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Horseytalk.net Special Interview
Ricky Webb

www.miamiherald.com

Rider killed by Hurricane Irene while feeding his horses

Rider killed by Hurricane Irene while feeding his horses If you saw Ricky Webb, chances are he was riding his gray mustang Diamond, enjoying retirement beneath a white cowboy hat.

He kept seven horses on his 10 acres in Nash County, N Carolina, - three more mustangs, a Paint Horse, an Arabian, an Appaloosa cross - and nothing kept him from feeding them every morning at 9.

Not even Hurricane Irene.

Webb's wife Patty heard the tree snap, and she found her husband of 40 years out in their yard, his body still warm, struck by an oak branch in the middle of his a favorite chore.

Before Irene even made landfall in North Carolina, it took its first life - a well-loved, easy-going, 63-year-old cowboy who wouldn't want anybody to make a fuss.

"He had one philosophy in life," said his son Weston, 35. "Never stressover anything. And he didn't. The man never got his blood pressure up. The man survived skin cancer. I had 35 years to enjoy him."

This hurricane, the fiercest to strike the state in nearly a decade, killed in unusual fashion.

Only one of the state's six fatalities happened on the coast.

Half of them came in cars: one in Sampson County, one in Pitt and one in Wayne. Two more came by falling trees, one again in Pitt County and the other at Webb's house outside Nashville.

But of the 46 deaths nationwide, Webb's was among the first.

Friends sawed up the limb this week with promises to take down the oak hollowed by carpenter ants, while Patty Webb clutched the couple's wedding portrait from 40 years ago, hair in 1970s styles.

"I'll miss him so much," she cried, rushing back inside.

If Webb wasn't riding his horses, he was tending to a flock of four grandchildren he nicknamed "my little people."

He'd retired as a mechanic for the city of Rocky Mount, where he was generous enough to work on fellow employees' private cars on the side, along with any other broken thing that came his way.

"If I had a dead battery, or whatever it might be, he would come to the rescue," said Frances Crisp, who worked as an administrative assistant in Rocky Mount. "Getting people to work on your vehicles is hard in a small town."

Webb's son recalled the time they came across a stranded motorist on the Fourth of July, and Webb offered the luckless man a seat in his air-conditioned truck while he tinkered with the broken one. Once he found the broken part and explained you couldn't get it on a holiday, he towed the man's car home with a chain.

"He was a heck of a guy, and a great mechanic," said Arthur Brinkley, who worked with him in Rocky Mount. "Police cars, buses, garbage trucks - anything the city owned. From a weed eater to a chain saw to a dump truck."

But when Webb bought his 10 acres at the end of a long dirt road, he pledged to steer clear of all engines, other than those he owned.

Between horses and grandchildren, Webb was a busy man. He rode everywhere on horseback, even through the streets of Nashville for the springtime Blooming Festival parade.

His Chihuahua, Dusty, would often follow alongside the horse's hoofs.

Webb didn't plan for a funeral. Death isn't the sort of thing a man of his temperament thought about. But he wouldn't want anybody to dry-clean a suit or put on a fancy dress. He'd expect them in T-shirts and cowboy hats, the way he carried himself.

Somewhere, his son believes, Webb is riding a favorite quarter horse, Half Moon, who died in March.

And he's just as much at peace as he was in life.

Interview sourced from miamiherald.com

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