“Two Florida friends whose lives intertwine around a love of things equine and a children’s novel, The Black Stallion, launch a nationwide literacy program.
By Wes Smith | Sentinel Staff Writer. KISSIMMEE, FL — -Just a few steps into the darkened Arabian Nights, Jonathan Eldredge came to a halt with hundreds of other fourth-graders filing in behind him. The stocky 9-year-old drank in the sights, sounds and smells of the arena, and let out a whoop: “Holy moly, this is too good to be true!” The flabbergasted Clermont boy was among 3,800 area schoolchildren invited to attend four performances this month at the dinner-theater attraction offering all courses with horses, from leaping stallions to chariot races. The special brown-bag matinees were rewards for participating in a unique reading program built around The Black Stallion series of children’s books that have sold more than 100 million copies in 28 languages.”
Two Florida friends whose lives are intertwined with those classic stories created the literacy program and are about to expand it nationwide.
“One of them brings the love of horses and the other brings the love of books,” says Beverly Brizendine, director of elementary education for the Osceola County School District, whose students have participated in the project for four years.
Arabian Nights owner Mark Miller, 59, of St. Cloud and Tim Farley, 51, of Sarasota are the trail buddies who kicked off the Black Stallion Literacy Project. Farley’s father, Walter, who died in 1989, was the author of The Black Stallion series.
The two men have known each other all their lives, because Farley’s father always bought his Arabian horses from Miller’s mother, famed Al-Marah Arabian breeder Bazy Tankersley. Walter Farley watched Mark Miller grow up on horseback at the Al-Marah ranch outside Washington and often said Miller inspired his later portrayals of Alec Ramsey, the fictional young hero of The Black Stallion series.
“Walter and I both loved horses in the same way,” Miller says. “It was the greatest honor of my life when he told me that I was a model for Alec.”
Family friends
Walter Farley began writing The Black Stallion as a 16-year-old high-school student in Brooklyn, N.Y., because he couldn’t find any good “horse books” to read. His family had moved from Syracuse because of the Depression. There, Farley had cultivated a love of horses at an uncle’s stable.
He never owned even a pony as a boy, but Farley’s interest in horses of all types never diminished. Later, he wrote that he even “loved to look at people looking at horses.”
While studying journalism at Columbia University, Farley was encouraged by a professor and children’s author to submit The Black Stallion manuscript to Random House. It was published in 1941 and was a hit with young readers.
Still, his Random House editor told Farley that he shouldn’t plan on making a living as an author of children’s books. But Farley kept writing even after marrying a New York fashion model two years later.
Rosemary Farley, 87, who still lives in their Venice, Fla., beach house with a black sea horse on the mailbox, once noted: “For 45 years, I lived with the man and his horse, the Black.”
Tall and athletic with an aristocratic bearing, Walter Farley followed a blue-collar work ethic and wrote eight hours a day in his home office overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. But he preferred doing “research” that involved hanging out with cowboys, jockeys, sulky drivers, stable hands and anyone else associated with his favorite creatures.
“My dad invented the Black Stallion character and then rode that horse around the world,” says Tim Farley.
Farley loved the Arabian breed most of all, his son says. It was inevitable, then, that he would show up one day at Tankersley’s celebrated Al-Marah farm, where television cowboy Roy Rogers and Ben-Hur movie chariot drivers camped with their horses while performing in the area.
“Mark’s mother was among the first to import purebred Arabians to the United States, so my father got to know his parents before we were even on the scene,” says Tim Farley.
Tankersley and the author became so close that Farley never purchased an Arabian from any other breeder. He owned many Arabians and horses of all types, even “sea horses,” his son recalls.
“We had a stable at our house in Venice, and we used to ride on the beach, ‘herding mullet.’ My dad even wrote a book about that — with a boy character named Tim — called The Horse That Swam Away,” says Tim Farley. His brother Steven, a New York author, writes the Young Black Stallion series, set in Ocala horse country. Read the rest of the article (Pages 2 and 3) at: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/orl-stallion06dec24,0,851978.story?coll=orl-shopping-headlines