Tom Sites showed up to the starting line of the Great American Horse Race with $750, a $15 saddle, and a horse he barely knew—100 days later, he was one of only 54 finishers out of 92 starters.
Click on the player to listen to Tom’s Great American Horse Race story.
Read Tom’s account of riding in the Great American Horse Race here.
Tom Sites’ Great American Horse Race Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. Listen to the audio to fact check.
Index
- The Stench of Severed Heads: Vietnam 1968 (00:00 – 04:05)
- Finding Peace Through Prayer and Letting Go (04:05 – 14:27)
- The Great American Horse Race: A Dancing Horse Dream and $200 in Arlington (09:51 – 16:46)
- The Biggest Fear: A Broken Coke Bottle (16:49 – 21:41)
- The Great American Horse Race Starts: Memorial Day 1976: 92 Horses, No Plan, Pure Chaos (21:56 – 30:56)
- Amish Wisdom: A Set of Shoes and 1,000 Miles (35:23 – 38:47)
- When the Porta Potties Left and Riders Took Over (40:26 – 43:26)
- Smokey’s Pancakes and a Beaten-up in Love (43:30 – 48:04)
- End of The Great American Horse Race:West Virginia Flag and Stars Painted on a Blaze (52:18 – 54:09)
- To Finish Is to Win: Jose’s Final Resting Place (54:09 – 54:34)
Tom Sites (00:00) I went out and then I got near the stench and I’ve never been able to get through with the stench but lately I have been cleansed I guess is a good word. Dead bodies.
Bernie Harberts (00:12) What was the stench?
Bernie Harberts (00:22) This is Tom Sites. Tom rode in the Great American Horse Race of 1976, which is the longest organized horse race ever. And I went to sit down and visit with Tom in Luray, Virginia, where he and his wife, Mary Ann, live. And as he started sharing the story of Vietnam, of his background. And I’m telling you, it was heavy, but it really set up the story of the Great American Horse Race in 1976, because it really gave that background of what was going on in Tom’s life.
Tom Sites (00:59) 1968 I was in Vietnam.
Bernie Harberts (01:02) What was your job?
Tom Sites (01:04) Photographer, photographed everything. I was an engineer battalion, so I did photography of the projects that they did. We put in three bridges in Vietnam, and one bridge was 1,600 feet, longest bridges Corps of Engineers put in Vietnam. So I saw that through, then we moved to a place called Ban Me Thuot, which was near Đà Lạt in the Central Highlands. That moved into there. I came back after a year and I was scarred.
Bernie Harberts (01:35) Explain to people what it was like for you to get your number.
Tom Sites (01:40) I pretty much knew after I was in the draft thing, and I knew that I was going to be drafted. That’s what I figured, and I was. And what I did is signed up to be a construction surveyor. And that was a school that got me promoted to a spec four and E four. I had orders for Vietnam five months from the time I was in the Army. So I was just freshly introduced.
Bernie Harberts (02:08) Did you go through basic training?
Tom Sites (02:10) I went through basic training and then AIT, which is Advanced Individual Training. Then I had 30 days of furlough. Then I got shipped to Vietnam. And I was in Vietnam within eighteen months of being in the Army off the streets of Arlington, Virginia.
Bernie Harberts (02:27) What was the night before you shipped out like?
Tom Sites (02:29) I wasn’t scared. I was pretty calm about the whole situation. There was a few other episodes. I don’t need to go into them. The word hell is the truest statement I’ve ever heard. I was 21 years old in Vietnam.
Bernie Harberts (02:46) So what was the day like when they said like with this clearing operation, they were clearing land, sounds like with bulldozers.
Tom Sites (02:54) It was a clearing land. That’s what the severed heads were up for, to intimidate the enemy.
Bernie Harberts (03:00) So the US put the heads up.
Tom Sites (03:02) Well, we had ROKS, which is Republic of Korea, as part of our support, and I’m sure it was them that did that. They were terrorists.
Bernie Harberts (03:12) Working on the US side.
Tom Sites (03:14) Yes. 173rd Airborne was there, special forces. I’m convinced that we were in Laos because I got on the helicopter and I says, where are we going? And he said, 11 Bravo. I knew what 11 Bravo was. That’s riflemen.
Bernie Harberts (03:35) What would you tell people that you served with who were 19, who are now 70 something, who are still dealing with that?
Tom Sites (03:44) Never lose your values. Love. Peace. Love and peace are the most wonderful words in the whole world. I don’t think that we can have anything more positive. So I focus on the positive. I feel blessed by the fact that I’m sitting here today with energy and a good mind.
Bernie Harberts (04:03) You made it.
Tom Sites (04:05) I made it. My battle is over, I gave up the fight and it’s such a release to give up the fight because we all have obstacles in our lives that we have to face up to.
Bernie Harberts (04:16) What was the biggest part of the fight that you gave up?
Tom Sites (04:20) Alcohol was probably the biggest. Marijuana. Little bit of cocaine, not much cocaine, but I got into drugs. I mean, in Vietnam you could buy a carton of cigarettes that had been bought from the black market, taken out the tobacco because they love tobacco and fill the cigarette up with marijuana, some of the best marijuana you ever smoked. The Vietnam War was probably one of the first ones that were fought with marijuana. Not everybody did it, but I would suggest that 50% of my company did marijuana.
Bernie Harberts (04:55) What is it like in a time of war as you were to be under that influence?
Tom Sites (05:02) I only did it in the evening. Didn’t do it during the day, but it was some of the best pot that you’d wake up the next day and you’d still be stoned from it. But I was not only the photographer, but I was the driver to the executive officer of the battalion because I would drive him and we’d go around to all the different construction projects and he’d look at that. And I got to thinking after I got back, I says, you know, that’s pretty dangerous because here he is, a Colonel, and I’m his driver and he would be a good one to assassinate. I mean, I think that I had sickness, but I didn’t have fear. Does that make any sense?
Bernie Harberts (05:46) Explain that a little more because fear often leads to sickness, but you didn’t have fear.
Tom Sites (05:56) I didn’t, I mean that’s the only way I can describe it.
Bernie Harberts (05:59) So describe this, you’re driving around in a jeep.
Tom Sites (06:03) Yes.
Bernie Harberts (06:04) And so there was sickness there, but there wasn’t fear. Where did the sickness come from?
Tom Sites (06:12) The severed heads. I’ll never forget that.
Bernie Harberts (06:17) Were you from Arlington? Were you born and raised there?
Tom Sites (06:20) My mother and father were divorced when I was about 12 years old. And she got a job in Washington, D.C. as a travel agent. So we moved up to Arlington, and that’s where I went to high school, Washington Lee High School in Arlington. And that’s where I was drafted from.
Bernie Harberts (06:38) So you were born in 1947, right after the war. What do you remember of that era going into the 60s?
Tom Sites (06:48) I delivered newspapers of the Washington Post and I got to be the person that had the system of all the newspaper people and I’d go out and count the papers out and put them out. I was called the drop man. And if there wasn’t a person available or they quit a route, I’d have to go out and do the route.
Bernie Harberts (07:08) And how old were you then?
Tom Sites (07:10) I was probably 17. But I made good money and bought myself a 56 Chevrolet. Wish I had that car today.
Bernie Harberts (07:18) So do I.
Tom Sites (07:20) Two door.
Bernie Harberts (07:20) Where did that work ethic come from?
Tom Sites (07:22) Let me explain to you some of this. I was young, I spent the summers in West Virginia with my grandparents on their farm. I remember riding Dewey, the plow horse, in and out of the field. I still to this day remember the smell of Dewey’s sweat. Dewey was the first horse I ever rode. There was a barn down the hill from my grandparents that was a show barn. And I helped clean out their stalls and one of those horses placed in a show at Madison Square Garden. And that’s how I originally liked horses. I was probably 13 or 14 when I was doing that in West Virginia. Do people plow today?
I remember how it turned the soil with a blade and then my grandfather came back with some sort of machine and leveled it out and ground it up to where it was fine dirt. He was German, his name was Holweden. He wasn’t my real grandfather. My grandmother had two other husbands that both died on her, and she married John Hal Weeden, and that’s the only one that I knew. I didn’t know any of the others.
Bernie Harberts (08:27) When you were plowing with your grandfather, was that a moment where you were like, that’s what I’d like to do more with horses?
Tom Sites (08:35) Well, I saw the horses down the hill, so they invoked interest also. I mean, the only horse or pony I ever rode was a pony one time. My life lesson from the Great American Horse Race was, with small, consistent, dedicated steps, great strides can be made. That was what I learned from the Great American. I didn’t know about taking your time and one consecutive move after another. And it was the first time that I ever got out with a horse going away from home. I’d never done it.
Bernie Harberts (09:08) So you had never taken a, you hadn’t done endurance.
Tom Sites (09:11) I didn’t do nothing. I had a year and nine months of riding around the house, over into the mountains, getting a sandwich and a beer, riding back and riding up to 30, 35 miles in a day.
Bernie Harberts (09:28) So you really trained for this.
Tom Sites (09:30) I didn’t know that I was training for this, but it’s just what I did and I saw an ad in Western Horseman in March and that was something that got me interested into it. And I spent time trying to drum up supporters or patrons or something, some way to get it paid for and I didn’t do very good on that.
Bernie Harberts (09:51) So back up real quick to the moment you first met Jose Dante.
Bernie Harberts (09:57) Tom told me that he’d written up his recollections of the Great American Horse Race and wanted to read some of those passages to me. Here, he’s reading about how he first met Joe, the horse that would become Jose Dante.
Tom Sites (10:12) Tack Shop, 1974. I walked into a tack shop and they asked me if I was buying or selling and I says, I’m just looking. They said they had a horse for sale and I went to look at Joe. He was seven years old, strawberry roan, 14’2″, with four white stockings and a white blaze. I went home and had a dream that night of a dancing horse, so I went back the next day and bought Jose Dante. It was like a premonition or something. I mean, I wasn’t looking to buy a horse.
Bernie Harberts (10:36) You what?
Tom Sites (10:42) I’d never owned a horse. So I went out and got Jose.
Bernie Harberts (10:46) So you walk into this tack store.
Tom Sites (10:51) I didn’t even know I had a premonition. They asked me. They said, are you buying or selling? I said, I’m just looking.
Bernie Harberts (10:59) Are you just looking for tack or horses?
Tom Sites (11:01) I had never been in a tack store, so I didn’t know what they had. I just walked in.
Bernie Harberts (11:06) So you just walked in. That’s great.
Tom Sites (11:11) It was March of 1974.
Bernie Harberts (11:13) And how old were you?
Tom Sites (11:15) 26. Back from Vietnam. Living in a house with three other Vietnam veterans. They got into heroin. I never did heroin. I never wanted heroin. So that’s when I got Jose out on Route 7. Well, it’s a busy thoroughfare. Well, I was walking Jose and he ran me down and ran out into the traffic. So I said, I gotta get out of here. So that’s what got me to Luray.
Bernie Harberts (11:49) Again, that’s Luray, Virginia, where Tom and his wife Mary Ann still live.
Bernie Harberts (11:54) So you buy him, he bolts into traffic and you were right in Washington then.
Tom Sites (11:58) Pretty close to it. I was living in Arlington. I mean, I found a field that I could board him on. I never even knew what it took to board a horse.
Bernie Harberts (12:07) Because you just walked into a tack store.
Tom Sites (12:11) Went home and dreamed about him you know it was my psyche or something which enriched my viewpoint and wanted to buy him.
Bernie Harberts (12:18) So how much since then have things risen up from your psyche? Would you say you’re more psyche driven or rational thought?
Tom Sites (12:27) Then or now?
Bernie Harberts (12:29) Then.
Tom Sites (12:30) I was always responsible. In our house, I was the one that handled the collection of the rent. Four of us, we split it. It was me that arranged the trash to get gone. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to cut the grass? This and that. So I was like the squad leader.
Bernie Harberts (12:46) Of three heroin addicts.
Tom Sites (12:48) Well, two addicts and one that just did it every once in a while. Heroin is a drug that I know is bad and I never tried it, never had a desire for it.
Bernie Harberts (12:58) So you organized it. So this is a pretty structured lifestyle.
Tom Sites (13:03) It wasn’t structured like that.
Bernie Harberts (13:05) And then this rose up somewhere in the night, bubbling inside you, this rose up from your psyche.
Tom Sites (13:13) It came from somewhere. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe it’s that spiritual thing that we never know what the path is.
Bernie Harberts (13:19) And so how do you feel that now versus the psyche versus the rational? To what point does the psyche move you now?
Tom Sites (13:27) It gives me direction. It gives me peace. Peace and love are the two most important words in the universe to me. In the way we share each other from the gloom of the tomb, the only thing for certain is a big black curtain because we’re all going to die. So I spend my life loving people and enjoying life.
Bernie Harberts (13:46) Beautiful. Do you meditate?
Tom Sites (13:50) Not like my friend Curtis who is a Buddhist who chants and such, but I pray. And sometimes I’ve found that the only thing that I can do to really reach the spiritual limit is to clear my mind of all thought and have a clear vision in your thought, your psyche, and your mind.
Bernie Harberts (14:10) What is a practice used to clear your mind of thoughts?
Tom Sites (14:15) I try to block out every thought to where I have a clear mind without any interruption.
Bernie Harberts (14:23) So what are your spiritual practices? Do you pray?
Tom Sites (14:27) I do pray. And one of my prayers is please. And I don’t even bring up the reason why please, I don’t have to say please for solving war problems, that’s my mantra is please because if there is a Lord in heaven or anything else, they’re going to know what’s in my mind. So I just say please. It would be like if I loved you, I would put, I love you and clear my thought. And that would be true love.
Bernie Harberts (14:58) I love you and a clear thought, clear mind.
Tom Sites (15:03) I love you, I don’t even know you to speak of. I mean we’ve never had an argument of any sort. But I can love you. You have a spiritual being. We share that.
Bernie Harberts (15:14) Yes.
Tom Sites (15:16) I’ve spoken some of this stuff. You’ve got a way of bringing out things of people. That’s a talent.
Bernie Harberts (15:24) I’m just honored that you’re sharing this because this helps other people and it helps me. It really helps me to hear this.
Tom Sites (15:35) Jose was a trotter and I thought him to be a hackney pony, Appaloosa. He had three gaits of trot but had the tendency to run away with you. He did not like a bit in his mouth and when I looked in his mouth I saw his tongue was practically cut off. That’s why he was a runaway. So I put him in a hackamore and he was like power steering. After that, we rode the mountains around Luray, sometimes 25 and 30 miles on a weekend for fun. We’d ride over into Fort Valley and get a sandwich and a beer at the country store.
Bernie Harberts (16:03) So you trained right here.
Tom Sites (16:05) We’d go out and ride in the snow in the winter and the snot coming out of our nose was froze.
Bernie Harberts (16:12) That’s a poem. We rode in the winter and the snot coming out of our nose was froze. It’s like the introduction to a book.
Tom Sites (16:25) We were experienced riding. I had two other guys that I rode with. Michael Sottosanti was on Salton, a black horse. Andy Peterson was on Lucky, the white horse, and I was on Jose. And we never even lost a horse. I can’t figure out how we got through it so well.
Bernie Harberts (16:46) Here’s Tom reading again.
Tom Sites (16:49) In March of 1976, I saw an ad in Western Horseman about the Great American Horse Race. I thought, that would be a great adventure to ride a horse from New York to California. The advertised distance of the race was 3,000 miles. But because of delays and unforeseen management issues, the 3,000 mile distance was reduced to 1,966 miles. I’ve been one of the few people that ever come out using the realistic figure. I mean, we did cross the United States, but it wasn’t 3,000 miles. There was a lot of time that we did trailer ride, and some people called it the Great American Horse Trailer Ride.
I saw the ad for the Great American Horse Race, and I says, damn it, that’d be a good adventure. So I got to thinking about it, and thinking about it more, and it ingrained in my head, and I said, yeah, I’m gonna try to go. So I was wrote up in the Washington Post, because I was the only one from Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina. They asked me if I had any fears and I said it was Jose stepping on a busted coke bottle. That was my biggest fear. And those coke bottles are heavy duty stuff. My mind works in ways of fear and trepidation and ways that most people don’t have.
Bernie Harberts (18:13) So the biggest fear was him getting lame.
Tom Sites (18:17) Yeah. Marion of Horse County Saddlery in Morristown generously let me have a saddle pad, and a few other things. I didn’t have a horse trailer and never thought how I’d get to the start in New York. Never took into consideration how I’d get back from California if I made it that far. Lewis Ireland, a friend of my mother’s gave me the $400 to get to Herkimer County Fairgrounds in Frankfort, New York. I was so grateful for her support. I had $750. The check-in fee was $500. But I met a guy who broke his collarbone and he sold me his entry for $250. So I had $750 to start the longest ride race in the world, New York to California. I was number seventy-seven. A lucky number I thought. I would say that $750 now would equate to $1,200.
Bernie Harberts (19:15) Five hundred dollars was almost twice the price of your horse. Real money.
Tom Sites (19:22) They sold him cheap to get rid of him because he was a handful.
Bernie Harberts (19:28) And tough to ride, he said.
Tom Sites (19:29) But that was worth a bit. I started out with a split snaffle and that was pretty loose, but he didn’t even like that.
Bernie Harberts (19:36) And then you looked into his mouth and saw his teeth.
Tom Sites (19:38) I saw his tongue half bit. You can see the scar in his tongue.
Bernie Harberts (19:42) Was the whole tongue there or was it cut off?
Tom Sites (19:46) Wasn’t cut off. Must have healed okay. The back, two inches in his mouth.
Bernie Harberts (19:51) So the scar of that. And the hackamore, again, for people who don’t know, is like a bitless bridle that’s just got like two shanks. I think it puts a little pressure on the nose.
Tom Sites (20:00) Yep. Worked wonders on him. I had a trainer who gave me some riding lessons. And she worked for the CIA, but she did training lessons on the side. So I figured I better get some training lessons. And I’ll never forget, I was doing something that wasn’t quite right, and she hit me with a crop.
Bernie Harberts (20:21) It’s very CIA-like.
Tom Sites (20:24) And I said, those lessons are done. I may have deserved it, but I didn’t like it.
Bernie Harberts (20:35) It’s moving very quickly. You’ve had Jose, did you call him, what did you call him? Jose Dante? Jose?
Tom Sites (20:42) Jose, but his name was Jose Dante. That name came out of the osmosis of the universe. I don’t know why Jose Dante was what I named him. He wasn’t a Joe. He definitely wasn’t a Joe. So those people that had him probably didn’t realize what a solid horse he was.
Bernie Harberts (21:01) So you’ve gotta get to the start. You don’t have a horse trailer. And the start’s in New York.
Tom Sites (21:08) I had never taken into consideration the expense it could have been. I mean, what was I going to do if I got to California? I mean, I can’t ride him back.
Bernie Harberts (21:18) So how did you deal with that? Just ignore it all?
Tom Sites (21:22) It’s sort of like I didn’t take responsibility upon what I was getting myself and my horse into.
Bernie Harberts (21:28) Sometimes that works and sometimes it gets you killed.
Tom Sites (21:33) It could happen in my old age. I was young and wild and free and just lusted for adventure.
Bernie Harberts (21:41) So you say you feel like it could happen in your old age.
Tom Sites (21:45) I’m content in my old age. I’ve lived a life of wonder and wonderfulness. I feel blessed and I try not to let those severed heads bother me.
Bernie Harberts (22:24) I’m curious, how this energy at the time funneled into your ride. How did it affect your ride? When you heard about this race, was there something about maybe being able to cope with the severed heads? Was it as a way to get over Vietnam?
Tom Sites (22:43) Through that period of my life, it didn’t affect me that much. I don’t know why. It just came up later on, I mean, in 1976, I was out of the Army in 1970. So I hadn’t really gotten into the depths of despair until after the Great American Horse Race. That helped me though.
Bernie Harberts (23:09) What was it like after the Great American Horse Race?
Tom Sites (23:13) I got into drinking. Drank too much. Smoked too much. Then I had the inclination to stop, knowing that it wasn’t doing me any good. And I was belligerent to people and shouldn’t have been belligerent to people. Now I have kindness. I don’t have any negativism towards people.
Bernie Harberts (23:32) How did you leave that part of your life behind?
Tom Sites (23:36) Through the grace of God. I said, please.
Bernie Harberts (23:40) Is that when you really started saying please?
Tom Sites (23:43) Yes.
Bernie Harberts (23:45) Okay, Tom’s gonna read a little bit more. And as I sat there listening to him read, I realized that this race was almost 50 years, half a century ago. And as he read over it, it was, and this is my take on it, his way of coping with all the hard stuff that came after the race.
Tom Sites (24:12) Memorial Day 1976, California or bust. The ride started in Frankfort, New York on Memorial Day and finished on 5 September 1976 in Sacramento, California and it was and is like a blur. It was intense at the beginning of the Great American Horse Race. It was chaotic with over 120 rigs and 150 horses and about 500 people. It was hectic, frantic, a circus. It was wild and crazy. That was the only way I can describe it. Some went too fast and thought the Great American Horse Race was a fast race. Rather than a long ride. Things sort of slowed down into a week or so after some bombed out early. There were at least 10 failures and some bogged along their own and some flew some in. Shoeing was around $20 with borium, it was $30.
The days were long, having hay and grain, two saddles, water, my gear and clothes, etc. all carried in the feed truck. I was grateful for that, but it was an obstacle to keep order of my gear with no crew and I had to take care of Jose too. There wasn’t much time for me. I was lucky to get a shower every five to seven days. I was not complaining though, it was adventure. The ride route was Frankfort, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Sacramento, California. I rode with holey jeans and Long Johns. My grandfather said, keeps the heat in keeps the heat out. So I did it not only to protect my legs against leg rub on the saddle. But I was keeping the heat out. And I was wearing holey jeans before holey jeans got cool.
Bernie Harberts (26:02) So everyone’s showing up and there were hundreds of people, sounds wild, there were trucks and trailers and horses and of course the riders and support crew and families. And what was it like meeting some of the people for the first time? I’ve got my copy of the Great American Horse Race here, which we’ll look at.
Bernie Harberts (26:24) So this is a great book. It’s called The Great American Horse Race of 1976. And I brought my copy to have Tom look at it, look over some photos, tell me what he remembered. And one of my favorite parts of the book was reading about all the different people who showed up and topping the list of all these characters was the Icelandic national team mounted on ponies riding in silly looking blazers. So I asked Tom, what do you remember about the Icelandic team?
Tom Sites (26:56) Quite the event. I remember them putting on demonstrations. We’d go into town and try to raise money. The riders came from all over, 32 states in the USA, from Canada, Germany, Austria, there was an Austrian count in there, real life count. We called him Countdown. France, Switzerland, Iceland, Australia. The ages from 18 to 70. Some came for the greatest adventures of their lives, some just arrived. Some had years of endurance experience including the Tevis.
Bernie Harberts (27:29) So tell people what the Tevis Cup is.
Tom Sites (27:32) The Tevis Cup is a ride in California that is the granddaddy of all rides. It’s 100 mile ride through the Sierra Nevadas. It’s probably the most famous endurance ride in the country. Maybe even the world. There’s nothing as big as that.
Bernie Harberts (27:51) And so riders that have completed that were in the race.
Tom Sites (27:54) The guy that won did the Tevis four times. I mean I’ve grown to respect Virl Norton who won the ride on the mules with his strategy, his care for the horse, I mean for the mules, and they were the most beautiful mules I’ve ever seen.
Bernie Harberts (28:11) So tell me more about him. What’s a steeple jack?
Tom Sites (28:13) He goes from steeple to steeple and fixes big chimneys and such on rope.
Bernie Harberts (28:23) He climbs up the chimneys. That was his job, chimneys. Virl Norton. So he was in California.
Tom Sites (28:25) Yeah. And he had his son who was his only crew and his son was 16 years old. Driving a big rig, taking care of the two mules, setting up camp, tearing down camp, getting water, getting food, do all the stuff you gotta do.
Bernie Harberts (28:46) So what do you remember about Virl?
Tom Sites (28:50) He was larger than life. If there’s ever a movie done about the Great American Horse Race, they’ll see the gratitude that he showed towards his mules, he loved his mules. He took care of them. He never came in first during the day, but his time was kept and he won the ride, legitimately, and got the prize money of $25,000, which then was like $100,000 now or something.
Bernie Harberts (29:25) He sounded like an amazing, steady, generous person who even I think in the book said he provided a mule to someone who had problems.
Tom Sites (29:34) The Deacon. He flew the horse in from California for her to start. He didn’t even really know her. He just met her and thought she was a kind girl and her horse had problems and she couldn’t start. She beat me. Came in ahead of me. I finished 28th.
Bernie Harberts (29:54) Wow. So I’m just imagining this first day, it’s 1976. You’ve shown up, you’re in your holey jeans. How do they start this thing? Was there a starting line? What do you remember the start with the horses riding around? Was it a gallop? How did you go across the starting line?
Tom Sites (30:17) He says get ready and the trail is now open. And some people went out in a flaming start. And I tried to stay somewhere in the middle.
Bernie Harberts (30:29) How many horses started? It’s like 100 horses.
Tom Sites (30:32) 92, 92 horses.
Bernie Harberts (30:35) At the starting line. And do you remember, were you just surrounded by horses? Was it like riding in a herd to start?
Tom Sites (30:48) Groups of three to five mainly. Sometimes you’d find somebody going the pace you want and you’d just drag ride with them.
Bernie Harberts (30:56) So explain drag riding, I’ve never heard of it.
Tom Sites (30:59) It’d be like getting into their gait, six miles per hour.
Bernie Harberts (31:06) And you would go behind them a little bit.
Tom Sites (31:08) Sometimes I led. Jose was a trotter and he could keep up a pretty good gait and some people would follow me at times. Sometimes I would just get out and walk and let him catch his breath.
Bernie Harberts (31:21) So how much would you ride and how much would you walk?
Tom Sites (31:24) I would ride 95, 90 percent.
Bernie Harberts (31:29) What time would you guys start?
Tom Sites (31:31) 7 o’clock.
Bernie Harberts (31:32) Did you trot across the starting line, walk, canter?
Tom Sites (31:36) Jose was a trotter. I could trot him. I didn’t even know anything about P&Rs, pulse and respiration. I didn’t know anything about testing that stuff.
Bernie Harberts (31:45) I have no idea, tell me more. I have no idea. Yeah, what does that mean in horse terms?
Tom Sites (31:48) What, pulse and respiration? Well, they take the pulse and check the heart rate and the respiration, how much they breathe. Another part of the veterinary process is they have to trot out and trot back to make sure that they’re not lame. So that was all part of vet check. They had control.
Bernie Harberts (32:10) I’m interested in like other racers and there was a guy named Frank Hopkins, long-distance racer and it was a big rage in the 1800s of riding really fast long distances. But what the untold story is these guys killed horses constantly doing that. It was almost a point of pride. I killed three horses to ride, you know, from Missouri to Santa Fe. So this is a very different horse race, it sounds like.
Tom Sites (32:38) There was somebody that fed their horse some bad hay. It was an Icelandic pony. And a couple of them got sick and one of them died. That was the only horse that died on the Great American Horse Race. And it was through bad hay.
Bernie Harberts (32:54) That’s incredible. It was not exhaustion.
Tom Sites (32:56) Colic. Wow. So there were no horse deaths at all.
Bernie Harberts (33:02) So you left at seven, trotted out, you do your 20 or 30 miles.
Tom Sites (33:08) Sometimes it’s 50. What set the trail, we had it after the organizers ran out of camp. We had a person, Rod Koppich, I think his name was, went out ahead of the crew to find a campground or a sleeping area for that volume of people. The shit! No, no, it was… Holy crap! It was…
Bernie Harberts (33:30) This was not organized in advance?
Tom Sites (33:37) We had like a support group in the front finding places to camp so as we would ride from one camp to another camp. Try to do it in today’s time.
Bernie Harberts (33:47) That’s insane! So at seven in the morning, horses take off. At the same time, there’s an advanced crew of people driving ahead 20 to 50 miles to try to find a place to put up a bunch of riders, trailers, support team, the same day without cell phones.
Tom Sites (34:10) No cell phones. I don’t know how we did it. It’s going to be in the book about the Great American Horse Race that comes out. I’m in communication with Curt Lewis, the author of the Great American Horse Race of 1976 book, and he says it’s going to be out soon, telling more of the story.
Bernie Harberts (34:25) The first book is the Great American Horse Race in 1976, which we’ll definitely talk about that. I read this book, it’s a wonderful book. What should have been in this book that wasn’t in the book?
Tom Sites (34:34) Thank you.
Bernie Harberts (34:41) That you wish, boy I wish they talked about this, about the race.
Tom Sites (34:46) I think there should have been some scenic photographs maybe of some of the area like the Medicine Bow National Forest and these fields, open fields of beautiful flowers growing wild. I mean like to get up in Medicine, up from Medicine Bow National Park. I mean, some of the most vividly beautiful places you could ever imagine. But it would need to have color to do it. And maybe in the next book there will be color.
Bernie Harberts (35:14) Early on Jose Dante lost a shoe, you got him reshod along the way.
Tom Sites (35:23) I got shod by an Amish farrier. And I noticed the Amish people riding their buggy horses down the road and how they were going. And I took it upon faith that I was going to try whatever they tried. And I have a shoe here that did that, and I got a thousand miles under the shoe. The vets looked at it and says, you’re gonna lame that horse out. Well, the Amish people didn’t lame their horses out. They went down the road safely with a product called Studite.
Bernie Harberts (35:56) Tell me about Studite. I know borium.
Tom Sites (35:59) Well, it’s like borium, but Amish people use something called Studite.
Bernie Harberts (36:04) So borium is like a metal thing you put on shoes to keep it from wearing because the horseshoes wear out on the pavement and they’re slippery. Studite is something to keep it from wearing out and maybe gives them more grip. Does that sound right?
Tom Sites (36:16) Yep. And no slipping and sliding. They thought I was going to get a tendon problem or something. Never had a tendon problem.
Bernie Harberts (36:27) Because that can be the issue from what I’ve heard with borium. A horse naturally, their hoof slides a little bit. And that borium can make it stick a little more on the cement and jar their tendons. And you didn’t have a problem with any of that.
Tom Sites (36:40) Yes. No, I followed it by faith. I said, if the Amish people can do it, I can do it. I was the only one that got that. But other people were changing shoes every seven to 10 days. The Studite shoes got put on in Millersburg, Ohio and got pulled at the Utah state line after 1,000 miles.
Bernie Harberts (36:56) So Tom pulls out a black and white photo of he and Jose sitting in a creek. It is so 1976. So when Tom was describing how the whole thing was organized, there were people, organizers, driving out the day that all the racers took off looking for places for them to spend the night that night. And the horse care was just as simple. This photo of Tom sitting on Jose sitting in the creek, that’s just to cool his feet down. There are no ice boots, there are no lasers. There’s none of the tech that we associate now with horse gear back then in 1976 during the Great American Horse Race. Here’s Tom describing what he’s doing in that creek sitting on Jose’s back, looking very chill I might say.
Tom Sites (37:45) If you look at it close, you’ll see that my feet are in the water. If you look at my arms, you’ll see a little bit of sunburn on them. And I had a stick in my right hand and I was sitting there with Jose and he had both his ears out this way at rest and peace. It could have been after a long day that I saw the creek and got into it. See the other people, they put their horses on the side.
Bernie Harberts (38:11) Yes. Yeah, beside the creek, but you went right into it.
Tom Sites (38:15) Yep.
Bernie Harberts (38:15) So how often did you have to like bandage his legs or rub down his tendons with alcohol or absorb him?
Tom Sites (38:23) Absorbine. I would say I didn’t do it every day and in fact I didn’t take any with me. I ended up buying some along the way. I didn’t even know about wrapping legs. I didn’t know about absorbine. I was totally green. Liniment.
Bernie Harberts (38:47) So absorbine is like a liniment.
Tom Sites (38:47) Yep.
Bernie Harberts (38:47) So in those early days of the race, you literally, you showed up, I think in the book it said you maybe had a footlocker. You started riding. Did you throw some of your gear in somebody’s trailer?
Tom Sites (39:04) I lived in the feed truck until Andy Peterson came with a truck, tent and other camping equipment in Ohio.
Bernie Harberts (39:07) Did everybody eat the same grain?
Tom Sites (39:09) If they wanted to put their grain in there, they could put it in there. It also carried signs, traffic cones and other things of usage.
Bernie Harberts (39:12) So you would ride during the day, then sleep in the feed truck, and get riding the next day.
Tom Sites (39:20) That’s what I did up until Ohio when I had a friend come, Andy Peterson, with the 58 Chevrolet pickup truck. He came and he bought a tent. All I had was a sleeping bag. I didn’t even have a cooler. I don’t even remember how I got water for the horse. I had two buckets, I guess I went and carried water in.
Bernie Harberts (39:43) That’s wild because you know now when we look at events.
Tom Sites (39:48) Everybody has everything. Exactly. I had nothing.
Bernie Harberts (39:50) Exactly.
Tom Sites (39:52) No power steering, conditioner. I had faith. I still can’t to this day remember all the turmoil that I experienced. Sort of like it blocked out of my mind or something. I only have the good feelings about it. But there was some very stressful times. And if we had a trailer day, because there was too much traffic, we would go from point A to point B and I needed to ride so I always had to bum a ride from somebody that only had one horse but a two-horse trailer. And there was a guy, Ted Alegria, I trailered a lot with, but he brought Jose back to Illinois to his house because he had a sponsor that gave him the trailer. And the sponsor said, if I pay for the gas, he can take me home. Ted took me from Sacramento back to Virginia.
Bernie Harberts (40:48) Wow, you really made this up as you went with very little money.
Tom Sites (40:52) Yes. I’d get $50, $75 along the way. We knew where to put in the money, I mean to put in the mail to.
Bernie Harberts (41:02) Like general delivery.
Tom Sites (41:04) General delivery, that was that.
Bernie Harberts (41:06) So explaining to people that don’t know, you can still send stuff with my name or your name, Tom Sites, wherever you’re gonna go, Quincy, Illinois, and people can send it to the post office. You go pick it up. To get that many people across the country in a race needs a little organization. But it sounds like there was some problems.
Bernie Harberts (41:27) Here’s some reading. What happens when you throw together a whole bunch of really enthusiastic, patriotic people to take this huge race across America, but they hadn’t really spent years or certainly even months planning things out in advance.
Tom Sites (41:46) At the beginning, they got run out of camp. The ride had management problems from the start and ride management fell apart. Randy Shyding, the organizer, was physically run out of camp. He did come through with prize money of $50,000 which was put in an escrow bank account in Sacramento. His intentions were pure, he was just in over his head for the lack of funding. He had a good concept but he was a dreamer and reality took him down. I’ll never forget when the Porter Potties had to leave because we couldn’t pay for them.
Bernie Harberts (42:12) You couldn’t pay for them.
Tom Sites (42:18) That’s when the riders committee was formed and managed. We introduced a $15 a day riders fee to be paid by each rider to cover the expenses of the vets along with other expenses.
Bernie Harberts (42:20) Yeah.
Tom Sites (42:32) We had circus horses that would go out and jump picnic tables and do silly stuff like that. We’d take donations and it’d help pay for the vets. I mean, that was the biggest expense we had. I mean, we had to pay for the vets.
Bernie Harberts (42:50) So the vets would check the horses to make sure they were okay.
Tom Sites (42:54) Two to three times a day.
Bernie Harberts (42:57) So the horses got good veterinary supervision.
Tom Sites (42:59) The head vet was the first vet inducted into the AERC Hall of Fame, Bruce Branscombe.
Bernie Harberts (43:11) The AERC is the American Endurance Ride Conference.
Tom Sites (43:16) So he gave us credibility. And he didn’t take any crap from people.
Bernie Harberts (43:26) What do you remember of a man called Smoky?
Tom Sites (43:30) Smoky Killian.
Bernie Harberts (43:32) So what do you remember of Smoky Killian? And then we’ll go back to reading.
Tom Sites (43:36) The first thing that I remember about Smokey is he got beat up over a girlfriend, Diane Marquardt.
Bernie Harberts (43:45) He was like 60.
Tom Sites (43:47) He was still a stud, I guess.
Bernie Harberts (43:50) Wow.
Tom Sites (43:53) And he rode with his arm up from the bandage.
Bernie Harberts (43:57) You love him in the book. He’s all wrapped up.
Tom Sites (44:01) Yeah, you got injured. You kept riding though.
Bernie Harberts (44:04) That wasn’t a horse that hurt him.
Tom Sites (44:06) No, it was somebody beating him up.
Bernie Harberts (44:08) Hahaha. What fights do you remember?
Tom Sites (44:15) That’s the only fight I remember. There was no fights. Smokey liked to come by our camp. Andy was a good crew for me after he came. And he would make pancakes, buckwheat pancakes in the morning with lots of butter on it and orange marmalade, rolled it up like a taco. And he would hand me that and that would be my breakfast. Well, Smokey found out that we were eating them and he come by our camp in the morning and he wanted a pancake too.
Bernie Harberts (44:43) Opportunist.
Tom Sites (44:47) That’s what I remember about Smokey. He loved his horses. He never would have abused them knowingly in any way. And he could have come up faster if he, he could do better in the placings if he went faster, but he just rode his horse and he was in fifth, I think fifth place.
Bernie Harberts (45:06) Yeah, yeah, it’s lovely. Wow. Read a little more.
Tom Sites (45:10) I could have had two horses, but I only had one. Not having a crew or trailer anyway, I could have taken care of one horse. One horse was all I could have handled. Additionally, riders could be penalized for a variety of reasons. For example, if you had one horse on the ground and one horse in the trailer, it doubles your riding time.
Bernie Harberts (45:20) Yeah.
Bernie Harberts (45:35) So explain that, so if you had two horses and you rode for five hours.
Tom Sites (45:35) It was double your riding time, so it would have been 10 hours.
Bernie Harberts (45:43) Okay, so if you rode one horse for five hours, five hours each time, if you rode one, trailered one, you got 10 hours, five for each. And so how many people do you remember had one horse and how many had two?
Tom Sites (45:50) Yes.
Tom Sites (45:58) About five or six had one horse.
Bernie Harberts (45:58) So you were in the minority.
Tom Sites (46:00) Most everybody had a second horse.
Bernie Harberts (46:03) So how did that work? They would ride one horse and then lead the other one and then switch.
Tom Sites (46:09) Ponied one. Both horses had to cover the distance or else you got penalized. So you rode one and ponied one. That was like Smokey’s photograph. He had both horses still sound. Virl had a mule that became lame or something. I forget now what it was, but they had to scratch Lady Eloise.
Bernie Harberts (46:21) Right.
Tom Sites (46:34) So that put him only down to Lord Fauntleroy. But he believed in Eloise, so he kept him with one horse rather than take the penalty time of the other horse. He took her off real quick.
Bernie Harberts (46:47) So then he just traveled with one mule after that. So you could start with two, but then could you retire one horse and not have you be penalized by that?
Tom Sites (46:59) If he didn’t travel the distance, you wouldn’t have been penalized. You make a formal decision, this horse is scratched. So the timers are notified of that and they figure out the time.
Bernie Harberts (47:11) So in the last stretch, Virl was just riding one mule.
Tom Sites (47:15) Yes.
Bernie Harberts (47:18) Interesting, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know.
Tom Sites (47:20) Virl only beat the second place finisher by about eight hours or something. So he solidly won the Great American Horse Race. And the Great American Horse Race was won by a mule. It’s in Ripley’s Believe It or Not within six months.
Bernie Harberts (47:40) As a guy that loves mules, I can only totally understand and feel vindicated.
Tom Sites (47:45) I don’t feel disgraceful or anything to him. I’m proud of him, the fact that he did it. Very few winners could be admired as much as Virl Norton. He was a kind man and he was a wonderful horse person, mule person.
Bernie Harberts (48:04) Tell me what happened to some of the finishers after the race, and then we’ll go back to the reading.
Tom Sites (48:09) You see the guy in the picture there on the right?
Bernie Harberts (48:12) So Tom points at the copy of the Great American Horse Race book sitting on his table. And it’s a photo of two guys galloping flat out across or in front of what looks like a cotton field. And the guy in the front, big gap tooth bearded guy grinning like Levon Helm in The Band. Levon Helm was a drummer, just euphoric, absolutely beside himself with joy.
Bernie Harberts (48:41) So he’s galloping the horse, looks very happy on the cover of the book. What happened to him?
Tom Sites (48:46) He came from West Virginia and he moved to Florida and he poached alligators with hand grenades. He’d get a hand grenade, blow up the alligator and that’s how he would do it. Well, he ran out of hand grenades so he got dynamite, figured that he would kill or poach the alligator with a stick of dynamite and he ended up killing himself with the explosive.
Bernie Harberts (49:11) He blew himself up.
Tom Sites (49:12) He blew himself up. He lived a violent life and his brother was electrocuted in West Virginia.
Bernie Harberts (49:22) I love this photo Tom, it’s one of my favorite photos from before I even knew you. You look so happy and you’re holding a can of Olympia beer with a key around your neck. What’s the story?
Tom Sites (49:35) That’s a soup bowl thing that I’ve got on my hand. I got some beef stew or something. My food, that was my food. And if you notice on the right hand, I had a cigarette in my hand.
Bernie Harberts (49:45) I noticed that. So you smoked then.
Tom Sites (49:48) I gave up drinking and smoking at about the same time and that probably extended my life. I was probably drinking too much and smoking too much.
Bernie Harberts (49:59) You were drinking Olympia beer at the time. What brand did you smoke?
Tom Sites (50:03) Camels.
Bernie Harberts (50:05) Filtered or unfiltered.
Tom Sites (50:07) Filtered.
Bernie Harberts (50:08) So when you rode, did you ride with traffic or against traffic?
Tom Sites (50:12) I think it depends. But we would ride on the same side as the automobiles or traffic. That’s what we rode on.
Bernie Harberts (50:21) And did Jose want to walk on the pavement or did he want to walk in the grass? If you just dropped the reins, where would he walk?
Tom Sites (50:27) Walk on the berm.
Bernie Harberts (50:30) Did you let him graze?
Tom Sites (50:33) Sure did.
Bernie Harberts (50:34) So as you rode, you had a hackamore on, so you would let him eat a little bit.
Tom Sites (50:36) Yep. I took care of him. I took better care of him than I did myself. I probably lost five or eight pounds on that ride. I mean, I was down to 144 pounds.
Bernie Harberts (50:51) So describe riding for people to really understand. You’re riding up the road, you’re with traffic, you’re riding in the grass a few feet from the pavement on Jose. Describe for people what it’s like for a tractor trailer to come up behind them. What does it sound like? What does a horse feel like?
Tom Sites (51:13) It depends upon what’s happening on the right side if you can find it or if you can get away from the berm.
Bernie Harberts (51:19) So you’re on a wide grassy shoulder, you’re riding along and a semi comes up behind you. What is that like?
Tom Sites (51:26) The one thing that comes to mind is gopher holes.
Bernie Harberts (51:32) Gopher holes like rodents, burrows.
Tom Sites (51:34) That’s why it sometimes was better to ride up near the median than going out into the berm. I took two tumbles. He fell down. So one of them laid himself out.
Bernie Harberts (51:42) So Jose stepped into a hole. You hear a semi, what is it like when there’s a guardrail? You can’t move over.
Tom Sites (51:56) Very frightening for peace. There was some danger. I mean, to this day, I have some of that scaring us.
Bernie Harberts (52:05) It’s just such a hard concept for people to understand how close it is between walking up the side of the road and boom, backfire, you’re in the road.
Tom Sites (52:16) Nowhere to go.
Bernie Harberts (52:18) What was your memory of the last day? What were you thinking riding towards the finish line?
Tom Sites (52:25) It was a sad, happy thing. It was sad because you were losing some people that were friends. You’re not going to see them for a while. But you’re happy because you’re going home. I couldn’t wait to get home, to be honest with you. The thing I list in there is I rented a house from somebody when I lived in Luray, so I had to pay my rent every month. And I needed to pay the electricity and the water bill. So I left my house in the hands of a friend of mine named Michael Sottosanti, and he paid the bills while I was gone.
Bernie Harberts (52:54) Hey.
Tom Sites (53:03) Because I didn’t have money to pay for it. They could have legally booted me out.
Bernie Harberts (53:08) You didn’t lose the place while you were out. What do you remember of that last half mile riding towards the finish line? Were there other people around you? Was it in town? Where was the finish line?
Tom Sites (53:19) It was at the California Expo.
Bernie Harberts (53:22) Describe that or what would that look like?
Tom Sites (53:25) It was like a show of horses and stuff. There was other things going on. We got there right at the time.
Bernie Harberts (53:31) The expo was going on. What did the finish line look like?
Tom Sites (53:36) I carried my flag and painted stars on Jose’s blaze. Silly stuff.
Bernie Harberts (53:43) Beautiful.
Bernie Harberts (53:46) Tom says he carried the West Virginia flag across the finish line. And I asked him, why West Virginia when he grew up in Virginia?
Tom Sites (53:54) It’s because that’s where I rode Dewey. Where I cleaned stalls. That was where I got my horse experience to begin with.
Bernie Harberts (54:04) What was the biggest takeaway from the Great American Horse Race and riding Jose through?
Tom Sites (54:09) It was probably the most I’ve ever done by myself. It gave me drive, inspiration and the knowledge to know that you can do anything if you keep your head down. The motto of the endurance community is to finish is to win. And I was happy finishing. I like the motto, to finish is to win.
Bernie Harberts (54:34) After crossing the finish line in Sacramento, Tom trailered Jose home to Luray, Virginia. They competed together in endurance events for many more years.
Tom’s skill earned him a spot on the United States team for the European Endurance Championships, where they won. The European Championships were held in Marloffstein, Germany in 1987 and the USA won the only Team Gold Medal won on foreign soil in 100 mile competition. The Team consisted of Mike Marino on SunWalt, Jeannie Waldron on CherAbu and Tom Sites on BayMar.
Eventually, Tom retired Jose from competition.
Today, Jose is buried on the property of Tom’s daughter’s house. A Vietnam veteran who found his way home, one small consistent step at a time, rests now in the same earth where his rider learned to love horses.
Some journeys end where they began, and some partnerships, like Tom and Jose’s, never really end.
Tom has written a great account of his experience in the Great American Horse Race, some of which he read to me when we sat down for a chat.
He has graciously allowed me to share this written account on Travel Grit.
Look for it below the podcast of our chat. Thanks so much, Tom, for sharing your story.
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