You might want to give Marcy Walker a hug today. And you might want to give her another hug tomorrow.
The amateur halter exhibitor from West Friendship, Maryland, is missing her dad, Earl Walker, who died in a traffic accident October 8. Marcy was at the 2010 All American Quarter Horse Congress when she got the news, and she showed anyway.
“I showed at Congress, because I could just hear Dad say, ‘Don’t you come home on account of me. You stay there and you show,’” she says. “I didn’t show very well and we ended up sixth, but that’s OK. I just lost it, trotting through four judges. I could barely see the orange cones, but I knew he would be proud of me because I was out there. He would have been mad at me, though, because I didn’t show very well.”
Earl was the kind of man who never saw a need he couldn’t help meet.
“He never knew a stranger,” Marcy says. “If you needed it, he gave it to you. There were people he became friendly with, and he bought braces for their kids because they couldn’t afford them. If somebody needed something and he had the means to get it, he did. This one time, he bought about 1,000 spiral notebooks and gave them to the kids in downtown Baltimore who didn’t have paper for school. His whole life was like that.
“He was the glue to our whole family.”
Despite her loss, Marcy is at the 2010 AQHA World Championship Show, hoping to win a world championship with her 3-year-old mare, Telusives Last Jewel, by Telusive and out of Conclusions Jewel by Mr Cool Conclusion.
“We spend all year getting them qualified, and that’s what I do,” she says. “It’s been very difficult.”
She has been taking some comfort in her Quarter Horse family, people who supported her with hugs and kind words.
“Friends were coming out of the woodwork,” Marcy says. “There were people I hadn’t seen in years that came up to me. And cards and flowers and fruit baskets, and it was just so nice.”
Marcy says her dad “showed a little,” but that “he was a nervous wreck” when he did.
“He was the best dad,” she says, “and he lived for me and my (two) sisters and my mom. He was proud of us.”
