Man Who Loves Horses

A Man Who Loves Horses

As a fourteen-year-old Missouri farm boy, jogging homeward from after-school chores, Roy Wayland was bucked off his balky mule. Since then the hoofprints of some kind of horseflesh have been indelibly imprinted on almost every page of his busy life. It may seem a bit far-fetched here to draw a parallel between being thrown from a stubborn mule and possessing a love of fine horses, but not in the case of Roy Wayland -today one of Arizona's leading businessmen and most successful financiers.

This man loves to ride, and at the age of fourteen the mule on his father's farm was the ultimate he could enjoy. He told himself then that some day he'd have a fine horse; one that people would pause and turn to admire.

And, because he already had decided no animal he could straddle would ever be his master, "Little Pete," as his father affectionately called him, drove off the barking dogs which had crowded his mule into a fence corner, remounted by climbing onto the fence, and went plodding the remaining three miles homeward to obtain first-aid for the bleeding cuts on his chin and mouth. Yet, at the age of nineteen-when he decided that in order to attain success in life he must seek opportunity elsewhere-it was in the West he sought that realization. His goal wasn't a career as a cowboy, though life in the saddle appealed to him, but rather in the rapidly developing frontier he was bent upon becoming a druggist. Later, he was to become a successful banker and one of the nation's best known hotelmen. And, incongruous as it might seem, at one stage in his career as an ambitious young druggist Who owned his own drugstore, he rode not a horse, but a bicycle, for transportation in his drug business, in this wild and woolly western town of Phoenix.

Yet the day was to come when hundreds of people, young and old, would watch him admiringly, seated on a hand-tooled silver saddle astride a brilliant Palomino, leading colorful parades along flag-bedecked streets in his hometown of Phoenix during the annual Rodeo Week, in Tucson, Douglas, Safford, Prescott, Yuma and in California during Pasadena's majestic Tournament of Roses Parade.

But that's half a century ahead of our story: William Roy Wayland was born in 1882 in an unpretentious frame house on "Shady Home Farm" a short distance from the little Missouri town of New Franklin. This was the home of his grandparents on the Wayland side, covered wagon pioneers who had prodded their oxen and pushed and lifted the heavy wagon wheels over the trails from Roanoke and Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, to reach the rich Missouri River bottom country. Perhaps their visions had been beyond Missouri, but it was young Roy who finally carried the family name into the new frontier. His grandparents, Nathan and Mary; his father and mother, William and Bettie, and his three sisters lived out useful lives in the Missouri farming country.

Before he was old enough to go to school "Little Pete" was helping with chores around the farm. Came evening, one of his regular duties in the house was to take the paper bag off the chimney and light the coal-oil lamp. After the family left the farm and moved into the village of New Franklin, there was little time for play, since Roy found spare-time employment at the grocer's and in the town drugstore after school. He worked diligently and saved the money he earned. It was with the druggist that Roy found the stepping-stones to his start on a successful business career. Preparation of prescriptions, commonly known as pill-rolling, fascinated young Wayland, and he set about with the determination to make that middle initial of his name read Rx.

Studying pharmacy, however, was something of a problem for a boy in New Franklin. But nothing daunted