COVER 1 - NMHBA SUMMER 2017 low res

LaRae had had health issues in recent
years. She spent three days in the intensive
care unit of an Albuquerque hospital after
suffering a stroke about a year and a half
ago. She had fainted a couple of times
at home and was on high blood pressure
medication.
But her feistiness, her sense of humor,
her devil-may-care, tell-it-like-it-is attitude
never wavered. She loved to drink Crown
Royal whiskey and she chain-smoked.
She was country-tough, it seemed, from
the moment she was born on Claude and
Myrtle Davis’ cattle ranch in the sandhills
of Nebraska.
“Her dad had three boys and then he
had a cowboy,” says Gary. “His cowboy
was LaRae. She was a daddy’s girl.”
A daddy’s girl who became one of the
boys during her successful 45-year career of
training racehorses. A woman who earned
a college degree in dental hygiene, but
quickly realized that a dental chair was no
match for the racetrack and all the thrills
that went with it.
LaRae Sumpter was always too
high-strung, too full of adventure and
imagination, to lead a vanilla-colored life.
In her 70-plus years on this earth,
LaRae took full swings at everything she
did. And she did it with vim and vigor,
regardless of the consequences. Political
correctness was never in her genes.
“If you don’t like her apples, don’t
shake her tree,” said her longtime friend
W.L. Mooring a few years ago. “She
don’t care if you’re the president or the
governor. She’s going to say what she
wants to say.”
“A lot of people liked her and I’m sure
a lot didn’t because of how she was,” says
Gary. “There was nothing phony about
her. She trained horses when most women
weren’t allowed on the backside.”
But there was so much more to LaRae
Sumpter, and if you spent enough time
around her, you got to sample the tender,
caring side of her.
This was a woman who would open up
the Sumpter home to Native American kids
at Christmas and made sure they didn’t go
away without a gift.
A woman who twice a year placed
flowers on the gravesite of a little girl who
got lost in a snowstorm and froze to death
on the north side of the Cross5 Ranch
nearly 90 years ago.
A trainer who promised jockey Don Lewis
when he was dying of leukemia that she
would look after his teenage daughter. LaRae
gave Lewis’ daughter, Donna, a job in her
stable and the two became lifelong friends.
A wife who spent 10 days and nights
sitting at Gary’s bedside when he was
hurt so badly in a starting accident at
Sunland Park that the doctors considered
amputating his right foot.
“She helped a lot of people. She was
always giving advice, whether you wanted
to hear it or not,” says Gary.
A great believer in celebrating holidays
and special occasions, every Christmas
she’d insist that Gary decorate all the
trees around their home with lights, even
though given the remoteness of where they
lived, they were likely to be the only ones
to see the lights.
Every Thanksgiving she’d prepare a big
meal for just the two of them.
“I’d tell her, ‘LaRae, it’s just the two
us,’ and she’d say, ‘We have to celebrate
with the spirits.’”
A woman so loved by her neighbors
on the Acoma Reservation that many of
them attended her graveside services at the
ranch. They said prayers and wept openly.
LaRae’s grandfather was a full-blooded
Lakota Sioux and perhaps that’s why
she shared such a bond with the Native
Americans and their love for the land and
the spirits.
“She believed in the way the Native
Americans live and the way we lived up
here,” says Gary. “There are a lot of spirits
up here and she could feel ‘em. She said
she wanted to be buried on this ranch. She
felt at home.”
Gary and LaRae met at La Mesa Park in
the summer of 1973. She was training and
getting a 2-year-old colt ready for the Land
of Enchantment Futurity. Gary had arrived
from Oklahoma and had gotten his jock’s
license a year earlier.
He and LaRae lost touch for several
years, but reconnected at Sunland Park
in 1979. Gary had won the All American
Futurity three years earlier with Real Wind
and his career after the futurity was on the
rise. But his personal life was a mess.
He was drinking and had become
dependent on diet pills to make weight.
“I was drinking and going crazy,” he
says. “She straightened me out. She got me
off the alcohol and off the pills. Without
her, I’d have been dead by now.”
Gary says they never left each other’s
side after they reunited in 1979. And three
years later, they were married at Circus
Circus in Las Vegas.
Though total opposites in many ways,
Gary and LaRae became a perfect match.
“She was my rock, she guided me,”
says Gary.
Gary says LaRae constantly boosted
his confidence, whether he was riding
racehorses or running their cattle ranch.
“She gave me a lot of confidence,” he says.
“She bragged on me. She encouraged me. I
was a very weak person and needed someone
like that. We’d fuss and argue, but by night
it was all over. I guess that was the best part
about fussing and fighting—making up.”
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