Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story
right here with Larry Hedrick on Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains along about the middle of
Ronald Reagan's first presidential run it became obvious that he was going to run for another
another presidential term and i was quite certain he was going to win and i wanted to be in his
inaugural parade and march down Pennsylvania you know I had a Calvary in it I had all the military
saddles I had the men and recruited we had all the uniforms and stuff like that somebody once said if
you want something you've never had you've got to do something you've never done well every job
I ever had in my life I'd never done before so i didn't see that as much as an obstacle
so
I admit that I had a misconception about how this worked because i thought there was somebody up in
Washington D.C. that sat around watching all the parades all across the country and they picked who
they wanted to be in the inaugural parade but nothing could be further from the truth and as
time went by I was watching the news one night and a member of the presidential inaugural committee
was being interviewed and the phone number went across the screen so I called it the next day and
I've got a set of of application forms sent to me in the mail to be in this parade and there was a
quite a list of things that you had to do uh in order to qualify uh one was of course submitting
pictures of of your organization you had to submit the names and other information of all the
members that's in your group because the secret service is going to run them by
and check them out even your horses had to have special shoes on the bottom of their hooves
they had to have parade insurance you had to have all kinds of things
and some of my guys owned their own horses but none of us were interested in dragging those
horses all the way from Arizona to Washington D.C. so we decided with we were going to rent
well in order to get the parade insurance I had to go over and meet with a guy I looked at him
up in the phone book and found this fellow that offered this kind of insurance and went over to
Scottsdale and met with him and when he saw the picture of the group and what we wanted to present
he was very interested and it was getting late in the in the time frame in order to get your
application mailed in and everything and he said that he knew a couple of guys that were
on the republican national committee and that he was going to talk to him well all three of
them come out to my house one day out in Apache Junction and these two guys offered to hand carry
my application with all the information and back to Washington D.C. and put it on top of the stack
well that's what you call greasiness kids i guess but you know as you look at the whole thing the
application said that you know you stood a better chance if you had somebody like a governor or a
senator that would back your organization well I didn't have anybody to back the organization
and this was a good deal to me to have these fellows carry that application back there
well you know it's it's a very expensive thing to do this nobody gives you any money for this
every man had to pay for his own airfare every man had to pay for his
his riddle horse every man had to share hotel rooms renting cars buy your own food
there's quite a bit of money involved in doing this and even back in the 80s we figured it was
going to cost about $800 a piece to do this and I had nine guys going on on the trip and
after we were selected and we got the letter in the mail that we were selected to be in the parade
a gentleman contacted me from an organization called the Confederate Memorial Hall
and he offered to put us up in this Confederate Memorial Hall free of charge
well that was very appealing there was some money we didn't have to spend so when we got
back there you know we took a week doing this and when we got back there we ended up sleeping
in the same old iron frame beds that those confederate veterans slept in after the civil war
and in the basement was a was a museum it was it was a great time and of course the the parade
people had to have all your phone numbers they had to be able to contact you and everything and we
rented a couple of station wagons and we hung around the memorial hall most of the time and
one little quirk that we understood was one of these gentlemen that hand carried
the application back there happened to be present in the office with Ronald Reagan
when he when the parade committee gave him a review of who was going to be in the parade
uh the President does not pick who's going to be in the parade the committee picks these people
but I'm sure he could he could have a say if he didn't like something and it came up
that somebody said we can't let a confederate organization by name go down Pennsylvania Avenue
and Ronald Reagan himself said well they were selected by their that name and that's how they're
going to ride Ronald Reagan played confederate officers in several movies he didn't have any
problem with that well what we really did was we had a color guard representing America's mounted
military history I had sent off to the u.s army and bought the series of 8x10 photographs
called the American soldier series starting with the revolutionary war the war of 1812
the Mexican war of 1848 the the Union soldier of the of the Civil war and then of course
i don't care what else he was he was an American soldier i had a confederate soldier next to him
and then of course we had the Indian Wars represented in in all the uniforms the
Spanish-American war won and world war I the world war one uniform that we used belonged to
um Clarence Barkley, Tex Barkley's brother and his wife gave me that uniform and that's the one that
we wore in the parade and the world war I belonged to my Uncle Jack Ewing who was killed in a B-17
in 1945. so the picture that you see here is me wearing my uncle's uniform so the morning of the
parade we got a phone call from the government it was nine degrees below zero with a wind chill of
22 degrees below zero and all the instruments were sticking to the lips of the band members
they called off the parade after all this effort to get here
which was nothing short of a miracle in my estimation the parade was now canceled and
our heads were hanging pretty low but about an hour later we got another phone call
we were to all go to the Baltimore Civic Center where the Baltimore Bullets play
and meet there and Ronald Reagan would come and entertain us so it wasn't
a complete loss but it was still disappointing that we didn't go down Pennsylvania Avenue
well we we were there we had the rental cars and we'd planned anyway to do this
so we went to the battle of Bull Run the first major battle of the civil war
we went to Gettysburg which was the middle and then we went to Appomattox which was the end
and we went in uniform and all that kind of stuff you know and uh some funny things happened on
on our way to the forum we stopped at a McDonald's in Alexandria Virginia
and all of us piled out of the cars in uniform Confederate uniforms and went into McDonald's
and everybody was staring at us and finally this one big fella got up and walked over and asked
who we were I thought it was pretty obvious who we were but I turned and I said we are with the
German luff offer here for battle training with the united states army and he bought it
we got our hamburgers and went on down the road
at Gettysburg even though the next day it was still below zero I had always wanted to walk
Pickett's charge battlefield and I walked that whole thing and I like to froze to death but I
was as I walked across there I was remembering the diaries of the union soldiers and the Confederate
soldiers of the things they wrote about as they went across that mile of open field under the most
galling fire in the history of the world where 600 pounds of lead was expended for
every casualty and on the confederate side you had 6 000 casualties how much lead was that
so on that first inaugural that was canceled we rented horses in Winchester Virginia
and we went out to the arena to ride them two days before the event and they all look like woolly
mammoths they had hair hanging off their bellies six inches they were the most horrible looking
horses you ever saw in your life and I obviously hadn't been ridden very much because the first guy
that threw a saddle on one it was rodeo time and he went off across the arena kicking his heels up
and it was it was a disaster I thought my we can't ride these horses in the parades to have a runaway
of all things and uh I would the horse I got on immediately laid down on the ground
and I rode him all the way down and wrote him all the way back up and but we spent about three hours
doing nothing but wheels not left turns but wheels all eight of us in a row making a sweeping turn
and that's all we knew we had to do through the whole parade route was make wheels and finally
after about three hours of this the horses when I gave the command and then said ho
those horses were automatically speeding up on the outside they they knew what they were doing and
as we left the arena I told the guy i said you know I'm a little disappointed in the looks of
these horses and he says well don't worry about it we'll fix them up before we bring them over
well of course the parade didn't happen he didn't have to bring those horses all the way
from Winchester to Washington D.C. and take him back but he didn't give us any money back either
it was an interesting trip and we're glad we got to go and i thought you know
whoever the next president is we should be right at the top of the list to be reselected
automatically what what a disappointment but you know on the next one I applied and
there were only four units that were reselected and we were one of them
now the same thing happened when we went to the next presidential parade which was for bush
we went to horses in Maryland and i got a call from somebody says
you know you better check into something you may have a problem with those horses in Maryland
so I called Senator Mccain's office and he sent two aides out to this place and he said
there's only one horse out there it was it was just another day just two more days before the
event he only had one horse that lined up in the arena so we ended up getting horses in Virginia
and there was a television station from Alexander no it's a Richmond Virginia that
came out to Mr lamb's farm who had rented horses for other groups in the parade
and we went out there to do the same thing write them and do this and plus the fact that we knew
we were sandwiched between two bands so we had a big boom box that somebody carried behind us
went to horses and turned the sound up so we would know how the horses were going to react to this
but the TV story come out that night on the on the Richmond news
about the horses in Maryland not working out and he said the word nag was used
I have a lot of pride in their Virginia horses
and they did quite well they they were very patient the the the inaugural parade was
slow getting started so we finally got to go down Pennsylvania Avenue as America's
mounted military history and all these colorful uniform and heroes with national tv they said
this is this must be the group from Apache Junction Arizona what a colorful outfit
and our mission was complete we had a chance to go over and talk to the
Arizona code talkers from Navajo nation and all that kind of thing we had a lot of celebrities
coming and going on the plane at the airport and stuff like that and uh it was it was an amazing
time and it was well worth the effort after all but that's how you get into inaugural parade folks
thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains