A Lifetime With Arabians Ronteza, Part I by Sheila Varian There have been many great horses at Varian Arabians, and some, especially our stallions, that have been particularly associated with the name Varian. But the first, the one that put me on the map, was a little bay mare named Ronteza.
old gelding by *Witez II. I really liked him, and he was right on a lot of counts, but I had it in mind that I wanted a 3-year-old to start and we preferred a mare we could eventually breed.
One of our next stops was in Porterville at Donald Jones’ ranch. Mr. Jones was a wonderful man, and he’d bred some very good horses. He had a small bay mare by *Witez II, 2 years old, that caught our interest. She was just nice, very cleanly-made, sort of unobtrusive—a solid color, with just a little bit of white on one foot and a tiny star. She was a year younger than I thought I wanted, but she had a dam named Ronna, who had been a successful hackamore horse. So I was really interested in the 2-year-old filly—not so much because of *Witez II, but because Ronna had been successfully shown Ronteza (*Witez II x Ronna, by Faronek). in the hackamore In the 1950s, by the well-known California was horseman Ora Rhodes, who also showed and trained coming into its own as a center of Arabian horse open reined cow horses. Mom and I went to lunch and breeding. Two of the better stallions were the Polish tried to decide what to do. The filly, Ronteza, was at the *Witez II and *Lotnik, who had been rescued by General top of our price range, which was $750. George Patton’s men at the end of World War II in the famous raid that reclaimed the Spanish Riding School’s After much debate, we went back to Donald Jones’ Lipizzaner broodmares. Once in American hands, *Witez ranch and bought Ronteza. She was the first horse II and *Lotnik were sent to the Kellogg Remount Station that I ever signed a check for, and I was so nervous in California, and *Witez II especially made his mark as that I wrote a deposit check for $4.50 rather than the a sire. Among the early horses my mother and I saw when appropriate $450. we went looking for stock horse candidates was a 4-yearRonteza was my second Arabian. My first was Farlotta, who was purchased at the age of 2 after an early life of neglect. She was the first horse I ever trained, finished and showed in a spade bit. I was just 15 when she came to me, and my neighbor, Syd Mary Spencer, was my teacher and mentor as Farlotta and I learned together. By the time Farlotta was 6, she was winning consistently in western pleasure competitions and starting to win in the stock horse classes (now reining). I was ready for a second stock horse/cow horse to start in training.
196 | AR ABIAN HORSE TIMES