TRAINER SPOTLIGHT
Sue Lightner S
BRINGING THE HUNTER SPORT FORWARD, ONE FOAL AT A TIME
ue Lightner was born in Ithaca, NY to a completely non-horsey family. Her mom
and grandparents moved to Lafay- ette, Ca when she was five, where the love of horses came from, she doesn’t know. “My mom was really afraid of horses,” says Lightner. “When we moved to Lafayette there was an old brown mare in the field behind us. I would crawl through the fence and brush that old mare with my dog brushes”. After Lafayette, Sue, her mom Dor-
othy and her sister Tina moved to an apartment in Oakland. “I begged and begged for riding lessons, and mom fi-
nally signed me up with Bob Lorimer at the Oakland riding academy where Linda Lorimer (now Linda Hough) would come and give our class demon- strations. I was a model child at home, because any transgressions might re- sult in missing my Saturday Lesson!” Sue’s mom married Ron Lightner in
1960 and he is the one who brought horses into Sue’s life full time. Ron was a team roper, who eventually gave his first horse to Sue. “I learned to jump with a friend and bareback with my eyes closed,” said Sue. “My horse, Rebel, loved to jump.” Dr. Bill Nissen spotted Sue jumping that horse and made arrangements to
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get her set up in lessons and gave her her first saddle, his old Pariani which she still has. Raising Quarter Horses on a small
farm in San Jose gave Sue her first un- derstanding of breeding, foaling and conformation. “I did my first term paper in the seventh grade on Quar- ter Horses and conformation,” says Sue. “As a child, I dreamed of having a barn full of horses; different breeds and different colors. Now here I am fifty years later with a barnfull!” “Horses have been so good to me”,
Sue says with feeling. “They are my life. I went to college and graduated Magna Cum Laude in English, Speech
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