Horse Chick

Marilyn “Chick” Cerniga was a young woman when she suffered the worst accident of her life, after being thrown off a horse.

A petit woman, the injuries were so serious that she might have decided to pursue another hobby. After all, she’s tried her hand at painting china, and she’s bred and raised dogs. She currently has a herd of short-horn cattle, with a couple of bulls that she continues to breed. But to have done anything else but ride would have seen her abandon her greatest passion. So, she let herself heal up and literally got back on another horse.

“I am not looking for the world, I’m not looking for championships, I just want to do it,” Chick said.

The accident, which she calls the “smash”, occurred on Feb. 23, 1949, while riding a half-Arab horse named Flash. She ended up with a fractured skull, broken arm and broken leg. Telling the tale, she says that if her father had any real say, she never would have ridden a horse again.

“He had strawberry red hair, and two weeks into my accident he turned white. I mean, it was pretty serious. They gave my folks twenty-four hours, and the doctor said you’d never ride again. I said ‘okay’ but I didn’t know why, as that didn’t stop it,” Chick said. “I’m glad I didn’t. I would have been a nothing, a vegetable.”

This wouldn’t be the last time doctors would advise her not to ride.

“There were three doctors in Porterville who wanted to get me off,” Chick said. “This was about twenty years ago. I said, you know my body will tell me.”

Chick has been in love with horses since she was a small girl. She still has a picture of a pony named “Teddy” that rode as payment for cleaning stables. She remembers watching a rider in her home town of Newcastle, Penn., and following along behind him on her bicycle, peddling fast to keep up with him. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to, as one of the wheels fell off her bike.

Even so, the things she has done and accomplished as far as equestrian sports would still be considered a “hobby” Chick said.

“I taught school at Porterville for ten years, and I did a lot of subbing. I taught at the college. But I have always worked with or around horses. I probably shouldn’t have. But we’ve had some really nice horses,” she said, noting that many were champion-level.

To sit down with Chick and her photo albums is to hear her tell of the classes she’s taken her horses through, the difficulties of training in each discipline. This year she was focused on showing a horse named Melodys Miss Peppy, who is the first horse that she has ever performed a “slide” with. This maneuver — commonly done by professionals in reigning, a sub-category of western riding — mimics a horse as it naturally slides to a stop. It had come as a surprise to Chick during the show, as it wasn’t something she’d planned on doing.

“I knew she could do this [slide], but I didn’t have the courage to try it. I am just starting this [reining],” Chick said. At this particular show, she said, she and two other amateurs were able to do the proscribed patterns, but the professionals all got zeros. Her husband, Ray, had wanted to leave before the day of this show, but she’d convinced him not to.

“I’d never gone all the way,” she said, glad that she had done so as she’d ended up doing pretty well. “This is a new thing and I’m really excited about it.”

Chick says that even though she’s 78, she is still striving to learn new things herself, and train her horses in new ways. She doesn’t stop, not really.

“I had breast cancer this year, so I took a week off in May,” she said. It’s something that isn’t necessarily easy for her to talk about, but she has survived.

“Going through this radiation for breast cancer and stuff,” she said. “I had the best doctors at the cancer clinic over there {at Sierra View District Hospital]. Each time they saw something new it was like a black hole to me. But they got me through it. I have been blessed.”

And as a survivor, she is focused on the future.

“I am hoping to continue with the reining,” she said. Chick takes Peppy to train at a neighbor’s arena because it has better soil.

“I take Peppy over and do some of these patterns, and I want to slide her — that will be better sliding — and get our spins better. Once she gets that and I get my head together and remember the patterns, she will be something to be reckoned with.”

According to Chick, this was her focus, her horses and Cerniga’s Arabian Farm. Everything else was “filler.”

Cerniga’s Arabian Farm

“We’ve had some good horses. We’ve raised and bred most of them, and I’ve done the training on most of them,” Chick said.

At least seven of her horses have been trained for driving, and Ray pointed out that it’s a good place to start with them, as it gives the horses a different mind set, and is better for the Arabians in some ways because they can’t carry the weight of certain riders.

The first horse she ever personally owned was a Palomino quarter mare, at three months old, which she trained to do a number of things. Pride’s abilities became the template by which she trained her Arabians later on. She often rode Pride in parades in Porterville, and trained her in a common equestrian class, “driving”, using a 1897 roadster buggy.

She very nearly had to sell Pride, because she of an almost-repeat of the horrible accident she had.

“This one day I went to ride her, and she was going to take off, just like what happened with my accident, and I had to two-hand her,” Chick said. “I had to sell her and I couldn’t. I went home and told my father. He said give me a week, and it was the worst thing.”

Her father did manage to calm her horse down, and she kept riding. Eventually she met Ray. They dated for a while and then broke up when he moved out to California. They came back together and, at that time, married. It was Ray who bought her the first Arabian horse she had, a stallion who died because of a bad reaction to medication he was given.

It wasn’t long before Chick saw another Arabian, a colt, in a paddock, which she “followed for a year” she said. Once he was sold to a man in Bakersfield, Chick insisted on going down there and buying him.

“Three year’s later he went national top 10 in native costume, pleasure driving, and qualified in English pleasure and halter. He was really great. We brought him home and he walked around the stall acting like he was home,” Chick said.

Chick remembers that horse, Waukena Ferzi, with a great deal of emotion. He had a very long stride, and was always a good competitor, able to win even if he was up against thirty or more competing horses and riders. She remembers that a man who owned race horses in Arizona tried to purchase Ferzi. But Chick knew not to let him go.

“He wouldn’t make a race horse,” she had told the men at the time. “He’s too heavy in his front end.”

“His feet were big,” she explained in the present. “He was the foundation of our horses.”
A pure-bred Arabian, they were able to get a mare named Ratara, who wasn’t “good with the halter but was great at performance” Chick said. From these two horses, they got their personal line, adding to it with purchases or crossing with horses that belonged to other breeders to grow Cerniga’s Arabian Farm. She speaks of her horses like children: Hawkeye, Waukena Fertara, Fertaras Melody, High Noon, Duke of Windsor, and Melodys Miss Peppy.
Currently, she has Hawkeye up for an international award, and has put working with Melodys Miss Peppy, who is ten, aside to work with Duke of Windsor.