Clients Put Their Best Hoof Forward for Female Farrier

If Ada Gates’ clients were human, you could say she covers a multitude of shins.

After all, her business is footwear.

Gates’ customers, however, have four legs and run for a living. At present, the horses she deals with may be found in affordable housing on the backstretch of Santa Anita, which began its Oak Tree meeting Wednesday.

Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands; the smith, a mighty woman is she. . . .

That’s right, the lady is a blacksmith--the only one in the nation who plies her trade for thoroughbred race horses. In fact, for many years she was the only woman member of the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers of the United States and Canada, AFL-CIO.

‘A Farrier for Trotters’

“A couple of years ago a girl in Chicago got a union card and became a farrier for trotters,” Gates said. “But there are about 40 of us shoeing the 2,100 horses here at Santa Anita, and I am the only female.”

It isn’t a responsibility to be taken lightly. “No guts, no glory,” the horseplayers say, but the people who train the running animals say, “No foot, no horse.”

The 42-year-old Gates works for 15 trainers, successful ones such as Lester Holt, Brian Sweeney, Peter Cole, Eddie Truman, sometimes Darrell Vienna.

Cole summed her up: “If she weren’t any good, I wouldn’t use her.”

As if being good at her business weren’t enough, it is a rare morning when there isn’t a smile on the backstretch as the result of some Gates witticism. She makes Perrier seem flat. She once told car painter and horse owner Earl Scheib: “I’ll shoe any horse any color for $64.99.”

But when she is bent over a hot forge in her shop on the premises, when she is holding the leg of a million-dollar colt over her knees along shed row, there is no clowning around. It is a living that hardly seemed likely from someone who made her debut at the New York Cotillion, who was graduated as a liberal arts major from the classy Briarcliff College.

“This is murder on the back,” she said, squatting in the shadow of a stall, laboring over the foot of Amarone, a stakes-winning 5-year-old horse from England.

It has been done thusly for thousands of years.

Upon parking outside stall No. 16, the first order of business for Gates in the brisk early morning air was to rummage through the bed of her pickup truck. There--among the hundreds of aluminum shoes and other essentials of her occupation--she fished out four felt pads and proceeded to glue them to the inside of four U-shaped shoes.

“The pads are the cushions,” she explained. “I have felt, leather, nylon and plastic. Everything depends on what the foot wants. I have 70 horses at this meeting, and I have to remember what each one prefers (based on trial and error).”

Inside the stable of trainer Howard Zucker, groom Howard Garland had already led Amarone onto the dirt walkway. The animal, being held in place by a leather shank, looked as if he felt he could have put his time to better use.

“This is something they just tolerate,” the groom said.

About once a month the average thoroughbred puts up with it, this changing of shoes. Not the latest in patent leather, no evening pumps, just the same old metal moccasin.

Staying on Schedule

“The whole point of shoeing is to shorten the toe, which grows about a quarter of an inch in a month, something like a toenail,” Gates said. “The aluminum shoes themselves (which are discarded) would last longer.” If too much toe remains, stress results, and it becomes difficult for the well-bred beast to make his step.

“I keep track of the shoeing schedule for the trainers on my calendar. Of course, a trainer might want to work a horse that day, and so I wait. Preferably, a racehorse should be shod the day before he runs. Many of the horses which the fans watch are wearing brand new shoes.”

At the Zucker barn, the gluing of the four pads having been completed, the farrier took the left foreleg of Amarone in her hands and used pliers known as pull-offs to remove the old shoes.

Her work outfit included a leather apron over her jeans, plus a Brooks Brothers shirt.

Using a tool called nippers, she trimmed the outer hoof, the dead and insensitive horn.

The blacksmith filed the hoof smooth with a rasp. A dog happened past and made off with a mouthful of trimming, which dogs like to chew on.

Gates had already spiked a portable anvil called a stall jack into the dirt, and, using its metal platform, was shaping the shoe with a hammer. She uses eight nails per shoe and, speaking through some of them that she was holding in her mouth (to save time), mumbled: “My dentist gets mad about this. It chips my teeth.”

Be that as it may, the procedure continued, the only female blacksmith of thoroughbreds using a hammer with a snoot resembling an anteater’s nose to strike the nails and fasten the new shoe. “I’ve had carpenters tell me they couldn’t hit a nail with something like this.”

Finally, Gates used a tool known as clenchers--probably found in no other trade--to hook the nails protruding on the outside of the hoof and secure the shoe in place.

Next would come the right foreleg, then the left hind, lastly the right hind. But first, attention to the ever-patient Amarone’s comfort. Both the groom and the farrier had observed that the horse was becoming fidgety. Gates took time to rub the legs with a liquid fly repellent.

By the time the shoeing was completed, about 45 minutes had elapsed. Usually three to five horses are done each day.

The talent behind (and in front of) all of this declines to reveal precisely how much this benefits her bank account, but said that she makes a good living. Although not without paying a price.

“Because of the strain on my back, I do exercises on the floor of my home, usually stretches,” the Pasadena resident said. “Sometimes I rub on liniment. Horse liniment.”

Gates holds forth at the Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar meetings, and now she was in her shop on the grounds of the Arcadia track, under a spreading oak tree.

Among the organized clutter were two forges--one a gas model that uses propane, the other the old-fashioned kind that uses coal. “Which one I use depends on my mood,” the blacksmith said.

This isn’t a tongless task.

Gates uses tongs to put the shoes into the forge, and to bend and shape them. She consults a steel pattern for each of her horses, obtained earlier in the stall.

She would never survive if her customers were human. “Basically, I carry five different sizes,” she said.

For 15 years now she has been at it, the last eight at the race tracks. She learned her occupation during two months at the Oklahoma Farrier College, and takes a one-week refresher course during the annual convention of blacksmiths, held this year in Raleigh, N.C.

“It was a tough exam to become a union farrier when I took it, but it has been made easier now,” she said.

Co-Producing TV Show

Gates is single, but hardly the type with time on her hands. After arising at 5:30 a.m. for a morning of shoeing, she heads for Temple City, where she is co-producer of the upcoming Channel 12 “Your Town” show. Then to diction classes at Pasadena City College.

Her earlier years saw her as a waitress, a modern jazz dancer.

And now, in addition to everything else, to finding time to tend her rose garden, she takes a class in Greek two nights a week in Pasadena. Why? Like the mountain climber, because it is there.

Never for a moment, however, does Ada Gates forget her responsibility toward an animal that weighs about half a ton, travels at roughly 40 m.p.h. and, going at top speed, sometimes puts all of its weight on only one of its four feet.

Not that being a farrier doesn’t take its toll. “My hands do have calluses,” the blacksmith conceded. “At night I rub in cream, and sometimes I wear gloves to bed, to keep the cream on.”

But then, that’s shoe biz.