Three essential ingredients make a handler: Mentors, owners, dogs. These ingredients plus talent and work, tempered by dedication, or determination. On these Fred Dileo built his career.
Then on the personal side, there was Patricia, the love of his life, and Taylor, his daughter, much like him in personality and equestrian skills and like her mother, a beauty.
Riding at Chinquapin in 1995 to watch his Double Rebel Buck was co-owner Mike Furcolow, DVM of Boulder. (Joe Davis shared in the ownership). Mike was among the first owners to be attracted to Fred by watching him work as an apprentice to Tony Terrell of Texas who had handled dogs for Mike but become tired of the circuit life, preferring to ready dogs for the rugged South Texas quail hunting market. (Among my treasures is a video of Tony working Rebel pointers on wild quail on foot in tennis shoes on the King Ranch, filmed by Mike and given to me.).
Mike and Fred were close, as owners and handlers tend to be, one of the endearing aspects of the sport. In 1994 at the National Championship Fred had handled Buck in an epic duel with Brush Country Specter handled by Ed Husser for owner Mary Finley of Texas. The dogs had traded finds for three hours in performances those who witnessed in person or on Brad Harter’s video declared among the best ever. Specter had barely edged out Buck for the Championship. Then Mike had taken Fred to the Rockies for a week-long fly fishing trip, another shared passion of the two.
After Buck’s 1996 five-find repeat win of the Florida Championship, Fred and Mike told me of a health problem shadowing Buck: a kidney disease. Prophetically, that win would be Buck’s last.
Whelped March 18, 1989 and bred by Mike, sired by his Greenbrier Buckboard out of his Morning Thunder, Buck’s winning had commenced early in the west with derby wins on the Packsaddle and continued in the east with a second in the Florida and first in the North Carolina in the spring of 1991. In the fall of 1992 he’d won the Lee County Open All-Age, the Southland Championship, and followed in 1993 with the Continental Open All-Age Championship. This was Fred’s second win there, the first having been with Chacoan Hummer in 1990.
Buck had followed with a Runner-Up in the North Carolina Quail. In the spring of 1994 he had won the Frank Riley Classic in New Jersey and for Mike, the Raymond Rucker Amateur in Oklahoma. Then in 1995, he’d followed the Florida with another first in the Frank Riley and in the fall Runner-Up in the Mid-America Open Prairie Championship
In all he chalked up eighteen wins including four major Championships. He sired seventeen winners, including Champion Double Rebel Sonny through whom his genes passed to more fine winners for Fred, most memorably National Champion and Hall of Fame member Funseeker’s Rebel.
That kidney disease got many of them… particularly those of Shadow breeding.