07/25/2023
WA Pejczyk
1997 to 2023
Wintersteen Arabians is deeply saddened to announce the passing of WA Pejczyk (Europejczyk x Phyllan by Bancock). Pejczyk, or “PJ” as he was known, spent the entirety of his life in the same barn and pastures where he was foaled in 1997. He was the backbone of Wintersteen Arabians. Perhaps, not the typiest Arabian, but his conformation and athleticsm I would hold up against any. As our race vet Dr. Moak once remarked, “The good Lord didn’t make too many like him, he is an impressive horse.” It was an attribute with which he collected numerous wins in the show ring and on the track. As a sire, his foals won multiple championships in halter, western and hunter pleasure, reining, racing and endurance. His grand get won Scottsdale Championships and Stakes races. It is not, however, these accolades for which he will be affectionately remembered by those who loved and cared for him, but manner in which he accomplished them.
Pejczyk won the farm’s first championship when he was just two and a half months old being name Grand Champion Stallion at the Elbert County All Breed Show. He won the first Class A Championship a couple of weeks later. In total, he collected 14 for the farm, most with his regular handler David Lowe. I still remember mom and I clipping him for his first show. He had laid down in his stall while we did his legs, face and ears. He couldn’t be bothered to get up. It was typical of Pejczyk’s accepting attitude of what we asked of him.
PJ was the first horse I galloped and saddled at the track as a trainer. Our first race I was unsure of his fitness, and instructed Kelly Bridges, leading rider from Turf Paradise, to not ask him for run until the quarter pole. Kelly dutifully followed my instructions. When Kelly finally called on PJ, he was 12 lengths behind the French bred Virgil. Pejczyk made up 11 lengths by the wire, the remaining length a stride past to finish second. The next race I had the good sense to offer no instructions and the duo won easily. Pejczyk raced for four seasons, finishing off the board only twice in the last three. He ran his entire career sound and medication free: no bute, banamine, or lasix. Few modern race horses can make that claim.
Pejczyk started his stud career while he was still racing. Often in the spring I would swing by the reproduction center to have him collected on the way back from a work or gallop at the track. He was, as dad liked to say, a blue collar horse who worked for a living.
Not long after his race career ended, Bazy Tankersley was organizing the Arabian Horse Celebration in Denver to promote the Arabian horse to the general public. PJ was asked to represent the Arabian race horse. Each discipline gave a few minute presentation in the ring, Pejczyk being last. I lead PJ in, then gave Megan Gromelski, our neighbor who exercised for us at the track, a leg up in the royal blue and white silks of the farm. The two sprinted around the arena to the cheers of the crowd before exiting at full speed. Afterwards the public was invited back to the stalls. Pejczyk stood without a halter, stall door open for a long line of kids waiting to pet him and have me lift them on to his back. I like to think they saw him as I did, an equine super hero who could do anything. After that, PJ was invited to several more of these type of exhibitions.
I never knew a horse more comfortable in his own skin than Pejczyk. I can’t recall a time he ever shied from anything, whether arriving at a new show grounds, entering the starting gate for the first time, or led into the operating room. The latter he did twice, once for tearing most of his right hoof off, the second time to have a bone chip removed from a trauma in his left knee. Often times I would arrive at the farm to see him head down in the middle of a 30 acre pasture. Is it not that he did not welcome companionship, he just did not require it.
That is not to say he was not keenly aware of his surroundings. One day the neighbor pulled in our drive to tell my dad that PJ always met his son when the school bus dropped him off at the corner of County Road 17 and 146, the northeastern corner of Pejczyk’s pasture. PJ would then walk with the boy home the hundred yards along the fence until they got to his driveway.
Another time on arriving at the farm, all the horses were in the paddocks with their morning hay except Pejczyk. When I asked, dad told me a doe had a couple fawns in the north pasture and as soon as PJ was let out, he headed up to watch over those fawns while the doe is away. I walked out to see for myself, and sure enough, two fawns lay in the grass not 10 feet from Pejczyk grazing. I am still not sure how PJ and that doe negotiated the arrangement.
Last summer, a couple months before mom passed away, she was in hospice care at the farm and I flew home to spend time with her. She told me she wanted to see her horses when I arrived. It was a bit of a project getting her down to the paddock with her oxygen, but we managed. As for Pejczyk, he was out in his north pasture which meant we needed to drive to see him. As I drove along 146, I spotted him a 100 yards away in the trees. I didn’t need to call to him, he walked up as I pulled the car over. For a long time he stood and stared at mom, sensing, I guess, why we were there. It was one of the last times they saw each other.
PJ was collected this May. It was, for the first time in anything we asked of him, not easy. We decided to retire him after, and he was turned out with WA Maksimum, a c**t we gelded after his race career. The two had been stalled together since our mares had left for Slovenia and become fast friends. In truth, it was Maks that had been having the harder time since the mares were no longer on the farm. When dad turned them out in the morning, Pejczyk would go over and bellow at Maks to remind him who was in charge, then the two would go out to graze in the pasture, never more than a couple yards separating them.
Jennifer Fosberg Meyers wrote the difference between a good horse and a great horse is what she calls an uncommon generosity, that ability to find a just little more when it counts, to give you their heart when asked. I can think of no better two words to describe WA Pejczyk than “uncommon generosity”.
~ Jeff Wintersteen
