October 19 - Anna Lee Aldred

Image courtesy denverpost.com

On this day, in 1939, Anna Lee Mills became the first licensed female jockey in the United States. Born April 19, 1921, in Montrose, Colorado, Anna Lee was part of a large family that included just as many horses as it did people. Her father and mother bred, trained and raced horses and four of her siblings became rodeo performers and champions. Anna Lee naturally began riding shortly after she learned to walk and had already won her first race (on a pony, of course) by the time she was six. Before she was a teenager, she was racing (and winning) on tracks all over Colorado and Wyoming as an amateur. As she neared adulthood, she looked around and thought, why couldn’t I do this professionally? All she needed was a license. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard to get, right?

As it turns out, not terribly easy either. Anna Lee had to actually leave the United States in order to get a license. She travelled south to the Agua Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico and applied there. Even though Agua Caliente had already been running all female amateur races as a gimmick, track officials were still reluctant to give her what she wanted. They scoured the rule book but couldn’t find anything that prohibited women from being professional jockeys (and apparently nothing they could conceivably misinterpret instead). So they concluded that, yes, she could be licensed and handed over the small wooden shield that granted her a place on the starting line of professional races.

Image courtesy time.com

Anna Lee jumped right into the racing circuit, apparently losing her first race by a nose. She more than made up for that in auspicious beginning by winning dozens of races over the next several years at state and county fairs all over the country. She wasn’t done growing however. By 1945, she’d shot up to 5’ 5” and weighed 18 pounds more than the even 100 she’d been when she got her license. You might still think she was still pretty petite, but in the racing world every inch and pound is crucial. So Anna Lee retire from racing and, after teaching herself some riding tricks, joined the rodeo circuit. For the next five years she wowed audiences as she rode around arenas actually standing on the saddle of a galloping horse or switching things up and hanging off the side of a horse by one foot. It’s hard to say what initially attracted the attention of Wayne Aldred of Raton, New Mexico but, in 1950, Anna Lee consented to marry him and retired.

Anna Lee didn’t stop riding horses when she began helping her new husband on his cattle ranch. She would continue to ride most days for the next 51 years. She would occasionally head up riding schools for local youngsters and, after she and Wayne split up after 35 years of marriage, she moved back to Montrose and helped move horses around before the races there every year. Right up until she fell from a horse and broke her hip at the age of 80. Only then did Anna Lee give up the thing she loved most in this world. Even after she moved into a nursing home, though, she continued to sleep under the comfort of a horse blanket. In 1983, she’d been inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and you can see her 1939 license and a pair of her riding silks at their museum in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2004, she was honored with a spot in the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.  And on June 12, 2006, the racing pioneer and woman who once said “God forbid I should go to any heaven where there are no horses” breathed her last in the same town she’d breathed her first. She was 85.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Body Wars