Frank Brophy’s Babacomari Ranch, Arizona’s Cowboy Millionaire, and a Filly Named June Almy

By Tobi Lopez Taylor 

This essay is part of the ongoing Arizona Horse History Project series, which also includes posts on Penny Chenery and Secretariat, Hank the Cowdog, Man O’ War’s son By Hisself, Major-General Jonathan Burton, and Doc Pardee. 

In October 1971, Hall of Fame jockey Bill Shoemaker won the sixth race at Santa Anita on a filly named June Almy, bred and owned by Frank Brophy of Phoenix, Arizona. For Shoemaker, it was just another day at the office. For Brophy, this filly’s name was a sly nod to his state’s storied past.

Frank Brophy and June Almy, 

  namesake of an Arizona legend. 

                                                                           

Frank Cullen Brophy was a native Arizonan, born in the border town of Bisbee in 1894. The son of banker and wealthy businessman William H. Brophy, Frank—who’d wanted to be a writer—became, as he called it, a “reluctant banker” at age 28 when his father drowned during a fishing trip near Tiburon Island off the coast of Guaymas, Mexico in 1922. Until that time, Frank admitted, he’d had a “prior lifetime of irresponsibility and fun with a token interest in Elizabethan English to vindicate the years of prep school and college [Yale] that my family had lavished on me. Fortunately, the spirit was willing, even though the flesh and its worldly knowledge seemed to be hopelessly inadequate to the job I faced” (Journal of Arizona History Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 172). 

Over the next decades, Brophy learned on the job and eventually “served as a director, then president and chairman of the board, of the Bank of Douglas for 35 years until he resigned in 1958, ending a 70-year family tradition in Arizona banking” (Arizona Republic, 4 February 1978). Brophy’s first love, aside from his family, was decidedly not banking—it was ranching and horses. In 1920, the year after Frank wed Sallie Blake, the couple established a ranch on 160 acres in Phoenix, near what is now Northern and Central Avenues. In 1928, a year before the start of the Great Depression, Brophy’s mother founded the Jesuit-run Brophy College (now a high school named Brophy College Preparatory) in memory of her late husband and provided an endowment of $250,000 (Arizona Republic, 8 September 1928).

By the spring of 1933, Brophy College was in such severe financial straits that a benefit horse show was planned to raise money for the ailing institution. It was held in the arena of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, and the master of ceremonies was C. W. “Doc” Pardee, well-known Arizona horseman, rider of Man O’ War, and friend of Frank Brophy; the latter’s horse Slippery won the show’s jumping class. 

Although the Phoenix area would become famous in the 1950s for its celebrated Arabian horse ranches and the annual Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, back in 1933 it was rare for any Arizona horse show to hold even one Arabian class. At the Brophy College benefit, the Arabian Stallions class had three entries. The winner, owned by Mrs. Pearl Gray Clyde, was Hassan, the first son of the famous champion stallion Antez (later the grandsire of Mister Ed); Clyde had paid Hassan’s breeder, cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg, $1,500 (equal to $23,000 today) for the colt a year earlier. In second place was a stallion, reputedly imported from France in 1928, called variously “Megmesi” or “Nejne Si.” (Stud book and pedigree information for this horse has yet to be found.) This French stallion was owned by the beautiful former Paris model, June Almy, a recent transplant to Arizona. 

                                                                 June Almy and friend.

June’s husband, Fred Almy, was born in New York to well-to-do parents. His father was a wool manufacturer, and the family rubbed elbows with the likes of President Theodore Roosevelt. But young Fred wasn’t content to be a member of a country club, get a law degree, or work on Wall Street. He reportedly told his parents, “No college for me—I’m going to be a railroad engineer” (Tacoma News Tribune, 11 October 1940). After a few years working on the Long Island Railway, he headed to the Southwest. By 1915, he was spending time in Arizona as a ranch hand. The same 1940 article noted admiringly that Fred “trekked west to ride the Arizona ranges — swinging from the Iron Horse to bucking broncos and the indispensable thundering herd. He took over a ranch, bred horses and cattle, and made money, an incredible feat for a tenderfoot. He did more—he learned to clamp his long legs against the flanks of the craziest cayuse on the range and remain in the saddle. He learned to ride steers and bulldog them, to spin a rope as deftly as the cowboys born on the plains, and empty a six-gun from the hip without wasting a slug.” 

Fred then became a rodeo performer in noted promoter Tex Austin’s shows—or, as the same Tacoma Tribune reporter less accurately put it, “Tex Austin drifted through Arizona, and noting Almy’s art, lured him into joining the national rodeo. Almy agreed, for he was wearying of the west, and the big show moved into Madison Square Garden New York. After a tour of the provinces and prairies, Austin was ready to disperse it then, but Fred said: ‘Listen, Tex, let’s herd the whole outfit over to England and show them real cowboys.’” 

Austin—born Clarence Van Nostrand in Missouri—made enough money in the rodeo business that he was able to buy 5,500 acres in New Mexico, where he established Forked Lightning Ranch, visited by the likes of Will Rogers and Charles and Ann Lindbergh. The main ranch house was one of the first works by noted architect John Gaw Meem, who also renovated the ranch house at Los Poblanos Ranch, in Albuquerque, for Albert Simms and Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms (mother of noted Arabian horse breeder Bazy Tankersley). 

                    Tex Austin’s Forked Lightning Ranch (courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

  In 1924, Fred was just one of the hundreds of cowboys who participated in Austin’s exhibition at Wembley Stadium, in London—the first rodeo in England. While there, Fred “was said to have attracted the attention of the Dowager Lady [Michelham], widow of a banker [Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham], when he gallantly doffed his 10-gallon hat to her while bulldogging a steer” (New York Times, 22 April 1965). 

Baron Michelham, who died in 1919, had been a successful owner and breeder of Thoroughbred racehorses. The horse with whom he is most associated nowadays is the mare Plucky Liege (Spearmint–Concertina, by St. Simon), widely hailed as one of the most influential broodmares of her era. Among her produce were *Sir Gallahad III, sire of Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox (and grandsire of another Triple Crown winner, Omaha); *Bull Dog (grandsire of Triple Crown winner Citation); and Bois Roussel, a winner of the Epsom Derby whose likeness was sculpted by Arthur Gredington for the British ceramic manufacturer Royal Doulton. It is said that there is scarcely a Thoroughbred alive today that is not a descendant of Plucky Liege. 

Above: Plucky Liege. Below: A collectible ceramic statue of her son Bois Roussel, 

manufactured by Royal Doulton (courtesy of Susan Daigle-Leach).

Baron Michelham’s widow married Fred in February 1926 in Clearwater, Florida; she was 43, and he was 38. Within months she became ill, and she died the following January, “leaving the bulk of her fortune, estimated at $50 million, to Mr. Almy. In the inheritance was said to have been a palatial house in Paris, which Lord Michelham had lent to Prime Minister David Lloyd George as his residence and British headquarters during the 1919 Peace Conference” (New York Times, 2 January 1927).

Not long after his first wife’s death, Fred received an invitation to a fashion show from a French salon that she had often patronized, and he decided to attend the event by himself. There, he met a 20-year-old British model named June Dibble. They were married the following month in Paris and began spending their way through the Michelham fortune. The media dubbed Fred the “Cowboy Millionaire,” and for a number of years, everything he and his new bride did seemed to make the papers. 

Fred, however, hadn’t forgotten his Arizona friends. A newspaper article from January 1927, only weeks before his second marriage, noted that Fred had shipped two purebred Arabian stallions from Europe to General Levi Manning, onetime mayor of Tucson, Arizona, credited as the first breeder of purebred Arabian horses in the state. The headline read: “Fred Alma [sic] Coming from Abroad With Papers of Pedigree for Manning’s New Arabian Horses—‘Finest Ever Seen’” (Tucson Citizen, 19 January 1927). (Unfortunately, the names of these two horses are not known.) By this time, Manning already owned the Arabian stallions El Jafil (*Ibn Mahruss x Sheba), Jarad (Ziki x Tamarisk), Kalub (Ziki x Hasiker), and Saraband (Harara x Sedjur), all of which he had acquired from California with the help of a man named Hamilton Bassett, a self-proclaimed horse authority whose British-born wife passed herself off as “Lady” Betty Bassett. (One article about the couple noted incorrectly that Hamilton was “the first man to penetrate into [Tibet]” and that “Lady” Betty was the daughter of “Sir Joseph Grice-Emerson, and is a noted adventuress and explorer” (Republican-Gazette [Gove City, Kansas], 26 August 1915).

Fred and June began buying vast tracts of land in Arizona, including a 30-acre parcel in what is now metropolitan Phoenix, southwest of the intersection of Seventh and Maryland Avenues. While Fred purchased cattle, cars, and several Kentucky-bred racehorses, June became part of Phoenix’s social scene, showed horses, and even rode some of her husband’s racehorses at the Phoenix fairgrounds track. 

By this time, Fred had become so well known across the U.S. that someone named a racehorse after him. Born in 1929, the equine Fred Almy (Jack Hare Jr–Eleanor S., by Ivan The Terrible), owned by Cora Polk, ran for nine seasons, started a whopping 194 times, and won 27, including the 1931 Juvenile Handicap at Agua Caliente, in Tijuana, Mexico—where the “Millionaire Cowboy” also ran his own racehorses. (Presumably, the human Fred Almy was aware of his namesake, but it’s not known what he thought of him.)

Things seemed to be going splendidly for the Almys. One Los Angeles reporter remarked, “Quite a character, this Almy. Known all over Arizona as the ‘Millionaire Cowboy.’ Owns about half the state of Arizona, his friends say, and the cattle roam far and free on his vast ranches” (Los Angeles Daily News, 4 February 1930). What Fred and June’s friends didn’t know, however, was that a large part of his fortune had been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash. Within a couple of years, the thousands of acres the couple had purchased on credit went into receivership. 

It’s unclear when June and Fred began to drift apart. In 1936, newspapers across the nation ran stories (complete with a topless photo) about June’s affair with a handsome married stockbroker named Jerry Wheelock. One reporter wrote, in a line that sounds particularly ludicrous to horse people, that Mrs. Wheelock demanded “a court snaffle to curb the Dawn Patrol canters of her playboy mate” (New York Daily News, 21 February 1936). By this time, June was living in New York and running a high-end florist shop. In 1939, June filed for divorce but asked for no alimony, as she was well aware that Fred had no money to give her (Albuquerque Journal, 10 November 1940). In fact, Fred was so poor that he didn’t have sufficient funds to attend his mother’s funeral. (Mrs. Almy wouldn’t have wanted him there, anyway, as she had cut him out of her will.)

                                     Cartoon in the Tacoma News Tribune, 11 October 1940. 

As Fred’s adventures receded from the headlines, it was his ex-wife whose name was again on the ascendancy. June made the national news for the last time in early 1943 after reporters learned that she’d married a wealthy, divorced lumberman, Albert Stanwood “Stan” Murphy. When Stan’s former paramour—a washed-up actress named Madge Bellamy—heard the news, she became so enraged that she drove to Stan’s club on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, waited for him to exit, and then shot at him with her revolver, but missed. The Texas-born Bellamy, who later told reporters that she was a good shot and “could have hit him” if she’d really wanted to, found herself back in the limelight for the first time in decades.

Bellamy’s movie career had certainly had its highs and lows—early on, she’d appeared in two John Ford pictures, including The Iron Horse (1924), and she earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, as she grew more difficult to work with, the only parts she was offered were in lower-quality fare, such as 1932’s White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi. By the time she shot at Murphy, Bellamy hadn’t worked in pictures for six years. She never served time for her crime, and instead received a six-month suspended sentence for violating a gun law. Later in 1943, Bellamy sued Stan in Nevada, on the grounds that they had been married there in 1941. However, no evidence of their putative marriage ever came to light, and the case was dismissed. Stan reportedly gave her a six-figure settlement to get her out of his life. 

                                    Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy in White Zombie (1932). 

Stan had become acquainted with Fred Almy several years before either of them met June. The two men had visited Arizona back when both of them were bachelors. In fact, in the summer of 1915, Stan and Fred dined together twice at Riverside, an amusement park south of downtown Phoenix that featured a large swimming pool, a zoo, and live music (Arizona Republic, 16 May and 20 June 1915). Stan married his first wife in 1917, and although the couple lived in California, they periodically visited Phoenix, where June and Stan likely became acquainted. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “No whirlwind romance was theirs, Stan and June having met some years ago when both had marital commitments” (10 January 1943).

The Murphys’ marriage appears to have been happier, and considerably more sedate, than their previous relationships. After 20 years of marriage to June, Stan died in April 1963 at age 70. Two years later, Fred Almy—who had eked out a living by hauling other people’s racehorses from track to track—died in his room at a seedy hotel near Hell’s Kitchen in New York. He was 77. For the next two decades, June lived quietly, never remarried, and passed away in San Francisco in 1986. 

Three years after Fred Almy’s death, a chestnut filly was born on Frank Brophy’s 30,000-acre Babacomari Ranch in southern Arizona. Her sire, the stakes-winning Whodunit, stood at Claiborne Farm and was, like Secretariat, a grandson of *Princequillo. The filly’s dam, Flower Pot, a daughter of Delphinium, had been bred and raised by Brophy. By that time, Brophy had been breeding and racing Thoroughbreds in Arizona and California for four decades, had served on the board of the Arizona Racing Commission, and had been dubbed “the patriarch of Arizona racing.” There’s no indication that Brophy had kept in touch with June (Almy) Murphy since the 1930s. However, something about this particular filly clearly reminded him of the beautiful young model who, with her husband Fred, the onetime “Cowboy Millionaire,” kept Arizona residents—and the nation—riveted during the Depression as they blew through $50 million in track record time.

                                                           June Almy (b. 1903, d. 1986).

What the Butler Saw: Or, What Do McDonald’s, Auntie Mame, Class Rings, and Arabian Horses Have in Common?

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

A Story in Three Parts

Part One: Daniel C. Gainey

In 1940, Daniel C. Gainey—chairman, CEO, and guiding force behind Jostens, Inc., the nation’s leading maker of class rings, received an unusual gift from his employees: an Arabian colt named Kaniht (Katar x Niht). 

Kaniht, bred by Albert Harris, scion of the family that established Chicago’s Harris Bank, descended primarily from horses bred by Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt of England’s Crabbet Stud. (You can read more about the Blunts here, here, and here.) Kaniht was also something of a rarity in the U.S., as only about 1,700 Arabians had been registered in this country since the founding in 1908 of the Arabian Horse Registry of America (AHRA; now known as the Arabian Horse Association). When Gainey acquired Kaniht, Harris was the AHRA’s president; many years later, Gainey would hold the same position.

Ferzon and his son Gai Parada. Photo by Sparagowski.

Now smitten with the breed, Gainey soon began acquiring Arabians with the goal of establishing his own breeding program in Owatonna, Minnesota. Unlike Harris, who prized Arabians for their toughness and athleticism, Gainey valued beauty, elegance, and refinement.  Over the decades, as he bred hundreds of Arabians, he created the “Gainey look”—horses with large eyes, “teacup” muzzles, and well-sculpted ears—based on the bloodlines of his herd sire, Ferzon (Ferneyn x Fersara). His program was quite successful in the show ring: three products of his program, Galizon (Azraff x Gay Rose by Ferzon), Gai Parada (Ferzon x Azleta by Azraff), and Gai-Adventure (*Naborr x Gavrelle by Ferzon), were all U.S. National Champion Stallions. Gainey first kept his Arabians exclusively in his home state of Minnesota, but later branched out, with ranches in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Ynez, California.

Gainey Ranch, Santa Ynez.

Part Two: Pat Tanner / Patrick Dennis / Edward(s) Tanner

If you’ve seen the 1958 movie Auntie Mame—which recounts the adventures of Mame Dennis and her nephew Patrick—you may have noticed that it’s based on a book by Patrick Dennis. However, “Patrick Dennis” was actually a pseudonym used by the flamboyant writer and bon vivant Edward Everett Tanner (known to friends and family as Pat).  A 2000 biography of Tanner/Dennis, Uncle Mame, by Eric Myers, makes for fascinating reading about this formerly celebrated, but now nearly forgotten, author who once had three books on the bestseller list simultaneously.

As Myers noted, “People assume that [Auntie Mame] is based on fact—that young Patrick really was raised by a madcap New York aunt—when in reality, he grew up rather conventionally as part of an upper-middle-class family....Once he left those confines, however, he led a life as unusual—and as poignant—as that of any fictional character he could have created. Auntie Mame was only one of Tanner’s sixteen novels. The book made him a millionaire and has earned its place as a perennial pop classic of American fiction.” Unfortunately, “[a]lthough both Tanner and his books were uproariously funny, and he was beloved by those close to him, his life was marked by an underpinning of frustration and melancholy.”

In 1963, at his professional and personal wit’s end, Tanner separated amicably from his wife and acknowledged that he was bisexual. Literary tastes were changing, and his light-comic prose, which had delighted so many readers in the 1950s, was now out of step with the turbulent 1960s. Tanner knew he had to do something else to make money. “He had sworn off writing,” remarked Myers, “but he was about to embark on the sort of escapade that could easily have provided material for five more novels.”

After living in Mexico, and then a stint as a gallery owner, Tanner decided to become a butler. As Myers noted, “He was already intimate with every detail that went into running a fine home; he loved to arrange lavish dinners and parties; he certainly had the grace, elegance, and tact—when he wasn’t sloshed—that were required for the job. Add to this his precise knowledge of cuisine, clothing, and decor, and you have a majordomo worthy of the White House....And best of all, it would be fun. Pat would be living inside one of his own novels, simultaneously observing and interacting with the class of people he had satirized.”

For his new profession, Tanner renamed himself “Edwards Tanner,” which made him sound like a character from one of his books. None of his employers knew that their butler was the creator of Auntie Mame. In early 1976, Tanner, by now an experienced butler, went to work for McDonald’s president Ray Kroc and his wife Joan at their apartment on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive. In a letter to his son, Tanner drew a portrait of the couple:

“Mr. and Mrs. Ray Kroc … are the dearest people on earth—nouveau riche (20 years of super affluence) and frank to admit it. If anyone has to be burdened with several hundred million dollars, it ought to be the Krocs. Far from being ashamed of their money, they revel in it. They have a place in Florida, a ranch in California, and this posh apartment in Chicago where they occupy the whole twenty-fifth floor and I simply pig it on half of the twenty-sixth, all exquisitely overdecorated and quite good in a terrible way. They revel in their yacht, their jet, their helicopter, their private railway car, their baseball team (the San Diego Padres, who have never been known to win a game), their Cork Foundation (guess what that is spelled backward) to combat alcoholism, their 15 cars (only three of which are Rolls-Royces) and their Arabian horses (neither rides)….Well, I just couldn’t have fallen into a better place or with nicer people.”

Part Three: Ray Kroc

The son of Czech immigrants, Ray Kroc grew up near Chicago. He served as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I and then worked at a variety of low-wage jobs. (Although Kroc never knew this, Tanner also had been an ambulance driver—for the American Field Service, during World War II.) Kroc’s New York Times obituary called him a “former piano player and salesman of paper cups and milkshake machines.” He was in his mid-fifties when he opened his first McDonald’s franchise, and in 1961, he bought out the original owners, Maurice and Richard McDonald. By 1965, when McDonald’s stock was initially publicly traded, Kroc’s shares were worth $33 million. Not long after that, Kroc and his then wife Jane (who had been John Wayne’s secretary) purchased more than 200 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley, about 35 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California, for $600,000 and named it the “J & R Double Arch Ranch.” The three flagpoles at the property featured the American flag, the California state flag, and a flag with golden arches. 

Sculpture by King Zimmerman at the Krocs’ ranch. Photo by Danforth-Tidmarsh.

The ranch was the focus of a 1968 article in Architectural Digest. Its 17,000-square-foot main lodge served as living quarters for the Krocs, a meeting room for McDonald’s executives, and the headquarters of the Ray A. Kroc Foundation. (Later, a round house, which reminded some observers of a hamburger, was built on the property for the Krocs’exclusive use.) The article noted that the property “has more comforts and conveniences than most city dwellings and at the same time offers the invigorating atmosphere of the outdoors and sporting life.” In addition, “for the recreation of guests, there is horseback riding” and “parts of the ranch are productive work areas, involved with horse breeding and training and the raising of cattle.” 

No mention was made of a horse barn, but the cattle barn was innovative for its time: it was air-conditioned and featured “automatic sanitation facilities” and music for the cattle; Architectural Digest called it “one of the most elaborate [cattle operations] in the country.” Noted Arabian horse judge Judy Delongpré Kibler, who lived in the area, remembered that the barn “was a bit over the top from the standpoint that [the cows] stayed in this building, which had a flushing system and feeding system. Way too expensive to raise cattle that way—I believe it was used for maybe a year or two.”

It was also around this time that Ray Kroc began buying horses from Daniel Gainey, now president of the AHRA. It’s unclear exactly how Kroc and Gainey met, but they had a number of things in common, aside from owning ranches in Santa Ynez. Both of them were Midwesterners who had joined already-existing companies, (McDonald’s and Jostens), reconfigured them, and guided the organizations to unprecedented success. Both of them were also staunch Republicans who hated FDR’s New Deal. 

Gainey was campaign manager for Harold Stassen’s 1948 and 1952 presidential bids, served as Barry Goldwater’s finance chair for his 1964 presidential run, and was a longtime friend and advisor of President Richard Nixon. Kroc made his only known foray into politics when he donated $255,000 to Nixon’s re-election campaign (this would be $1.6 million today). The donation was made during the time that Kroc was doing horse business with Gainey, so perhaps the latter suggested or facilitated it. (Nixon, too, had a connection to Arabian horses via Gainey; his daughters Tricia and Julie learned to ride on the mare Gali-Ferra (Ferzon x Gali-Rose), who had been a gift from Gainey to President Dwight Eisenhower.)

Goldwater and Gainey, 1964. 

In 1967, while the Krocs’ Santa Ynez property was being constructed, Ray became the owner of his first Arabian, bred by Gainey. Kroc’s new acquisition was the 1966 colt Gi-Frisco, out of one of Gainey’s excellent broodmares and by the stallion El Kumait, owned by another local breeder, Frisco Mari. Since Gi-Frisco was only a yearling when Kroc acquired him (and thus couldn’t be ridden for a few years), perhaps he was a gift from Gainey—just as Kaniht had been a gift to him from Jostens employees in 1940. (Notably, this colt was the only horse of the hundreds bred by Gainey whose name carried a “Gi” prefix. The names of Gainey’s other horses featured the “Gai” or “Ga” prefix—suggesting that this may have been a spelling error on the part of whoever filled out the colt’s registration papers.)

Gi-Frisco’s sire El Kumait had been foaled in 1935 at cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg’s ranch in Pomona, California. Arabian breed historian Gladys Brown Edwards wrote that El Kumait “was injured on one leg as a yearling, causing permanent damage to the leg. Since it was not certain whether he would outgrow this deformity he was sold as a two-year-old, but otherwise it is doubtful if this splendid stallion would have left the ranch.” His descendants include race winners, like Speed King and Fercheyn, and numerous National winners, such as RSR Kumait, U.S. Top Ten English Pleasure and Pleasure Driving, and Speed Princess, with five National titles to her credit, including U.S. National Champion Futurity Cutting Horse. 

Gi-Frisco’s dam Galata was by Ferneyn (sire of Ferzon) and out of Gainey’s best-producing mare, Gajala (*Raffles x Rageyma). Galata’s descendants include Gurisha Ferzona++ (dam of Kaborray, U.S. Top Ten Gelding), Gai Rainbow++ (sire of Gai Beauseyn, U.S. Top Ten Jumper), and Galatia (dam of GA Amir Amage++, U.S. Reserve Champion Western Pleasure, as well as granddam of Grand Jazz, twice U.S. Top Ten English Pleasure Amateur Owner to Ride, 18 & over). 

Gubla, dam of three foals for Ray Kroc. 

Kroc made more purchases from Gainey in 1968. These were the 1960 mare Gubla (*Royal Diamond x Ghuli), her 1968 filly Ferbla (by Ferzon), and the foal that Gubla was carrying, the colt Galizon Prince (by Galizon), born in 1969. Judy Delongpré Kibler and her then husband Don DeLongpré managed the Gainey Ranch in Santa Ynez back then and delivered the horses to Kroc’s place. Ray’s new mare Gubla was by *Royal Diamond (Oran x Grey Royal), who had been bred in England by Judith Blunt-Lytton, Lady Wentworth (daughter of the previously mentioned Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt), and imported to the U.S. in 1957 by Bazy Tankersley of Al-Marah Arabians, then in Maryland. Tankersley recalled that *Royal Diamond “was a spectacular creature, but I wasn’t very happy with his disposition, nor did he have the exceptional hindquarters mandatory for Al-Marah breeding stock.” Other breeders, including Gainey, bred to him multiple times with good results. Among *Royal Diamond’s well-known descendants were stakes winner Charlie Valentine, 1988 Darley Horse of the Year; Ibn Raffon++, U.S. and Canadian Top Ten Stallion; and Royal Mace, U.S. National Champion Western Pleasure Amateur Owner to Ride.

Galizon, sire of Kroc’s colt Galizon Prince. Photo by Johnston.

Ghuli, Gubla’s dam, bred by James and Edna Draper, was of mostly Crabbet breeding. She was a full sister to Sur-Ghari, U.S. Top Ten Stallion. Ghuli’s sire, Sureyn (*Raseyn x *Crabbet Sura), was linebred to Lady Wentworth’s influential Polish stallion Skowronek, and Ghuli’s dam, Gharisa (Gharis x Mona Lisa), had bloodlines from Spain, the Davenport importations, and Crabbet Stud. Sureyn was a notable sire of champions, including the first U.S. National Champion Stallion and Mare, Mujahid and Surita. A half-sister to Gubla, named Gata (by Ferzon), foaled Nigatt, U.S. Top Ten Native Costume and sire of four National winners. 

Prior to her purchase by Kroc, Gubla produced Gublazon (by Ferzon), who is best known as the paternal grandsire of U.S. National Champion Stallion Arn-ett Perlane. Gublazona, her second foal, was a good broodmare for Arcadian Arabians of Pennsylvania; Gublazona’s daughter Arkdn Gublaziona (by *Cebion) was an early winner of the Legion of Supreme Merit. 

In 1969, Ray Kroc divorced his wife Jane. Within days, he and Joan (née Mansfield) Smith—the recently divorced wife of McDonald’s franchisee Rollie Smith—married in front of the 28-foot-tall fireplace at the J&R Double Arch Ranch. 

In 1972, Gubla was taken back to Gainey Ranch to be bred to Gai Warsaw (Ferzon x *Paleta), producing the 1973 filly Gai Easter. Gai Warsaw, a sire of champions in the U.S. and U.K., was the grandsire of Gai Radiant, U.S. and Canadian Top Ten Western Pleasure Junior Horse, who was purchased in 1997 by Shirley and Charlie Watts (of Rolling Stones fame) for their Halsdon Stud in England.  Gai Easter was Gubla’s last foal. 

Gai Warsaw, sire of Gai Easter, bred by Kroc. Photo by Sparagowski.

Kroc bred Ferbla (a full sister to Gublazon and Gublazona) twice. The first time, she was bred to Khari (Khemosabi x Carinosa), Canadian National Champion Stallion, who was trained and shown by Don Delongpré. The resulting colt, born in 1974, was named Padre Khari, presumably in honor of Kroc’s having purchased the San Diego Padres baseball team in January of that year. 

Above: Khari, sire of Padre Khari; Below: *Eter, sire of Corky. 

Photos by Sparagowski.

Three years elapsed before Ferbla produced another foal, this time by the Polish stallion *Eter (Comet x Estokada), Don DeLongpre’s well-known sire of National winners, who was standing at nearby Caravan Arabians. Ferbla’s 1977 colt—named Corky—was the last of Kroc’s breeding experiments. Corky’s name was likely a nod to Operation Cork, a foundation established by Joan Kroc to combat the effects of alcoholism on families. The foundation produced public service announcements, including animated spots featuring Corky, the talking cork. (After her husband’s death, Joan Kroc admitted that Ray’s drinking was the impetus for establishing the Cork Foundation.) Author Lisa Napoli has written an engrossing biography of the couple in Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away. )

Corky the talking cork.

Kroc’s  seven Arabians were all of excellent Gainey Ranch bloodlines. None of the horses appear to have been shown, only two (Gubla and Ferbla) produced offspring, and only one (Galizon Prince) is known to have been sold by him, according to the Arabian Horse Association. As Judy DeLongpré Kibler noted, Kroc “really never intended—in my recollection—to be a breeder, [and] the horses probably lived out their lives on his ranch.” 

Daniel Gainey passed away in 1979, and his Santa Ynez ranch now features a winery run by his grandson. Ray Kroc died in 1984. His widow sold the J&R Double Arch Ranch—the birthplace of the Egg McMuffin and McNuggets—to, of all people, a health-supplement magnate, Gerald Kessler, who converted the ranch’s test kitchen into a fitness center. If only Pat Tanner—who died in 1976—had been around to witness this. What a novel he could have written! 

Sign outside the former J&R Double Arch Ranch.

Photo by Lisa Napoli (cropped from original). 

         

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Living Soil, Living Art: Eve Balfour, Her Arab Mare Bendira, and New Bells Farm

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

This post is part of the ongoing Crabbet Chronicles series, which also includes Lady Anne Blunt’s Stradivarius and Wilfrid Blunt’s meeting with Lawrence of Arabia.

In 2018, Prince Charles sent his “warmest congratulations” to the UK’s Arab Horse Society (AHS) on its hundredth anniversary, writing, “As the proud owner of four very beautiful Arabian horses, I have come to appreciate this particularly special breed....For one hundred years The Arab Horse Society has devoted itself to promoting interest in Arabian horses in the United Kingdom.” The AHS’s first president was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who, with his wife Lady Anne Blunt, established the world-renowned Crabbet Stud in Sussex.

Eve Balfour, “the Compost Queen,” and her draft horses (from Brander 2003).

The previous year, Prince Charles had celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the Soil Association, “the UK’s leading food and farming charity, and organic certification body,” whose motto is “healthy soil, healthy people, healthy planet.” While at the association’s annual luncheon, he lamented the fact that he had never met its founder, Lady Eve Balfour, OBE (1898–1990), nicknamed “the Compost Queen” for her efforts to inculcate organic farming in the UK. In addition to obtaining a degree in agriculture (at a time when few women were college graduates) and writing the literally groundbreaking book The Living Soil, Eve was an early member of the AHS and owned a mare named Bendira—a daughter of the Blunts’ famous stallion Mesaoud, whom they had imported from Egypt to their Crabbet Stud in 1891.

Eve Balfour in the 1940s (photo credit: Wikipedia).

Born in 1898, Eve was the niece of Arthur James Balfour, who later became British prime minister; she called him “Nunkie.” Her mother was the daughter of a viceroy of India, a granddaughter of prolific author Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame), and a sister of Neville Lytton, third Earl of Lytton, who was an artist, an Olympic medalist, and son-in-law of the Blunts. His wife, Judith Blunt-Lytton, is known to Arabian horse fanciers as the breeder and author Lady Wentworth.

Drawing of Eve by her uncle, Neville Lytton (from Brander 2003).

From a young age, Eve knew she wanted to be a farmer. She was fortunate to be born into an eccentric, passionate family. A number of her Balfour relations were early members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (her uncle by marriage, Henry Sidgwick, was the SPR’s first president), and her aunt, Constance Lytton, was a suffragette who was jailed four times. As Eve’s biographer noted in 2003, “It must have required a strong personality and an equally strong voice to hold one’s own in the often animated family discussion….Nor were such discussions restricted to the male side of the family.”

Fishers Hill, Eve’s childhood home (photo credit: The Lutyens Trust). 

The house in which Eve grew up—Fishers Hill, in Surrey—had been designed by the well-known architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose wife, Lady Emily (Lytton)Lutyens, was Eve’s aunt. (Lady Emily became a Theosophist and went on to become a follower of Krishnamurti.) The architect’s biographer (and descendant), Jane Ridley, wrote that Eve’s mother, Betty, “was unworldly and helpless in practical matters. She shocked [Lutyens] by travelling in dirty third-class carriages with her children, none of whom ‘looked as if any care, thought or trouble was taken with their appearance, either clothes or body.’ For a family of intelligent, tomboyish, and rather neglected girls, Fishers Hill was a paradise; it [was] ideally suited to games and outdoor theatricals. Betty’s grandchild Anne Balfour remembered it as a magical house, with the feel of Kipling and Puck of Pook’s Hill.”

The teenage Eve working  with a pony (from Brander 2003).

As a youngster, Eve was often on horseback, and had numerous cats, dogs, and other animals. She became a vegetarian at a young age and also took a great interest in plant growth, encouraged by her mother and her aunt, both excellent gardeners. Whereas in a typical family of her socioeconomic class, she would have been expected to “marry well” and raise children,  her biographer wrote that it was “an example of the advanced approach to parenthood of both her mother and her father that when she announced her wish to become a farmer…she was promptly entered for the Agriculture Department of Reading University College.”

Eve’s biographer also recounted that while Eve was in college, she “was closely in touch with her Lytton relations at Crabbet Park. Judith Wentworth, her [aunt by marriage], was to become the noted Arab horse breeder. Eve, of course was greatly interested in her work and enjoyed vising her. She even contemplated leasing one of the Crabbet Park farms in Sussex and went as far as discussing the possibility with Judith. At this stage her inclinations were strongly towards eventually taking a farm in Sussex.”

However, after Eve’s graduation, she and her sister Mary instead found a 157-acre, dilapidated farm in Suffolk named New Bells. There, the two of them and an assortment of friends, relatives, and, eventually, employees, worked twelve-hours days in an attempt to make New Bells a profitable concern. Her biographer noted, “Despite the fact that there was no running water or electricity, and sanitation was primitive in the extreme, everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves in this youthful household and contributed their assistance to the farm, whether feeding pigs, herding sheep, milking, or harvesting.” Eve’s cousin Betty Lutyens remembered her first visit to New Bells, “when she was greeted at the door by Eve...in breeches and a red spotted handkerchief.”

In 1939, after working at New Bells for two decades, Eve and her associates began the well-known Haughley Experiment at New Bells and a nearby farm. This study compared organic and chemically fertilized farming methods. As Kevin Desmond wrote, “Balfour published the initial results of her experiment in a book called The Living Soil where she presented the case for an alternative, more sustainable approach to agriculture. Its influence was such that, in 1946, Balfour co-founded and became first president of the Soil Association. While continuing the Haughley [E]xperiment for the next 25 years, the Association has developed into an international organization pioneered by Balfour. [She] continued to farm, write and lecture for the rest of her life.”

Eve’s “Lytton relations” at Crabbet Stud had sold her the well-bred Arabian mare, Bendira, around 1909. Bendira’s sire, the aforementioned Mesaoud, was one of the world’s most influential stallions, appearing (often multiple times) in the pedigrees of upwards of 90 percent of today’s Arabians.

Mesaoud (Aziz x Yamamah III).

Bendira’s dam, *Bushra, was bred by the Blunts. She stood only 14 hands. Arabian historian Carol Mulder noted that though she was a bit “long and low” through the body, in some photos “she could look very beautiful.” *Bushra was purchased by Charles Husted and imported to the US in 1900. Of her nine foals, only *Ibn Mahruss and Sira have living descendants.

*Bushra (Azrek x Bozra) (from Mulder 1991).

Bendira made a cameo appearance in the journals of Lady Anne Blunt, who recorded on June 3, 1903 that Prince Scherbatoff had come to tour Crabbet Stud and that her husband “took the Prince in the road cart with Bendira to see the mares and fillies….” Some years earlier, Scherbatoff and his brother-in-law Count Stroganov had established the Stroganov Stud near Tersk, in the northern Caucasus, where they bred Arabians. In 1899, the two men had visited Crabbet and had seen Bendira’s sire Mesaoud. In their book on Arabians, published in Russia the following year, Scherbatoff and Stroganov wrote that Mesaoud was “Crabbet Park’s number-one sire. He is a splendid specimen of a first-class Arabian and has won many prizes in England.” In 1903, Scherbatoff came back to Crabbet to look for more horses. Within weeks of Scherbatoff’s ride with Wilfrid Blunt driving Bendira, Mesaoud was purchased by a Polish breeder, Wladislaw Klineiwski, and appears to have changed hands again rather quickly, as he soon took up residence at the Stroganov Stud.

*Berk (from Covey 1982).

Bendira was closely related to the Crabbet-bred stallion *Berk, whose descendants often had excellent movement. *Berk was by Seyal, a son of Mesaoud, and out of Bukra, a three-quarter sister to Bendira’s dam *Bushra. (I wrote about *Berk’s daughter Tahdik and granddaughter Santa Fe, maternal ancestors of *Marwan Al Shaqab, for  Arabian Horse Life Magazine in 2019.)

Bendira was registered initially in the UK’s General Studbook (GSB). In 1906, it was noted that she had been bred to Narkise but came up barren. The 1909 GSB recorded the birth of Bendira’s “only produce to live,” a filly named Beneyeh (by Feysul)—suggesting that if Bendira had previous offspring, it or they had died before registration. Beneyah herself was never assigned a registration number, which presumably means that she did not survive for very long. Bendira was not re-bred in 1908, and after that was sold to Eve.

In 1920, a periodical called The Near East featured the following notice: “A council meeting of the Arab Horse Society was recently held at the Grosvenor Hotel, S.W., where entries for the Stud Book Vol. II and for the Arab-bred Register were accepted.” “Miss Eve B. Balfour, of New Bells Farm,” was listed as one of the new members, and Bendira, now twenty years old, was given AHS registration number 172. She was described as a chestnut mare with a blaze and three white socks, her color and markings similar to those of her sire.

Eve did do some horse breeding at New Bells, but her biographer, Michael Brander (Eve’s nephew by marriage), did not discuss about this aspect of her farming in any detail, other than to reproduce a letter from Eve’s mother in which she wrote that “the horse dealer who brought the stallion to Eve’s mares nearly had a fit when he found the New Bells farmer was a young girl. He’ll get accustomed to that....” Whether Bendira may have produced some part-Arabian foals for Eve is unknown, though possible, since one of the reasons for establishing the AHS was “to encourage the re-introduction of Arab blood into English Light Horse breeding.”

The same letter from Eve’s mother also mentioned seeing Eve’s fellow farmer, her sister Mary, driving a pony named Betty who “just gets in between the shafts and goes a jolly pace.” Is it possible that the “pony” Betty was actually Bendira, an experienced driving mare who could have inherited her dam’s small size? We likely will never know, but it’s charming to imagine Bendira, a flashy chestnut daughter of the great Mesaoud, trotting along at “a jolly pace” at New Bells Farm.

A Robe, a Hovercraft, and Lawrence of Arabia: The Curious Connections between Alec Guinness, Sydney Cockerell, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

This post is part of the ongoing Crabbet Chronicles series, which also includes Lady Anne Blunt’s Stradivarius and the Crabbet-bred mare owned by Eve Balfour. 

Wilfrid Blunt knew, was related to, had affairs with, and/or wrote about everybody who was anybody in England from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. His “Secret Diaries,” which were sealed for fifty years after his death in 1922, “mixed up scandalous gossip with serious commentary,” according to his biographer Elizabeth Longford. Blunt’s observations have provided many a historian with a useful perspective. Peter de Mendelssohn, Winston Churchill’s biographer, called Blunt “a shrewd observer of men and a faithful and reliable recorder of their opinions.”

Blunt and one of his Arabian horses. Etching by Tristram Ellis, 1883. 

National Portrait Gallery. NPG D1079

Blunt, who wrote verse prodigiously, believed that he would be known to posterity as a poet. However, the first word about him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is “Hedonist,” followed by “poet,” then “breeder of Arabian horses.” (His wife’s grandfather, Lord Byron, was the real poet in the family.) As Oscar Wilde wrote about minor poets, like Blunt, “they are never quoted.”  Blunt’s poems didn’t even make it into the Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets—whose compiler had excluded him only due to the “magnitude” of his output. During his lifetime, Blunt’s work did have its admirers, including Yeats, who remarked (incorrectly) that “certain sonnets, lyrics, stanzas of his were permanent in our literature,” and Pound, who praised Blunt’s double sonnet “For Esther” (a pseudonym for Catherine Walters, known as Skittles, considered “one of the last great courtesans of Victorian London,” linked not only to Blunt but also to King Edward VII and Napoleon III).

Just as Blunt would be disappointed about posterity’s view of his poetry, it’s likely that Academy Award–winning actor Sir Alec Guinness would be less than thrilled to learn that he is now best remembered by people under forty for originating the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars franchise—whose dialogue he dismissed as “rubbish.”

Although Guinness never met Blunt, who died when Alec was a mere seven years old, they do share a curious connection through a robe belonging to Sir Sydney Cockerell, as discussed in Guinness’s memoir, Blessings in Disguise.

This robe was not, however, Guinness’s most famous robe, the one that his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi required him to wear (copies of which are worn by millions of kids annually on Halloween). After shooting ended on Star Wars, that robe, and other costumes from the film, went into storage at Angels and Bermans, a costume company in London. “The [robe] was thrown in with hundreds of monks’ robes and later rented out to customers, also being worn by an extra in the 1999 film The Mummy…Company boss Tim Angel said the [robe]was only discovered during a routine stock check.”    In 2007, the robe was sold for 54,000 pounds (about $71,000).

Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Seventeen years before the release of Star Wars, Guinness had the opportunity to wear yet another robe when he portrayed T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—on the London stage in Terence Rattigan’s Ross. As blogger Groggy Dundee notes, “Ross began as a film project for the Rank Organization. In 1955, producer Anatole de Grunwald commissioned Rattigan to pen a screenplay based on Basil Liddell Hart’s T. E. Lawrence in Arabia and After (1934). The movie was to be shot in Iraq, ruled by the descendants of Lawrence’s ally Emir Feisal, with Anthony Asquith directing and Dirk Bogarde as Lawrence. However, in July 1958 Iraqi army officers overthrew Iraq’s King Feisal II and the project was scrapped.” (I can’t help but note here that Asquith’s mother, the former Margot Tennant, had been one of Blunt’s many lovers.) Rattigan then reworked the screenplay into a play. The following year, the playwright was asked to turn it back into a screenplay, but by then, David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia was already in production, with Guinness–again wearing a robe—playing Prince Faisal opposite Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence.

Alec Guinness as T. E. Lawrence.

In the film, which a contemporary reviewer gave an “A” for entertainment and a “C-“ for historical accuracy, Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, a former archaeologist, is sent by the British army to Arabia to find Prince Faisal. Lawrence’s goal in Arabia, like Byron’s in Greece, was to help free the locals from their oppressors—in this case, the Turks. Over the years, historians’ perspectives have shifted on Lawrence’s legacy; he is known variously as a hero, a poseur, a cultural appropriator, and even a traitor.

Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal.

For example, here is Isabella Hammad, writing earlier this year in the Paris Review:

I am familiar with the legend of T. E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mention him with admiration. The image of Lawrence as an adventuring Orientalist, galloping through the desert in flowing robes at the head of a Bedouin army, has endured in the imaginations of the British and American publics at the expense, arguably, of an accurate understanding of Lawrence’s role in the events of the First World War and its aftermath. Despite the fact that, to date, Lawrence has been the subject of nearly fifty biographies and scores of critical works, it is the image of Lawrence in the film Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole and a heavily made-up Alec Guinness as the Arab Prince Faisal, that has stuck.

After his experiences in Arabia, Lawrence greatly wanted to meet Blunt, who, many years earlier, had traveled widely with his wife Lady Anne (and on her dime) in the Middle East. He was a fierce anti-Colonialist, sympathetic to Irish, Indian, and Egyptian nationalism. In 1888, Blunt’s support of Irish Home Rule landed him in Galway and Kilmainham  prisons for two months. (After Blunt published a book of poems about his prison experience, his acquaintance Oscar Wilde, years away from his own stint in jail owing to his relationship with Blunt’s cousin Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote, “prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet.”) Blunt also had some political influence over both Randolph Churchill and his son Winston. As A. Warren Dockter writes in “The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills,” “Where Lord Randolph took Blunt’s anti-imperialism with a grain of salt, Winston accepted him as a more serious figure.”

It was the younger Churchill who facilitated Lawrence’s pilgrimage to Blunt’s Sussex home; Lawrence later proclaimed the elderly Blunt a prophet. Blunt was equally taken with Lawrence, writing in his diary that Lawrence had embarked on “an adventure of the heroic kind [in the Middle East], carrying out very exactly the old one I had dreamed of attempting myself in 1880.”

A couple of decades before he met Lawrence, Blunt hired a secretary, Sydney Cockerell—later the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University—who had previously been employed by designer William Morris (with whose wife, Janey, Blunt had an affair). Cockerell and Lawrence later became friends and correspondents, in part because of their mutual interest in the Middle East. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s website notes that:

Blunt and Lady Anne, both self-taught Arabists, nurtured Cockerell's interest in the history, literature and arts of the East. They offered him a first-hand experience of the Orient. During his visits to their house [Sheykh Obeyd] near Cairo he explored the region's rich culture, travelling to Karnak, Thebes, Memphis, Beirut, Baalbeck, and Damascus, camping with Bedouins in the desert, and surviving a shipwreck on the way to Mount Sinai in 1900. Cockerell swore to keep his beard for the rest of his life. He kept his Arab robes too and wore them at a Fancy Dress Ball at the Cambridge Guildhall in 1919.

Sir Sydney Cockerell and friend.

 Blunt and Lawrence were both dead by the time Guinness met Cockerell on a “hot Sunday in March 1939 [that] was heavy with the unmistakeably dusty, peppery and aromatic smell of Egypt and the Near East which can make even drab places seem glamorous.”  Despite a large disparity in their ages, they instantly took a liking to one another. Indeed, many years later, when Guinness was studying for the role of Lawrence in Ross, he visited Cockerell to, as he put it, “pick at Sydney’s memories.” According to Guinness, Cockerell remembered Lawrence as a “terrible fibber,” but Sydney’s companion, Miss Dorothy Hawksley, painted a more comprehensive picture:

I came in here one day and saw a small man, dressed as an airman looking out of the window. His back was turned to me. I wondered why Sydney should be talking to such a very undistinguished little man. Then, just as if he could read my thoughts, the little man turned round and stared at me. I was stupefied; I don’t think I have ever encountered such a strong personality. I didn’t know who he was, of course, until introduced. He rather gave me the creeps. 

Cockerell’s young son Christopher, who later became an inventor, had an opportunity to meet many famous men of letters who came to see his father. However, “Sydney was very disappointed when Christopher showed very little interest in literature, public affairs and other aesthetic pursuits of such visitors. It was only when T. E. Lawrence stayed at their home that he showed an interest—this was in Lawrence’s 1000 cc Brough Superior motorcycle.” Lawrence owned eight of these motorcycles, one of which he crashed when he swerved to avoid two bicyclists. He died from his injuries six days after the accident, in May 1935.

T. E. Lawrence on one of his Brough Superior motorcycles.

It was through Cockerell that Guinness acquired the robe that connected him to Blunt. Guinness recalled, “Sydney gave me a coarse, striped robe which he had bought from a Bedouin when he and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had been wrecked off the coast of Sinai in 1900. He used it as a dressing-grown later in life; lent it to Lawrence who in turn handed it on to [George Bernard Shaw]. Eventually it found its way back to Sydney, and shortly after it came into my possession I handed it over to Clouds Hill, T. E.’s hideaway cottage in Dorset, as a memento.”

Today, Clouds Hill is a British heritage site. Among Lawrence’s effects there, in addition to the “coarse, striped robe,” is a copy of Blunt’s In Vinculis — a volume containing the Irish prison poems that Wilde admired.

And as for Sydney Cockerell’s concern about his son’s lack of culture, Christopher Cockerell turned out just fine. Almost two decades before the landspeeder in Star Wars enchanted young moviegoers, Christopher, who was more taken with Lawrence’s motorcycle than with Lawrence himself, invented the Hovercraft, which employs a cushion of air to stay aloft above water or ground. Hovercrafts are “now used throughout the world as specialised transports in disaster relief, coastguard, military and survey and applications, as well as for sport or passenger service.” As writer Amy Cowen noted, “Remember Luke’s landspeeder in the original Star Wars trilogy? Remember the way it skimmed across Tatooine’s surface of sand as he went in search of R2-D2 and found Obi-Wan? While not necessarily a textbook example of hovercraft technology, the story set in a “galaxy far, far away” did a memorable job in 1977 of showing the potential—and alluring ‘glide’—of an air-cushion vehicle.”

Like his father, Christopher Cockerell received a knighthood, though the son’s was “for services to engineering,” something the elder Cockerell likely never expected of the son he once derided for being “no better than a garage hand.”

Hank the Cowdog, Trainer Hank Ack, and an Arabian Stallion Named *Zbrucz: The Brusally Ranch Connection

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

An Arizona Horse History Project Essay

In 1982, a writer named John R. Erickson penned the first entry in his Hank the Cowdog series of children’s books, about a canine head of security at a ranch in Ochiltree County, Texas. As of this year, there are 73 Hank the Cowdog titles, as well as toys, games, t-shirts, and other merchandise. With sales of more than six million books, Hank’s popularity shows no sign of abating.

      To be honest, I had never heard of Hank the Cowdog until earlier this year, when I was helping my friend, dressage rider and painter Shelley Groom Trevor, with her forthcoming memoir, A Riding Life: Memories, Dreams, Art, and Love. One day, I was fact-checking the lives of various people she’d written about, including cutting-horse trainer Hank Ack, who worked with Arabian horses at Shelley’s grandfather’s Brusally Ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the early 1970s. A Google search of Hank Ack’s name brought up something interesting, a 2007 article by Joshua Rabe in The Oklahoman:

Hank the Cowdog, the fictionalized “head of ranch security” dreamed up by Texas children's author John Erickson, is known to thousands of kids and their parents. Hank the cowdog, the real one that inspired Erickson's character, was known to few.

But he was no less beloved.

“I can still just see that dog,”  recalls Glen Kirkendall, best friend of Mark Mayo, the man who owned and trained the real Hank to be a real cowdog. “He would jump up and put his feet on your stomach. He'd wag his tail and stand there and have a conversation with you.” 

The tale begins about 1970 when Mayo, a horseman [and Arabian horse owner/breeder] who had inherited a 10,000-acre ranch outside nearby Mocane [in Oklahoma] with his brother, decided to try his hand with a working cattle dog. At a horse show, Mayo was entranced by two Australian shepherds that dazzled the crowd with their ballet of herding maneuvers. “The male was a three-legged dog, and he was an incredible cowdog,” said Mayo's daughter, Meredith Lemaster, 43, of Bartlesville. So impressed was Mayo, he got one of the three-legged dog's four-legged offspring… [and] Mayo named the dog after its sire's owner, Hank Ack.

A 1976 article in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph reported that “Ack trains Appaloosas, Arabians and Quarter horses for all events, but specializes in cutting horses and reining horses. He has trained and shown five national champion Arabian cutting horses, and the Kansas state champion Appaloosa cutting horse.”

Hank on Jameel Basklawi.

      I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Hank Ack, but many years after the fact, I learned that he’d been a crucial player in an event that made a big impression on me.
      Back in 1974, while I was attending my first Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, I was fascinated by the Formal Combination class, in which the horses are first driven, then ridden. After the driving portion of the class, helpers in white coats enter the ring, remove harnesses and buggies, and outfit each horse with a cutback saddle and full bridle. During this intermission, a beautiful bay horse broke loose from his handlers before they could put on his bridle. With two sets of reins around his neck, and the headstall and bits near his feet, he went soaring around the show ring at a dead run, leather straps flapping, breaking, and goading him on—until some brave soul stepped over the ring’s low wall and caught him.
      For a moment, it appeared that the horse and his lovely young rider/driver were going to have to be excused from the class due to broken equipment. Just then, a long-legged cowboy came running back with a new bridle, hopped the wall, and went to help the young woman. Within minutes, the horse was saddled. With his petite blonde rider aboard, the bay stallion went right back to work and took third place in a large class. To this day, I don’t remember who won, but I’ll never forget that striking stallion doing laps around the arena.
      That was the first time I ever laid eyes on Shelley Groom (now Trevor) and *Zbrucz, the well-known son of Comet who’d been 1970 U.S. Reserve National Champion Park Horse and was a top sire for Brusally Ranch. And the quick-thinking man who dashed back to the barn for a bridle? That was Hank Ack. Shelley remembered Hank as a “tall, lanky blond-haired cowboy with a grin that creased his whole face.”

Shelley Groom Trevor and *Zbrucz in a (different) 

Formal Combination class at Scottsdale.

      A few years earlier, Hank had been a trainer at Brusally Ranch, where he’d taught Shelley how to cut cattle on another son of Comet named *Centaur. Hank and Shelley both did well with *Centaur at the 1970 Arabian Nationals in Oklahoma City; Hank was Top Five Open Cutting, and Shelley was Top Five Novice.

Shelley Groom Trevor and *Centaur, mentored by Hank Ack,

 at the 1970 U.S. Arabian Nationals in Oklahoma City.

     By 1974, Hank was working as a cutting-horse trainer for Arabian breeder Owen McEwen of Wichita, Kansas. No longer an employee of Ed Tweed, Hank had no obligation to help Shelley and *Zbrucz—but his actions kept her in the ribbons that day.
      As I continued my Google search into Hank Ack’s life, I found a post on Facebook that dated to 2006. Hank, then 64 years old, was at a cutting competition in Ardmore, Oklahoma. As his friend Rod Miller recalled, Hank had just finished a run that was “good enough to win a check.” Hank stepped off his horse to talk to friends, then collapsed and died. As Miller noted, “If Hank was going to script his passing, he could not have done it any better.”
      Hank the cowboy inspired Hank the Cowdog, helped a friend in a time of need, and died doing what he loved. I’d call that a life well lived.

“Horse Racing Royalty”: Allison Janney, Ruffian, and a Ride on Secretariat

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

Just after Finest City won the 2016 Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint at Santa Anita Park, NBC’s racing commentator Laffit Pincay—son of Hall of Fame jockey Laffit Pincay Jr.— made some remarks that “won” him a Turkey Award courtesy of racing’s Paulick Report. It all started when actress Allison Janney arrived in the winner’s circle to present the trophy to Finest City’s connections. Pincay accidentally introduced Janney as “Elizabeth Janney,” and then compounded his mistake by calling her an Academy Award winner—which she was not. That is, not until last week, when she received an Oscar for her supporting role in I, Tonya.

If you happened to notice Allison Janney in the winner’s circle that day, you may have wondered if she had any particular interest in horses or horse racing. Indeed she does, and she comes by it naturally.  In fact, Allison is not the only statuesque, talented, award-winning female member of the Janney family: her great-uncle, Stuart Janney Jr., and his wife Barbara Phipps Janney, were the breeders and owners of the incredible filly Ruffian, the highest-ranked female runner on the Blood-Horse’s list of the top 100 racehorses of the twentieth century and a member of the Horse Racing Hall of Fame.

Although Janney appears to be more of a dog person than an equestrian, she did say, during an October 2013 appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, that she is “horse racing royalty,” and that in addition to her uncle having owned Ruffian, her cousin Stuart Janney III had bred and raced that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Orb, who descends from the same female family as Ruffian. Then the future Academy Award winner ended the episode by climbing aboard a pantomime horse called Secretariat that was a fixture on Ferguson’s program. Tally-ho and congratulations, “Elizabeth Janney”!