THE NEW GENERATION OF AMERICAN TURFMEN

Horse-owners Who Are Maintaining the Highest Traditions of an Ancient Sport

BYO'NEIL SEVIER

THE part that the new recruits—the recruits of the past seven or eight years— are now playing in racing is not less important than was the part the veteran sportsmen, August Belmont, Richard T. Wilson, John Sanford, Harry Payne Whitney, and others in a lesser degree, played in the lean racing years, now happily past, in preventing its disappearance by keeping up their great studs, when there were few buyers for' thoroughbred yearlings, and keeping open the race tracks when the funds for purses had to be raised by popular subscription.

GIFFORD A. COCHRAN, Captain E. B.

Cassatt, James Butler, Price McKinney, Willis Sharpe Kilmer, George D. Widener,

H. C. Hallenbeck, Schuyler L. Parsons, Joseph E. Davis,

Herbert L. Pratt, Frederick Lewisohn and two or three others are the active buyers at the yearling sales through which the produce of the great studs are marketed.

They have effectually stopped the exportation of American thoroughbreds and established a demand for the best that England may produce which is sure to stimulate the importation of first-class material wherewith to make good the losses which automatically followed the illadvised legislation against the thoroughbred in the State of New York in 1908 and 1910.

Besides bringing to racing the means to keep it going these recruits have endowed it with a representative ownership which guarantees its future. Moreover Mr. Cochran, Mr. Kilmer and Mr. Butler, in New York, Captain Cassatt and Mr. Widener, in Pennsylvania, and Mr. Hallenbeck

in New Jersey, are engaged in a conspiracy to revive Eastern interest in the breeding of thoroughbreds by helping John Sanford, Harry Payne Whitney, R. H. McCarter Potter and Mrs. Lillian A. Livingston to demonstrate to an uninformed generation that as high a type of thoroughbred may be produced in New York and New Jersey as in the favored blue grass belt of Tennessee and Kentucky.

Mr. Cochran is now establishing a great stud at Mount Kisco and Mr. Kilmer and Mr. Butler are building up smaller establishments at Binghamton and Tarrytown. Mr. Hallenbeck will soon have the second biggest nursery in New Jersey at Meadowbrook Farm in Monmouth County, close by the old Monmouth Park race track; Captain Cassatt has already a prosperous institution in Southern Pennsylvania, and Mr. Widener is making ready his place at Elkins Park, near Philadelphia, for the growing stud he has in temporary quarters at Silver Brook Farm, a famous breeding place in New Jersey in years past and the birthplace of Henry of Navarre and Irish Lad.

MR. COCHRAN put $40,000 in yearlings last season and is having a fair measure of success this year with the best of his purchases, the two-year-olds, Prince of Como, Plieone, Hands Off, Airman, Feminist, Short Ballott and Prohibition. During the next season he will certainly campaign the strongest string of twoyear-olds, in respect of numbers at least, that will race in this country, as he recently purchased the entire yearling output of John E. Madden's Hamburg Place stud— forty-three head all told.

The stud Mr. Cochran is organizing at Mount Kisco will be the largest in New York after the Sanford establishment at Hurricana Farm, near Amsterdam. His principal stallion will be His Majesty, an American-bred son of Ogden for which Alexander Smith Cochran paid $20,000 three seasons back and sold to him last fall. Later Mr. Cochran expects to bring a first-class stock horse over from Great Britain, for the home variety are exceedingly scarce and exceedingly high.

Mr. Kilmer, better known among the horse show folk than at the races, has bought for the stud he will place at his model farm near Binghamton a dozen of the mares of Thomas Fortune Ryan's Oakridge stud in Virginia. It is believed that he would like to obtain Mr. Ryan's English stallion Sea King, a son of the late King Edward's Derby winner Persimmon, and the finest representative of the family of the celebrated St. Simon on this side of the Atlantic. But Mr. Ryan does not seem disposed to sell.

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Mr. Butler, whose first horse interest was in trotters, became a factor in thoroughbred racing eight years ago when he purchased the Empire City trotting track at Yonkers and threw it open to the runners after a successful fight in court with the Jockey Club and the Racing Commission for official recognition. Mr. Butler made his peace with the racing fraternity in 1908 and loyally backed the sport in its adversity.

IN the spring of 1913, while the effort to revive racing at the great tracks of this state was still in a precariously experimental stage, Mr. Butler had the courage and foresight to put $60,000 in forty yearlings of the late James R. Keene's stud. He had his reward last season when his youngsters won practically everything that was worth winning that did not go to Regret. Pebbles, Comely, Last Coin, Capra, Kilkenny Boy and one or two of the other yearlings of his 1913 purchase are holding their own this season as two-year-olds, and they are to form the nucleus of the stud Mr. Butler is organizing at his Tarrytown place, the most attractive in all Sleepy Hollow. Mr. Butler was a not ungenerous patron of the yearling sales of 1914, notwithstanding the appalling capacity for oat consumption he recruited from the Keene stud. His Celt colt Paddy Whack is one of the crack youngsters of the current season.

Most of the stallions and mares of the Keene stud were purchased at the executors' sale of the estate by Mr. McKinney, who hails from Cleveland and is interested with Mr. Butler in the winter race course at Juarez, Mexico. Mr. McKinney put up $200,000 in an effort to keep the stud intact. Colin, fifteen times a winner, Disguise, Sweep, Delhi, Ultimas and Hippodrome were the stallions that fell to him with the best of the mares. He has removed the stud to Kingston, one of the best farms near Lexington, and Miss Elizabeth Daingerfield, a daughter of the late Major Foxhall Daingerfield, who managed Castleton for Mr. Keene, is managing for him.

It is the intention of Mr. McKinney to race the produce of Kingston stud as Mr. Keene so successfully raced the produce of Castleton from 1895 to 1910. The first homebreds that will bear his silks will appear next season as two-year-olds.

Foxhall Keene, his father's racing partner for twenty odd years, inherited the famous polka dotted jacket under which Domino and his famous sons and grandsons, Disguise, Cap and Bells and Commando, Peter Pan, Celt, Colin and Superman won their fame, and he is racing a modest stable of two-year-olds, mostly of his father's breeding, this season. One of his youngsters, filly Lorac, has shown a bit of class.

IT is not out of place to relate here that the aging Voter was the only successful stallion of the Keene establishment that left the country after the dispersal sale. He went to France. Harry Payne Whitney bought Peter Pan; Arthur Hancock, Celt; Henry T. Oxnard, Superman; and Senator Johnson N. Camden of Kentucky, Ben Brush. Ballot, greatest of Voter's sons and a vastly better horse than his daddy, was acquired before the dispersal sale by the late James Ben Ali Haggin and established at Elmendorf. He will fall to some other American breeder when the Haggin stud is broken up by an executors' sale in the autumn. *

George D. Widener is a nephew of Joseph E. Widener, the Philadelphia horseman under whose silks El Cuchillo and Coligny raced through the field with great success a few seasons back, and Relluf, more recently, won two Whitney Memorial steeplechases in as many years. He is a breeding enthusiast. He owns the stallion Garry Herrmann and a dozen or more exquisitely bred mares which will be transferred from Silver Brook to Elkins Park shortly. Lady Hillington and Trumpeter, which have raced creditably under Mr. Widener's silks this season, are homebred youngsters and there is a group of likely yearlings at Silver Brook waiting to be broken in the autumn.

Mr. Hallenbeck, one of the biggest printers in the country, came into racing in 1908 and helped to maintain the tottering thoroughbred market by paying good prices for horses of various ages in the succeeding years. He is enjoying his best season. His smart black, The Finn, winner of the Withers and Belmont stakes, the Paumonok Handicap and the Hamilton Derby, is the cleverest three-year-old colt the season has developed. There is another threeyear-old in the stable as good as The Finn, Iron Duke, like The Finn a son of Ogden.

Beside these good horses, Mr Hallenbeck has for the stud he will domicile at Meadowbrook the stallion Adams Express, best of the sons of Adam, a horse which Francis C. Bishop brought over from France in 1906 at an outlay of $70,000 and shipped back again in 1910 to be sold to the Hungarian government for $59,000. Adam is a splendid individual with a first rate racing reputation, and, besides being a son of Adam and a grandson of Flying Fox, he is a descendant in the female line of the celebrated Maggie B. B. This wonderful mare, the dam of Iroquois, the only American bred horse that has yet won the Derby at Epsom Downs, was the female progenitor of America's strongest thoroughbred family.

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The mantle of Aristides Welsh, the breeder of Iroquois, has descended upon Captain E. B. Cassatt, the eldest son of the late Alexander Johnstone Cassatt, of Pennsylvania Railroad celebrity and in his day a liberal patron of racing himself. Captain Cassatt is now the leading breeder of thoroughbreds in Pennsylvania and the Keystone state's most conspicuous representative in racing. His stud is at Chesterbrook farm, near Berwyn, and it has played an important part in the racing of the last five years. Among the first rate performers Chestcrbrook has sent to the tracks to win under the red, white and blue blouse which The Bard bore to victory in the Brooklyn Handicap of 1888, are Flying Fairy, a. really great mare, and the useful three-year olds. ^2 this season, Garbage and Trial by Jury.

PIPING ROCK brought Herbert L. Pratt, one of New York's moguls of Standard Oil, into racing. Mr. Pratt subscribed as a disinterested sportsman to the fund ol $50,000 which helped materially to keep the sport going in 1911 and 1912 by throwing the picturesque Locust Valley course open to the thoroughbred. What he saw of racing in one season at Piping Rock so fascinated him that he bought a couple of racers a year ago last spring. One of his purchases, Star Gaze, won the Saratoga Cup last summer. The other, Razzano, was a capital twoyear old in 1914 and he is a winning three-year old this season.

Joseph E. Davis, master of the Meadowbrook hounds, finds more entertainment in steeplechasing than in flat racing, and he has developed some first rate fencers in the course of the last four or five years. With one of them, Single Stick, he won the Harbor Hill steeplechase at Piping Rock last fall.

Schuyler L. Parsons, the successor of William K. Vanderbilt as president of the Coney Island Jockey Club, became an owner of racers in 1913 when he purchased Tranid and another two-year old from the Keene estate. This season Mr. Parsons has first rate three-year olds in Sharpshooter and Phospor and four two-year olds of class, the best being Winter Belle and Scottish Knight.

Mr. Lewisohn, who paid $4100 for the Celt filly Celandria last summer and lost the first purse she won by disqualification, proved his interest at the Haggin sale in July by paying $5600 for the Watercress-Pearl V., two-year old Watercress 2d. In this colt he has one of the most promising young racers in the country. Last year Mr. Haggin bought Watercress 2d in at the last sale of Elmendorf yearlings it was given him to attend for $8100. Watercress 2d, a full brother to Edward R. Thomas's Water Pearl, a great two-year old in 1906, was picked by Mr. Haggin to succeed his sire as the head of the Elmendorf stud.

THE use of the expression "horse folk" in the first paragraph of this article is made necessary by the fact that three of racing's new and enthusiastic patrons are women of society, Mrs. Payne Whitney, Mrs. Lathrop Brown and Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark. And these women do not confine their activities to Piping Rock and the Hunt meetings. Their colors are seen at eastern tracks and they are borne by horses which have held their own wherever they have been placed. Mrs. Whitney's Greentree Stable, indeed, is one of the strongest in the country. She paid $8000 for the three-year old Gainer and $5000 for the sprinter Meeting House, which bore Harry Payne Whitney's colors with considerable success for two seasons in Great Britain. These two horses have proven disappointments to the extent that they have failed to show aptitude for steeplechasing which was the department of the sport for which Mrs. Whitney intended them. But both are racing successfully on the flat, as is Virile, one of the most reliable of platers.

GAINER defeated the smartest horses of mature racing age in training (the brilliant Roamer being one of them), when he won the Empire City Handicap at Belmont Park. Early in the season Mrs. Whitney's English jumper Marcellinus and her American fencer Flanders broke down, but she has a sterling cross country performer in Cherry Malotte, a winner at Piping Rock, Brookline and Belmont Park and she is encouraged to believe that she has promising candidates for the coming Harbor Hill steeplechase in the three-year olds A1 Reeves and Etruscan. Mrs. Whitney maintains her own winter training establishment in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Mrs. Brown, whose husband tried hard to represent a Long Island constituency in Congress, is a daughter of the late Robert Chamblet Hooper, of Boston, and she has brought back to the turf the cherry and white jacket under which Zinziber and Land of Clover won the Champion steeplechases of 1901 and 1903 for "Mr. Chamblet." She has adopted the racing name of Miss Chamblet and the last year she developed the champion three-year old fencer of the Maryland meetings in Chupadero.

Mrs. Clark, whose husband, F. Ambrose Clark, owns that formidable quartette of fencers, Meadowsweet, Meadowlark, Savannah and Lysander, embarked upon her first racing venture at Belmont Park in June when she purchased the three-year old Distance from Mr. Madden. Distance won at the first asking under Mrs. Clark's colors and he too is being schooled for the Harbor Hill. Mrs. Clark was bidder at the yearling sales, and she has strengthened her stable since by private purchases.