Getting a horse to say ‘cheese’

As an award-winning amateur photographer for over 60 years, I focused during the first 40 of those years on dogs and pups and cats and kittens. For the last 20 years, I’ve concentrated on horses.

I have always favored the word serendipity, meaning the good fortune of finding something accidentally. Last December, I attended an antique and collectibles function at the beautiful Angels for Animals complex on Route 165. The facility was a real eye opener. I consider it another gem of our Valley, like the Butler Institute of American Art and Mill Creek Park.

It brought back memories of the Great Depression, because it occurred to me that I would have gladly traded my basement living quarters of back then with any of the animals living at the complex.

There’s a connection

Now, for the rest of the story. I met the driving force behind this operation, Diane Less, and though it was the first time we met, we had something in common. In the late 1980s, I visited the farm of her father, Paul Less, on Route 165 to pick apples. I had parked my 1987 Chevy Cavalier along a fence and noticed a beautiful Appaloosa horse nibbling on my mirror.

Paul, suggested I give the horse an apple. The Appaloosa must have been grateful, because I told him to say cheese and he posed for me.

I titled the photograph “Say Cheese” and it has become my most famous image.

It was accepted in a nationwide Kentucky Derby Museum/Nikon photography contest, the only Ohio photo among 40 in the exhibit. It traveled from Churchill Downs to various museums in the country for three years, including our own Butler Institute in 1991.

In the old days, I entered the Kodak International Newspaper Snapshot Awards annually and was a finalist six times. Four of the photos were dogs and two were kittens. My first winner was a photo of three alley cat kittens scampering over the back of a couch and was entered through The Vindicator in 1951. There have been a lot of photographs of cats, dogs and, more recently, horses in the six decades since then.

Michael J. Lacivita is a Youngstown retiree and a member of the Ohio Senior Citizens Hall of Fame and Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame.