A dream ride at Bon Air rehab center

Major Akers always figured he'd take another ride on a horse.

It had been 67 years, but yesterday the 99-year-old didn't seem a bit rusty. He flashed a big smile from his perch atop Rocky, a Tennessee Walker that was the star attraction of dude ranch day at The Laurels of Bon Air rehabilitation center. Akers twirled the horse's mane through his fingers as he took a leisurely stroll around the parking lot.

"That felt real good," he said afterward.

A few feet away, Akers' daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and Sam Hurst, relaxed a bit. They were all for the ride, they said before the horse arrived, but they weren't at ease until Akers had his feet back on the ground.

"I couldn't believe when he saw that horse and stood straight up," his daughter said. "That tells me he'll come home" from the rehabilitation center. Akers arrived at the Chesterfield County center a little more than a week ago after fighting off pneumonia.

"A week ago, he couldn't even stand," Sam Hurst said.

When Pamela Hoy, the marketing director for the center, showed Akers a picture of her horse, "his eyes just lit up."

"He said to me, 'I'd love to be able to ride again,'" she said. "I told him I'd see what I could do."

It wasn't a stretch. Hoy has owned Rocky for a little more than five years, and she had already planned on bringing the horse to the center. But she wasn't so sure about getting Akers in the saddle.

"You just don't know [with people that age]," she said.

Akers was more certain. In his younger days, he rode horses for a sawmill job in Elgood, W.Va. "I got $2.50 a day with a horse but only $1.75 a day without," he said.

Before yesterday, he hadn't been on a horse since leaving West Virginia for a job at an Allied Chemical plant in Pulaski in 1942.

But he never lost the desire to ride.

Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or .