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My first girlfriend of consequence in the post-Harolyn years was the vivacious Betsy Harper, a hip southern belle, if there is such a thing. Betsy was the sister of everybody’s go-to drug lawyer Bobby Harper, whose lot in life was to keep errant hippies out of jail, which he did with amazing consistency. Betsy’s father was a stern Alabama banker and both she and sister Nan were proud ‘Bama graduates who hummed the school song around the house. In college, Nan had dated Joe Namath and both girls thought crotchety old Tide football coach Bear Bryant was the second coming of Jesus Christ. This was not an odd thing in Alabama. I knew Betsy casually, as people inevitably do in smallish towns, but then one night she knocked on my door to tell me she disagreed heatedly with a lawsuit the brother of her boyfriend was bringing against me for falling off a ladder while doing some wiring in Silver City. Nice gesture, I thought. Unusual, but nice.
I met Betsy again some time later at the gala wedding of George Swinford, the notorious proprietor of Lillian’s popular saloon. She was dressed magnificently in her own old wedding dress, a lovely antique, and she carried a parasol. She was easily the belle of the ball, and that includes the bride. Two days later, I mailed her a plane ticket to Miami for a race. Soon after, she called me back. “I have just one question,” she wondered. “Will it be one room or two?” One, I answered. “Good,” she said. Relationships were less complicated in hippie times.
Betsy Harper loved horse racing and she really loved Miami. On her first trip, two of my fillies, Black Limousine and Mito’s Touch, won races on the same nine-race card, something that never happened to me before or after that day. Betsy was not one to hide her excitement under a basket, yelling her head off in the trainer’s box as the races proceeded. My ancient trainer Dominic Imprescia* gave me the Italian Eye of Approval. “You got a good one this time. I’m even getting used to the southern drawl.”
Months and many trips to the races went by and Betsy’s enthusiasm for the city and the game never wavered. Then one day she brought me a large framed picture combining the two winner’s circle photos from day one at the races. It must have cost her a small fortune. A few days later, she called and confessed she could resist the the siren’s song no longer. “I’m moving to Miami,” she advised. “Once I saw what it was like, it was inevitable. I’m helpless, caught in its spell.” And just like a pretty thief in the night, she was gone.
New Girl In Town
My all-star veterinarian Ted Specht came by one fine afternoon with a rookie in tow, a serious looking young woman, hair pulled back in a braid, following him on his calls and learning the business. She was terse of sentence and didn’t give away her smiles cheaply. “This is Siobhan Ellison,” he said. “She’s just out of vet school at UF.”
At the time, I had a mare named Fast Janice, whom I had bought in that second star-crossed yearling-buying season at Keeneland. As a two-year-old she was very fast but didn’t bring the price I wanted at the Hialeah sale, so I brought her home to race. The first day she was turned out, she ran through a fence and came up with an infection in her elbow joint, leaving her three-legged-lame. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Janice together again, so we bred her and got a very fast filly. When Dr. Ellison first saw her, she was pregnant with her second foal. Ted Specht and I had been trying different things to keep the mare comfortable and her compromised leg had never caused any hint of laminitis in the other foreleg, but the new vet in town seemed critical that we were keeping Janice alive. Walking off, I asked Ted “Who does she think she is? I thought the Marquis of Queensbury made the rules.” He smiled and told me “She’s just different…not much bedside manner but very bright. Some day she’ll be one of the best vets in Ocala.” Okay, if you say so, Ted. But not around here.
Love At Fourth Sight
After several years of brilliant service, Ted Specht came to the farm one day and told me his true desire was to be a surgeon. He was going back to school to learn the cutter’s trade. Others in the practice would take over and it would be business as usual. Wrong! The replacements often showed up late, if at all. I called him and said I was wandering in the desert without sustenance. Who could I call for help? “Well, there’s Dr. Ellison, of course. She’s new, but what she lacks in experience she makes up for in intelligence. You could do worse. I’ll give you her number.” Oh God, I thought, not her. But I also realized a new vet would be a lot less busy and more likely to show up on schedule. Ted promised the quality of the work would not suffer. When it came time for her first visit, she was on time and cheerful. Two months later, she brought me a fruit popsicle. Meanwhile, she was getting all my mares in foal on one or two trips to the stallions. One afternoon, walking out to check a horse in the field, she pulled a few pins from her hair and it toppled down in a great blonde wave to the top of her butt. WELL!…I thought, like the shallow beast that I am. I told her if she got all fifteen mares in foal I would take her anywhere she wanted for a celebratory dinner. When the final results were in, I went to the barn one day and checked my chalkboard for messages. There was just one. PARIS!… it read. Great, I smiled to myself. There’s one of those in Kentucky.
Vaunted Vamp
Racetrackers have a term for those days each week when there’s no racing. They call them dark days. Betsy Harper adopted the term for those days when I was working until ten and there was no dating, of which there were plenty. Siobhan Ellison did not believe in dark days, especially when there were four or five a week. Matter of fact, since the Subterranean Circus was closing, why didn’t I just move in with her? I couldn’t think of any good reasons, so I did.
Not long afterward, Marion County found itself in the midst of a thoroughbred glut…too many optimists with too many mouths to feed were jumping off the bandwagon, closing down farms and searching for greener pastures elsewhere. For about a decade after Secretariat, horse racing was all the rage and captains of industry who made their fortunes in more reliable adventures were jumping in with both feet. Most of us who are fortunate enough to succeed in business early often get the notion that we are more brilliant than is really the case and that our success in one thing will translate immediately to success elsewhere. The unpredictable thoroughbred business with its mercurial highs and lows is the ultimate proving grounds for that philosophy. But even so, the country’s tax laws at the time generously allowed losses in the racing business to be subtracted from one’s taxes, so a man of means had the choice of paying the IRS or his horse trainer. What would you do?
Ronald Reagan let a charge to change all that in 1986 when new tax laws gave horse owners a stiff shot to the gut. Owners were required to show a profit in a certain percentage of fiscal years, otherwise their pursuits would be considered a hobby by the Internal Revenue Service. Suddenly, you could hear the sound of barn doors slamming everywhere. Very few entities make a profit in the thoroughbred business, which was fine before but not so much in the days of unprofitable hobbies. Broodmares particularly found a slow market and were often sold cheaply or even given away. One day, Siobhan came home with a pedigree and an offer. A mare named Peace and Quiet was available for zero dollars from one of her clients. “Here, look at this pedigree and see what you think,” she said. Even though we were chock full of horses, the lineage was too good to ignore. “I don’t think we should pass this up,” I told her. “I don’t need her, she’s all yours,” she said. I remind Siobhan of this fateful episode every time she questions my sterling judgment.
The next breeding season, I took Peace and Quiet over to Farnsworth Farm and bred her to a free stallion named Racing Star, who had won over half a million dollars on the turf. Horseman are often reluctant to breed to grass horses, feeling their offspring might not run well on the dirt surfaces on which most racing is held. Since the majority of thoroughbreds are bred to sell, until a turf sire has proved himself, the prices for his offspring will usually be low. Since I would be racing mine, all that was irrelevant. Racing Star was a terrific racehorse, grass or not, and it’s hard to beat free.
The result was a lovely bay filly I named Vaunted Vamp, who won early and often, eventually netting $420,000. In 78 starts, she won 21 races, was 16 times second and 12 times third. She was stakes-placed six times and remained sound her entire career. Siobhan Ellison, no longer concerned about economics, put her modest practice on hold, went back to vet school and earned her PhD. While doing so, she fortuitously discovered a drug that would inhibit a frustrating horse disease called Equine Protozoal Myelitis and parlayed the discovery into a profitable career with her Pathogenes, Inc. lab, all because of a filly out of a gratis mare bred to a free stallion. And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around. Some days are stones, some days are diamonds. Big fat ones that glow in the dark.
That’s all, folks….
*In THE FLYING PIE of March 13, 2011, there is a lively column about our second trainer Dominic Imprescia called “A Life Well Lived.” Dominic, a colorful relic of the older days of racing, presided over my first two stakes horses, Thundering Heart and Mito’s Touch with aplomb and a good sense of humor. His favorite expression in tough times was, “Don’t worry about nuthin’.” DI ran one horse in the Kentucky Derby (7th) and had the pre-race favorite, Timely Writer, in another. The latter colicked the week of the race, alas, and missed his big chance. Defying all odds, Dominic, a chain-smoker, lived til age 94 and kept his wits about him to the end. To access the article, see the Blog Archive under the logo.
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| Besties; Dominic and Bill |
