As I walk into the lobby of the Stage Stop Inn to talk with owner Gerry Isaac about the history of this place, I notice the pattern of cattle brands neatly and uniformly imprinted on the tile floor and I realize that this detail is a fitting start to the writing journey I am about to begin. It’s a journey I hope will elicit fond memories for some Patagonians while for others will introduce one Anne C. Stradling whose presence in and around this town was, for some 30 years, a huge part of the town’s identity.
The Stage Stop Inn, known to many as “the hotel,” is perhaps the most obvious of Stradling’s remaining legacy contributions to Patagonia’s present-day cityscape. Gerry tells me she built the 43-room hotel in the late 1960s, in part at least at the suggestion of actor John Wayne who came often to the area to shoot western films. She apparently didn’t require much persuasion, reasoning that the hotel would not only house the crew of movie makers but serve to support her beloved lifelong dream-come-true, the Museum of the Horse, which she had launched in 1960.
That Anne Caroline Schley, born in 1913 into New York wealth and privilege, found her way at all to out-of-the-way Patagonia is a highly improbable tale that I’ll not tell at length, but some milestones marking her younger years are central to understanding this fascinating woman’s character.
Eschewing the lifestyle of the rich and famous (the very lifestyle that facilitated her love of all things horse-related), as a young woman Anne refused to adhere to the mold of high society girl. Reflecting later in life on what might have lain in store for her, she is quoted as saying, “Those days …. A woman’s life was boring and stupid unless you could do something to get yourself out of it.” And get herself out of it, she did. While enamored with horses and demonstrating exceptional riding talent, as a teenager she also took a shine to flying, lied about her age to take flying lessons and earned her pilot’s license at the tender age of 18. Though she enjoyed this new pursuit for a few years, even barnstorming the country in her very own biplane, the cowgirl life tugged tenaciously and relentlessly at her heartstrings.
Having tasted the rough and tumble ways of the west as she enjoyed numerous childhood summer vacations on family ranches in Wyoming and Colorado, young Anne bought so wholeheartedly into that culture that at age twenty she married a Texas rodeo cowboy and trick-roper, Jack Webb whom she had met five years earlier when she attended a world-renowned 101 Ranch Wild West Show in which he starred. Eleven years his junior, attractive and wealthy, Anne was quite a catch for Webb, but he was no mere cowboy either. A professional singer/songwriter, he also mastered the guitar and piano and was a published writer, to boot. Consequently, Webb was readily embraced by the Schley family.
Anne married Webb, willingly moved with him to the 101 Ranch headquarters in Oklahoma and herself became an accomplished trick-rider and show performer.
Twelve years later her marriage to Webb ended in divorce, at which point she moved with daughter, Jean, first to Tucson and then back east when she married a second cowboy, albeit one who had grown up rich in New Jersey. That marriage quickly ended in divorce, whereupon she moved back to Tucson, where, in 1956, she met her third husband, Floyd Stradling, a rancher, well-driller and all-around “Westerner.”
The Stradling couple wasted little time in searching for a ranch they could settle into and raise quarter horses. They found their equine prize just outside Patagonia, moved into the Sorrel Ranch in 1957 and soon brought perhaps the most dramatic change in this town’s character since the mining industry imploded in the decades immediately preceding the Stradling’s arrival.
Next: The Anne Stradling Story, Part 2: The Making of the Museum of the Horse