Pays

This is a true story told to me by Leonard Victor Pope, my father, prior to his passing several years ago. A heartwarming story of the times and events spent by my father as Len the milkman, one of the two principal characters in the story titled Pays, the Milkman's Horse. The other principal character is a horse named Pays, a pseudonym for a thoroughbred racehorse named after an infamous outlaw character in a Hollywood movie. Pays became Len the milkman's horse at Valley Dairy in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1928, and this story chronicles some of the events between Len the milkman and his milk wagon horse.

This story goes way back in time to that period known as the roaring twenties, an era of considerable prosperity and much social and political change. Two of the major events that highlighted Americans' experience in the 1920s were the August 1920 passing of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, and later that year, in November 1920, the first commercially licensed radio broadcast was heard from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.