Marsha Immerman started riding horses as a very young child when her family went to BayView Stables on Sundays. There was a pony ring, and her favorite horse was “Dimples” and she never wanted to leave, because she felt riding was ‘heavenly’.

“The first time on a horse at camp scared the hell out of me, because the horse ran off with me on the road from the lodge, heading off to the meadow. I ducked under a tree branch and didn’t fall and couldn’t wait to get back on the horse again,” she said of her camper experience at Maqua.

Geri Fleming was her first instructor—a mass communications student at MSU and was only twenty years old. “It was love at first sight,” said Marsha, of her first girl crush, “especially since she was on her horse “Gay”. I learned all the basics of riding with her and never fell off until years later.”

“One year we used to ride into a meadow and down a hill, which we called “Suicide Hill”. The road came into the camp and went away from the camp to the right and everyone was terrified of it. There was another road that led to the lake and it was usually a one hour trip on our horses,” She and Molly Olson used to ride bareback through the woods and through a meadow. They would lean over, holding the horse’s reins and gobble up wild raspberries picked from the nearby bushes. To this day, eating raspberries remind her of those trips.

“I was so horse crazy that I brought some horse manure home in a suitcase and put it in my dresser drawer. After three days, my Mom came in my bedroom and asked what that terrible smell was and I had to throw it away.”

Racing with one of the stable boys, either Mel or Ron, while heading out toward Hale Park, was another horse memory. The cinch broke, then the saddle broke and Marsha came out of it with a broken arm in the V between her elbow and wrist. “I felt nauseated when I looked at it. Somehow I remember being taken to camp in a vehicle with a pillow and then someone drove me to West Branch to the hospital. I hated to throw up and I will swallow before I would throw up. They laid newspaper down and they had to put me out and I recall I thought I was going to throw up from the ether and wondered why they were putting the newspaper down, but it ended up being there for the plaster.”

“I was in Dutton for a few nights. My parents came the next morning and told me to gather my things because I was going home. I said NO WAY! I went over to see Kay Webb to show her and get her support, since she had been an instructor and lived in town. She was in agreement totally that I could teach with a broken arm. I ended up staying the whole summer teaching the basic skills to my students. Basically, it was “giddy-up-and-go” horseback skills.”

The “Loon”1953 joked Marsha or “Marsh” taught so many horseback riding lessons that she had the “familiar bowlegs and peculiar odor known to equestrians”.

Mary Lou Googin (1950-61) was in the same horse crazy category as Marsha.“I went two weeks every summer as a camper until I was old enough to be a C.I.T. There might have been one summer I did not go, but I came back when the camp wanted to re-instate the riding program. Camp membership had dropped when there was no riding program, so in 1958 or 1959, I went back as the Horseback Riding Director under Mert Webb with ten horses. I even went to pre-camp to help set up,” she said.

Mary Lou sent through two great Bay City Times photos of a group of girls on horses and laughingly joked that she could remember the horse’s names, but not her group of girls! (Dixie, Dolly, Denver, Brownie, Prince, Rilla, Diamond, Poncho, King and Patches) “As a camper, the highlight of my day was the horses. As a counselor, I was proud of the fact that only one of my girls fell off her horse and she was unhurt. My horse was Rilla and I did sell her to the Webb’s for $1. 00, so she would be covered under the camp’s liability policy. I brought her back with me at the end of the summer.”

Horseback riding was her passion and she still rides dressage four days a week, and her fondest memory was the Western Day when the counselors dressed up as cowboys and ran the horses through the camp. It resulted in a tradition she carried on when she was a counselor.

Were you a horse crazy girl?