Jo & Danny Boy
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J. L. (Jo) Hardesty has had a special bond with horses since she was a small child. In her powerfully inspiring Lost Legend Trilogy, she shares her passion for this gift from God, and speaks to the origin of the mystical bond between the horse and humankind.
Jo’s father, the renowned piano man, Keith C. Hardesty, was a member of the Illinois National Guard’s Horse Drawn Field Artillery before his service as a U. S. Army commissioned officer in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. He introduced Jo to the horse when she was just 4 years old, and the love affair began. At 10, Jo started cleaning stalls and grooming horses at a livery stable to pay for the board of her own horse. At 12, she broke to ride a young horse for which her father had traded a grand piano. By 14, she was giving riding lessons and starting colts under saddle.
When she was just 9 years old, Jo and her beloved Dad decided that she would one day be a writer. But she didn’t begin that career until she was in her twenties. Jo’s independent and adventurous spirit led her to learn about life in a variety of careers. In addition to her horse life, Jo has been a police dispatcher and a school bus driver, a waitress and a restaurant manager, an event coordinator and video producer, not to mention being a wife and mother. She had her first child when she was 18, and became a grandmother at 35. The mother of three and grandmother of seven has been—since 1988—very happily married to Jim Lauter, her partner in life and love and creativity.
Oh, and by the way, there were also “moms” in Jo’s life. Blessed by fate in a way that might look from a distance like suffering, the child, then the young girl, had the grace of being loved and led by two women of great heart and tremendous character. First there was her biological mother, Arline Hardesty, who adored Jo’s dad and taught her daughter to do the same. This mom was terrified of horses and remained certain that Jo’s love of them would be a passing fancy, a childish love affair of which she would one day grow tired. Then, there was the extraordinarily generous sort of foster mom, Betty Butler, who took Jo in when the exigencies of life sent her away from home at the age of 14. This is too long a story to include in this brief biography—but it will be told one day. Suffice it to say just now that, from Betty, Jo learned life lessons that will always carry her forward; and that this beautiful woman gave Jo two sisters of the heart, Bonnie and Cindy, with whom this writer will continue her journey, as long as the journey goes on.
Today Jo and Jim live on a mountain twenty miles North of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. They share their little piece of paradise with grandson, Cole Pollard, a young Australian Shepherd, Danny Boy, two giant house cats—Smokey Lonesome and Tubby Tommy Tiger Toes Tucker, a family of raccoons, and all manner of other wild creatures including deer, elk, foxes, porcupines and a variety of lovely birds. Soon One Last Time, a buckskin Half-Arabian colt that Jo’s daughter, Riyan, presented to her on Mother’s Day, 2007, will join the menagerie on the mountain. And the adventure of life goes on . . .
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