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Holbrook had just gone into retirement at the time, and had moved to a little spot in the country, primarily so he and his wife could enjoy owning and riding a couple of horses.

He loved horses so much that he wanted his young grandchild to learn the same joy—hence his gift of the Shetland pony.

This animal was the pride and joy of the child's life for more than a year, but the child grew larger and the pony stayed the same size, until the child became really too large for the tiny pony. So Holbrook sold the pony, and realized a neat profit over his original purchase price.

Holbrook felt pretty elated at this for a few days, and then he began to miss the pony, which had solidly established itself in his affections. So, remembering how much fun it had been to have a pony around the barn, and remembering how he had made a profit on the first one, Holbrook bought another pony, and then still another and another. Then at Christmas time he sold a couple of them, again at a good profit, and after Christmas bought more of them at a lower price—and before he knew it he was in the Shetland pony business. He was operating like an old-time horse trader, but on a small scale—a small scale in every respect, handling pint-sized horses, with a small barn and small pasture, and with very small costs of operating.

HORSE TRADING happens to be an activity for which Jess Holbrook has great natural aptitude. He is a good judge of horse flesh—or pony flesh—because of the fact that he has always loved horses and has learned to appreciate their good qualities and knows what to look for in any four-footed equine, be it horse, mule or Shetland pony. He is philosophical and shrewd, and knows that he doesn't need to make a fortune on every deal, but that it's better to get a reputation for fairness and consequently make a lot of deals with a small profit on each one.

This policy has been so successful that he now sells an average of a hundred ponies a year, and could have a still larger turnover if he wanted to be aggressive and go after business instead of keeping his dealings on a hobby basis—doing only as much volume as comes his way and is easy and enjoyable to handle.

Holbrook sells a good young pony equipped with saddle, bridle and blanket, for around $225. He also has less expensive ponies, and cheaper saddles and bridles, or he'll sell a pony without any equipment at all. Ordinarily, he keeps a stock of fifteen or twenty ponies on hand, so he can suit any taste.

WHERE DOES Holbrook get the ponies to sell?

He has three sources. He breeds a few mares and raises some of the ponies from colts, he buys some from other pony breeders in the South and Midwest, but most important of all, he buys back ponies he has sold and sells them over again.

He can sell the same pony several times, making a profit on each transaction, because the average child keeps a Shetland pony for only a year or two, and sometimes not that long.

At one stage in his life nearly every child goes through the stage of worshiping Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers or some other Western movie star and his keenest heart's desire is to own a pony to make his cowboy play more realistic.

Should the parents drive past Jess Holbrook's Shetland pony farm at this time and the child get a look at one of Holbrook's ponies tethered at the white corral, the child, as you can well imagine, will set up a pretty insistent demand to stop the car and let him see the pony. The parents can see no harm in humoring Junior to the extent of letting him get out and look at the pony—and in many cases they have a hankering to look at the pony themselves—and so they stop and take the fatal first step of letting the child pet the pony.

Holbrook always uses a thoroughly gentle pony to tie out front as advertising, and lets the child get into the saddle.

At that point, the sale of the pony has been made, as far as Junior is concerned, and Holbrook finds it is just as well to let Junior be the chief salesman in selling the pony to the parents.

"Sometimes the youngster sets up such a howl that they can't drive away without buying a pony first, and sometimes it takes him a day or two to get his parents to come back and buy it," Holbrook says. "But if the folks can afford it, they usually buy."

HOLBROOK USES no pressure whatever to sell his ponies. Usually his sales talk consists of answering questions, and assuring the mother that the pony is a perfectly safe pet for Junior and is not likely to hurt him in any way.

On this point, Holbrook gives an unconditional guarantee. He specializes in very small, very gentle ponies, and if any buyer is ever dissatisfied with his purchase, Holbrook not only refunds the purchase price, but goes after the pony and brings it back at his own expense.

"Shetland ponies have a reputation for being hard to handle, so I go out of my way to get a reputation for selling only the gentle ones," Holbrook explains. And he has found that such a policy pays.

Occasionally, although he is a good horse trader and knows his animals, Holbrook gets stuck with a pony which is too vicious or too stubborn for a child to handle. In that case, he unloads the pony by selling it at public auction in Atlanta. He loses money, sometimes as much as $75 a pony, by selling them this way, but he takes the loss because there is no guarantee or no refund in an auction sale.

Holbrook buys every spotted, or pinto, pony he can find, sometimes bringing them to his Georgia farm from as far away as Iowa or South Carolina. Children seem to prefer the pinto ponies over others, but he sells a good many of them not for pets but to the itinerant photographers who specialize in taking pictures of children on ponies. The pintos photograph more strikingly than solid-colored animals.

HOLBROOK DOESN'T name his ponies, but leaves that to each youngster who becomes a pony's master. He has noted that the junior cowboys overwhelmingly favor the names of Western movie stars' horses, so that many a pony will respond to the name of Trigger, Silver, Tony or Flicka.

Just before Christmas, naturally, is one of Holbrook's busiest seasons, and another is right at the beginning of the summer vacation for school children.

When parents pick a pony in advance and want to hold it for a special occasion gift, such as for Christmas or a birthday, Holbrook offers the service of boarding the pony at a charge of fifty cents a day. He doesn't figure to make much profit at this rate, because he feeds them oats and corn as well as letting them run in his twenty acres of alfalfa and clover pasture. This keeps them fat and happy, the way Shetland ponies should be kept, to Holbrook's way of thinking.

Holbrook feels that his best advertising is to have a pony saddled near the roadside, especially on Sundays, when as many as a hundred people a day stop to make inquiries during the busy season. Along with the pony on display, he also has signs painted on his white barn which make it clear that the ponies are for sale.

He also advertises occasionally in the classified sections of the Atlanta daily newspapers, and he has found that such advertising gets enough response to be worthwhile. Usually he runs the advertisements only on Sundays, but places them daily before Christmas and in the spring.

ONE OF the things which Holbrook enjoys most about his hobby-business is the gentling and training of the ponies.

"I don't go through any set way of doing things to train a colt," he says. "I just fool around with it a lot and the first thing you know it's all tamed down and easy to manage."

Also, he thinks it's fine that he has no need for worry about the health of his stock.

"Shetland ponies are about the hardiest animals in the world," he asserts. "They can weather any kind of climate and they don't seem to get any kind of disease. In fact, you wouldn't really need to have a barn to be in my business, and you wouldn't need all my pasture. You could go into it on a small scale in your back yard almost anywhere by buying a little hay and grain to feed the ponies, and then sometimes tethering them to graze on vacant lots or at the roadside on the outskirts of town."