Menotti doesn’t ride horses anymore, but she remembers it as liberating and therapeutic. She volunteered at the charity called Wings of Hope about 10 years ago because it combined her love of horses and her love of working with young people. And she noticed the difference in the children and adults with disabilities who rode.
“They were more relaxed,” she said. “When you ride a horse, you’re just a free spirit.”
Menotti describes herself as a giver who likes Italian food, neat surroundings, and good-looking people.
She has met plenty of good-looking men during her lifetime, Menotti said, but she let them all go and doesn’t miss what she left behind.
“When you give up something, it’s gone. When I say you give it up, you gave it up for something greater,” she said. “You don’t go back. You always have to move forward.”
More than a decade has passed since Unsworth nominated the 84-year-old for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Menotti wondered aloud about whether there’s still a chance she might someday join the more than 200 women who have been inducted into the prestigious circle — women such as Cynthia Ann Parker, Sacagawea, Menotti’s old rodeo colleague Dale Evans, and Mother Joseph Pariseau, a Canadian-born Catholic nun who helped establish Catholic schools and hospitals in the Pacific Northwest.
Diana Vela, associate executive director of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, said that just being accepted as a nominee is an honor in itself and that nominees continue to be considered in subsequent years. It is still possible Menotti could be inducted, she said.
“She has been successfully accepted as a nominee,” she said. “She now just needs to move to honoree.”
Vela, who wrote her dissertation on Catholic nuns, said such women truly were the unsung heroes who often go unnoticed in the history of the Old West.
Menotti made a trip this year to the Fort Worth Stock Show — she doesn’t go as much as she used to, because of the cold weather. She educated her tenderfoot companion on different breeds of cattle in the barns and went for a whirl on a mechanical horse at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame
“To be in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, you have to have done something in your life to make a difference,” she had said a few weeks earlier. “You have to be … kind of a pioneer.”
North Texas freelance writer Karen Gavis can be contacted at 817-821-3547.
What an interesting and inspiring story of life.