By Jill Hanning
Enquirer contributor

Farrier Charles Yankie pounds a red-hot horseshoe into shape as he works in his shop at the Lebanon Raceway, where he has been fitting horses with footwear for 34 years. (Michael Snyder photo) | ZOOM |

LEBANON - When Charles Yankie was asked at a parent-teacher conference what he does for a living, his daughter begged him not to tell. When he asked her why not, she replied: "She won't like you if she knows you put nails in horses' feet."

Yankie, 63, has been a farrier for the last 34 years at the Lebanon Raceway, and by now, his daughter knows that shoeing racehorses doesn't hurt them.

"I like the animals more than anything - as a kid, I would ride horses all the time," Yankie says. "Even with a bad horse, I don't really mind it. It's easier to deal with horses than people."

Yankie's great-grandfather had a blacksmith shop where Yankie says he used to "hang around and get in the way." After apprenticing with a blacksmith in Springfield and a farrier in Brandywine, Pa. , he opened his own business, shoeing horses at Lebanon, Scioto Downs and in Kentucky.

Yankie gets to work on his second horse of the day. He wears a sweat shirt and jeans, a buzz cut of gray hair and the smile of someone who has enjoyed the many years of what he does.

"The hoof is just like toenail or fingernail," Yankie explains. "If you go too deep, you're in the quick."

Yankie compares shoeing a horse to aligning a car. If something is out of balance, neither will perform correctly.

"If they're improperly shod, it causes them to do strange things," he says. "They will hit knees or crossfire (where the back foot hits the front foot). They're going at such a speed, you have to have them clean."

"He had more toe than I thought," says O.D. Robinson, as he watches Yankie trim and file the front of his horse's hoof. Robinson is a retired General Motors employee and a horse owner who stables his three horses at Lebanon.

Yankie uses calipers to measure the length of the toe, and a hoof gauge - a type of protractor - to measure the angle of the foot. Then he cuts the shoe to the correct length.

Most racehorses are shod every 28 days, Yankie said. Before retiring last year, he would shoe an average of seven horses a day at a minimum cost of $60 a horse. Now he shoes two or three a week.

"I think he does the best - but it's hard to get him," Robinson says. "You don't see many young blacksmiths coming on, and that worries me. There's a lot of knowledge to it, and hard work. I wouldn't want to do it."

Robinson's horse, whose race name is Sport Czar but goes by Richard in the stables, is shod with aluminum shoes in the front and steel shoes in the back.

Yankie aluminum is a softer and easier to work, but the shoes need to be replaced more often.

"If you have a real mean horse, you try to talk the owner into using steel so you don't have to shoe him so often," Yankie says with a smile.

Yankie works continuously while he talks, explaining the different tools and telling the horse to settle down from time to time. It takes him an hour to shoe Sport Czar, most of which he spends bent over. The last few winters his back began to hurt, he said, prompting him to retire from full-time work.

Asked if he'd ever been kicked, Yankie replies: "Yes, but not bad, I've been lucky. The worst was in the hand, a piece of bone chipped and came out the finger."

Next, Yankie welds some steel grabs onto the shoes so the horse won't slip on the ice. Holes are drilled and the shoes are nailed into thehorse's toe. The ends of the nails are broken off with a hammer and then pinched off at an angle with a tool called a clincher.

But, Yankie points out, the nail isn't clinched too tightly. If something catches the shoe, it will pull off without tearing the horse's foot.

Yankie plans to cut back gradually on his business, especially in the summer, when, he says, he'll "take the trailer to the lake and enjoy myself."

And maybe even get in a game of horseshoes.