DADDY DOUG’S LITTLE HAY BABIES

Everyone has something they associate with their fathers. Maybe he was a car guy, and every time you hear the roar of a vintage sports car, your heart revs a little, too. Maybe it was baseball, and now the taste of sunflower seeds takes you back to all those afternoons in the bleachers. Maybe it was simply long days and hard work, and now you see him in every pair of calloused hands and worn-out work boots, or sense him when the wind blows a faint scent of diesel.

As for us McMullen girls, it was racehorses.

Now if you ever met our Daddy Doug, you know he was larger than life and that his legacy could’ve been any number of things – car dealerships, custom trailers, Harley Davidsons, or even just his unrivaled charisma. And he is remembered for all of those things, but Doug McMullen is inextricably and eternally linked to his legendary run with racehorses.

Daddy had an innate, unnamable, and inimitable ability to choose a champion.

“He could walk through a stable of a hundred horses and tell you which five would either be champions or breed champions,” Cheryl said. “Just by looking at them.”

If it was something that could be taught, we’d all be Winner’s-Circle-rich and probably would never have started peddling coats to pay for our ski trips! But alas, that was a gift unique to Daddy, something encoded in his DNA and written in his soul. What he could (and did) share with us, though, was the reality of racing horses; the sacrifices required for success, the exhilarating wins and agonizing losses, the endless hours and million miles on the road (with us bouncing around in the backseat), and above all, the rush – of betting big and believing in yourself. We don’t spend a lot of time in the stables these days, but the lessons stuck, and in a way, doubling down on DDR might be Daddy’s darkest horse yet.

We didn’t plan to have this horse-themed collection be the one that fell around Father’s Day (we would love to be *that* on top of things!), but it was certainly fortuitous for us, because in a way, we were Daddy’s little Hay Babies.  

Happy heavenly Father’s Day, Daddy.