Club is Home for Horses and Riders

In the Italian styled courtyard of The Portuguese Bend Riding Club, surrounded by tile-roofed buildings and blue-trimmed barns, a gilt-edged Della Robbia mosaic graces a tower. 

The Madonna and Child sculpture, along with a marble fountainhead and sarcophagus (converted from coffin to planter), were imported from Italy by Frank A. Vanderlip Sr., who envisioned the hillside above Point Vicente as an Italian village when he and a consortium of Eastern investors purchased 16,000 acres of the Rancho de los Palos Verdes for $1.5 million in 1913.

The Portuguese Bend Riding Club, which began as a dairy, blends the perfection of nature with a quiet sense of Rancho Palos Verdes history.  

Originally called “The Farmstead”, the riding/boarding/training facility rests on an idyllic ten acres populated with peacocks, Aleppo pines and magnificent Brazilian pepper trees, many of which go back to 1916, when Vanderlip, built his first residence — the “Old Ranch Cottage” — in Portuguese Bend. 

The “headache stuff”

But the lush landscape, as inspiring as it is, requires constant maintenance and tree trimming — just a small part of the “headache stuff” owner of the riding club, Lisa Wolf, has to deal with. 

“When the tree trimmers come in, the horses get scared and we have to move them,” said Wolf, who purchased the facility 33 years ago with her parents, Lloyd and Lucy Wolf of Pacific Palisades. “It’s always something. Water pipes break, electricity goes out, the tractor needs repair; it’s just endless.” 

Wolf's role as “overseer” sometimes puts her “in a position of always seeing what’s wrong and not what’s right,” she said. “But I’m the one who has to have the big picture. … I’m the one who has to see that things get fixed.” 

Living in one of two residences at the club since 1987, Wolf would not change a thing.

“The best thing about living up here, it’s so peaceful,” she said, looking around the courtyard, where horses gaze contentedly out of their stalls, ivy climbs the white, stucco walls and sea breezes caress the air. “Where else can you have this?” 

In the process of training Roxy, a new, young hunter/jumper for the spring show circuit, the formerly horse-crazy teen, who “never got over it,” said riding, training and showing horses is her life. “It’s what I’ve always done,” she said.

Still, it is a Herculean task, looking after 50 plus horses, including “the pensioners and retirees” Wolf refuses to send out to foreign pastures.

“They live out their lives here,” she said.

Then there are the school horses (for students) and the thoroughbreds and quarter horses boarded by clients at costs ranging from $270/month for training to $485/month for box stalls. 

“I have good people here”

To keep horses bathed, shod, groomed, fed, wormed, exercised and trained, Wolf depends on three groomers, several stable hands, a raft of contract workers (from farriers to a horse masseuse) and a devoted band of seven instructor/trainers.  

“It all goes back to I have good people here,” Wolf said, giving special credit to Laura Feldman, PBRC’s very hands-on manager, and head trainer, John Vogel.  “They are good, really good. I just can’t say enough; they really look out for me.” 

Looking out for the boss was particularly important when Wolf, 59, broke her hip in a fall from her hunter/jumper a year and a half ago.

“I was basically on my couch for months,” she said.

Yet she plans to compete in the spring.

Admittedly not quite up to par physically, Wolf conceded that jumping in competition is “a huge undertaking,” considering her injuries, including four concussions in four years.

“I’m just glad that I still love doing this,” she said.

A passion for horses and overcoming obstacles, whether physical or mental, is a given for equestrians like Wolf and Mary Hirsch, 32, hired this year as an English instructor/trainer, a job she “fought, fought, fought for,” she said. 

Willowy, with flowing blonde hair and a determination to act as a role model/mentor to her young students, Hirsch, 32, one of four English instructors at the club, said her most important duty is to set “the best example I can … both in the saddle and on the ground. That duty never sleeps.”    

Like many at the barn, Hirsch, a resident of Rolling Hills Estates, first came to PBRC at age 12, as a self-described “barn rat."

"I would do anything, as long as I could be on these grounds and feel a part of it,” she said. “The smell of manure to me is like the most expensive perfume there is. I just always lived horses.”

But ten years ago, after a terrible fall from her hunter/jumper left her with three cracked ribs, a punctured lung and a “horrible concussion,” Hirsch abandoned the sport for eight years.

Then, two years ago, eager to ride again, she purchased two “investment horses”, German Warmbloods in the $50,000 to $100,000 bracket.

“I went into business in the worst economy,” Hirsch said, who hoped to sell the horses on the circuit, competing against celebrity offspring like Destry Spielberg and Hannah Selleck. 

Not only did the horses fail to sell, one of her jumpers wrenched his back and Hirsch “went through from $50,000 to $75,000” in seven weeks, her cash eaten up by everything from entry fees to stall and condo rentals.

The “relaxed, mellow environment” needed to heal

“I came home with two horses that were body sore; I was emotionally sore, and my pockets were sore,” she said. The Portuguese Bend Riding Club offered the sort of “relaxed, mellow environment” she and her horses needed to heal. 

It also offered a job: teaching English horsemanship to beginners. Worried adolescents might prove tiresome, Hirsch found just the opposite.

“These are the people who are the most passionate about riding," she said. "You see their eyes light up. … I also get to teach them how to avoid the bad habits I picked up at that age.” 

Hirsch even took one of them, Jamee Cremeans, 12, horse shopping.

Although Jamee was too shy to talk on the phone, her mother, Julie Cremeans, a Torrance resident, spoke about Hirsch’s finding them the perfect chestnut gelding, Gait Expectations, which they adopted on the spot in Santa Barbara. 

“He follows Jamee around like he’s attached,” said Cremeans, who had especially high praise for Hirsch. "Mary is very patient, very centered on Jamee ... educating her about horsemanship” and helping to bring her out of her shell.

Another instructor, Carolyn “Callie” Bell, has been in the horse business since she was eight, training and selling ponies in Long Beach.

“Horse traders got that negative name for a reason,” said Bell, 43, who spent 11 years at Palos Verdes Stables before coming to PBRC in 2010 to oversee a new Western program. 

She equated horse sellers with used car salesmen.

“You have to be really careful who you buy from,” she said.

Still, matching the right horse with the right person is difficult.

“I always tell people, I don’t have a crystal ball,”  she said.

What Bell does have, in spades, is teaching ability, especially when it comes to prize students like Sarah Powley, 17, of Rancho Palos Verdes, Kaitlin Huben, 17, and her sister, Mariana, 14, of Palos Verdes Estates. 

The Huben sisters swept the awards in the Western divisions of the Orange County Interscholastic Equestrian League (OCIEL), Huben for the fourth year in a row. All three girls are members of the Palos Verdes High School Sea King Equestrian Team. Kaitlin is the captain. 

Powley and Kaitlin are also seniors.

“It was my last show before college,” said Kaitlin, who plans to major in engineering. Of the places she’s applied, only one, Santa Clara University, offers engineering and an equestrian team.

Poised and confident atop Honor, the American Quarter Horse she borrowed for the OCIEL show from Celina Tu, a Peninsula High graduate, Kaitlin said she has always wanted a horse of her own, as has sister Mariana.

“Either get a horse or go to college”

“Our parents were very up front with us,” said Kaitlin, whose long, auburn hair exactly matched Honor’s coat. “They said, ‘Either get a horse or go to college.’” 

Both girls chose college.

Still, all the girls appear to treasure the horses they ride at PBRC, like T-Bone, one of three quarter horses Bell boards at the barn. Kaitlin calls T-Bone “the sweetest horse I’ve ever ridden. If he were a dog, he’d be a total lap dog.” 

Powley on Samba (an American Saddlebred owned by Jenny Corona, another of Bell’s clients) said she has come “full circle” at the club.

“I was here for a year or two when I first started riding,” said Powley, who for several years went to another barn, where there was less emphasis on showing. 

Then she started “hanging out” at PBRC over the summer.

“I have a couple of really great friends riding here” said the blonde senior, who switched back to the club, “because Callie started putting me on horses.”   

Now she wouldn’t go anywhere else. Powley adores the Portuguese Bend environment, she said, and the calm, preciseness of Bell’s instruction.

During a lesson in a tree-shaded area near one of the three open arenas, Kaitlin and Powley practiced one of the Western “Trail” events common at shows like OCIEL.  It entailed guiding their horses over logs scattered about in what appeared a haphazard fashion. 

“They have to execute the pattern as accurately as possible,” said Mariana, watching from the sidelines as her sister and Powley performed the maneuver.  “Every time a horse knocks a pole, a point is knocked off.”

“We go for style points, how free and effortless the horse looks,” Bell added. “It takes months and months of training for a horse to say, ‘Now I get this.’”   

A special magic

It doesn’t take long to “get” that the Portuguese Bend Riding Club is home to horses, as well as to those who ride and instruct here. The spectacular trails that lead through Palos Verdes Nature Preserve, the peace and quiet that reigns in the air — all lend a special magic to the place.

“People who come here for the first time always comment on that,” Bell said. “It is so spread out here, so beautiful ... it doesn’t even feel like you’re at work.” 

But work it is, and pleasing students, clients and horses, not to mention Wolf and Feldman, is a balancing act.  

Wolf and Feldman make it easy, the instructors say. Wolf ensures compatibility by insisting that each instructor stay with his or her base, Hirsch said.

“That way, no ones steals clients from other instructors,” she said.

Bell calls Feldman “one of the most amazing managers I’ve ever had at a barn. If you need something done for your horse at midnight, Laura’s going to get up and do it for you.”

“A happy horse equals a happy owner,” Hirsch said. “A happy owner equals a happy horse.”

It falls to all at PBRC “to make sure both are fulfilled with the least amount of friction possible.” 

For information regarding English or Western instruction or boarding, call (310) 377-3507.