MY FATHER’S SPURS
My history with horses began more than a decade before I was born.
My father, George Nelson McHugh, signed up with the 101st Cavalry Regiment of the NewYork National Guard in fall of 1940. For a year, he galloped over the New England landscape with his newfound comrades in khaki, riding and camping for months at a stretch. Then, as the United States entered World War II, his regiment first was federalized, next went mechanized.
Years later, in the 1950s, I could admire Dad’s old riding boots as well as his set of alloy spurs. He kept them polished and pristine in the back corner of his closet. Even when I was a kid, these artifacts struck me as both romantic and forlorn. My father had often told us how he’d hated the soulless, exhaust-spewing military vehicles that had replaced those magnificent cavalry horses.
That noisome shift was underscored after he shipped to England, where he was issued a Harley-Davidson motorcycle for recon and escort duties. One winter morning his Harley swapped ends and slid through an icy intersection and under the hooves of draft horses hauling a freight wagon. Oh, how he loathed the Harley that put him in such a fix. Yet he loved the way those horses quickly stutter-stepped to keep from stomping him with their huge hooves. He came away from the incident unscathed but with a grim determination to transfer out of the Cavalry and into
