A Stable Environment Has Troubled Teens Riding High

Underneath a calm summer sky, the boys and the horses met.

Some encounters were smooth, like old friends meeting again.

“Hey there, Diamond,” a boy named Michael cooed, gently petting the mare’s face.

Most were charged with fear--and then triumph.

“Damn,” one boy muttered through a smile, as he trotted along on a stallion.

On the quad at Central Juvenile Hall on Saturday, where the boys and the horses met, lessons abounded: The boys learned what it means to understand an animal, and what it means to face their own fear and conquer it.

That, say organizers, was the goal of the day.

“There’s a certain magic that happens between a horse and a kid--you just have to experience it to understand it,” said Michael Joseph Patrick McMeel, founder of the Woodland Hills-based Awareness Foundation, which sponsored the event.

That magic is what prompted McMeel to create his “Inner City Slickers,” an “Old West Program” that provides a cowboy experience to incarcerated youths.

On Saturday, McMeel took 16 horses and a group of “wranglers”--all volunteers--to Juvenile Hall to teach the boys how to ride, care for and appreciate horses.

Actor and rider Chris Burgard offered not only instruction in the how-tos of riding, but a history lesson as well.

Much of what is seen in cowboy movies “wasn’t that way,” Burgard explained to the boys, all dressed in the uniform of the hall--orange jumpsuits or white T-shirts and gray pants.

“Most of the cowboys were Mexican, Indian or black. One of the best cowboys in the world was black, Bill Pickett.”

The wranglers each took charge of a “posse” of about five boys. John Lemons and the mare named Diamond offered what was for most boys in his group their first riding experience.

The horse can sense fear, Lemons explained. Horses, like people, have a personality, and that must be respected. Lemons taught them about horseshoes and saddles and how to hold the reins.

“If you’re going to be a cowboy, you leave your right hand free,” Lemons said. “Why do you leave your right hand free?”

“To shoot with?” a 14-year-old named Leivano offered.

“Your right hand you use for roping, to handle your rope,” a patient Lemons explained.

At moments like these, posturing has no place. Jose, a 14-year-old, is covered with tattoos. He ran with a gang. He once was shot.

But when it came to Mac, the black Arabian stallion, Jose was not up for the challenge.

“It was scary!” he said, after Xena Richter finally convinced him to ride. “The homies did it,” he said nodding to a cluster of boys, “so I couldn’t be a chicken.”

A producer and director of commercials, and formerly the drummer in the rock group Three Dog Night, McMeel wanted to provide young people with an experience that would help them grow. Saturday’s event was his fourth visit to a Juvenile Hall.

“The kids overcome their own fear,” he said. “Getting on the horse, they have a chance to be courageous. Any time anyone pushes past their own fear, that’s courage.”

Not all the boys were novices.

*

Back in Nayarit, Mexico, another 14-year-old, named Jose, rode horses with his grandfather. The horses Saturday reminded him of those days.

“My grandpa showed me how to ride,” Jose said, sitting under a tree watching the horses trot by. “That’s why I wanted to come today. He passed away. I had a lot of love for my grandpa.”

Where Alvin lives in Lancaster, there are lots of horses, he said. “I didn’t know some of the stuff [Lemons] said.”

If magic happens when kids and horses come together, something also happens with people who are serious horse lovers, like McMeel’s friends, many of whom are working in some aspect of the entertainment industry.

“I get a lot of joy just sharing my love of horses with the kids,” said Lisa Brown, a celebrity horse trainer, who also works at Will Rogers State Park.

Lemons, who rode out of stables in South Los Angeles and for many years taught youth there to ride, said the program would show the boys that “they’re not forgotten. People still care about them.”

Patrick Shining Elk, a Shoshone, lived on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and shares Native American stories with the boys.

“This is the closest I can get to back home,” he said. “I can learn from them just as much as they can learn from me.”