Black featured in Palomino Horses magazine

By Jo Anne Efird, Lifestyles Editor

Tuesday, August 5, 2008 August 06, 2008 11:53 am

— From the time she was a 5-year-old spending summers on her grandparents’ farm until the present when she regulary shows on the Palomino circuit, Sherry Black does not remember a time when she did not love horses.
While she and her parents lived many places, as her father was a Methodist minister, she spent most summers with her grandparents, Jim and Ruth Sides, at their farm on Biles Road in the Millingport community of Stanly County.
It was here she first began riding at age 4 and started taking lessons at 10. She bought her first horse with her own money, Sherry’s Foxy Kojak, a paint, in 1980 when she was 10 years old.
Sherry realized that her grandfather made a little money each year raising calves. So, when she was 5 years old, she asked him to let her raise a few calves to save some money to buy herself a horse.
With her parents’ approval, her grandfather agreed to give Sherry a calf to begin raising more.
Sherry quickly figured that she could make more money if she had the calf’s mother. She took her piggy bank to her grandfather and dumped out the coins and dollar bills in it. She asked her grandfather to sell her the calf’s mother.
“My grand total savings was $50 and to this day I can’t believe he took me up on it,” she said.
For five years she raised calves with the cow and her calf and by the time she was 10 she had earned enough money to buy a horse.
She owned a couple of horses before she bought her first show horse, a 2-year-old Palomino gelding named High Flower Fever. With that horse, she put herself through Pfeiffer University, giving as many as five riding lessons a day on him, every week for four and a half years.
“He was my best friend who helped me through some rough times,” she said.
She has been showing horses since she was 15.
There came a difficult time in her life when she had to get out of horses all together and she had to sell Fever.
“But thanks to the Good Lord and my will to overcome incredible odds, I’m back in the horse industry today,” she said.
Proof that God does work in mysterious ways, and with the help of many people in the Palomino Horse Breeders Association, Sherry found her old friend recently and was able to purchase Fever again.
He is 25 years old and has a scar and a limp from a terrible leg injury. His registration papers are lost.
“But he means more to me than any horse I own. Every day now I count as a blessing that we are together. I know that he and I both made it against incredible odds, and we belong together.”
Sherry will be featured in the August issue of Palomino Horses. She has eight horses she is now showing. At present she is living in the Concord area but is looking for a place to move to in Stanly County, where has spent much of her life. She is the mother of three children, two of whom also show horses.
“I want young people that have a desire to get into the horse industry, or any dream they have, to know that they can do it no matter what odds may be stacked against them, if they believe in their dreams. I look at life as an open book of opportunties, and sometimes disappointments. But every day starts a blank page. I would rather have failed at chasing my dreams than to never have followed my dream at all.”
Contact Jo Anne Efird at (704) 982-2121 ext. 20.

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.