Farewell To Tony!

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7106, 15 March 1933, Page 5

Farewell To Tony!

TOM MIX’S FAMOUS HORSE HAS GONE INTO RETIREMENT. With a heavy heart hut with extreme pride, Tom Mix has ridden his beloved Tony before the movie camera for the last time. Tony has been retired to spend the rest of his life in a comfortable stable and in the green hills of Universal City, while the film star introduces to screen fans a horse he has been training for three years—-Tony Jun.

Tony, jun. is a chestnut sorrel of mixed blood, seven years old, fleetfooted, an unusual jumper and, except for the fact that ho is a few shades darker, almost identical in appearanco to Tony. The new horse makes his film debut with Mix in “Oh, Promise Me,” by Peter B. Kyuc, and although ho stumbled in jumping a fence and fell on his rider, crushing two of his ribs, Mix says that Tony Junior is the best horse he has ever ridden.

Tony, now 24, was purchased by Mix in Prescott, Arizona, in 1909, for 12 dollars 50 cents. He carried his master through IOS film features and 250 shorts, becoming the most photographed and possibly the best known horso in the world. On several occasions the horse saved Mix’s life, once when a premature explosion drove sharp pieces of brokeni rock into his body as well as Mix’s, and on another occasion the horse dragged the actor to aid when his right leg and collar bone were broken in performing a hazardous feat for the cameras and ho could not ride.

No one but Mix ever rode Tony and Tony never had a double. Tony made his screen farewell in the recentlycompleted Universal Western, “Hidden Gold.”