It is dusk in late winter on a white-fenced horse farm in Wayne.
A dark stallion, cat-like in grace, is being led from the horse van that has brought him from the quarantine station in Wisconsin where he has spent the last three months. He raises his sculpted head and pulls a great draught of air into his nostrils.
He apparently recognizes this as his home, after a year away, and voluntarily enters the barn in a passage, the high, showy trot with suspension between the lifting of the diagonal pairs of legs that is natural to a stallion in proud display before his mares. It is thrilling to watch for the power and majesty it contains.
Troubadour is home.
Home from a stay in Europe and from the Seoul Olympics last fall, where he was the reserve horse for Christine Stuekelberger, an international equestrian star who took the bronze medal on another horse.
A year ago Troubadour`s owner, Edith Kosterka, sent the 16-year-old stallion of a centuries-old German breed called the Trakehner to Kirchberg, Switzerland, where he was put into training with Stuekelberger.
Winner of the individual gold medal in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the 1978 World Championships, the Reserve World Championship in 1982 and 1986, the World Cup in dressage in 1987 and 12 times the Swiss national champion, Stuekelberger is considered one of the world`s top riders in dressage, a discipline often compared to ballet. After years of training, horse and rider are able to communicate and interact so harmoniously through nearly imperceptible weight, rein and leg aids that they become a unit that is very close to the legendary centaur as they perform the pattern of movements required in grand prix, the highest level in dressage competition.
In the year he was away, Troubadour fulfilled for his owner, Kosterka, a passionate dream.
”It was an ego trip for me,” she says. ”I wanted to prove that Troubadour is the best Trakehner stallion in dressage, one that gives his movement to almost 95 percent of his offspring.”
The beauty of a horse`s movement, which results from conformation, is considered one of the most desirable assets in dressage.
”I did little breeding with him, because he was always in training and the trainers don`t want to be bothered, but he already has sired a number of horses who are in the ribbons, from second level to Intermediare I,” Kosterka says, naming two levels, one low, the other near the top, in the progressive gymnastic training of the dressage horse.
”Other stallions breed 500 mares and they have nothing.”
Kosterka was not, as most horse breeders are, born into the craft.
Sitting in the kitchen of her house on the farm, with foal halters hooked onto the backs of kitchen chairs, piles of stud books on the table and photographs of her stallions on the walls, she tells how horses came into her life and how they ultimately saved hers.
One`s immediate impression of her is of a strong will and an intelligent mind in a porcelain-frail body. She still limps slightly from a hip operation and she has had other health problems, but it does not keep her from making the daily rounds of her horses.
Flipping her champagne-colored hair back from her face, she raises her hands and feigns horror: ”For God`s sake don`t tell my age!”
”I was a young girl during the War,” she says, meaning World War II.
”I was born and raised in Vienna. I always had dogs. I loved animals. I was in the ballet. I was in the opera. I studied acting. I did very well. I could show you pictures, but I was not the most ambitious person.”
After the War, she met an American sailor named Donald Kosterka.
”He was in Italy in the Navy, and I was visiting a friend there. I had gone to Naples with the ballet. We went over there in the fall for a performance, a few girls together. I met Don through other girlfriends. We dated for three months and after that he asked me to marry him. He was a very nice young man. He didn`t smoke or drink and he was very handsome.
”The Navy priest married us. In 1954 we came to America. Don was still in the Navy, so we lived in Norfolk, Va. Don got out of the Navy shortly and we came to Chicago and stayed with his parents. We bought a three-bedroom house in Wheaton.”
Don formed his own company, of which he was president, AGI, Album Graphics Inc., with offices in Melrose Park.
”He got started with commercial printing,” says Kosterka, but became known for his work with record albums for stars such as Michael Jackson, the Ohio Players and others.
”Nine years I lived in Wheaton,” she says. ”My sister, Elizabeth Hodacs, came over here as Miss Austria in the Miss Universe contest in 1960 and came to visit me. She loved horses and wanted to ride so I went with her to the Keith Line Stables in Oak Brook. That`s how she got me interested. I went once a week, and then after that I went on weekends with Don to ride.
”I bought my first horse, Royal Comet, a big, gorgeous thoroughbred I couldn`t ride. Seventeen hands (with four inches to a hand), but beautiful.” She turned the lively Comet over to her husband and got another for herself: ”Rob Roy, a chestnut and a good horse, with a very good
disposition.”
Their interest in horses intensified, and they built a home 26 years ago on a four-acre lot in Wayne, a horsey community.
”Don hunted with the Wayne Du Page Hunt and enjoyed it very much. Then he got involved wih polo so we had polo ponies, too,” Kosterka continues.
”In a short time, we bought 25 acres. My horse Rob Roy wasn`t too good anymore; he was ouchy. A friend told me there was a stallion in Indiana that would make a great hunter for Don”.
The horse was Nenufar, a 16.3-hand black Trakehner stallion of excellent European breeding.
”He turned out to be very strong and a super jumper, a very quiet horse, an angel. Nothing bothered him. He was perfect for Don.”
A short time later, a friend sold her a mare named Mister Day, a chestnut thoroughbred with an injured knee that cost more to fix than her original price. Breeding her to Nenufar she got the mare New Day. ”I had a lot of children out of her,” says Kosterka, and she is still on the farm producing. Then we bought the 25 acres here and built a big shed.”
It was not always easy. In winter she had to drive her Jeep out to the pastures with heated water in five gallon cans to dump in the troughs.
”We started building the riding arena and got more mares.”
Then 16 or 17 years ago, ”Don needed a new hunter,” Kosterka explains.
”Nenufar was too busy in the breeding shed. Don went over to Europe to look for one.
”That`s how we got Morgenglanz,” a bright chestnut, whose name means morning glow. (He died in December, 1987 of colic.)
Eugen Wahler, a German breeder of Trakehners, wanted to sell him because he had already bred him to so many mares there.
”Morgenglanz is one of the best,” says Kosterka. ”He`s a legend. They sold him to me on the condition I promise never to sell him.”.
Wahler also arranged for her to buy Troubadour, then only 5.
Arrival of these two stallions of a quality seldom seen here was definitely an event for horse people in the area, who began bringing their mares to Morgenglanz, the proven sire of the pair.
In the late `70s and early `80s, things in Kosterka`s life began to sour. ”A lot of bad things happened to me,” she says. ”I was very ill. I had a stomach tumor that was malignant. I had not much chance to live, but I believe God wanted me to live to care of my horses. . . . I had hip surgery, too. Through the chemotherapy I developed arthritis in my hip. I didn`t have an operation (on her stomach) because I would have died, they said.”
After surviving those two ordeals, her marriage broke up.
”He left me when I had just been out of the hospital three days,” she says. ”I had a lot of nice friends who supported me in my misery. I was very unhappy. I was very fed up with life, but I had a responsibility to my horses, and I survived. . . . My love for the horses kept me alive. I had strong will power.”
”She`s a very loyal and fierce horse lover,” said Jack Wetzel, prominent Chicago horseman and former chairman of the Midwest region for the United States Equestrian Team, who has known Kosterka for 18 years. ”I don`t know anybody who has that intense need to care for her horses. She even sleeps next to the mares when they foal,” added Wetzel. ”They`re actually like her children. She`s like a protective parent. She doesn`t like to give them up and sell any of them. They`re like her family. They`re her entire world.”
Kosterka has become legendary for her meticulous horse care.
”If the horse world would have more Edith Kosterkas, there certainly wouldn`t be any need for humane societies,” said Donna Ewing, founder and president of the Hooved Animal Humane Society here. ”She is probably one of the more conscientious and dedicated horsewomen I`ve encountered.”
Her caring is matched by her technical skill as well. ”She`s very knowledgable in breeding. She has an uncanny knowledge and feel for bloodlines,” Wetzel said.
”She`s also done a lot for the warmblood breeds in America,” said Ewing, referring to a two-year old stallion Kosterka had bred, sired by Morgenglanz, that was purchased by a prominent European breeder. ”The United States can be proud to have someone of that caliber raising warmbloods that are in demand in Europe.”
Coming out of her dark period illness and broken marriage, Kosterka turned her attention to Troubadour, showing him to great success.
”When he was 5 we put him in shows at second and third levels,” she recalls. He was ridden by a young Irishman named Shay Walsh, who also was listed to ride in the Seoul Olympics for Ireland.
When Troubadour had reached third level, Melle van Bruggen, a dressage coach for the American Olympic team suggested that Kosterka turn his training over to him in California.
”In the three years he had him, he trained him through grand prix and showed him very successfully,” Kosterka says. Together they won many top awards from dressage organizations.
But after three years of training, Kosterka tired of having her stallion so far from home and brought him back to Wayne, where he did nothing for a year or so.
Then in April, 1987, she asked Christine Stuekelberger to ride Troubadour in a special exhibition that benefited the Illinois Hooved Animal Society at Coach Horse Stables in Old Town. It turned out the Swiss rider ”knew him when he was little and she was crazy about him,” says Kosterka. ”Christine did so well, she agreed to come back in November.”
Stuekelberger rode him at the American Trakehner Association`s annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. ”He was a knockoff. They fell off their chairs,” says Kosterka.
”Then I decided to send him over there. Christine rode the horse the best,” she says, explaining why she lent the horse to a Swiss rider and not an American. ”I believe she really got along with the horse, and they were a nice pair, so I sent him over there for training. She started working him. He had done nothing for a year (and thus was unfit as an athlete).
”But since Troubadour was such a trooper, they got him going. He was chosen as Christine`s reserve horse for the Olympics in Korea. What she likes about him is that he`s extremely willing and giving and has a good disposition. He`s an honest horse.”
Kosterka adds that Steukelberger ”was so happy about Troubadour because her dream was always to ride a black stallion,” and the European press made much of this notion.
Early in 1988, Troubadour was shown in Aachen, Germany; Bern, Switzerland, and other top European shows against the toughest competition in order to qualify against all the other Olympic horses.
”It was not really fair to him,” says Kosterka, since he had been out of action for a while. ”But his dispositon is so nice, he doesn`t get excited or explode. You cannot do that with just any horse, let him stand that long and then go. He came back from Korea and he was shown in Bern one more time and he did very well. We thought we should stop him when he is on top.
”After traveling so much around the world, I thought he should come home and start some breeding, so he can provide some good horses for dressage riders here.”
She went out of her way to give Troubadour the opportunity to prove himself, she says, to prove that ”we have a lot of good horses in this country. We do not have to go to Europe to buy,” or to breed, something the American equestrian athlete has been doing at great expense for the past several years.
”In my eyes, breeding is really an art; it is an art for me to pair the right horse and bring the right mares to the stallion to get a good sporthorse. The breeder is really here for the riders. I am not a dealer or a hustler,” she says.
”I believe there is something that I`m supposed to fulfill, still to be done, which is probably why God didn`t let me die. That`s also probably why I lost my husband. If he were still with me, I could not fulfill what needs to be done.
”My goal is to sell my farm here and buy more land and create a stallion station and a training facility to break young horses, so they behave well and people have fun with them.”
This is one woman`s own form of creative contribution, each spring bringing foals to the pastures of Wayne, where one day an American rider may pick as his or her teammate a native-born Olympic champion.
