Unlike many avid foxhunters, Larry Pitts didn’t have a childhood filled with ponies and foxhunting. As a child, growing up in Guilford County, N.C., Larry Pitts rode his grandfather’s mule every time he could.

“Mostly, it was when my father borrowed it to cultivate tobacco,” he recalled.

But with the exception of a four-year hiatus in the U.S. Navy, Pitts has been hunting hounds of one variety or another since he was old enough to walk.

“As a child, I hunted Beagles with my father,” he said.

But, it wasn’t until he returned from the Navy that foxhunting entered his life.

Before a May 14 dinner party in honor of his 25th anniversary as huntsman at the Potomac Hunt in Potomac, Md., attended by 175 guests, at the Bretton Woods Country Club in Potomac, Md., Pitts recalled with obvious pleasure and contentment his chosen vocation. Many of those present were masters and huntsmen from surrounding Maryland and Virginia hunts,

“I met a girl who showed and hunted horses. I just couldn’t believe anyone would go foxhunting on a horse and have fun,” he exclaimed. The place was Sedgefield Hunt, near Greensboro, N.C., and unbeknownst to Pitts at the time, it wasn’t the girl who would change his lifestyle, but Sedgefield Hunt’s professional huntsman, Ian Milne.

Milne, who needed help, hired Pitts at $20 a week.

Obviously, he needed a horse for the job. With the money from his income-tax return check, he bought a $300 Quarter Horse. “Of all I saw, he was the only one I would have. His name was Buckwheat, and he was just a pretty horse,” he said.

Pitts and Buckwheat learned about fox hunting together, but it wasn’t all smooth going.

“I got knocked out three times during the first season. Down there it’s all woods, and slippery leaves. Buckwheat would fall down, and I would go off. One time Ian rode by, saw me laid out on the ground, and called out, ‘When you get up from there, come on and catch up!’ I thought he would have at least been a little sympathetic,” Pitts said with a laugh.

It didn’t matter. By then the foxhunting bug had bitten Pitts. He quit school (it interfered with hunting) and became a full-time professional whipper-in at Sedgefield for the next two seasons.

He and Milne became life-long friends, and it was Milne who encouraged Pitts to take his next job. Milne saw an ad in The Chronicle of the Horse for a job at Old Dominion Hunt, Orlean, Va., and encouraged Pitts to apply.

He got the job, but stayed only one season prior to moving to Eglinton and Caledon Hunt in Ontario. His intuition was to move on when he was offered the job as a kennelman-huntsman.

It was at Eglinton and Caledon Hunt that Pitts first met Beverley Bosselmann, now a Potomac joint master, and her husband, Rainer. Rainer was an honorary whipper-in for the Ontario hunt at the time.

At the end of his fourth season in Ontario, Pitts met Warren Harrover, jt.-MFH of Bull Run (Va.), at a hound show and expressed a desire to return to Virginia. “There was nothing available in Virginia, but he told me Potomac Hunt was looking for a huntsman,” he said.

As they say, the rest is history.

It was April 30, 1980, when Pitts moved from Ontario and May 1 when he showed up at the Potomac Hunt Club. “That’s when you’re supposed to start the job in the hunt service. That’s the rule I grew up with. You leave April 30, and the next morning you show up at your new job for work,” he explained.

Other than the late Tom Dowd, who was master when Pitts arrived in Potomac, he has served under the same masters ever since-Jt.-MFHs Irwin “Skip” Crawford, wife Vicki Crawford, Peter Hitchen and Bosselmann.

Pitts may not have taken a break between jobs, but he did take time off a month later (June 14, to be exact) to return to Canada and marry his bride of nearly 25 years, the former Peggy Bayliss. The couple has two children. Son Justin shares his father’s enthusiasm for fishing, but not for riding,
and Laura is a student at Hood College in nearby Frederick, Md., and an event rider.

Getting Larry Pitts started talking about his hounds is equivalent to opening a dam.

He ticks off hound names, and when asked for specifics he repeatedly mentions Rapidan, the sire of seven dog hounds and six bitches, all of whom he planned to show this year at the Bryn Mawr (Pa.) and Virginia hound shows.

“We’re going to have another champion this year. His name is Jefferson, a Rapidan hound. He has it all,” Pitts predicted.

There are 361³2 couple in the Potomac kennel today. “The most important thing about a hound is his brain. Once hounds understand what you want, they will do it. I think it’s a big deal to make the hound understand the program,” he explained.

Does he plan a retirement anytime soon? “Not as long as I can keep on hunting and doing a good job,” he answered. At age 55, it doesn’t seem likely that it will be any time in the near future, especially because he still thinks that “a good day of fishing is not quite as good as a good day of foxhunting.”