Each year the Chronicle offers three editorial internship opportunities for college students or recent graduates who seek to combine their passion for horses with a vocation in writing and photography. Many current and past Chronicle staff members, myself included, began working here as interns.

So, for the past two decades more than 50 interns have passed through the magazine’s door, usually spending three to four months with us in the spring, summer or fall. We’ve been fortunate to have many talented individuals, some of whom have gone on to careers in the equestrian journalism field, from public relations to marketing to professional photography.

While there are many interns who later choose a career outside of the equestrian world, most have one thing in common when they arrive for their interview–they consider themselves horse people.

So, to help us ascertain what a prospective intern knows, we offer each applicant a basic knowledge exercise where we ask him or her to identify 10 famous riders and horses from the various disciplines we cover. Generally, we tailor the questions to the applicant’s strengths, but there are a few people and horses that we regularly include, such as William Steinkraus, Rodney Jenkins and Gem Twist.

Over the past decade, though, we’ve noticed that a growing number of intern applicants don’t recognize these names. These are the children of the late 1980s. Most of them grew up well after these famous riders and horses had earned their most memorable accolades in their respective sports. Sometimes we think we’re showing our age in asking these names and consider replacing them with Beezie Madden or Rodrigo Pessoa. But should we?

As a child, I used to spend hours in the local libraries around my hometown, scanning the shelves for horse books. Often, I’d stumble across a book that I’d never seen but that was written many years earlier. But no matter the amount of dust on the cover, if it was about horses and I’d never read it, I’d check it out. This is how I learned about many famous horsemen who influenced our sports, including Mr. Steinkraus and Snowbound, who won the individual gold medal at the 1968 Olympics.

Unlike interns of the past who relied on books and magazines for their equestrian knowledge, a growing number of young people today are glued to the Internet. Now it’s almost information overload. Who wants to read old books with black-and-white photographs when you can spend your valuable free time watching streaming video of current competitions in real time?

But, perhaps I’m showing my age again when I say that it’s just as important, if not more so, to know who developed our sports and who influenced today’s stars as to know who won last week’s $50,000 grand prix.

And that’s why Bill Moroney’s Between Rounds column (p. 32) “A Way To Honor And Remember Our Mentors” really struck me. He recently visited the American Saddlebred Horse Association Museum at the Kentucky Horse Park and wondered why the hunter/jumper community doesn’t have a similar type of place, a vast collection of historical artifacts to honor the great names in our sports.

I agree with Bill that such a place would be a tremendous boon to our community. It would also be a way for us to educate our young equestrians, to show them the importance of those who came before us, reveal how they accomplished what they did and why they mean so much to us today.

A true horseman never stops learning. We need to make sure the next generation looks back as well as forward.

Tricia Booker