Georganne Hale: cool woman in the hot seat at Maryland tracks
As director of racing at Laurel and Pimlico, Hale is credited with helping Maryland racing remain competitive in a harsh economic climate.

Story by Joe Clancy Jr.
Photographs by Jim McCue

The phone rang in trainer Katy Voss’s barn.
“ Hello!”
“ Hello, is Katy available?”
“ Who’s calling?”
“ The racing office.”
“ Oh, I’m sorry. She’s not here.”

In the 1980s, Georganne Hale was the italics, as an exercise rider and assistant trainer. Now she’s the plain type, as the director of racing at Maryland’s two major tracks, Pimlico and Laurel Park.

She laughs about her early days on the other side of racing, when she was a nemesis of Tommy Baker, then Maryland’s assistant racing secretary and the man charged with calling trainers and urging them to enter horses to fill races.

“ Mr. Baker used to call the barn and Katy would tell me to say she wasn’t there,” recalled Hale, who also worked at various times for Voss’s sister and fellow trainer Ann Merryman. “When I first started working in the office, Tommy told me, ‘I remember you. . .’ What else was I going to do? That’s what she told me to say. Now I can’t believe she made him wait like that.”

Hale knows the racing business inside out, because she has just about seen it all. Her father, Bobby Hale, trained race horses and later managed Jeanne Vance and Laddie Dance’s Tay­lor’s Purchase Farm, then a major commercial Thor­ough­bred nursery, where the Hales lived, in Sparks, Md. In high school, Georganne worked for acclaimed horsewoman Audrey Riker.

Only briefly did she have visions of pursuing another line of work—attending Harford Community College and Towson State University on the path to becoming a nurse.
“ What a joke that was,” she said. “I don’t know why I tried it. I was telling someone the other day, you should never choose a major when you come out of high school. Like you know what you want to do. Why at 17 I wanted to be a nurse I have no idea. I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.”
So she went back to horses.

Hale joined the staff at Hall of Fame trainer Mikey Smith­wick’s farm in Hydes, Md., a job that involved pretty much everything—riding, feeding, grooming, driving the van to far off places such as steeplechase meets in Tennessee. Jobs with Voss and Merryman followed, where Hale mainly rode and honed her telephone evasion tactics.

Like many in her position, she stared at an uncertain future.
“ I didn’t want to train—I had seen too many people work hard at it and not get anywhere,” she said. “Since I stopped the nursing, there was no career there. Everything I knew was about horses and I just saw too many people not making a living at it.”

In conversations with Voss, Hale hinted at the possibility of moving to the other side of the race track. Voss mentioned her to then racing secretary Larry Abbundi and Hale joined his staff in 1984 as assistant horse identifier—just the second woman on Abbundi’s staff. She moved on to placing judge, patrol judge, paddock judge, assistant racing secretary.

Hale held similar positions at Maryland’s last remaining half-mile track, Timonium, and after that track’s longtime racing secretary, E.T. McLean, retired from the post, he recommended Hale for Timonium’s brief summer meet in 1986.
Being a racing secretary didn’t always come naturally. “It was a big deal, but I had to work at it,” Hale said. “I used to be so nervous every year before Timonium. My stomach would be in knots. I had to write the book, had to get the horses. I wanted to do a good job, but it was a lot of stress. Not until a few years ago did I realize I didn’t need to be nervous.”

She still marvels at the opportunity McLean and Timonium general manager Max Mosner gave her.

“ They said, ‘Georganne can do it,’ even when I wasn’t sure,” she said. “It was an honor, fun, and I still enjoy it. I’m still there. I can’t very well leave now. They gave me my first start. I love Timonium.”

In 2000, when Baker retired, she was promoted to racing secretary at Pimlico and Laurel— and a year later she was given the added title of director of racing.
Hale is the first, and so far only, woman to serve as racing secretary at a major race track in North America. Her current job involves far more, as she’s the de facto contact person for horsemen, addressing concerns about anything and everything having to do with training and racing at the Maryland tracks.

“ I run at a lot of different tracks, and by far Maryland is the best place to run horses, and she’s a big part of that,” said trainer Dale Capuano. “The people you have to work with always do things the right way. She knows racing, knows the people, knows what she has. It makes for a pretty good combination to get the job done. She’s a good asset for Mary­land racing. No doubt about that.”

“ I don’t know how it is between racing offices and media relations offices at other tracks, but we talk a lot,” said Mike Gathagan, media relations director at Laurel and Pimlico since 2001. “She’s been a go-to person from day one—the best, the absolute best. She has a fascinating job trying to figure out all the horses that are here and what kinds of races fit them. I still wonder how they do it all, but when our handle is up and business is good it means the racing office has done its job.”
Former employer Merryman marvels at Hale’s work ethic and career progress.
“ She works harder, she’s smarter, and has more integrity and more loyalty and a better sense of humor than anyone you want to know,” said Merryman. “She’s always been like that. When she went to work in the secretary’s office it looked to me like she kept her race track hours.”

The compliments and glowing reputation come with caveats. Maryland racing, during Hale’s term, has weathered unprecedented competition from neighboring states as slot machines now fuel purses in Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

“ For what she has to work with, what she’s up against, she does a great job,” said Capuano. “It’s brutal. She’s realistic and works hard to find out what we need to do to make things better. There aren’t a lot of egos and that makes a big difference. We tend to agree on most things. If we had more money it would really be something.”

Hale knows that, but works to not let it rule her world. Her job depends on full fields, and she does all she can to ensure them. Big fields mean bigger handle and bigger handle means more revenue for the tracks.

Like any director of racing, Hale keeps tabs on her horse inventory, writes proactive conditions, monitors the statistics, watches the entries at out-of-town tracks and never stops trying to fill races. The racing department calls trainers—at home, in the barn, on vacation, in their cars, even on boats.

“ Yes, we’ve gotten people on boats; we find out where you’re on vacation, so don’t think you can hide from us,” she said. “Jocks’ agents are a big help in finding people. Sometimes, a horse is all you need and we’ll work to get a horse. We go one by one. I’ll have a race with only three entries and I’ll give it to someone and tell them to call, and they get the race up to seven or so.”

Racetrackers call it hustling. Racing departments hustle horses into races. Agents hustle mounts for jockeys. Trainers and horses get hustled.
“ Nobody gets mercy. I’ll call anyone—friends, anyone,” said Hale. “We are not prejudiced. I usually call the friends last because you don’t want to put too much pressure on them.”

One of Hale’s favorite hustles involved Merryman.
“ Ann’s horse had no shot, but we really needed her,” Hale said. “I told her ‘Come on, Ann. Maybe you can beat a horse and you’ll get a check.’ The horse had no shot, no shot— and she won, she galloped. See, it pays to help people. That actually happens quite a bit. My racing office has won quite a few races. Some trainers will come in and thank you afterward. The others just say they’re smart and they picked a good spot.”

Hale’s day typically starts at 6:30 or 7 in the morning and lasts until the races are filled—sometimes 12 hours later. In today’s climate, every horse is important. Much of the system is computerized—via The Jockey Club’s InCompass system in use at tracks throughout the country—so Hale’s job no longer involves big books of Daily Racing Form charts and winners’ books. Like racing secretaries of years past, Hale still needs the telephone and good sales skills.

“ You have to twist arms, a lot of twisting arms, a lot of saying ‘Look, you’re stabled here with me, for free. You’re not stabled at Charles Town,’ ” said Hale. “I don’t mind them going every now and then or if a race of mine doesn’t go, but if there’s a horse in the barn that’s been there for a year and hasn’t run in Maryland, why should I be giving him a stall?”

MJC keeps three stable areas open year-round, with 2,100 free stalls for trainers at Bowie, Laurel and Pimlico. A new turf course at Laurel and popular dirt tracks at Laurel and Pimlico keep trainers happy and horses racing in Maryland despite the purse disadvantage.

“ Everyone has bigger purses all around us, but we haven’t downgraded in quality of horses,” said Hale. “We’ve held our own, we’ve been right there. A lot of that is because the Maryland trainers are not just trainers. Maryland has the finest horsemen. They can go anywhere in the country and run a horse and win. My horsemen are the best horsemen around.”

Her horsemen.
“ Anything with the trainers, they’re my trainers or so people tell me,” said Hale of upper management’s opinion of the racing office/trainer relationship. “They’re not my people, they don’t work for me.”

Not by definition, anyway. Hale’s stewardship of the racing product goes beyond mere race-writing, stable-area management and so on. Personality matters, and Hale radiates personality. She talks (to pretty much anyone), listens (ditto), gets involved, cares. She’s just as likely to answer a question about stakes nominations as she is a need for toilet paper in the stable area bathrooms.

“ People come in and spill their guts to me; I don’t ask for it,” she said. “Maybe I should have been a psychiatrist, I don’t know. They come in, I say hello, and they sit and tell me their problems. I don’t want to hear about their problems—I just want to hear how many horses they have, how many stalls they have, what kind of horses they have. But that’s part of the job. Every day is different.”

Longtime friend and trainer Holly Robinson often asks Hale, “Well, whose life story did you hear today?” But just because Hale listens, she’s not a pushover. Trainers are warned to support her racing product if they plan on staying in her stalls. She checks the ship-in and ship-out lists kept by guards at the stable gates, and monitors the out-of-town starts by Maryland-based trainers.

In the end, the two-way street makes for the best racing product Maryland can produce.

“ I get along with people, that’s the main thing,” Hale said when asked why she’s good at her job. “I can sit and yell at somebody for running a horse out of town, go crazy on them, and the next day they come in and bring me lunch. I don’t keep grudges, so once it’s over it’s over. That’s it. Getting along with the trainers is the main thing.”

Now 49, Hale hardly looks past tomorrow’s condition book page, but sees her racing career continuing—maybe even advancing to steward, general manager, something with a little less chaos and a little more authority.

“ A couple of years ago, I tried to be a steward and everybody zapped me,” she said, feigning indignation. “The trainers all said, ‘You don’t want to do that, you’ll be too bored.’ My trainers said that—they didn’t want me to go up there [to the stewards’ stand]. They think I know too much and they’d have to break in a new director of racing if I moved up there.”

Regardless of where the career path meanders next, Hale won’t lose her energy for Maryland racing.

“ Racing is important here, the trainers are horse lovers, they’re connected through their families,” she said. “It’s important to life in Maryland.”

And she’s part of it—even if she can’t get you on the phone.