Moneda at the HAV Horse Rescue

For the Love of Horses

Horse Rescue CEO Alice Whitfield on a Love Story 53 Years in the Making

BY STACEY GUALANDI / PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF HAV HORSE RESCUE

It’s feeding time at the HAV Horse Rescue barn in Las Vegas, but that doesn’t keep CEO Alice Whitfield from singing to her stable.

She bursts out her rendition of “Side by Side” as Casper, a 17-year-old Quarter Horse and retired barrel racer, continues inhaling a handful of hay.

“I have my repertoire, and I sing to all of them,” says Whitfield. “But when it comes to food, I take second place.”

Always quick with a quip, this feisty five-foot (15 hands in horse lingo) force of nature—with her signature lime-colored hair—never puts her cart before the horse.

But don’t let her small size fool you. This former Broadway singer and actress is a thoroughbred in saving and rehoming surrendered horses.

“Lilac was bones when she came here and wouldn’t go near anybody,” says Whitfield as she introduces her hungry herd one by one. “She’s now up to weight and somebody is sponsoring to adopt her.”

“Joe was a racehorse who had kissing spine disease that had to be operated on,” adds Whitfield. “Instead of being put down, we took him in. Now he’s absolutely perfect and being ridden.”

Then, there’s little orphan Annie, the horse who inspired this 15-acre 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Kyle Canyon.

“She was just 333 pounds,” says Whitfield. “Now she’s up to 1,000 pounds and a spoiled brat! Ha!”

With support from volunteers, generous donors and an expert team in place, HAV Horse Rescue has built a horse’s dream house in just two short years.

“This is the Ritz Carlton of horse rescues,” says part-time volunteer Ellen LaPenna, who heard about HAV Horse Rescue on the local news. “I bonded with Willy. He’s my love. Now I’m his financial sponsor.”

“I just pray that people do get the word and that it’ll become self-supporting,” says Whitfield of her charity. “We have turned horses and people’s lives around for the better.”

The “we” is she and her partner-in-equine, husband David Hammer. He was instrumental in making his horse-worshipping wife’s bucket list wish a reality.

“We want to take in horses that need to be surrendered due to a family crisis, financial difficulties, an inability to care for a horse and the need for medical intervention,” says Hammer.

“For horses that aren’t adoptable, they get to live out their time in our sanctuary with all the love, attention and medical care they could ever want.”

“[Horses] will come right up and sniff you and they’ll find out if you’re naughty or nice,” adds Whitfield. “You don’t pick them. They pick you.”

Decades ago, this devoted duo picked each other as teens growing up in Brooklyn, New York.

“We were sweethearts in ninth grade until our senior year in high school,” gushes Whitfield. “I was in love and that was it. There was nobody else for me.”

But Whitfield says Hammer’s “Daddy dearest” put pressure on his son to go to college, not to go steady, so her beloved boyfriend broke it off.

“He was a dutiful son and left me with a bag of Chinese food on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. Not that I remember it. It was a Sunday,” jokes Whitfield. “I never got over it. It killed me. I never stopped crying.”

Hammer says they did meet up in Brooklyn once more a short time later.

“I was going into the train station to go to school and she informed me that she was getting married,” says Hammer. “That put a kind of a finality to the whole thing, so we just went off to what became our own incredible lives.”

Whitfield earned two doctorates—one in English and the other in primate animal behavior—both of which went unused in favor of the Great White Way.

In a twist of fate, she was asked to be one of the original cast members of the acclaimed 1968 Off-Broadway show “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.”

Her “perfect pitch” and versatile vocals earned her fame in both New York and Chicago, and an invitation to perform her one-woman show at Carnegie Hall.

But Whitfield says she soured on show business.

“When I decided to leave the business, my father was ready to kill me,” says Whitfield. “He said, ‘How could you do this to me?’ He liked having a daughter who was famous. I was pretty famous and successful, but gosh, did I hate show business!”

Her streak of success continued as a New York City ad agency director/writer/producer, which led to coaching and casting voice actors. She worked with and befriended such legends as Dick Van Dyke, Tony Randall, William H. Macy, Nathan Lane and Mary Tyler Moore, to name but a few.

Whitfield opened her own company, Real-To-Reel Recording, Inc., which became one of Manhattan’s top creative production houses, and was recognized as one of the top voiceover coaches in the country, all while raising her son Mitchell.

(Fun fact: Mitchell Whitfield followed in his mom’s famous footsteps with memorable roles like Stan in “My Cousin Vinny” and Rachel’s ex-fiance Barry the orthodontist in “Friends!”)

Meanwhile, Hammer, a widower with two children, had moved to Taiwan and became a hugely successful international businessman.

“He spent 38 years building an empire, never being able to speak a word of Taiwanese; a word of Chinese; a word of anything other than English and a couple of Jewish phrases here and there,” jokes Whitfield. “But he turned nothing into a 1.2 million-square-foot furniture factory.”

Throughout the years, Whitfield admits she never stopped thinking of—and trying to locate—her long-lost love. Promising leads, even one from a private detective, always led to dead ends.

The story of her decades-long search is a complicated one, but in 2013, Alice Whitfield (née Berman) finally got an email address for Hammer through the help of old high school friends. She contacted him immediately.

“I looked at this email and said to myself, ‘Do I remember Alice Berman?’” recalls Hammer. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

From then on, they emailed each other every day, which Hammer says, “mushroomed into over a hundred email trails, back and forth and back and forth.”

“Then came that one special email,” adds Whitfield, who was by now living in Las Vegas and teaching voiceover classes at UNLV.

Hammer invited her to meet him in Hawaii for a Midwood High School reunion…for two.

“So, there I was on the way to Oahu, sitting in the aisle seat near the bathroom because all I could do was run and pee,” laughs Whitfield. “A woman next to me asked, ‘Are you all right?’ No, I’m not. I’m meeting the love of my life, who I haven’t seen in 53 years!”

That first face-to-face is a moment they will never forget.

“He didn’t do anything; he just stood there,” says Whitfield. “Then he said, ‘Alice Berman?’ I said, ‘Yes, David Hammer.’ Then, all of a sudden, he grabbed me and kissed me, and that was that.”
Since then, they haven’t stopped making up for lost time, which includes a family of three goats, two horses, two dogs and 38 rescued horses, at last count.

“The number keeps on changing,” jokes Hammer.

Many adoptable horses at HAV Horse Rescue have healed and found forever homes, and dozens of families have written letters raving about how perfectly matched they are to their new horses.

The bottom line is that Whitfield credits its success so far to a talented team led by ranch managers and COO Sharon and Tommy McGarry, trainer Erica Manke and a large group of volunteers.

Once the veterinarians properly care for a surrendered horse’s medical issues, Sharon determines which ones are ready for rehoming. But before any horse is released, she visits the potential new owners’ home and facility to make sure it is suitable.

“This is an opportunity of a lifetime for me,” says McGarry while holding back tears. “HAV Horse Rescue has a serious purpose and has really been put together to last and to get it right. It’s all a gift; it’s good for the horses, and once people come, they want to be part of us.”

That includes one veteran named Orlando. Whitfield says he would lock himself in his house and never talk to anyone until he started coming to the HAV Horse Rescue.

“He comes up and just takes care of the horses, plays with them and he’s a new person. He leaves his house!” says Whitfield. “That’s the power that these animals have. Grace, to me, is the connection between a human being and, let’s face it, an animal.”

Right now, everyone is chomping at the bit for Phase Two to be completed. Whitfield says—for the first time in Las Vegas—there will be a state-of-the-art equine rehabilitation center at HAV Horse Rescue!

“No more hauling your horses to another state,” says Whitfield. “We’re building already. We don’t waste time.”

After five decades apart, not wasting time makes perfect sense. That is, horse sense.

“I’m not a religious person, but there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s some fate involved here, some extraterrestrial thing out there that put us back together again,” says Hammer. “Of course, it would not have happened had Alice not pursued it.”

“And he’s been making it up to me ever since,” adds Whitfield. “We have Chinese food once a week. Ha!”

To learn more about how to help and get involved, visit www.havhorserescue.org.