Valentines Day and Cole Porter? Who has written more songs about love and romance than Porter – Let’s Fall in Love; What Is This Thing Called Love; At Long Last Love; Do I Love You; You’d Be So Easy to Love; to name but a few.

Given his penchant for the finer things in life and the money to buy them, it might not be a surprise to see Porter in the attached clip from the 1940s, with Bert Wood, Jack Speiden and Joe Reed II. But there is some attendant  irony.

In 1937, while riding at the Piping Rock Club near Oyster Bay, New York, Porter fell with his horse and suffered severe injuries to both legs. The accident left him crippled and in chronic pain. Following countless surgical procedures, his right leg was finally amputated in 1958 (he had refused the surgery when it was recommended shortly after the accident).

Jack Speiden was a Yale graduate, like Porter, and a former Wall Street broker, who moved to the Tuscon area in 1933, on the advice of New York newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, and  purchased the J-6 Ranch.

Speiden raised purebred cattle as a business on the J-6 and Quarter Horses primarily for pleasure. He also helped out a friend by giving summer jobs in 1936 to Joseph P. Kennedy’s two young sons, Joe Jr. and John Kennedy, in order to “toughen them up” for the Harvard football team in the fall.

There is a double irony in the clip of Porter and Speiden because a riding accident would later leave Speiden’s wife an invalid with “three round-the-clock nurses,” according to a letter written by Thornton Wilder, one of Speiden’s many famous friends.

Coincidentally, Porter wrote Don’t Fence Me In (reportedly his least favorite song), which became a cowboy standard and huge hit for Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, as well as for Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, who sold 1 million copies with their version and topped Billboard’s 1944-1945 charts. The video below has Roy Rogers and Trigger performing the classic.

Click here for another rare Joe Reed II video.