
When a woman said she owned the beautiful, 3-year-old dark filly – which was named Little Sadie Ann – he asked if she wanted to sell it.
The woman, who had had trouble getting the young pacer to hold form on the track, said Sadie wasn’t for sale, but eventually, Emily said, she reconsidered: “She said, ‘I kinda like you guys. If you want her, I’ll sell her to you.’ And that’s when I thought, ‘Oh great, now what?’”
Emily called back home to Celina and reached her friends, Phil and Jill Belanger, a Canadian harness racing couple who had moved from Azilda, Ontario near Sudbury to the Mercer County Fairgrounds so they could better compete on southwest Ohio’s new casino-financed tracks, Miami Valley Raceway in Lebanon and especially Hollywood Gaming’s Dayton Raceway, which is running now.
“I got Jill on the phone and said, ‘You want to go in on a horse?’” Emily said. “She goes, ‘What’s it look like?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. We’re having a good time here. It’s a horse.’”
The price was cheap — $2,000 — and the deal was agreed on.
“The next day the lady called just to make sure,” Emily remembered. “She said, ‘Your husband’s head has cleared now, you still want the horse?’”
Emily not only took her, but made her the pampered centerpiece of her modest three-horse stable.
In return, Little Sadie Ann has done little on the track to reciprocate.
And that gets to the heart of this Thanksgiving Day tale.
Where Emily Hay is concerned, it’s the horses who should be giving thanks today.
Along with caring for the standardbreds, Emily is the mother of four boys – three sons, including an 18-month old, and a 6-year-old stepson – and works in Coldwater and Celina as a phlebotomist.
Just 5-foot-2 and 38 years old, Emily has a full life, big dreams … and an even bigger heart.
That’s how she got that one-eyed horse a few years back.
“She was blind in one eye and a lady from Indiana was getting rid of her,” Emily said. “She didn’t want to give her to the Amish to be a buggy horse, so I took her and we raced her a year at Toledo and on the county fair tracks.”
And before that came the note that started it all. Emily found it taped to her door one day when she came home from work:
“Free Male Sterile Horse.”
“It was from my neighbor who knew these people from Napoleon,” Emily said. “They’d raised this horse — Aloha Kelly – from a baby and couldn’t make it go. My neighbor saw I had some trail horses, but I said, ‘I don’t know anything about race horses.’”
Still, she took in the 4-year-old gelding and figured she’d break it for the trails. First, though, a friend convinced her to bring it to the Darke Country Fairgrounds in Greenville, loaned her the equipment, took her around the track once and told her she was ready.
“The horse took off for me and well, we went racing with him for three years,” she said. “That’s how I learned.”
It was after all this that she met Jason Hay, who’d come from a harness racing family. His grandfather and dad both had been in the sport and for a while he had worked at Balmoral Park in Chicago.
He was used to horses as a business, not a hobby, but he didn’t press the issue with Emily.
“I think he thought I’d get rid of him before I got rid of the horse,” she said with a laugh.
And if you’re wondering how that has worked out, consider this:
• When Jason and Emily got married in 2012 on the beach at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, they had a cake — made here, frozen and shipped down – that featured a frosted picture of Emily’s horse on top.
• Now when the couple takes its annual vacation, the beach has been replaced by an extended weekend at The Red Mile, the fabled harness track in Lexington, Ky.
• Their 18-month-old son Colton now has a set of lime green and purple racing colors – complete with the embroidered horseshoes on the front and back and his name over his heart — just like his mom wears. And this Christmas he’s getting a special gift.
“He plays with doll babies at the baby-sitter’s, but his dad doesn’t really like that,” Emily said with a grin. “So now I’ve got him a doll that has a set of colors exactly like ours.”
• For Emily’s birthday, her dad, who has a farm near Lightsville north of Greenville, gave her a hopper wagon filled with corn for her horses.
• This Christmas the only present she and Jason are getting each other is a three-horse trailer.
• And today, before they go to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Minnie Dingledine, Jason’s aunt, they’ll both go out to the fairgrounds to care for their horses.
“Yeah, we’re in it deep,” Emily laughed. “All because of one free horse showing up on my doorstep.”
At home in the barn
After finishing her medical work the other day, Emily picked up Colton at the sitter’s and headed to the Mercer County Fairgrounds. With the little boy sleeping soundly in the car seat of the SUV she’d parked just outside the barn, Emily – now in work shoes, sweatshirt and heavy pants – began mucking out a stall.
A few feet away, Si, the pet goat the little boy had gotten for his birthday, romped around wildly as the horses looked out from their quarters and occasionally neighed.
“The girls at work tease me and say, ‘You’re not very girlie,’” Emily laughed. “I tell them I’ve never been. The girliest thing I ever did was be a cheerleader in high school.”
That was back at Mississinawa High School when she still was Emily Carrico. She was in the Future Farmers of America, too, and spent over a decade in 4-H.
“I took steers to the fair every year. Sheep and turkeys and chickens, too,” she said. “My mom likes to tell the story how one time the post office called us at 4 in the morning and said, ‘You have chickens here.’
“Mom said, ‘We don’t have chickens,’ but they said, ‘Well, these are addressed to you.’ And she said, ‘Emily, you forget to tell me something?’
“I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m taking chickens to the fair this year.’ They were one day old and had been shipped from Osceola, Ohio.”
Soon after she graduated, Emily had a child – son Austin – who is now 19.
“I was working in a factory then and my ex-husband and I worked separate shifts so we wouldn’t have to hire a baby-sitter,” she said.
Five years later she had her second son, Tristen. Eventually she and her first husband split up, she got her schooling to draw blood and a few years ago met Jason Hay at the barn.
“I’ve always told him, ‘We met at the horse barns, not a bar, and that’s where you’ll find me now,’” Emily said. “The barns are my bar.
“When I had my first son, I was still a child myself. I couldn’t really be a teenager then, so now I guess these are my teenage years and I’m having fun.”
Halfway through her chores the other day, her son woke up and she took him into the tack room – which is equipped with a stroller and a small playpen filled with toys – to dress him for the cold.
Sometimes she has crock pot in there, too, and slow cooks that night’s supper.
Once Colton was dressed, he went out into the barn, picked up his little whip and chased Si, who promptly pivoted and bowled him over.
As Belanger recounted, the little boy’s first-ever word wasn’t “Mama” or “Daddy.” It was “Si.”
Once it was time to take the often-rambunctious 2-year-old filly, Royal Delta, out onto the track for a three-mile workout, Emily called Jill, who works out of another barn.
“She can be kind of a head case,” Emily said of the filly… not Jill. “She likes to rear up and cause a commotion right before she goes out.
“At the Wapak (oneta) Fair (Auglaize County) she reared just when they were ready to hook the cart up. Down I went between her and the race bike. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I was more scared than anything. Nobody got hurt and I got back in and we went out and raced.
“The same thing happened at the Kenton Fair (Hardin County.) She reared up and I went down. Greenville she went up, too. She’s a handful, but once we get on the track she’s usually OK.”
When Emily sits behind a big horse, she can’t see over its rump. So she looks around the side. And if you check out the tack room wall, you see that can work just fine.
Above the stroller, there was a Winner’s Circle photo of Emily and Aloha Kelly in their first-ever race, a matinee qualifier at the Darke County Fair.
Promoting women in racing
Little Sadie Ann was in the third race — a one-mile pace for fillies and mares – at Dayton Raceway on Monday night.
Although she is impressive looking, she’s had troubling breaking stride in past races and had never finished better than seventh in her five previous starts for Belanger and Emily. The only win of her career came at a county fair with her previous owners.
“She’s just a green mare,” said Belanger, who had two of his other horses on Monday’s race card. “Before this she only raced fairs, never on major tracks.”
While she had driven Sadie on her warm-up laps long before the race, Emily does not have a pari-mutuel driving license. So when it came time to compete Monday, Shawn Barker II was in the sulky.
Three women have driven races during the Dayton Raceway meet, but they’ve combined for only five starts. Meanwhile, veteran drivers such as Chris Page, Dan Noble, Kayne Kauffman and Josh Sutton all have around 400 starts at Dayton.
“We only have a few women drivers, but I’d say 30 percent or more of our trainers are women,” said race secretary Gregg Keidel.
While Emily is a novice in the business, she’s doing all she can to promote the sport and especially women in harness racing.
She now runs the racing schedule at the Mercer County Fair, where programs have been instituted to allow everyone from local school children to special needs adults to have a day helping in the horse barns.
She’s also been instrumental in launching the upcoming Ohio Ladies Pace Series at county fairs in the state. To date, she said nine fairs have signed on to host all-lady driver races in 2015. Competitors will accumulate points at each event and the top nine points winners will then race in a final during Jug Week at Delaware.
Both Phil Belanger and Art Rain — a retired Goodyear Tire and Rubber worker from St. Marys who has owned horses in the past and now helps Emily and Phil — agreed Emily was “good for the sport.”
“We need more people like her,” Belanger said. “She’s new to the game, but she brings some good ideas and a real passion for it.”
Monday, though, none of that helped Little Sadie Ann.
Although she was in good position midway through the race, she lost her right rear shoe and some of her grip. Barker took her out of the pack and she drifted backward and finally finished seventh of eight horses.
“Just bad luck, what else can I say?” Jill said quietly as she lifted the harness off the sweat-glistening filly. “You got maybe two more chances. Hopefully it will be better, eh Sadie?”
As Emily put it the other day: “Mares are way more moodier than geldings. They always say it’s because they’re a girl, but I don’t know. Sounds pretty biased to me.”
As Emily sponged Sadie off Monday and had her continually take swallows of water “to cool her from the inside out,” she shook her head at another disappointing outing.
And that reminded her of something her husband said recently as he recalled the Brown Jug revelry that led them to buy the filly:
“He said, ‘Yeah, this is just like when you’ve been drinking at the bar at night and you go home with a 10 … And then wake up with a 2.”
From the stall, Sadie snorted.
It was her way of giving thanks.
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