War Horses Raised to Fly High

Even when they finally hired her, Dana McCreary wasn't given a uniform. She just pieced something together from her own wardrobe, vaguely matching what the male pilots had been issued. After a year's probation, she suggested that it was about time a proper uniform were organized. So they sent her to a tailor in downtown Cleveland.

He just exploded, waved his arms. “And what exactly am I supposed to do with you?”

“I don't know,” Dana said, shrugging. “They sent me here.”

But by that stage she was well accustomed to this kind of thing. This was 1982. She doesn't view herself as a victim, looking back: just as someone making her way in the world as it was. But the fact is that she had always had to know more, in training, than most of the guys. Both her parents had been hobby fliers, they would cram the four kids into the back seat and fly to Grandma's farm the other side of Ohio. Dana can't have been more than seven when her father put her on his knee and started teaching her: here's your altitude, here's the compass, here's how you trim. She couldn't even see out of the cockpit; she was basically flying by instruments.

In high school, she knew that there were no female professional pilots but figured she could at least try air traffic control. And couldn't she learn to fly regardless? “Well, sure,” her parents said. “But we're not paying for it.”

“So I went out to the local airport and worked the Unicom and wrote up gas bills,” she recalls. “I was making $1.25 an hour, paid for all my flying lessons, got my private license.”

Then in her senior year she heard that one of the airlines had broken the gender bar and actually hired a woman. So that settled it: she would follow through the breach.

But while she was allowed (after four years of college and training) to sit in for the ground school, it was strictly on the understanding that she wasn't going to be hired-and she would meet her own costs. In one class the instructor smirked and said,     “Hey guys, Dana's wearing a nice skirt today. Why don't we get her to go draw the schematic for the electrical system?”

“That is truly the kind of thing that I faced,” she says. “But I didn't know any different. All I wanted to do was fly and I figured that's what you have to do.”

She sailed through her tests. They shrugged, wished her luck in life. But after a while she got permission to observe a training flight.

“And I was just sitting there thinking, 'I know I can do better than this,'” she recalls. “And then the instructor, it was the same one, turned to the guy that he was training and says, 'Let's see if a girl can fly this airplane.' Which was good. It inspired me.”

She flew so unanswerably well-this is someone who can hand fly to 100 feet with only one engine and no autopilot-that a couple of weeks later they faced facts and hired her. No uniform, as we said, but she was 22 and her foot was in the door. That was just a regional outfit but a couple of years later she joined a national freight operator, which proved a little more enlightened, and stayed 18 years.

Yet all the talent and determination that sustained a pioneering career, in pursuit of one lifelong obsession, has stood her in equally good stead in another. For her love of horses has also led her to embrace steep odds, to the point that this year she even discovered the temerity to bring in four stallions, standing between $5,000 and $2,500, to offer the market something different from the industrial farms.

Yet when Dana and her late husband Gerry Aschinger bought War Horse Place, a couple of decades ago, they were still polo people who primarily wanted to cut down their travel from Ohio.

“We did have a couple of mares up there, and for a time actually had a stallion as well,” she recalls. “But honestly, this wasn't my dream. Horses were always my passion, but I had no idea it was going to go the way it did. When we bought this place, it had been a division of Northridge and there was nothing here but two barns. So we built the office, built the house. And then we set it up just as a boutique broodmare facility.

“The original thought process was that instead of these huge farms, where you show up to see your horse and someone might go, 'Oh, yeah, I recognize that name, let me call somebody who might know something,' we wanted people to feel like they knew how their horses were being handled every day, and by whom. We wanted War Horse Place to feel like their own personal farm in Kentucky.”

To that end they even built a guest apartment above the office. The site overall is no more than 180 acres, but modesty of scale permits ambition in execution. For instance, they are up to 12 miles of new V-mesh in their fencing. And the ethic of intimacy extends to the horses. Clients remarked how foals that could hardly be caught, on other farms, at War Horse Place proved to be full of trust and curiosity.

“For us, getting the foal started on the right foot has always been really important,” Dana says. “We didn't want them just standing in the field three weeks at a time. The halter's on the day after they're born, their feet are picked up, and we do the old-fashioned let out. They're not just following the mare.”

Then in 2008 they got a call from Zimbabwe. There was a brother to Kingmambo standing there, Kitalpha, and his owners felt he needed a safer home. He did not present a terribly inspiring spectacle when he arrived, after a six-month odyssey, but they did right by the horse. Not only did they build a stallion barn and breeding complex, but Gerry even took out a license to train the babies.

And then he also took on Dramedy (Distorted Humor), who was being sold through their consignment after showing some ability in a light career to that point.

“We went into the horse's history, and it turned out that he'd had some kind of accident as a younger horse, broken his hip and pelvis,” Dana recalls. “So obviously there was arthritis in there. And he'd always come flying at the end of his races, so we thought, 'Well, this horse just needs to get warmed up.' And as soon as we figured that out, he did really well.”

After winning the GII Elkhorn Stakes, indeed, Dramedy earned his turn at stud. And those experiences with stallions proved so encouraging, not least in bringing mares whose owners were on the same wavelength, has ultimately produced this sudden and enthusiastic expansion of the roster.

The new recruits include the admirable Smooth Like Strait, winner of $1.8 million across four campaigns, whose owner Michael Cannon typified the process. “I'm not concerned about breeding 200 mares and going through all that,” he told them. “I just want a nice, safe place for my horse, and somewhere I can breed my mares.”

Then Cannon's friend John Fradkin heard about the beautiful set-up here, just when he had Rombauer looking for a fresh start. And one thing led to another and next thing knew Sacred Life and Hog Creek Hustle were on the team, too.

Initially they tried to stop at three. “But pretty soon it was just like, okay, sometimes God has a way of putting things in front of you that you need to take a look at and work out,” Dana says. “I think what we've found here is a little niche for people who really believe in their horses and want a place for them to stand. If they breed 20 or 30 mares, they're happy, they just want their horse to have a chance. The big farms don't want to deal with those horses. But the owners have really supported these stallions. James Kelly, for instance, went out and bought some very nice mares just to breed to Sacred Life. These owners are so passionate, and after they get turned down by a lot of places, you just really hope it works out for them. These are people that really care about their animals–and those are people we like to work with.”

This is certainly a wholesome corner of the Bluegrass. Neighbors Crestwood have always prioritized the runner over the show pony, and on the perimeter of War Horse Place you'll see a slogan of similar intent: “Raising Racehorses.” Sure enough, graduates of the farm include the superbly hardy Whitmore, while Drain the Clock is another who came through here without going to auction. (And we shouldn't forget Kitalpha's best daughter Martini Glass, who won $900,000 across 24 starts in 26 months.)

“It really does seem like a lot of the industry is mostly into selling,” Dana observes. “But most of our clients are breeding to race. Most people just don't have the patience to do that. A lot of racehorse owners don't have any experience, breeding or raising horses, and really don't understand the tremendous commitment of time and patience and money that goes into it.”

She notes that the four stallions, between them, cover every possible discipline, distance or surface; Rombauer, indeed, pretty well do so on his own. “And if you're breeding to race, what more would you want?” she asks.

But another who must cover all bases is Rafael Zambrano, the indispensable farm manager, whose responsibilities have duly expanded with the arrival of the new stallions.

“But we have great teamwork here at War Horse Place,” Zambrano stresses. “We have a good group of people that know what they're doing in all the different aspects: mares and repro, yearlings, stallions. We just have to make sure we're organized, so that everybody knows, every time they come into work in the morning, what is to be done and when.”

Zambrano's previous specialization, during 16 years as yearling manager and then assistant farm manager at Summer Wind, was sales prep. In 2008, he helped Summer Wind consecutively top the July, Saratoga and September Sales.

“So yes, if I had to pick from all the different things we do, yearlings would be my first pick,” he says. “I enjoy seeing how they change. My dad used to tell me, 'Never cut corners. You'll always pay in the end.' So we try to do everything the way I was taught, the way it's supposed to be done. We had a filly last year that when she arrived, she looked like she must have had a lot of issues: if someone offered her for free, you would probably have said, 'No, thank you.' But after 65 days with us she went to the October Sale and sold for $75,000, from a $5,000 stud fee. The owners were like, 'I don't know what you did, but that was magic.'”

“And that was a perfect example,” Dana adds. “The owner really hadn't seen the horse where she'd been before. They just heard, 'Oh, yeah, she's doing fine.' When she shipped in, we sent them pictures, and they were horrified. In the end it turned out very well, but it was a lot of work. Rafael does a great job. We've had some come in and you just think, 'Oh, boy.' But you just take your time and do what you can. And the horses, they like the job. They like being given something to do.

“And that's exactly why we have that sign, 'Raising Racehorses.' Because I think getting a good start on them is the foundation. You go to sales and some of the horses you see, they're so nervous and scared, and you think, 'Is this the first time they've been handled in two months?' And when those go to the racetrack, it's all going to just to take a longer time to get them adjusted. So we want people who buy the yearlings to go, 'Oh, wow, this was raised at War Horse. Nice job.'”

Again, this is one of the ways in which the farm's relatively intimate scale pays off. They have 20 stalls in their prep barn. Any more would stretch the standards they want to meet.

The man who brought joy back into Dana's life, after she lost Gerry, is Kevin McCreary. They married last October (though their friendship actually goes back to third grade) and Kevin has eagerly embraced the War Horse project as business manager. He condenses the farm ethic to just two words: “Details matter.”

“A lot of my experience comes from corporate America,” he explains. “And culture is always so important. Really culture is what trains people, which is why you have to strive so hard to get it right. So that when someone comes into it, they feel it, understand it, are able to express it. And I think that the culture we have here is all focused around the relationship with clients.

“I think we've done a really nice job in matching the client to what we have. Obviously it's a business, but it is a little bit more than that: our people call constantly, visit constantly, consider themselves somewhat friends. We know about things happening in their families. And that all reflects the boutique aspect of the farm. The equine care here, I mean, it's second to none. But I think where we're able to be a little different is the way that we connect with our clients. It's hard to put all that into a word or a sentence, but there's a culture here that I think the horses feel.”

And it's true. There's an unmistakable warmth to this place. You can only admire the cheerful way Dana has defied prejudice and assumptions twice over: first as a pathfinder in aviation, and now in standing four Davids against the stallion Goliaths.

One way or another, this is plainly a woman who enjoys taking on the odds.

“Maybe a little bit,” she acknowledges with a smile. “It is true that I never liked the uneventful. Taking off and flying and landing four hours later was boring. It was when you had to do an approach in bad weather, that was what was interesting. That's what you trained for. You have these skills that you've developed and worked on, and it's nice to be able to use them. But for me, life's not about trying to prove a point. It's about just following your passions. And that's what I do.”