Tim and Nancy Hamlin

"Her dad should have shot me," says Tim Hamlin wryly. Needless to say, he had met Nancy at a horseshow. She had just started out on her veterinary studies. "And she quit school to come to a little town in northwest Iowa to help me," Hamlin recalls. "This was '84, we were kids, had no money. We lived in a single wide trailer house for seven years. Nancy would get up at 4 a.m. to make donuts, so we could buy horsefeed." Eventually they found a filly that emboldened a...