Devil Red & Plain Ben

(See Cover)

This Memorial Day weekend, two days of racing will give some 400,000 customers a chance to bet as much as $21 million on the horses and hunches they like.

At Garden State Park, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia,' Palestinian and Olympia are expected to head the field of three-year-olds in the $50,000-added-Jersey Stakes. For Californians, Hollywood Park will feature the $25,000-added Will Rogers Handicap, in which Star Fiddle and Pedigree are entered. Boston, Wilmington, Detroit, Chicago, and scores of lesser U.S. tracks will also put their best equine feet forward this weekend--as will Toronto's Woodbine Park, where the best of the Canadian racing crop will run for the Sg-year-old, $10,000-and-50-guineas King's Plate (probable favorite: Epic).

The pick of the ponies--and the crowd of crowds--will be at New York's Belmont Park. There some 75,000 racing fans will bet some $5,000,000 and see renewals of two choice stakes: the Coaching Club American Oaks for three-year-old fillies and the Suburban Handicap for older horses, both $50,000-added attractions. Topping the Oaks field is Calumet Farm's Wistful. Topping the Suburban entries--by such a wide margin that he was all but "weighted out of the race" this week--was Calumet's great Coaltown, co-holder of two world's records.

Barn 41, Belmont. Since 1940, Calumet Farm has been a front runner in the U.S. racing stakes. Whirlaway, Pensive, Twilight Tear and Armed were the horses that first carried Calumet's devil red and blue to fame & fortune. In the past three years, Calumet's Citation and Coaltown, Fervent and Faultless, Pot o' Luck, Ponder, Bewitch and Wistful have run away from all competition. Other horsemen may not be happy about it, but the public is. Fans know that Calumet is not a betting stable, and that its horses are always sharp when they go to the post for a big race.

This week, Calumet's racing headquarters was Barn 41, at Belmont Park, once base of operations for Oilman Harry F. Sinclair's all-conquering Rancocas Stable. Despite the barnyard-like peace that always hangs over the stable area at dawn, there was an undertone of excitement around Barn 41. Boys from other stables, trudging past on their way to a cup of coffee, eyed it as a country boy would the big house on the hill.

At 6 a.m., the first set of nine horses headed for the track. During the next five hours, 28 Calumet horses kept moving under the watchful eye of Trainer H. A. ("Jimmy") Jones. But the one man most responsible for the stable's extraordinary success, recognized by his fellow horsemen as the best in the business with something to spare, wasn't even there. Calumet's famed Benjamin A. (for Allyn) Jones, trainer of five Kentucky Derby winners and leading money-winning trainer last year, was in Kentucky handling another string of Calumet horses.

Barn 15, Churchill Downs. Ben wasn't worrying about what was going on in New York. He had taught his son Jimmy all the tricks he knew. "I can train three horses better than Jimmy," he says, "but Jimmy can train 50 better'n me."

At 66, bulldog-jawed, 5 ft. 10 1/2 in. Ben Jones walks with short, mincing steps and a hint of a limp (from a football injury). But he sits a horse straighter than most men half his age. Outside Barn 15 at Churchill Downs last week, atop his stable pony, Ben hardly looked like the boss of the most efficiently run stable in U.S. racing history. There are no fancy airs about Ben Jones, from Parnell, Mo.

Around Plain, Ben's pony, munching grass, was a set of Calumet horses with the exercise boys still in the saddles. It is one of Ben's tricks to let his horses settle down and get a bellyful of grass as soon as they come back from a morning's gallop. He feels that it helps horses get the idea that work and play are practically the same thing. Such basic ideas, plus patience and instinctive horse sense, have made him famous wherever horses are raced.

Men from Missouri. Ben Jones is not the first famous horse trainer from Missouri. In the '20s a close-mouthed man from Independence, superstitious Sam Hildreth, worked wonders with Sinclair's Rancocas horses.

Jones makes a habit of sending fat horses to the post. So did Hildreth; old-timers still remember that his Zev was "fat as a pig" the day he won the 1923 Kentucky Derby. Hildreth's superstitious aversion to cameras and black cats is something that Jones has no time for, but he shares his predecessor's ability to glance at a horse and tell how it feels. On the way to the track for a morning workout, he frequently flabbergasts an exercise boy, as Hildreth used to, by saying "Take that filly back to the barn."

The secret of keeping horses high in flesh, Missouri-style, is so fundamental that many horsemen pay little heed to it. The secret: hay. When the feed man delivers a bale that doesn't strike Ben's fancy, back it goes. "I can smell hay, or feel it in the dark, and tell whether horses will like it," he says.

Rival from Brooklyn. Even Trainer Jones performs no feeding or training miracles with second-rate horses. Quick to spot the no-goods, he loses no time unloading them. His pet phrase: "Trade'm away for a dog and then shoot the dog."

Those he keeps are more than likely to go places, thanks to the fact that Ben Jones is a first-class manager as well as a smart conditioner of horses. Plenty of other stables have good stock, conditioned to a fine edge, but never make money because the trainers run their animals in competition that is over their heads.

The only trainer today who even challenges Ben Jones is redheaded, Brooklyn-bred Hirsch Jacobs, 45, who has a talent for placing horses properly, i.e., in races they figure to win. Like Jones, Jacobs is an unusually keen observer, and he has a phenomenal memory, especially for the ailments of other men's horses. But for sheer training-horsemanship, wily Ben Jones (in partnership with able son Jimmy) has no real rival. He has come a long way from Parnell (pop. 490), with more than a few detours.

Right Down Main Street. The folks around Parnell remember young Ben as a rough one. Quick as a cat and strong.as a bull, he could lick any young buck in the county, and frequently did, and he would bet on anything.

When he was 16, folks wagged their heads mournfully and predicted that Benjamin would break his father. But Horace Jones, a covered-wagon man who got the choicest piece of land in northwestern Missouri, would take a lot of breaking. A shrewd, hard-bitten Welshman, he founded the town of Parnell, ran the Parnell bank, and knew more about raising cattle than anybody in Nodaway County. He wanted Ben to become a banker, but that wasn't in the cards.

Parnell really buzzed the day that young Ben, who had ridden cow ponies on his father's farm since he was four, thundered down Main Street in an impromptu match race for $5 a side. There also came the day when a riot was threatened after he single-handedly attacked a group of Italians and felled one of them with a stone; his father hustled Ben off to a logging camp until things cooled off.

Eventually, after pedaling a bicycle 500 miles or so from Parnell, Ben turned up at the State Agricultural College of Colorado (now Colorado A. & M.). There he met a kindred spirit, a rugged football player named Merlin ("Deacon") Aylesworth, whose father was the college president. They whooped it up together, on the gridiron and on & off the campus. But it wasn't long before Ben said goodbye to Aylesworth (who later became president of the National Broadcasting Co.) and pedaled back to Parnell. That was the end of his academic education.

Along the Pumpkin Circuit. It took him no time at all to figure out what he wanted to do. "Banking and horse racing wouldn't have went together," he decided. "Folks think all horse trainers are horse thieves."

Banker Jones remonstrated, but Plain Ben got himself a few horses and struck out. In between fairs, he kept his eyes open for a man with a horse and an urge to bet. Whenever he found one, a course was marked out and a match run, with the stakes sometimes as high as $400.

It was a tough league. In Oklahoma City, Ben once got hornswoggled in a match race against an Indian quarter-horse. The Indians dug a hole in the lane Ben's horse was to run in, filled it with straw and covered it with dirt. When Ben's horse hit the hole, she went sprawling and the Indians took his money. Since then Ben has been pretty thorough about inspecting tracks before a race.

His early wanderings took him along the "pumpkin show" circuit, from Tulsa to Lewiston, Idaho. Race meetings lasted one or two days, and purses were a piddling $100. About 30 vagabond horsemen roamed this circuit, and none ever got rich--or starved--mainly because of a secret mutual-assistance pact that no matter who won a race everybody with a horse in it shared equally in the purse.

South of the Border. Racing was then at its lowest ebb in the U.S.; a reform movement had closed the sport in Chicago, then blacked it out in Memphis, New Orleans, Seattle and San Francisco, finally shutting it down (for two years) in New York. The only two major racing centers that were not affected were Maryland and Kentucky.

In 1909, a group of U.S. sportsmen headed by Kentucky's Matt Winn built a track at Juarez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. The grandstand and the barns (where a horseman could sleep when he couldn't afford a $4-a-week room in El Paso) were made of adobe. It looked good to Plain Ben. Jones: there was money for anybody smart enough to win it, and plenty of excitement for all.

One day before dawn, Pancho Villa's men shot up the town and a scare spread along shed row's grapevine: "They're looking for black horses." Ben's best horse, Lemon Joe, was black as coal. He got some mud in a hurry, swabbed it on one of Lemon Joe's legs, covered it with flour and painted generously with iodine. When Villa's men came by later in the day, they passed up Lemon Joe after one look.

Although Ben seldom went looking for trouble, he knew what to do when it found him. In Juarez' Black Cat dance hall one ' night, he was dancing with a Mexican matador's girl friend. The matador took exception, and let fly with a knife. Ben returned the compliment. One punch sent the Senor reeling into the street, busting one half of a swinging door on the way out.

Back to the Farm. His third winter in Juarez, Ben had a lightning-fast filly named Julia L. (after his mother) and he persuaded his parents to come down for a visit. Then he persuaded his father to bet $10 on her.

Julia L. won by a Mexican mile, and Banker Horace Jones began to wonder how long this sort of thing had been going on. Next spring, he gave Ben money to buy a stallion and some brood mares.

Ben Jones didn't train horses then the way he does now for Calumet Farm. "I was always on short money," he says, "always in a drive." He wanted horses with plenty of lick that could win and be converted into cash. After racing came back to New Orleans in 1915, the Jones Stock Farm made it a habit of showing up about Jan. 1 and winning most of the races for two-year-olds. "Had to," says Ben, "we were always low on cash after laying up on the farm all fall."

Second Look. His early habit of looking for speed, above all else, has stayed with him. "Once in a while you get one that's got endurance too," he says. The implication is a fact: a good trainer can build up endurance, but speed is something that horses have to be born with.

Ben Jones himself was born with an instinct that is his greatest asset. In the morning on the race track, a hundred horses can gallop past and he will never notice them. But the first time a good one goes by, he will instinctively turn and give a second look. Plain Ben can't explain why. He has no set idea what a good horse should look like or at least he can't put it in words, because "you don't know what it is until you see it." Neither can he explain his knack of knowing when his horses are "doing good" without consulting a stop watch.

First Derby. In 1932, "money was awful scarce" for Ben when Herbert M. Woolf, a Kansas City clothing merchant, phoned him in New Orleans to offer a job. Ben became trainer for Woolford Farm, a betting outfit that went as high as $20,-ooo on a race when the owners thought the horses were right.

Over the next seven years, other trainers learned to worry when Ben Jones came into sight. He had hard-hitting horses--Joe Schenck, Inscoelda, Technician, Rifted Clouds, Lady Broadcast.

In 1938, Ben Jones brought a sore-footed colt named Lawrin to Louisville. If he worked Lawrin, the horse would probably break down; if he didn't work him, he wouldn't be fit for the long Derby grind. Ben got a blacksmith to shoe the horse with heavy protective bar plates, then got one hard work and a race into him. On Derby Day, lightweight shoes replaced the heavy ones and Lawrin must have felt as though he was flying. He romped home at $19.20 for $2.

It was Ben Jones's first Derby winner. Several months later, Ben was sitting in a box at Chicago's Arlington Park when Millionaire Warren Wright stopped by and said: "Telephone me tonight." Wright wanted Ben Jones as the triggerman for his then not-too-successful Calumet Farm.

Horses for Profits. A meticulous man who inherited a Chicago fortune, Warren Wright decided when he took over his family's Calumet Baking Powder Co. that he would not be satisfied until he doubled the fortune. Under his able management, Calumet prospered so well that Postum Co., Inc. offered him "more than it was worth" (about $29,200,000 worth of common stock), and he sold out.

Wright insisted that all his enterprises, including Calumet Farm at Lexington, Ky., show results. He went as high as $75,000 to get the best brood mares he could find. The rest of the Calumet first team that operated under Quarterback

Ben--from blacksmith to farm manager--was hand-picked for performance.

Ultimate result: Calumet's high-pressure horse factory, which costs $500,000 a year to operate, earned a whopping $1,269,710 in purses last year; the year before it won $1,402,436, a runaway record. Says Ben Jones: "It's like running a grocery store ... I love to hear that cash register ring."

Halters for Foals. Calumet Farm, 1,038 acres of grass and white fences, five miles west of Lexington, is a rare gem among the bluegrass country's jeweled horse farms. The white, red-trimmed barns with dormer windows are quaint and comfortable looking on the outside, elegant and modern inside, with chrome handles on stall doors, chrome saddle racks, cork-brick floors and pine-paneled walls. Although 55 persons and 140 horses inhabit the farm, the place is so carefully kept that it gives an impression of never having been used. But Willow Run has nothing on Calumet's production line.

In Bull Lea, sire of both Citation & Coaltown, Calumet Farm has the most valuable stud in horsedom today. The waiting list of those who would like to breed their mares to him, at a fee of $5,000, stretches clear to the Quarter Pole.

When Calumet's own foals begin dropping early each year, no time is lost preparing them for their goal in life--the race track. Halters go on the wobbly legged foals when they are only two days old. Ben Jones and his hard-working farm manager, Paul ("Dutch") Ebelhardt, like horses to get used to human hands early. After that, the Calumet education proceeds with the greatest caution and care. Yearlings, for instance, are legged-up three months before being called on for speed over the farm's three-quarter-mile training track.

Nitwit Champion. Such thoroughness, practiced more in Europe than in the U.S., aims to develop disciplined horses that can adjust to race-track life. But there was one notable exception, a nitwit named Whirlaway, in the 1939 yearling crop.

Ben Jones recognized Whirlaway as a potentially great horse--even though he was foolish and eccentric off the race track, and completely crazy on it. It took three men to put a saddle on him. In the paddock the horse shook like an aspen. When he went into a turn during a race, no amount of strong-arming by a jockey could keep him from going wide.

Bull-headed Ben rolled up his sleeves. Month after month, he led Whirlaway around like a puppy dog, let him inspect the inside rail, sniff the starting gate, look over the stands. Now & then, Ben would stop to let the horse nibble at some grass. Whirlaway visited the paddock so often that it began to seem like a second home. Gradually the addled horse seemed to realize that there was nothing about a race track that was going to hurt him.

Before the 1941 Derby, Ben told Jockey Eddie Arcaro to "take it slow around the far turn. This horse can be last at the head stretch and win for you." Actually, Whirlaway and Arcaro were fourth heading into the stretch, but they put on a breathtaking charge and won by eight lengths.

Before he was through, Whirlaway won $561,161 in purses and became the world's leading money-winner. "I couldn't stand a horse like Whirlaway now," says Ben, "he'd take too much out of me."

Family Stand-Off. Not long after Whirlaway was retired to stud, in 1943, Ben himself began to talk about retiring. Diabetes and the strain of 40 hectic years on the track was beginning to tell.

But before he got around to quitting, Pensive won the 1944 Kentucky Derby for him (at a $16.20 mutuel). That summer, Pensive bowed a tendon and was retired to stud. (He died last week.) By then Ben was busy with a Calumet filly named Twilight Tear, who struck a stride which finally carried her to 1944's Horse-of-the-Year title.

Next season it was Armed. So small as a two-year-old that he was gelded "to make him grow some," Armed didn't see much of the race track until he was four. Then he began to take his bows. Still racing, Armed has won more money ($782,175) than any other gelding ever did.

Two years later, Ben Jones got himself promoted to the post of "head trainer and manager of the Calumet Farm Training Stable," and turned the heavy chores over to Jimmy. Since then the stable has often raced in two divisions, with horses and trainers interchangeable. No matter who tightens the saddle girths, the horses keep on winning. Financially, it is a family stand-off with each of the Joneses getting a $12,000-a-year salary plus 5% of all purses won by Calumet (or some $160,000 apiece in the last two years).

Pounds v. Dollars. On matters of policy, Ben does the talking. One of his principal matters of policy is weight--and that mainly concerns Citation and Coaltown. Weight will stop any horse from winning if the handicappers put enough of it on his back, and Ben Jones is not in the business of losing races.

After Coaltown, with 130 Ibs. up, romped home last month by seven lengths in the $50,000-added Gallant Fox Handicap, he was assigned 138 Ibs. for Memorial Day's Suburban Handicap at Belmont. "That would strip his gears," stormed Ben, "and if he won, the next time they'd put 145 on him." In short, Coaltown was a very doubtful starter in the Suburban.

Citation, second leading money-earner of all time ($865,150) and generally ranked with Man o' War, has been idle since he was "fired"* for an ankle injury five months ago. According to present plans, he will run in Chicago this summer. Shuddering to think of how much poundage handicappers would pile on him, Ben Jones is looking ahead to such weight-for-age fall classics as Belmont's Jockey Club Gold Cup and the Pimlico Special.

Many owners and trainers, wondering out loud if either Warren Wright or Ben Jones has any sporting blood in his system, argue that a horse can prove his greatness only under high weight. At anything like even weights, Citation and Coaltown are admittedly in a class by themselves. Horsemen and fans alike would like to see a match race between the two, but Warren Wright is too sharp a businessman to waste that much horsepower on a single race.

Citation v. Coaltown. Only last month Jimmy Jones said that "Citation could roll up Coaltown into a little ball and throw him away." Ben isn't that sure, or he makes believe he isn't. "Horses change," he hedges. "Coaltown is ten-times better than he was last year."

Calumet's greatest pair, while the same age (four) and the same height (16 hands), are poles apart in temperament and style. Citation is the class horse, a rugged bay that runs only as fast as he has to. "A Chinaman could train him," says Ben Jones. The only one he is hard on around the barn is his exercise boy; he gets his head low in morning gallops and just about pulls his rider's arms out of their sockets. He is a glutton for feed.

In a race Citation won't really extend himself unless he sees other horses in front of him. Once he gets in front (which he has done 27 times in his 29 races), he seems to relax, looks at the scenery and even throws a glance at the stands. Such inattention sometimes calls for a solid crack on the rump, which his jockey may have to repeat.

Pert, nut-brown Coaltown is the speed horse. He naturally bounces along at top speed unless he is restrained. Because of his terrific speed, cautious Ben Jones insists that Coaltown wear a quarter-inch pad of piano felt between hoof and shoe--just in case his feet start stinging. Coaltown, who has more crowd-appeal than Citation, at Florida's Hialeah Park last winter equaled the world record for a mile-and-an-eighth (1 :47 3/5). Then at Gulfstream Park, under a tight hold, he equaled the mile-and-a-quarter record of 1:59 4/5

Successor to Ponder? Even with their aces on the sidelines, Ben Jones & Partner Jimmy are not exactly badly off. Wistful, easily the outstanding three-year-old filly of the season after her victories in the Kentucky and Pimlico Oaks, has drawn a sharp bead on this weekend's rich Coaching Club American Oaks. Calumet's 1949 Kentucky Derby winner, Ponder (son of Pensive), is one of the favorites for the Belmont Stakes two weeks hence.

Back of these stars Ben Jones & Co. have a flashy crop of two-year-olds, neatly named as usual by Mrs. Warren Wright. One is Shine Boy, a bay colt whose Calumet Farm report card carries these impressive comments: "Extremely great hay-eater . . . has everything a good horse needs." Another is a fiery chestnut named Urgent: "top Blenheim II colt." Nevertheless, Ben Jones suspects that when Derby Day, 1950, rolls around, a brown son of Bull Lea may be the colt to beat. His name: All Blue.

* "Added": in addition to nomination and entry fees. A race-track process to overcome knee and ankle injuries. A series of holes about an eighth of an inch deep is burned around the afflicted area with an instrument resembling an electric soldering iron. The "fired" leg, swollen and inflamed, is then painted for ten days with a strong iodine solution. Alleged result: it changes the chronic inflammation into an acute inflammation, and nature cures whatever Is wrong with the knee or ankle.

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