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The Last of the Cavalry Days Remembered
George Carter '74, one of the last of McDonogh's cavalry riders, reflects below on the 1971 discontinuation of the semi-military program and the end of the beloved cavalry. At the first-ever cavalry reunion April 30, he was one of five alums who spoke fondly of McDonogh riding experiences.
When I was putting my four-year-old son Josh to bed last night, I asked him: What should I talk about at the cavalry reunion tomorrow morning?
“Dinosaurs,” he said firmly, with not a hint of hesitation.
I thought for a moment. Hmmm. Yep, he’s right. We’re all dinosaurs. It’s been 40 years this spring since the cavalry was disbanded, and I was among the last of the breed. I was a freshman in 1971, the youngest grade that a student could be in the troop. The cavalry, like the dinosaur epoch, is long extinct. But it will similarly never be forgotten.
When Wade asked me to talk a little about the cavalry, from my vantage point in the class of 1974, I said, “Well, sure, but you know this isn’t going to be a completely happy story?
He said: “Just tell it.”
So here goes:
A few years ago, after the memorial service for my dad, Snowden Carter, a very proud cavalry officer from the class of ’35, Bob Lamborn, sidled up to me and asked me when I graduated from McDonogh. “Early ‘70s,” I said.
Bob gave me a nod and a sympathetic look, and said something to the effect of “this must have been a very difficult time to be a student at McDonogh.”
“Oh yes,” I replied.
He then summed it up quite well. All the truths we had known, all the training we had had up to that point, suddenly society said it wasn’t that important any more. The certainties were gone. Instead of a right way and a wrong way, which every McDonogh boy could immediately discern, there was in the wake of the Vietnam War a moral relativism sweeping everything before it aside.
Welcome to the McDonogh of 1971. Long before it was announced, we all knew the military was on the way out ... There were acts of disobedience, both large and small, some innocent and some less so.
The most memorable for me was related to a movie we saw called “Second Effort.” I believe it was in Edwards Gym, and at least the entire upper school was assembled to watch it. It was an inspirational story about the legendary coach Vince Lombardi and his real-life example of how a “second effort” often won the game.
Not long after, an apparently unhappy student (a cavalryman in fact) enlisted some other fellows to open all the water taps on campus, while he sabotaged the pump house down in the meadow. His aim was to run the school out of water, just shut it down. His crowning achievement was to climb the water tower, and spray-paint in large letters for everyone to see: SECOND EFFORT, ‘71.
Well Joe, you ran the water tower low, but you didn’t shut the place down.Your sarcasm, writ large over campus, though, weighed heavily. We had excellent teachers, most with decades of experience, many of them World War II combat veterans, but their message not only wasn’t getting through, it was now subject to ridicule. Welcome to the 1970s, the goofiest of decades!
The day the school announced the military was ending, we were assembled in Edwards Gym. When the edict was read, nearly everyone stood up and cheered. I did too. Then I looked beside me and saw my buddy Chris Harrison (Bart’s son) sitting and looking glum. He stared up at me: “Don’t you know? This means they’re killing the cavalry.” I sat down too. Well, we did of course, lose the cavalry, but the horse program lived on and you can see the heights that it has reached today.
Even in those dying days of the military, though, we felt special to be in the cavalry. I wore my shoulder patch proudly and liked the cool white cover for my hat. I even remember one cavalry charge, of sorts. One spring day, we were on our horses in the riding hall when a student charged in, yelling that there were some hippies camped down in the meadow. Since we were unsupervised at the time, we all raced off after him. About a dozen of us roared down along the stream, about to the area where the old swimming pool had been years before, and sure enough, there was an honest-to-God hippie camp in the meadow. When they saw us charging at them, they became supremely frightened, and formed up in a circle facing us. We galloped around their camp once or twice, then raced off back toward the barn. A short time later, we ventured back down, and the hippies had vanished, lock, stock and barrel. I later envisioned them roaring down Reisterstown Road in their rattletrap VW van, wondering if it was the LSD or if they had really been buzzed by a dozen crazed horsemen.
And there was one man who lived the core values of McDonogh and the cavalry every day. I’m talking about Willis Lynch, of course. I always tried my best because I never wanted to let him down. I remember trading with another kid in the ninth grade just so I could be a biddy (or waiter) at his lunch table, the cavalry inner circle. Strong, stoic and modest, he seemed omnipresent at the barn and out on the trails. If you were doing something the least bit out of line, he would immediately materialize – on a tractor, on a horse, or on foot – and yell: “What the Sam Hill’s going on here?”
I remember he always took the toughest, screwiest horses to ride for himself. We were on a run with the Green Spring one day when we started jumping a series of solid rail fences. Mr. Lynch, who was pretty much alongside me, yelled over that we were on part of the Grand National Course. I wasn’t scared because I was on Cricket the Wonder Horse. She was just eating up that course. Mr. Lynch, however, was riding a green and skittish chestnut horse named Pom-Pom. At one fence, Pom-Pom swerved sharply and stopped. As Mr. Lynch lined up for another try, he asked me to circle around in front of the jump and come past him. As I did, he yelled “YAH, YAH!!!” With all his might, he got Pom-Pom right on Cricket’s tail and we all soared right over. “He’s not a bad horse,” Willis said later of Pom-Pom, “he just lacks courage.” Unlike Willis Lynch, who was almost 65 years old, with a bad back, and using the Grand National Course as a schooling opportunity.
So, in the end, we all came out of the military pretty much OK. The times had changed, and McDonogh did too. I look around at this gorgeous campus, and the fabulous riding facility, and realize that it was men like Willis Lynch and headmasters Doc Lamborn, Bob Lamborn and Bill Mules who made darn sure that there was a place to hand down to the younger generations. It could have wound up a subdivision or shopping mall, but for their strength.
And I think of the McDonogh boys who gave their lives so that we’d have the chance to live to be old men, even though they didn’t. Guys like Mark Kelly, a star lacrosse player who was lost in his Wildcat fighter at the Battle of Midway, and Lee Temple, shot down over Normandy the day after the invasion, and Bobby Rasche, a gifted athlete and horseman who died on his third day in combat in the Battle of the Bulge. Those many young faces I saw hanging in the memorial hall of the old fieldhouse make me supremely proud to be a McDonogh boy. It’s all about loyalty, duty, and never, ever giving up. The military and the cavalry aren’t really gone. They are the bedrock foundation for the McDonogh of today and tomorrow.
George Carter '74, one of the last of McDonogh's cavalry riders, reflects below on the 1971 discontinuation of the semi-military program and the end of the beloved cavalry. At the first-ever cavalry reunion April 30, he was one of five alums who spoke fondly of McDonogh riding experiences.
When I was putting my four-year-old son Josh to bed last night, I asked him: What should I talk about at the cavalry reunion tomorrow morning?
“Dinosaurs,” he said firmly, with not a hint of hesitation.
I thought for a moment. Hmmm. Yep, he’s right. We’re all dinosaurs. It’s been 40 years this spring since the cavalry was disbanded, and I was among the last of the breed. I was a freshman in 1971, the youngest grade that a student could be in the troop. The cavalry, like the dinosaur epoch, is long extinct. But it will similarly never be forgotten.
When Wade asked me to talk a little about the cavalry, from my vantage point in the class of 1974, I said, “Well, sure, but you know this isn’t going to be a completely happy story?
He said: “Just tell it.”
So here goes:
A few years ago, after the memorial service for my dad, Snowden Carter, a very proud cavalry officer from the class of ’35, Bob Lamborn, sidled up to me and asked me when I graduated from McDonogh. “Early ‘70s,” I said.
Bob gave me a nod and a sympathetic look, and said something to the effect of “this must have been a very difficult time to be a student at McDonogh.”
“Oh yes,” I replied.
He then summed it up quite well. All the truths we had known, all the training we had had up to that point, suddenly society said it wasn’t that important any more. The certainties were gone. Instead of a right way and a wrong way, which every McDonogh boy could immediately discern, there was in the wake of the Vietnam War a moral relativism sweeping everything before it aside.
Welcome to the McDonogh of 1971. Long before it was announced, we all knew the military was on the way out ... There were acts of disobedience, both large and small, some innocent and some less so.
The most memorable for me was related to a movie we saw called “Second Effort.” I believe it was in Edwards Gym, and at least the entire upper school was assembled to watch it. It was an inspirational story about the legendary coach Vince Lombardi and his real-life example of how a “second effort” often won the game.
Not long after, an apparently unhappy student (a cavalryman in fact) enlisted some other fellows to open all the water taps on campus, while he sabotaged the pump house down in the meadow. His aim was to run the school out of water, just shut it down. His crowning achievement was to climb the water tower, and spray-paint in large letters for everyone to see: SECOND EFFORT, ‘71.
Well Joe, you ran the water tower low, but you didn’t shut the place down.Your sarcasm, writ large over campus, though, weighed heavily. We had excellent teachers, most with decades of experience, many of them World War II combat veterans, but their message not only wasn’t getting through, it was now subject to ridicule. Welcome to the 1970s, the goofiest of decades!
The day the school announced the military was ending, we were assembled in Edwards Gym. When the edict was read, nearly everyone stood up and cheered. I did too. Then I looked beside me and saw my buddy Chris Harrison (Bart’s son) sitting and looking glum. He stared up at me: “Don’t you know? This means they’re killing the cavalry.” I sat down too. Well, we did of course, lose the cavalry, but the horse program lived on and you can see the heights that it has reached today.
Even in those dying days of the military, though, we felt special to be in the cavalry. I wore my shoulder patch proudly and liked the cool white cover for my hat. I even remember one cavalry charge, of sorts. One spring day, we were on our horses in the riding hall when a student charged in, yelling that there were some hippies camped down in the meadow. Since we were unsupervised at the time, we all raced off after him. About a dozen of us roared down along the stream, about to the area where the old swimming pool had been years before, and sure enough, there was an honest-to-God hippie camp in the meadow. When they saw us charging at them, they became supremely frightened, and formed up in a circle facing us. We galloped around their camp once or twice, then raced off back toward the barn. A short time later, we ventured back down, and the hippies had vanished, lock, stock and barrel. I later envisioned them roaring down Reisterstown Road in their rattletrap VW van, wondering if it was the LSD or if they had really been buzzed by a dozen crazed horsemen.
And there was one man who lived the core values of McDonogh and the cavalry every day. I’m talking about Willis Lynch, of course. I always tried my best because I never wanted to let him down. I remember trading with another kid in the ninth grade just so I could be a biddy (or waiter) at his lunch table, the cavalry inner circle. Strong, stoic and modest, he seemed omnipresent at the barn and out on the trails. If you were doing something the least bit out of line, he would immediately materialize – on a tractor, on a horse, or on foot – and yell: “What the Sam Hill’s going on here?”
I remember he always took the toughest, screwiest horses to ride for himself. We were on a run with the Green Spring one day when we started jumping a series of solid rail fences. Mr. Lynch, who was pretty much alongside me, yelled over that we were on part of the Grand National Course. I wasn’t scared because I was on Cricket the Wonder Horse. She was just eating up that course. Mr. Lynch, however, was riding a green and skittish chestnut horse named Pom-Pom. At one fence, Pom-Pom swerved sharply and stopped. As Mr. Lynch lined up for another try, he asked me to circle around in front of the jump and come past him. As I did, he yelled “YAH, YAH!!!” With all his might, he got Pom-Pom right on Cricket’s tail and we all soared right over. “He’s not a bad horse,” Willis said later of Pom-Pom, “he just lacks courage.” Unlike Willis Lynch, who was almost 65 years old, with a bad back, and using the Grand National Course as a schooling opportunity.
So, in the end, we all came out of the military pretty much OK. The times had changed, and McDonogh did too. I look around at this gorgeous campus, and the fabulous riding facility, and realize that it was men like Willis Lynch and headmasters Doc Lamborn, Bob Lamborn and Bill Mules who made darn sure that there was a place to hand down to the younger generations. It could have wound up a subdivision or shopping mall, but for their strength.
And I think of the McDonogh boys who gave their lives so that we’d have the chance to live to be old men, even though they didn’t. Guys like Mark Kelly, a star lacrosse player who was lost in his Wildcat fighter at the Battle of Midway, and Lee Temple, shot down over Normandy the day after the invasion, and Bobby Rasche, a gifted athlete and horseman who died on his third day in combat in the Battle of the Bulge. Those many young faces I saw hanging in the memorial hall of the old fieldhouse make me supremely proud to be a McDonogh boy. It’s all about loyalty, duty, and never, ever giving up. The military and the cavalry aren’t really gone. They are the bedrock foundation for the McDonogh of today and tomorrow.