NEWS

Weekly Feature

Industry News

Most Popular Stories

Most E-mailed Stories

Mid-Atlantic region: Grande dame of Woodstock

Posted: Saturday, September 29, 2001

Allaire duPont, owner-breeder of Kelso and 43 other stakes winners, remains active in Maryland

Looking back at the great racehorses of the 20th century, names such as Man o' War, Citation, Dr. Fager, and Secretariat come quickly to mind. But few horses have matched the exploits of Kelso, who was Horse of the Year an incredible five consecutive times from 1960-'64. He won the Jockey Club Gold Cup in each of those years, twice breaking the American record for the two-mile distance on dirt. His record of 3:191Ú5 at Aqueduct on October 31, 1964, still stands as the American mark.

Allaire duPont
Farm: Woodstock Farm
Location: Chesapeake City, Maryland
Size: 1,000 acres
Past/present member of: Jockey Club; trustee, Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association; member, Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation; founder, member, Greener Pastures; founder, vice president, Thoroughbred Charities of America
Best horses bred: Believe the Queen, Best of Luck, Byars, Dixie Flag, Explodent, Kelso, King's Bishop, Manlove, Politely, Thirty Flags

Kelso was owned and bred by Mrs. Richard C. duPont, formerly Allaire Crozer of Philadelphia. Four decades after Kelso's exploits, duPont remains full of life and charm. One of the first women ever elected to the Jockey Club, she still resides in Maryland at her Woodstock Farm near Chesapeake City, a Victorian waterfront village she largely restored.

Her long, finger-shaped farm of about 1,000 acres lies on the banks of the Bohemia River, for which her Bohemia Stable is named. The gray and yellow Bohemia colors worn by Kelso's jockeys are now the colors of the farm office, barns, and stables. Even the Subaru station wagon duPont drives is gray with yellow trim.

Greeting guests at Woodstock, she smiles warmly but moves with a slight limp from a recently broken bone. "I can't play tennis, and it's driving me crazy," she said.

In her youth, duPont grew up riding horses at the Radnor Hunt Club in Pennsylvania. As a young woman, she set world records for both altitude and endurance in glider planes. Richard duPont was a pioneering pilot of gliders and sailplanes who in 1933 set a distance record of 121 miles that almost doubled the previous American record. In World War II, he led a daring raid in Sicily and subsequently headed the Army Air Force's glider program before his death in a 1943 crash.

Allaire duPont never remarried; she raised two children and bred 44 stakes winners as well as countless dogs and cats, many of which still patrol her farm. The farm has approximately 20 active broodmares.

Bought farm in 1939

In 1939, the duPonts bought Woodstock Farm, which remained largely a cattle operation until about 1960, when Kelso's career began and Allaire duPont began to breed racehorses in earnest. Kelso was her second homebred stakes winner; the first was Ambehaving (by Ambiorix), who won the Remsen Stakes at two in 1956 before going on to a career at stud.

Kelso's sire, Your Host, was a story in his own right. A winner of the Santa Anita Derby, he went off as the 8-to-5 favorite in the 1950 Kentucky Derby and led for a mile before tiring. A broken leg the following year ended his racing career and very nearly his life. His breeder, Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer, browbeat Lloyds of London into paying off promptly on the insurance policy. (Your Host was owned by Mayer's son-in-law, William Goetz).

Lloyds paid off and subsequently sold Your Host to a syndicate as a stud prospect. Allaire duPont purchased shares in Your Host and in 1956 sent her Count Fleet mare Maid of Flight to him. The result was Kelso, named for her friend Kelso Everett.

Just as Kelso's career began to take off, Your Host reinjured his leg and was euthanized. He had sired 16 stakes winners but had never again been bred to Maid of Flight. When developers later took over the farm where the stallion was buried, duPont had his gravestone shipped to her own farm, where it still rests next to Kelso's.

Maid of Flight, who was stakes-placed, had been trained by veterinarian John Lee, who would train Kelso as a two-year-old. Kelso, nicknamed "Kelly," was Maid of Flight's first foal. She would produce 11 more foals but no other stakes winners. The young Kelso was especially headstrong, and Lee had little choice but to geld him.

Sweet tooth

Gelding made Kelso trainable, but for several years he continued to buck for 1 1/4 miles before breezing on the training track. He was a wood chewer, but his aggressions were soothed by stable companions. When Carl Hanford took over training Kelso, the gelding had the company of two stable dogs, Sketch and Mickey, who traveled with him. Later, his companion was mixed-breed Charlie Potatoes, who sometimes slept across Kelso's head. Kelso slept on beds of sugar-cane shavings. His owner discovered Kelso had a sweet-tooth and loved sugar, candy, and apples.

Kelso won his first start, a six-furlong maiden race, on September 4, 1959, at Atlantic City Race Course. He finished second in two allowance races at Atlantic City that month and was put away for the year.

Hanford, who took over Kelso's training in 1960 when Lee cut back on his training operation, remembered Kelso as rather small and scrawny at three. A stifle problem delayed the gelding's first seasonal start until June 22, when he won a Monmouth Park allowance race by ten lengths while running six furlongs in 1:10.

In his next start, an Aqueduct allowance, he scorched a mile in 1:34 1/5 on July 16, winning by 12 lengths. A week later, he made his first stakes start in the Arlington Classic and finished a dull eighth behind winner T. V. Lark.

The Arlington Park race would be Kelso's only poor start of the year. He won Monmouth's Choice Stakes easily, and Eddie Arcaro took over riding duties for a win in the Jerome Handicap at Aqueduct on September 3. Three more stakes victories followed, and Kelso concluded the year with a 3 1/2-length victory over *Don Poggio in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. On a sloppy track, the three-year-old ran two miles in 3:19 2/5, an American record, and subsequently was voted Horse of the Year.

Kelso began to fill out at four, standing a shade over 16 hands with a girth of 73 inches. He began his 1961 campaign with five consecutive wins, including the Handicap Triple Crown (Metropolitan, Suburban, and Brooklyn Handicaps). He became only the third horse in 50 years to sweep the series, after Whisk Broom II and Tom Fool. Kelso remarkably carried 130, 133, and 136 pounds, respectively, in those three races and his winning streak over two seasons stretched to 11. "I have never ridden a better horse," said Arcaro, whose mounts had included Citation and Whirlaway.

Second overall title

Following a loss in Arlington's Washington Park Handicap, Kelso won the Jockey Club Gold Cup by five lengths before T. V. Lark upset him in Laurel Race Course's Washington, D.C., International Stakes, Kelso's first start on grass. With seven wins in nine starts, Kelso was voted 1961 Horse of the Year.

As a five-year-old in 1962, Kelso got off to a slow start but came on strong in the fall to edge Beau Purple and Carry Back for Horse of the Year honors. Bill Shoemaker, who replaced the retired Arcaro early in the season, was replaced by Milo Valenzuela for the Stymie Handicap. The two clicked immediately, and Valenzuela would ride Kelso for the next 3 1/2 years.

In 1963, Kelso enjoyed his richest season, winning nine stakes and $569,762, and he was approaching Round Table's all-time earnings record of $1,749,869. But his greatest feats may have come at the end of his seven-year-old season in 1964. In his final two starts that year, he won his fifth straight Jockey Club Gold Cup, breaking his own American record for two miles in front of 51,222 fans at Aqueduct. Eleven days later, he finally won the prestigious Washington, D.C., International after four second-place finishes. In defeating rival Gun Bow by 4 1/2 lengths on the hard turf course, he ran 11Ú2 miles in 2:234Ú5, obliterating the American record.

Kelso had become a national hero. He was not the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, but he had the most heart and he simply refused to quit.

Age began to catch up with Kelso as an eight-year-old in 1965, when won just three of six starts. DuPont and Hanford considered retiring their dark bay gelding, but Kelso had other ideas. After finishing fourth in a Hialeah Park allowance race in March 1966, Kelso fractured a right front sesamoid bone while training for the Donn Handicap. He was retired with a record of 39 wins in 63 races. He was in the money 53 times, set nine track records as well as two American records, and was the all-time leading earner with $1,977,896.

Eight-acre paddock

When he was not barnstorming and making appearances on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School's large animal hospital at New Bolton Center or the Grayson Foundation, Kelso lived in his own eight-acre paddock at Woodstock. There he received thousands of visitors and letters from his fan club.

Soon duPont began hunting and jumping Kelso without any special training or reeducation. "One day my daughter said to me, 'Come on, why don't you ride Kelso?' He loved to hear voices, and I would just say, 'Now, Kelly' when we neared a hedge or wall, and he would jump them effortlessly," duPont remembered.

In the fall of 1983, the 26-year-old Kelso was paraded with Forego before the Jockey Club Gold Cup (G1). He developed colic the following day and died. DuPont's daughter, Lana duPont Wright, followed in her mother's footsteps. The first woman from the United States to ride in an Olympic three-day event, she won a silver medal at the 1964 Tokyo games aboard her mother's retired racehorse Mr. Wister.

For a few years after Kelso's retirement, duPont stood stallions commercially at Woodstock. They included Nearctic (sire of Northern Dancer), King's Bishop, Maribeau, and T. V. Commercial.

In the late 1960s, Canadian sportsman E. P. Taylor decided to open a training track and breeding farm in Maryland with the help and encouragement of duPont, who took him to see a neighboring farm. "Come on, Eddie, buy this farm," she chided, and for $60,000 Taylor purchased 200 acres of land. The property became Windfields Farm Maryland, where Northern Dancer spent most of his illustrious career at stud.

After Northern Dancer was pensioned, the Windfields Maryland division was closed in 1988. The property was sold off in three parcels, with the primary one becoming Northview Stallion Station, now a leading breeding farm in the Mid-Atlantic region. With managing partner Richard Golden and veterinarian Tom Bowman, duPont is a part-owner of Northview, which stands such successful sires as Polish Numbers, Waquoit, and Two Punch.

Trained by Jerkens

In the early 1970s, H. Allen Jerkens-the Racing Hall of Fame trainer who had defeated Kelso three times with Beau Purple-began training the Bohemia horses. The first horse he trained for duPont was King's Bishop, a son of Round Table who won the Carter Handicap (G2) in 1973 and earned $308,079.

Although duPont never bred anything to rival Kelso, she has bred King's Bishop and 42 other stakes winners, each of whom has a brass nameplate displayed on a large plaque in her indoor training center.

When asked about the pedigrees of her stakes winners, duPont produces a small notebook containing the bloodlines and race records of all her homebreds. These include the mare Politely, who won 21 of 49 starts from 1965-'68, earned $552,972, and was twice voted Maryland-bred horse of the year; Believe the Queen, who won the 1984 Monmouth Handicap (G1) and earned $452,335; and Explodent, who won the Bay Shore and Swift Stakes in 1972 before becoming a successful sire.

In 1999, her colt Best of Luck won the Peter Pan Stakes (G2) and ran fourth in the Belmont Stakes (G1). He now is at stud in Kentucky. His homebred dam, Crowned, won the 1991 Delaware Handicap (G2) and $605,323. The filly Thirty Flags, by Hoist the Flag, was a stakes winner of $275,243 and ran third in the 1983 Acorn Stakes (G1) before producing Grade 2 stakes winner Dixie Flag (by Dixieland Band) and stakes winners Byars (by Deputy Minister) and Manlove (by Mr. Prospector). The latter two now stand at stud in Florida.

Remarkably, duPont has developed her stable the old-fashioned way: with homebreds. The only horse she bought at auction was Early Spring, the first racehorse she ever owned. "When she was a maiden filly at Havre de Grace, my husband gave me $20 to bet on her and on my way to the windows I noticed she was 80-to-1,"duPont said. "I thought she had no chance and put the money in my pocket. Well, don't you know she won, and I have never bet another race since!"