Carol Timmermann's First Horse
Carol got to work right away to find the money to board and care for her horse. She lined up babysitting jobs and a part-time job at the bakery next to her dad’s tavern, where she also worked during the week. She then made arrangements with a property owner in Wauconda with a pasture and a barn about a mile away from her family’s house. It cost her $3 dollars a month to board the horse, but she had to take care of the horse and buy her own feed.
With everything lined up, she told her brother “Let’s go get that horse!” She rode the horse home from Volo bareback with the halter because she didn’t own any tack. “So I rode it to my house and my mother said ‘oh, where did you rent that horse from?’” Carol remembers. “I said, well, I bought it. She started yelling for my dad ‘you don’t know what your daughter did this time! She bought a horse, she bought a horse, what are we going to do with a horse?’”
Carol remembers her dad being considerably calmer and asking her “Okay Carol Ann, what are you going to do with this horse?” She sat down and outlined her whole plan with him. “He said ‘okay, it’s your horse, it’s your responsibility. Don’t ask me for any help, don’t ask me for any money,’” she says. “Dad told me ‘the day you don’t have enough money for her shoes, her vet or her food, I will give her away.’”
Carol named the horse Penny and lived up to the bargain. Carol and the three other girls who boarded their horses at the barn took turns taking care of all the horses, feeding and grooming them before and after school every day. Satisfied with her dedication, after a year her dad built a stall in the barn on the family's property and allowed her to bring the horse home.
Mr. Loshiavo always acted like he didn’t like the horse very much, but Carol saw that Penny would knicker when he was around. One night, Carol woke up to go to the bathroom and noticed the barn lights were on. She then saw her dad was walking out to the barn with a bag of carrots. Curious, the next few nights she made sure to stay up until her father closed the tavern. It was then she realized that every night after closing the tavern and before going to bed, Mr. Loshiavo would stop by the barn with a bag of carrots for the horse.
Carol eventually sold Penny and bought another horse, trained that horse and sold him at a profit…and the rest, as they say, is history.
