He met and married his wife Donna in the 1980s, and the two of them worked on opening new apartment complexes in Arizona and elsewhere.
And though he once made thousands of dollars at the horse track( bought a used Cadillac with some of the money), he said he hasn’ t placed a bet of more than $ 50 since then.
“ But wherever I was, I sold lots of horse supplies,” he said, including medication for race horses.
Griffith met a Texas saddle maker along the way, and made a business deal with him to produce fancy horse saddles. He treats horses plagued with joint and muscle problems. He once had a small factory turning out horse gear, and produced a liniment of his own recipe called PDQ because that’ s how it worked— pretty darn quick.
He returned to Indiana in 1989 when his father was ill, and opened a tack and saddle shop in Greenwood called Griffith’ s Wild Horse Junction. And he won some races with a horse named Bandito Buck. He also opened a shop called Trails End in the Story area, and spent part of the 1990s travelling across the state with a mechanical bull similar to the one shown in the Urban Cowboy movie, sponsoring contests and participating in charity events.
He sold the Trails End store in 1994, and began selling tack and saddles from his current location in about 2000.
In the barn next to his house on Indiana 135, you’ ll find a sample of his dazzling saddles, along with blankets, lead ropes, and an array of colorful horse equipment. And, of course, the PDQ liniment, which Griffith points out is cool to the skin, not hot. He also sells firewood and ice, and is a drop-off point for trash collection.
PDQ is the result of reading books on veterinary medicine, listening closely to relatives and friends who knew horses, and consulting with a woman who owned an herb farm. He makes the tincture at his Brown County business and sells it all over the country.
A series of health problems put him in a mobility scooter instead of astride a horse in recent years, and his faithful dog Pup keeps an eye on the shop when he and Donna are away. One of the places you might find him is at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, or at its nearby museum and restaurant.“ There’ s lots of history right in our own back yard,” he said.
Why the life-long love of horses? It’ s pretty simple. Horses are therapeutic, he said, and make you feel better just by being around them. Bobby G subscribes to the quote which has been attributed to everybody from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers:“ The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”
Bobby G’ s Tack and Saddlery can be reached at( 812) 988-0424. •
July / August 2016 • Our Brown County 31