Cowgirl Won’t Be Cowed by Aging
In 1901, while the Wright brothers were trying to fly and Guglielmo Marconi was trying to get his radio to work, Constance Douglas was born in a tiny Texas border town, the only child of a district judge and his genteel wife.
It would never occur to Connie, as she swam in the Rio Grande and rode horses with cowboys, that other little girls in other places lived vastly different lives. She was a spirited, willful child and the world was hers. That it began in Texas and ended in Texas was just fine with her, and with everyone she knew.
After she grew up and went to college, she became the first woman to enter the University of Texas Law School. She met Eleanor Roosevelt. She taught school and horseback riding. She didn’t marry until age 42, becoming a rancher as well as a wife.
It never crossed her mind that she would outlive every person she ever loved, including Jack, her husband of 40 years. Or that along the way she would become famous simply by being herself.
Connie Douglas Reeves, at age 100, helped open the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame this summer, sharing the spotlight with a new inductee, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Reeves was honored because she has taught more than 30,000 girls to ride Western and English, because she embodies the independent cowgirl spirit, and because on most days, although she is “hard of hearing and can’t see a thing,” she still gets on her horse and rides.
For the past 66 summers, a significant portion of her life and heart has been claimed by Camp Waldemar for Girls, an exclusive oasis straddling the cool, green Guadalupe River in the Texas hill country.
Riding, canoeing, swimming and archery are taught during monthlong sessions intended to supply 7-to 16-year-olds with something that Reeves never seemed to lack -- self-possession.
“Always saddle your own horse” has become her life motto and is repeated almost every time her name is mentioned. They read it during her Hall of Fame induction. And somehow, it ended up in Liz Smith’s tabloid gossip column, just before a juicy item about Tom Cruise.
“I don’t remember saying that, but they keep saying I did,” she said with a chuckle.”I meant really saddle your own horse. You want to know that your horse is saddled properly. It establishes a good relationship with the horse.”
Now it is part of her folklore, and that’s fine with her too.
At first, she didn’t think that she belonged in the cowgirl hall of fame. “I didn’t see that I had made much of a contribution,” she said, sitting on the porch of Camp Waldemar’s stables, taking refuge from a merciless Texas sun.
She is wearing a blue oxford-cloth shirt and form-fitting navy slacks with stitched creases. A black belt, with a silver buckle the size of a passport, rides her flat stomach. On her tiny feet are cowboy boots of ancient leather, crinkled like the surface of an old oil painting.
Her white hair is tightly curled, her lips painted crimson, her fingernails manicured and lacquered red.
“But they said I taught all those girls, and when you add the fact that I did all that ranching, I guess I’ve done enough to contribute to the Western heritage of life,” she said, thoughtfulness creeping into a voice cracked and high-pitched with age. Her failing eyes are fixed on the horizon, gloriously blue with clouds of spun cotton.
“Boy, that makes me feel important,” she said, smiling, hooking her thumbs into imaginary suspenders.
In just a few days, the latest collection of 300 campers will trudge home from Waldemar, little more than an hour’s drive northwest from San Antonio. But on this hot, clear morning, about 20 girls sit on newly saddled horses, trying not to look terrified.
Riding classes are divided by age and experience. “These are the absolute babies, the weakest ones, the smallest ones, the timid ones,” she said softly. She means the girls. The same could be said for their horses.
Then off they all go, single-file behind a college-age instructor, the girls rigid under white riding helmets, their poky horses shuffling with long necks slung low.
“That’s good, that’s good. Keep your heels down,” Reeves trills from the porch. “Just relax!”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girls chorus over shoulders so tense they’re almost at ear level. Some of the girls shoot wide-eyed looks to each other that say, “Is she crazy?”
“A horse really can smell fear,” Reeves said.
That does not bode well for some of the departing riders.
Reeves is teaching her third generation of campers. At Waldemar, mothers often sign up daughters at birth, who grow up to enroll their daughters -- until Reeves recently found herself teaching the granddaughter of a girl she taught to ride in the 1930s. The cost is about $2,800 for four weeks.
She is legendary here, as constant as the live oaks and stone camp buildings. “Did you notice this?” she asked boldly, pointing to a life-sized statue of her near the entrance. “I’m just a spoiled brat,” she said, grinning.
She has a hitch in her get-along courtesy of her horse, Dr. Pepper, who got piqued about 16 years ago after having new shoes nailed into his hooves, and hauled off and kicked her, shattering her thigh bone.
It is only one of several injuries she’s sustained in old age. In 1994, an Arabian gelding named Macho threw her after stumbling into a hornet’s nest, leaving her with a punctured lung, fractured ribs, broken arm and too many hornet stings to count. That earned her another spot in local history: She is the oldest Texan to apply for worker’s compensation.
She has suffered macular degeneration for years now, leaving her unable to see much of anything except vague shapes and foggy colors. This does not keep her from racing all over camp in an electric golf cart, sometimes veering off the asphalt path, scattering giggling teenagers like a grenade in a trout pond.
“Hi, honey, how are you?” she croons, waving as she tools by. “Coming through!”
“Hi, Miss Connie,” the girls reply from a safe distance.
“Sure wish I knew who I was talking to,” she mutters under her breath.
She turns 101 on Thursday. She hasn’t decided yet how to celebrate.
Always, she is asked these questions: To what does she attribute her long life? (“I’m just fortunate.”) What is the most significant historic event she has witnessed? (“Men landing on the moon.”) And what, after all these years, means the most to her? (“Nature.”)
“I am not a church-going individual,” she said. “My church is in nature. I can go sit on the banks of the river and watch the water and feel the wind, and I am closer to God -- or whoever runs the universe.”
Which is why she stays in Texas. “I never wanted to live anywhere else,” she said.
When just a baby, she was propped up on a horse by her mother for a photographic portrait. “I was sitting on a horse before I could sit up by myself,” she said. This was not necessarily a sign of things to come, she insists. “I have a baby picture of me sitting on a cow too,” she said, cracking herself up.
When she was 16, her family moved to San Antonio. Her mother, Ada, who wouldn’t go to the grocer’s without gloves and hat, wanted her to study speech. Her father, William Constant, wanted her to study law, as he had.
She was never able to choose between her parents, so she studied both.
She was the only woman in law school. One professor made her sit in front, where he called on her constantly.
“He would say, ‘Now, do you understand that point, Miss Douglas?’
“And I’d nod my head and say, ‘Yes.’
“And he’d say to the class, ‘See, it’s an easy point. Anyone can understand it.’ ”
When the Depression came, money for lawyers went. Her father had no work. Reeves took a teaching job. For years, it was her family’s sole income.
When she took a job as counselor for horseback riding at Camp Waldemar, she met Jack Reeves, a former rodeo star, trick rider and keeper of the camp’s horses.
Six years later, they got hitched. On their 10,000-acre ranch, her wifely duties included herding and branding cattle, vaccinating and castrating sheep, birthing sheep and, always, caring for the horses.
Forty years after their wedding, Jack died from Alzheimer’s disease. It was just plain hard watching a proud and strong man disappear piece by piece. In his place was a sometimes frightened, sometimes angry stranger.
“He got up one day and started out of the house and I said, ‘Jack, where you going to?’
“ ‘I forgot to unsaddle my horse.’
“ ‘Jack, we’re in town and you don’t have a horse.’
“He snarled. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ ”
“It was that kind of thing,” she said with a heavy sigh.
“I was relieved when he died. It was no kind of life for him,” she said. That it was no kind of life for her, either, goes unspoken.
She never remarried. She never had children and doesn’t regret it. “And I’m sure glad I don’t have grandchildren. The world today, it’s disturbed.”
Children approach her with awe, looking deep into her lined face, reaching tentatively to touch creased, age-spotted hands.
“I think it would be awesome to be that old,” said 11-year-old Carol Soules, just back from riding class, a fine sheen of sweat covering the freckles across her nose.
“I wish I could have lived when she lived because then I would have seen all the inventions, like the computer,” she said wistfully. “I think that would be so cool.”
The inventions Reeves has seen predate the computer by decades -- the automobile, the radio, phonographs, telephones of the party-line variety.
Long ago, she made peace with solitude. She has known it as an only child, as a middle-aged wife riding the fences of her ranch and, now, as an old woman.
Sometimes it seems each week brings a new report of dying friends. “I do get despondent sometimes,” she said shyly. “But I get over it. Old age is not fun.
“My husband’s sister lives in a one-room apartment. She watches TV all day. When she does her washing, she’s tired. When she finishes eating, she’s tired.”
Sometimes, Connie Reeves would like to take the woman -- who is more than a decade younger -- and shake her.
“What kind of living is that? You have to get out in the world and look at all the wonderful things.”
On the Net:
The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame: www.cowgirl.net