Horse of a lifetime
Kelso, voted Horse of the Year an unmatched five times in the 1960s, earned his trainer, Carl Hanford, a well-deserved place in racing’s Hall of Fame by Andy Plattner

As 90-year-old Carl Hanford stood at the podium during the racing Hall of Fame induction ceremony on August 7 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., no one who knew him expected to hear a lengthy acceptance speech, a caught-up-in-the-moment gallop down memory lane. And Hanford was true to form.

“I’m here because of one horse and one horse only,” said Hanford, the trainer who in the early 1960s guided Mrs. Richard C. (Allaire) duPont’s Kelso to an unmatched five consecutive horse of the year titles.

He has always been a man of few words, and carefully chosen ones at that. In 1969, the Miami Herald’s Edwin Pope, in writing about Hanford, observed, “Staying out of sports’ front and center glare is almost impossible for any sports figure worthy of his hire. . . One man in recent years has done it. He did it deliberately and not out of ugliness or anti-social spirit—just simple and direct modesty. When pictures were taken, he removed himself from camera range. When questions were asked, he was at pains to be beyond earshot. . . Maybe you have heard of him, if you were listening closely. . .”

A Hall of Fame induction is usually wrought with emotion. Jockey Bill Boland, inducted into this year’s class along with Hanford and *Cougar II, was so overcome that he had to stop speaking. Hanford, for his part, delivered a simple thank you to those who had selected him. “All of the top trainers of the past have received this honor,” he said, “but I don’t think any one of them—and maybe I’m being a little prejudiced here—ever had their hands on a horse like Kelso.”

He noted that both Allaire duPont and his wife, Millie Hanford, had passed away within the last 14 months. “I wish they were here today to enjoy this with me,” said Hanford, who remained on excellent terms with duPont and visited her a week before her death this past January. “Maybe they are.”

Memories galore.
A former jockey, Hanford had about a decade’s worth of experience at training good runners when, in 1960, he heard that duPont, one of Maryland’s preeminent breeder/owners, was in search of a private trainer for her Bohemia Stable. He applied for and was offered the post. DuPont turned over to him nine horses—seven fillies and two geldings. One of the geldings, Kelso (a Kentucky-bred despite making his home at duPont’s Woodstock Farm in Chesapeake City), had broken his maiden at Atlantic City in a brief campaign of three races the year before as a juvenile.

Six years later, Kelso retired as the best Thoroughbred of his era. Kelso may or may not be the greatest American race horse of all time, but he was—without question—the most accomplished.

“Equipoise was truly a great horse,” Hanford said. “I felt lucky to have seen him run. For the longest time, I thought he was the best horse I’d ever seen . . . Kelso was racing for a while before I thought of him as the equal to Equipoise. Towards the end, yes, I guess I thought of Kelso as a better horse.”

In 1974, Hanford told the Daily Racing Form’s Joe Hirsch, “Carrying weight, I think [Kelso] could have beaten anybody over a distance. . . Yes, the red horse [Secretariat] or anybody.”

The reality is, of course, that comparing horses of different eras is difficult at best, even for a sage such as Carl Hanford. But no horse, before or since, has equaled Kelso’s feat of earning the Horse of the Year crown five consecutive seasons. Kelso, named to that title each year from 1960 to 1964, also won five divisional crowns, four as champion handicap horse and one as champion 3-year-old.

“The old days, that’s when we saw the best of racing,” said Hanford, who for many years has made his home in Wilmington, Del. “It’s obvious that commercial breeding has taken over. . . The days of horses carrying all that weight are over. So we might see another horse as determined as Kelso, or as tough as Kelso, or as fast as Kelso. But we probably aren’t going to see all that he did ever again.”

From Nebraska to Kelso
Carl Hanford, a son of the American heartland, was born in 1916 in Fairbury, Nebr. He grew up with three sisters and seven brothers, two of whom, Buddy and Ira, became top jockeys. Horse racing dealt the Hanford family both tragedy and glory in the 1930s. Buddy Hanford was killed in a spill at Pimlico in 1933, two days before he was scheduled to ride in the Kentucky Derby. Three years later, Ira Hanford became the first apprentice jockey ever to win the Kentucky Derby, accomplishing the feat aboard Bold Venture for trainer Max Hirsch.

Carl, two years older than Ira, had a nondescript riding career. He said, “I rode in Florida, New York, Maryland . . . all over New England, but I never really got on a decent horse and I never did win a stake. Then, I started to get too heavy to do it. In those days, racing was the premier sport in the country. All the big stables bred their horses to race. The top trainers were Max Hirsch and Sherrill Ward. It was very exciting. . . and I never regretted leaving high school for the track, not one day of it.”

He moved on to the training ranks, worked with Irish Jimmy Stewart (father of Maryland veterinarian James V. Stewart), went with a string of Stewart’s in 1939, and saddled his first winner that year, at Charles Town. His training career was interrupted by World War II; Hanford was drafted and spent most of his four-year service in Fort Robinson, Nebr., with the Army Remount Corps.

In a 1980 interview with the Daily Racing Form’s Claude Williams, Hanford noted, “During World War II, the Army must have had 20,000 head of Thoroughbreds and mules. . . the mules were trained as pack animals, but I was mostly around the Thoroughbreds. We had a lot of well-bred horses that we broke there. Several racetrackers were stationed at Fort Robinson and we broke most of the young horses. A lot of the geldings were later given to farmers in the area, and I wouldn’t be surprised if guys like Marion H. Van Berg raced some of the horses we raised and broke at Fort Robinson.”

After the war, Hanford barn­stormed, first taking a small string of runners from Ohio to Delaware by boxcar. He traveled to Florida and wound up developing a good stakes-placed filly named Jupiter Light. His work did not go unnoticed, and Hanford began to attract a clientele.

La Corredora, whom Hanford trained for Mrs. Marion W. O’Connor, won five stakes, including the 1953 editions of the Ladies and Comely Handicaps. She finished third in the voting—behind Sickle’s Image and Atalanta and ahead of A Gleam and Real Delight—for the champion older mare title that season.

“She came from nowhere when she ran and she ran her heart out every time,” Hanford recalled. His success with La Corredora led to better things, one of which was a new relationship with Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney, whom Hanford had already known for years. Rooney offered Hanford a string of horses to train. “He was a great guy to work for,” said Hanford. “The O’Connor family was like that. Mrs. duPont the same. None of them ever picked up a condition book.”

Landing the job with duPont was a major coup but not, originally, because of anything having to do with Kelso.

“I’d seen Kelso run at 2; I think I’d even bet on him,” Hanford remembered. “When I picked him up to train, it was the winter of 1960. He was pretty impossible to manage. He kept throwing the farm riders. Finally, I sent down to Bowie to get somebody, Lionel Lafavre, to get on the horse. I was allowed to do things my own way. Mrs. duPont was very hands off. . . no pressure.”

As William H.P. Robertson noted in his definitive work, The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America, “There was little about Kelso’s appearance as a young horse to suggest his eventual status as a king of the turf. As a three-year-old, he was rather a plain-looking dark bay or brown. . . with a thin neck sticking out of a none-too-copious torso. He continued to grow and develop, however, until as a five-year-old he stood a shade over 16 hands and girthed 73 inches. Exceptionally wide across the hips, up front he had long, smooth muscles of a stayer, and, all in all, a hard, deer-like aspect.”

Kelso was a son of the “Old Sidewinder”—Your Host. Known for his unusual appearance, Your Host had a crooked neck—supposedly the result of an injury when he was a weanling—and ran with his head tilted. He also was known as the “magnificent cripple” after overcoming numerous life-threatening conditions, and became a terror at middle distances, possessing immense strength and heart. These were assets that allowed him to survive a horrifying spill in the San Pasqual Handicap, one that left him with four broken bones in his right foreleg and a fractured shoulder. His recovery was a remarkable story, as the insurer Lloyds of London took control of his care and made every effort to save him. He entered stud in California and eventually moved to Meadowview Farms in New Jersey, where Kelso was conceived. Kelso’s dam, Maid of Flight, was a daughter of 1943 Triple Crown winner Count Fleet.

Kelso, by most accounts, was an intense and intelligent race horse. In addition to being a tough horse to train, he was an inveterate cribber, which, in part, explained the lack of flesh he held, especially early in his career. The horse’s personality was in direct contrast with that of his low-key, perceptive trainer.

“He was very determined, very smart,” Hanford said. “You had to watch him. He was always sending signals. I had to change his training routine frequently to keep him interested, on-guard. If he got bored, he’d drop a rider and run off. After time, I learned never to work him with other horses. He would just run them into the ground. He also had unbelievable stamina.

“Some of it wasn’t hard to figure out. When I had a problem, I made decisions with my gut.”

Kelso began his career for Hanford by winning a race at Monmouth and another at Aqueduct, each by double-digit lengths. At Aqueduct, he ran the fastest mile ever (1:34) by a 3-year-old in New York.
By year’s end, Kelso had taken the first of his five Jockey Club Gold Cups. It was a race in which he also broke the American record for the two-mile distance. In 1960, the duPont runner won eight of nine races.

Hanford has frequently cited the following year’s Metropolitan Mile as Kelso’s single greatest race.

Carrying 130 pounds, Kelso seemed hopelessly beaten, with just two horses behind him, at the head of the stretch. Under a zigzagging, brilliantly brave ride by Eddie Arcaro, he got up to win by a neck over All Hands, in receipt of 13 pounds. Kelso would lose only twice that year from nine starts; one of those losses was a second-place finish in the Washington, D.C., International, his first start on the turf and a race he would set a course record in three years later.

During his reign as king of the American turf, Kelso won 31 stakes races, at least three a year for six years straight, and in 63 starts carried a burden of 130 pounds or more 24 times. His last major win came in the Whitney Stakes of 1965. When a fractured sesamoid ended Kelso’s racing career the following winter, he retired as racing’s all-time leading money earner; his $1,977,896 would remain a record until topped by Affirmed in 1979. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1967 and lived out his life at Woodstock Farm, enjoying a second career as a hunter and show jumper. He died on October 16, 1983.

After deftly managing the career of an equine immortal, Carl Hanford quietly moved along to the next phase of his own life. He left duPont’s employ in 1967, his career with her also having coincided with that of duPont’s superb race mare Politely, who earned honors as Maryland-bred horse of the year in 1967 and 1968. Hanford developed Politely as a 2-year-old, and she went on to become a star for trainer George Baker, twice establishing herself as the runner-up for the Eclipse Award as the nation’s champion handicap mare (won by Straight Deal in 1967 and Gamely in 1968). “She was a large filly, and we didn’t rush her,” said Hanford.

In the late 1960s, Hanford started a public stable with his brother Ira (who a few years earlier had trained the fine runner Creme dela Creme). But in 1969 he moved on to work in the racing office at the newly opened Liberty Bell Park, a Pennsylvania race track that had been launched in part due to the efforts of his old friend, Art Rooney.

It was a different sort of life, but one that allowed him to spend more time with his wife and their daughter, Gail.Millie Hanford, always a keen racing fan and her husband’s chief cheerleader, launched a career of her own in about 1980 at Delaware Park, where for a quarter-century she greeted horsemen at the paddock gate. The Hanfords met when he was riding races at Havre de Grace and were married for 48 years before her death in June 2005.

Hanford worked as a steward at numerous tracks, including Atlantic City, Garden State, Keystone (now Philadelphia Park), Shenandoah Downs and his home track, Delaware Park, before he retired in 1988. That was when Gail took up training horses. Since then he has been a fixture at his daughter’s barn at Delaware Park.

“Just watching,” he said. “I don’t tell anyone what to do.”
Gail Hanford was part of the entourage that made it to Saratoga for her father’s Hall of Fame induction. Ira Hanford, living in Ocala, Fla., was unable to attend. “He wanted to,” Carl noted. “The doctor said he shouldn’t.

“I guess we have lived a long time. . . my oldest brother, who died a few years ago, lived to be 97. No, there’s no secret to it. We just wake up and go where we’re supposed to go, I guess.”