Oscar Belliveau: A life well lived

Oscar Belliveau is a quirky guy.

But he’s the kind of guy that once you engage in conversation with him, you don’t want that conversation to end. He has numerous stories about a life well lived, which has taken him around the globe, and it all began with harness racing.

Born in Halifax in 1950 and raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, Oscar got his first taste of harness racing as a newspaper boy.

“It was 1963 and I had a paper route that ended at the racetrack,” he recalled. “I was eight years old then, and the track was the old Moncton Raceway, which became Brunswick Downs. Joe O’Brien’s father was instrumental in putting that track together, which was, during World War II, an airport.”

Oscar credits his astrological sign—Sagittarius—as the reason he was attracted to the barn area at Moncton.

“The sign of Sagittarius is half-horse,” he explained. “I was attracted to the horses and the barn area of the track on an emotional level. I kept going there after school, and that eventually expanded into the summers. Danny Pelerin was a trainer at the time, and he took me under his wing—cleaning stalls and taking care of the horses.”

Back then, during the brutal winter months, Oscar had to endure the frigid Canadian weather.

“The climate was rough,” he admitted. “In the winter we’d jog the horses using a sled, because of the snow and ice.”

Not one to sit in a school seat for any length of time, Oscar ran away from home when he was just 14, heading to Frederickton, New Brunswick.

“They didn’t pay me, but they made sure I had a place to sleep and eat,” he said. “I went to Woodstock, New York and the cops caught me there and took me back home. I ran away again that fall. I didn’t have a bad home life, I had five brothers and was the middle kid, I just wasn’t doing well in school and wasn’t a good student.”

Oscar had a group of friends he hung out with, and they were all horse lovers.

“As a teenager, I was frequently at the racetrack and spent a lot of time around the horses,” he recalled. “On Friday nights, we often slept in the barn. We would go to barns to watch the trainers and drivers drink and listen to what they talked about. It was interesting, because they argued about horses and told tall tales about horses and things that happened to them. I learned a lot about life during that time.”

The second time Oscar hit the road he went to St. Johns, at age 15, where he stayed a couple of weeks before taking a train to Truro Raceway, which was not racing at the time. After spending one miserable night in a tack room bathroom, he hitchhiked back home. Not long after, he hitchhiked to Quebec City, where he found a trainer who gave him $20 a week to groom horses. He finally ended up at Three Rivers, working as a caretaker for various trainers.

“I took care of all kinds of horses there,” he recalled. “Swamp Fever was going around the barn area at time, and I took care of one horse who eventually died from it. It was my first real experience with death, and it stuck with me. Eventually I started working with a trainer named Benoit Cote at the Richelieu Farm, which was owned by a man named Denis Larochelle. I worked there in their broodmare section for three years, and it was there I really learned how to take care of horses.

“Things were much different back then (1969),” he reported. “I had four horses and made $45 a week but being at the farm protected me from the bad elements of society. It was a different time and gave me a time to cement my personality and my morals. That farm was a well-run operation, and we had the best racehorse stable around.

“The barn we worked in was beautiful, and it had a big furnace to keep us warm,” Oscar continued. “There were about 40 horses in that one barn, and it had an upstairs, where we had our living quarters and an area to keep hay and straw for the horses. Each person took care of four horses, typically and one of the grooms had a wife who cooked for us, so it was a good life.”

Oscar later traveled to Vernon Downs, where he met some of the greatest names in harness racing: Galbreath, Simpson, Garnsey, to name a few. From there he traveled to Seminole Downs, Saratoga, and Roosevelt, getting to see top horses such as Lavern Hanover, and Fresh Yankee. By the time he returned to Canada in 1974, Oscar had a distinct perspective of horses and the racing industry.

“I loved being a caretaker, because I saw what these horses dealt with, and how important it was to keep them mentally sound as well as physically sound,” he said. “I had a lot of luck healing horses and getting them back into shape and helping them to reach their potential. I started studying acupuncture and learned the benefits of herbal therapies, which I used on the horses I took care of.”

Oscar then teamed up with astute horseman John Patteson, Sr., of Dalton, Georgia.

“He had a Free For Aller in New York named Bygone, and had also bought the first colt by Bret Hanover,” Oscar said. “He was an excellent horseman. He had bought a mare, and she was a cross-bred, not a full Standardbred on her sire’s side and she was wild, and John took her and made a good racehorse out of her. That’s the kind of guy he was–he was very patience and a true horseman.

He took care of his horses and the people that worked for him and never stopped working. He was conscientious and honest to a fault. He took as much pride in taking care of the people who worked for him as he did for his horses.”

Oscar recalls the night he took care of Most Happy Fella when that pacer’s regular caretaker fell ill.

“Most Happy Fella’s groom had a kidney issue and he asked me to paddock the horse the night he won the Cane Pace,” Oscar chuckled. “I had never met Stanley (Dancer) but in the paddock he gave me kind of a funny look because I had long hair and looked like a mess. I know that Stanley didn’t allow his grooms to look like that.”

“I went to work for Randy Perry who raced a lot in New York too,” Oscar continued. “He had a good sized stable and we raced at Roosevelt and Yonkers, and he gave me a lot of freedom with the horses. When he got into an accident at Freehold and broke his hip, some of his owners approached me about taking his horses, but I wouldn’t do it. That was not in my DNA.”

Content to be a career caretaker, Oscar spent several years with Buddy Gilmour, during the late 1980s, just prior to the closing of Roosevelt Raceway.

“He had a horse named Fog Patch, who belonged to John Kopas,” Oscar noted. “He was a big grey horse and was in the 3-year-old open, and we did some acupuncture on him, and he raced well as a result. Around this time, I was also doing laser therapy for some horses at Aqueduct part-time and a friend with a couple of horses introduced me to reading horse’s astrological signs and charts, based on their birthdays. This has become an interesting hobby that I still engage in today.”

Oscar’s life took several twists and turns through the 1990s and beyond, and in 2006, he accepted an offer to travel to China as an English teacher.

“Ironically, a person with a seventh-grade education was teaching English,” he laughed. “I ended up staying in China for 12 years, in Shanghai, and came home five years ago. Of course, as an American, you stand out, but after six months, I loved it there. I still teach 37 students remotely, usually three to four hours a day.”

While Oscar says he misses aspects of China, he is happy to be back in North America, and credits his years of working with the horses, to him becoming a successful and sought-after English teacher.

“I adapted pretty quickly to the Chinese culture,” he admitted. “I miss the friends I made there. Shanghai is a big city, but you don’t feel like it is. It was an amazingly easy city to live in for being a big city. The people were nice, and the food was nice. I loved teaching and had a wonderful time doing it. Sometimes I’d have five students and often times 35, but usually around 15, all different ages. Now I teach one on one, or two on one. The experience of working with the horses helped me with this process. Think about it, as a caretaker-groom, you are in the barn with 100 things going on around you, working with animals who do not speak, and you have to multi-task, and it develops your fluid intelligence.

“It is kind of the same with folks who don’t speak the language you speak,” he added. “The same way a good trainer determines what a horse needs, you do the same thing with a kid who is trying to learn English. You work to get them to understand what you are trying to show them and how they should do something.

“The horses taught me to think for myself, Oscar explained. “And to follow my gut feelings, and to figure out what they needed to learn a process. It’s the same way with teaching kids—you do things which are relatable to them to help them succeed; that’s the difference between a good trainer and an average trainer—the good trainers are able to determine what a horse needs to succeed and has the foresight to bring it out of him.

“I remember listening to Ralph Baldwin once when he was talking to someone in Goshen about a trotter he had,” Oscar remembered. “Ralph was telling this guy what he suspected was wrong with this horse, which means he was reacting to what the horse was telling him. That’s the difference in trainers.

“The Burkes are the modern-day version of that,” he continued. “The Burkes keep horses good for years—that’s the mark of true horsemen. The same with Linda Toscano—I knew her when she started her career as a groom, and she’s another person who keeps her horses healthy, treats them all as individuals, and really thinks about who they are and what they need.”

Despite his lack of formal education past the seventh grade, Oscar says he realized that being at the track helped to provide him with a different kind of education.

“Sure, at times I wished I had a more formal education,” he admitted.” But even though my friends were in school, I knew the education I was getting with the horses was my kind of education. It forced me to rely on my guts, my instincts, and that has helped me in teaching today. With people who aren’t speaking your language, you have to figure out why one kid is learning, and another one isn’t—and this prompted me to research and read on how the human brain works. It helped me to figure out how to help students learn.”

Oscar says a simple technique in teaching is to use storytelling.

“I find stories and send them to them, and we will go over them together,” he explained. “Mostly, I use historical stories and interact with them via videos. We will cover the A to Zs on everything, and a lot of kids are able to comment and interact with many parts of American history—of which they’re fascinated. This to me is equivalent of claiming a horse, improving him, and racing him in a higher class. It’s the same concept, really, once you understand how the brain works.”

The years he spent working with the horses have ultimately proved invaluable for Oscar, influencing not only the way he teaches non-English speaking people, but also in the way he views life.

“Finally, at age 73, I’m healthy and financially secure. Taking care of horses is an art; and working with living creatures who are animated of their own accord is by no means a simple task,” Oscar stresses. “It requires years of practice to determine their needs, how to discover their injuries, and what to do (for them) in any given situations.

“Horses can’t talk, Oscar said. “And because of that fact, they can’t tell us where the problem is in their body. On top of that, each animals shows the same problem in a different manner, or there is more than one problem to contend with, so finding and solving those issues is no easy task. It’s the same with anyone who doesn’t communicate the way you do. The years spent working with these animals helped me understand that life is never black and white, but that things have many shades and therefore very rarely are things the way they appear on the surface.”

by Kimberly Rinker, for Harnesslink