If I had to pick a favorite book from my childhood, I would choose “The Black Stallion” by Walter Farley.
It's the first nonpicture book (novel) I ever read. It's also the first book I ever owned; I received a Random House paperback copy as a birthday present on my eighth birthday, which would put the year at 1984.
I would guess that many U.S. readers, especially those of us in the Silver Bloggers cohort, will remember “The Black Stallion.” (I'm curious to know how many readers outside the U.S. will remember it, if any.) The adventure story of a boy and the horse that saves him from a shipwreck (to then become together horse racing champions) was first published in 1941, which makes it a children's classic of the generation just a tad before my parents' generation, who were just starting to read in the late 50s.
I know it was a favorite of my mom and her six sisters. I don't remember who bought me that first book (my mom or one of my aunts), but it was a topic that frequently came up at birthday parties and other family gatherings: Farley wrote 21 books in the Black Stallion series, most of them about the stallion and the boy, Alec Ramsay, and my aunts were always asking how many I had read or how many I had collected.
Acquiring new Black Stallion books was always part of the appeal for me. I remember sitting on the couch after finishing the first one (for the first time basking in the fading residual of an imagined world) and my dad asking what I thought. I immediately flipped to the series list in the back of the book and showed him all the other books I could get.
Sometimes getting a new Black Stallion meant waiting for my next birthday, but there was also the occasional pilgrimage to the 1980s book lovers' Mecca: the bookstore at the mall, which for my family was Waldenbooks in Concord Mall (Dunlap, Ind.). Dad would pack mom and us kids (five in '84 and 10 by '93) into the station wagon for the trip from the farm to the mall, where we would (too slowly) browse as a group through JC Penny or Sears before heading into the mall proper for the bookstore. I don't know what the rest of the family did (once we entered the bookstore I was allowed to separate from the group), but I headed immediately for the kids' section, for the shelf with the Black Stallion series on it.
I bought one book a trip with my chore money, for around $2 each. I tried to buy them in order, but, this was the '80s: you had to buy what the store had. No hopping on Amazon back then to get exactly what you wanted. I ended up skipping around a bit – I remember reading books late in the series and having to wonder for months (or years?) how the Alec Ramsay family ended up moving from Flushing, New York, to a horse farm upstate, before finally getting the book that told that part of the story.
Of course, the Black Stallion books weren't the only horse books on that shelf at Waldenbooks, and sometimes I already had purchased all the Black Stallions the store had to offer on a particular visit. But, the Black Stallion was my gateway drug and I was hooked; by the early '90s, when we moved farther into the country and the mall trips ended, I had bought or read them all: Black Beauty, the My Friend Flicka trilogy, National Velvet, and of course the Marguerite Henry books (Black Gold being my favorite of hers).
One of my favorite books in the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley – book 9, "The Black Stallion Revolts," in which the Black Stallion and Alec get in a plane crash and Alec suffers amnesia. As you can see it has been reread a few times ... and travelled a few miles!
Twenty-odd horse novels I bought (or was given) in the '80s, and I still have 18 of them (dog-eared, broken-spined, well read and loved) on my bookshelf. The Black Stallion books in particular, incredibly, still have the unique scent I remember from 40 years ago. I don't know what Random House did to their paperbacks to make them smell so good, but it lasted!
My horse-crazy has lasted all this time too, though it remains in the abstract. I dreamed of being a jockey like Alec Ramsay when I grew up, and as a teen in the '90s I seriously studied thoroughbred racing and breeding, subscribing to industry publications like the Thoroughbred Record and the BloodHorse and religiously reading each issue. I even purchased the annual stud book and studied the bloodlines. I still watch the Kentucky Derby and the Breeders Cup races every year. But aside from a few riding lessons in my college days, I never got involved with horses in real life.
Correction: I have never been involved with horses in real life … yet. Just because I deferred my dreams until I'm (probably) too old to become a professional jockey, doesn't mean I couldn't get involved with horse racing or horses at some point.
Never say never. I believe that. But maybe my childhood dreams won't take the form of horse ownership.
Maybe I'll just write a beloved children's classic about horses.
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