In the Garden with Gentle Palm: Papa

Gentle Palm is named after my father. Papa, as G.P. calls him, is not a gardener. He loves to work outside, but he is happier clearing brush and maintaining fences than he ever would be in a garden.

Papa grew up in Corporate Capital. His parents, G.P.'s great grandparents, were both first generation immigrants, one from Ukraine and the other from Lithuania. They owned a small corner grocery store, and lived above it.

This is the story of how Papa started the business that caused him to meet Nana, and led him to his life.

Being a Jewish kid from the very poor part of town, Papa had to do everything the hard way. He got himself a scholarship to the University of Our State for boxing and football. Can you imagine? Papa is five foot ten inches, and weighs 163, which is exactly what he weighed then. He was tough. He was also smart, and fiercely determined.

Early during his college career, he answered an advertisement in the paper. The ad was for a Riding Master at a camp in upstate New York. Papa was a city kid. He didn't know which end of a horse to feed or how to ride, much less how to care for a whole stable full of horses or actually teach kids how to ride.

To Papa, these were minor deficiencies, certainly not enough to disqualify him for the job. He took the train (in the middle of a snowstorm) into New York City, where the owner of the camp lived. By the end of the interview, he had the job.

Papa went to camp a week before it opened for the summer. Sizing up the situation, he told the owner that the stable at the camp was not ready to receive the horses, and that they should stay at the farm down the road while he got the stable ready. This, of course, was a ploy. Papa needed time to learn how to ride, and he certainly didn't want to do it on the camp grounds.

He practiced morning till night all that week. When camp opened, he was ready.

He taught riding all that summer to a camp full of kids, and cared for the string of horses. The kids loved him:

But he was already thinking bigger. At the end of the summer, he told the camp owner that the horses that the local farm had supplied were really not up to his standard. He suggested that the owner should really pay Papa to bring horses from his own "farm" the next summer. The owner agreed.

Just to review, Papa lived in a shared bedroom in his fraternity house. His parents lived above the store. There was no farm.

Details, details.

Papa walked in to the local bank, told them he had a contract to supply horses to a camp, and that he needed to borrow $600.00 to start the business. He had no collateral. The bank suggested that he really needed $1000.00, and loaned it to him on his signature. (Those were the good old days.)

A week before camp, Papa went to a local auction and bought the horses. He paid a shipper to take them up to the camp. He was in business. At the end of camp, the horses were shipped back to the auction, and Papa went back to school.

The next year, Papa realized that he could really stand out from the other providers of horses if he could guarantee that the camp could have back the horses that they liked, rather than getting a string of different horses each year. This meant keeping the good horses through the winter. Keeping the horses required land and money, neither of which he had.

No land, no money. No problem.

Papa put an ad in the local paper. "Horse free to good home for the winter." He found a home for every horse with families who were thrilled to have a horse for nine months without having to buy one. Families could take the same horse every year if they wanted, or "trade up" as their skill increased.

Papa quickly realized that he could buy new horses in the fall, when they were cheap. He would then place them in homes for the winter, where they got good food and nine months of training before they ever went to their first camp. It was a perfect system for a poor boy with no money.

Within a few years, Papa had a string of about 200 horses, which he supplied to about 14 camps in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions.

Who helped him with all this? Nana, of course. Nana and Papa met when Nana, who is about eight years younger than Papa, signed on to be the Assistant Riding Master. Nana, who was 16 at the time, actually knew something about horses, having mucked stalls in return for riding lessons for a number of years.

Here they are in those years:

Nana rode shotgun on all Papa's shoestring endeavors. She mucked stalls, taught riding, went to auctions, kept the books, and generally held everything together. Oh, and she did it while going to college and being Phi Beta Kappa.

She also became the camp sharpshooting champion. As Papa says, "I married her because she could shoot the wings off a mosquito at 200 yards."

What did they name the farm, the one that existed at first only in the closet of Papa's fraternity house?

Wonderland Farms - because they wondered where the land was.

There was eventually a real farm, thanks to their hard work.

It was an amazing place to grow up, and it is still where Gentle Palm goes to have "sleepovers" with Papa and Nana, explore the woods, fish in the pond, and sled the triple black diamond hills.

Not bad for a poor boy from the city.