Doug Arthur: Master of his Trade

Doug Arthur had a gift. Maybe more than one.

Based at the edge of tobacco country near Norwich, Ont., Arthur would look at a yearling and spot potential that others might not, using intuition and knowledge, and then go into the sales ring, fully prepared. And it worked for him, in spades.

Once he got his young prospects home, he had another forte, honed  through years of hard grift. He could develop these youngsters into racehorses that others coveted. He had tools and smarts that others missed. He only had a quarter crack on a horse once in his life and that was because it shopped in with one. So apt was he that Tom Crouch of Kentuckiana Farms sent all of his own broodmares to Arthur’s Oxford Meadows Farm. Arthur raised the foals and sold some good ones in Kentucky. To top that, Crouch had a notation on the sales page that yearlings he offered up were raised by Oxford Meadows, a powerful endorsement of Arthur. And a sound enticement for a buyer.

Over the years, people would pay big money for a colt developed by Arthur. Over and over again, he made this work, too. His motto was always to sell.

It wasn’t so easy for him to sell Cam Fella, however. Cam Fella was the most classic example of the Arthur craft. The star of stars. The impossible dream. The buried treasure that he unburied.

And for all of this, Arthur will be inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in Mississauga, Aug. 12.

“I’ve always had great respect for Doug”, said Doug McIntosh, trainer of Hambletonian winner Yankee Paco. “What a great honour for him. He’s not out there to get recognition any more. He’s a man in the shadows.”

Arthur was forced to wrap up his business during the early 2000s because of heart arythmia. It took him four years to unbuckle what he had spent years building. It was an operation where nothing was too good for the horses: a 38-stall training barn, and nine miles of white oak fencing. Some called it a bit of Kentucky in Ontario. He had many employees under his wing. Afterwards, he just wanted to sleep for six months, he said.

“He’s developed so many great horses,” McIntosh said. “He ran such an unbelievably great operation. Everything was first class. He was very fussy. He developed many horses, not just Cam Fella.”

One of Arthur’s first memories was standing at the front of a wagon being pulled by a team of white horses. What scene could be more idyllic? He was standing beside his grandfather, James Arthur,  who had been guiding the horses through sheaves of grain picked up by men with forks. They piled them on the wagon.

At one point, his grandfather handed him the reins  “making me think I was in control,” Arthur said. “Back then kids just did everything. You’d ride on the fender of a tractor.”

He was probably four years old.

Little did Arthur’s grandfather know that he was introducing the small boy to his life’s profession.

They key to Arthur’s future was his uncle, Ed Arthur, who always had horses in his life. When he was a kid, Ed would rescue horses from the glue factory, taking six or eight of them at a time. He’d get them back home to the farm by riding one and tying together the manes and tails of the others that followed.

Ed would rehabilitate them. There was a big market for horses in western Canada. He sold them there.

The family drove teams of horses to road construction sites, using the horses to do the work.

By the time Ed was 14, he owned two trucks. The little business continued for years. Arthur’s father, Harold, drove the second truck when he was 12. They would load gravel by hand with shovels onto these trucks.

In the south of Ontario, south of Norwich, industry had cleared out all the pine trees for export to England to build ships. But they were left with a wasteland of “blow sand,” Some entrepreneurs from the Carolinas figured the land would be perfect to grow tobacco.

Ed did all the trucking for them. And when Arthur was a kid, Ed owned three tobacco farms, using an old business formula where tenant growers would get 60 per cent of the proceeds and the owner would get 40. He would bring in people from the Carolinas to be tenants. Ed would travel to the Carolinas at a time when there were no throughways to do business with people that became an important part of the local scene.

Meanwhile young Arthur was drafted to work the tobacco fields with heavy horses. His first job was to work between the rows of tobacco. A neighbour who was also his father’s first cousin wanted to know if they could have Arthur for work. His job was to get there at dawn, grab the horses out of the field, harness them up and have them ready to go. And then work with them all day between the rows.

“That was a good experience” Arthur said.

One day, a neighbour a mile down the road told Arthur to take two horses over to another farm. So Arthur rode a grey one, and led a bay.

As he was leaving, they told him: “Now, don’t run them.”

“They knew exactly that I was going to run them,” Arthur said. “I would just tell them that they got away on me.”

But when he was on the shoulder of the road, he “had them in motion pretty good.”

Arthur hung around another farm owned by neighbours, who were hobby farmers, with some tobacco, a couple of heavy horses and a couple of riding horses for the kids.

One time, Arthur was riding one of the heavy horses toward the barn and he couldn’t stop him.

The horse was almost as tall as the door, so as the horse bolted into the barn, Arthur was splattered against the wall above the door.

“They get wound up,” he explained.

Years later, he could safely say that heavy horses were not nearly as intelligent as standardbreds. Arthur would go to the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. He thought they were marvelous. But he would always ask folks with the drafts how badly they got hurt working with them. There were stories galore about people with heavy horses getting hurt. Bones were broken.

In a more quiet moment in 1943, Ed was one of a group of locals sitting around a pot-bellied stove in the Home Hardware store in Otterville, Ont., trading tales, as small-town folk do.

At this bucolic setting, one small event changed the course of Arthur history. A man walked  in , complaining about a standardbred mare he owned that had just foaled and she wouldn’t let him in the stall.

He said: “Ed, you trade horses. How be you take this mare and foal off my hands?”

Replied Ed: “What would I ever do with a racehorse?”

Eventually, Ed said he would give the man $300 for the pair.

The man replied: “I’ll take two.”  Later reports noted that Arthur paid $150 for the pair.

Obviously he badly wanted to shed the troublesome twosome.

Ed’s house in Otterville had lots behind that backed up to the next street. That gave him about three or four acres of land, and garages came with accommodations for horses. He had three or four stalls in a garage, and that is where the foal was raised.

Ed got advice from people and learned what was involved and what to do. He ended up racing this foal himself. Her name was Dillon Flicka. She was by Dillon Mc, who stood at stud in Norwich, Ont., the pride of owner Dr. William Norman Meldrum. Dr. Meldrum eventually made his way into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. So did Dillon Mc, who won the Canadian Pacing Derby in 1939. (Doug Arthur is now the third entity from the town to be inducted into the Hall. With the population of Norwich being 12,320, that’s one Hall of Famer for every 4,000 people.)

Dr. Meldrum took time out from his medical practice to train and drive his string. Dillon Mc dominated Canadian free for alls from 1937 to 1939 and set tracks records at Ontario tracks, some of which stood for more than 20 years. In 1940, Dillon Mc won eight consecutive races, and remained undefeated in  24 heats. In 1947, the racetrack and stables in Norwich were officially named Dillon Park at a time when harness racing prowess seemed to be centred in the town.

Dillon Flicka was well meant. Eventually, she paced the fastest mile in Ontario on a half-mile track (2:06 ½) in the 1940s. She raced in the 1949 Canadian Pacing Derby in New Hamburg, Ont.

Racing until she was 10 years old, she became the highest money-winning mare to come out of Canada. She made $33,000 for Ed and wife Anne.

When Dillon Flicka retired from racing, Ed kept her at Castleton Farm in Kentucky. She produced a foal every year. Ed would drive down and pick up the foal and bring it back. Her first foal was an invitation pacer throughout his life. She produced other fillies and another colt that was just as good as the invitational pacer. Ed sold him to interests in Montreal for $50,000. That initial investment was starting to look pretty sound.

Ed had many facets. When Arthur was a kid, he remembers his uncle as superintendent of the Sunday School, but in the spring, he would disappear from that role, and appear again in the fall, when the most important part of the racing season was over.

While he was taking a break from the Bible, Ed would take a string of string of horses and a big house trailer as he and his wife would head to various tracks in the United States to race. Buffalo Raceway and Batavia Downs became home bases to them, but he also spent one year at Vernon, one year at Saratoga.

Once in a while, after Sunday School, Arthur would visit Ed’s stables. At the time, Ed had started to train at the fairgrounds in Norwich, but then built a racetrack at one of his tobacco farms. He had accommodation for horses there.

To Arthur, seeing the horses and getting close to them was “really mesmerizing.” But Arthur remained in the shadows. While his older brother was shown everything. Arthur didn’t get a lot of attention on these tours.

When Arthur was in high school, some of his good friends were a set of triplets, Tom, Don and John  Strachan, the first triplets to survive at Hamilton Hospital. Their father taught math at the high school and their mother had been a school teacher, too. They grew up in Norwich, and the town sort of adopted them.

They were smitten by harness racing. They lived only a block away from Dr. Meldrum’s property in the town. And they were always hanging around the barn. Dr. Meldrum’s daughter managed the stud career of Dillon Mc, and she employed an older gentleman to help. But one day, he decided to retire.

What to do?

The retiree suggested the Strachan boys, who were always around anyway. So they got the job of looking after Dillon Mc and the mares coming and going in the spring.

Their infectious love of horse racing – pouring over the Harness Horse magazine at every chance  – pushed Arthur along. “They knew far more about it than I ever did,” Arthur said. He gives them credit for “taking the fear away of getting into the business.”

They had been to Lexington and had been to the grave of Dillon Flicka, buried at Castleton. “They were a big influence on me,” Arthur said.

Education was in the cards for Arthur, who graduated with an associate degree in agriculture from the Ontario College of Agriculture in Guelph, Ont. When he started, it was a college. When he finished, it was a university.

Companies were staging interviews for prospective employees at the university, but none of this appealed to Arthur. There was one other option that he preferred.  “I got my nerve up and went and talked with my uncle, Ed,” he said.

“Ah, it’s the easiest thing in the world!” Ed told him, about getting in the standardbred business.

Ed took him on. Arthur said he didn’t know anything about horses when he joined his uncle, but the business would give him an opportunity to be his own boss.

Arthur once said that his uncle was an influence on him, but “what he taught me was more a philosophy of life. That was, to work hard, and  things don’t come easy. He was a good man to work for. He taught me how to work,” he said.

As soon as school was out, Arthur landed at Ed’s place. The very last day of school, they were loading horses on a truck headed for Buffalo Raceway. Arthur jumped on this load, along with a bedroll in the back.

On the way, at about 10 a.m., the driver had to stop and take some papers into Fort Erie. Arthur got out with him. He wandered into a building and looked in at a restaurant, packed with people, playing cards. Racetrack fans? The overflow of racetrack folk?

“I’m thinking, what the hell am I getting myself into?” Arthur recalled.

But the scene at Buffalo Raceway was nothing like that. “There was a lot of work to be done and no time to be playing cards in the morning” Arthur said.

After Buffalo, Ed switched gears and moved to Greenwood Raceway. He had no troubles getting stalls. He owned stocks in the Ontario Jockey Club, and besides, he was very well liked by all.

Ed had no patience for those who were not dedicated. As a boss, he was strict.

“It was a great example to me,” Arthur said. “It was a good operation to get involved with because people weren’t just in charge of three horses.. Everybody worked together and you got the work done. “

By the end, Arthur was the second trainer for the stable.

The second year, he got his driver’s license, by the end of 1966.

Arthur had to find sponsors to stand for him while getting the driver’s license. He didn’t have a problem finding good ones. “There were so many admirable horsemen there at that time,” he said. “Guys that worked hard and were very  good at what they did.. A lot of them shod their own horses [including Uncle Ed],  Doc Findley, Percy Robillard, a long list of them. I had picked out guys that I really admired.”

He found about eight of them willing to vouch for him: also including  Bill Herbert, Harold McKinley, Jimmy Holmes.

Meanwhile, Ed had always sported green colours, so proud of his Irish roots, But then, he was also particularly fond of trainer-driver Del Miller and adopted his brown and gold colours. Miller who was training for the owner of the Reynolds Tobacco company, said his colours were copied from the package of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Arthur followed suit.

That being settled, Ed and wife Anne had him in for lunch one Sunday at the house trailer in Buffalo. Ed had just received a communication from Castleton, that showed a picture of a foal, from a daughter of Dillon Flicka. All Arthur saw was a little snapshot of the foal and something made him  think: “Would I ever like to own him!.” In his mind, Arthur believed he had already taken possession of the newborn foal when he saw the photo,

This little love affair lasted for years. A wayward boy, the colt didn’t always return the sentiment.

Arthur does not know when Ed went to pick up the foal, but by the time he saw him, nobody could get near him. He would wheel around, show his backside and kick.

The foal had a name: Right Dillon.

One evening at feeding time, in a broodmare barn, an old bank barn, while Ed was busy trimming a mare’s feet in the shed room. Arthur went into the stall of one of Ed’s top horses, Ensign Dillon’s to change his water. But the horse was worked up with the mare being right in front of his door. Arthur grabbed him by the halter to push his head aside.

But the horse wheeled sideways and grabbed Arthur’s left hand. He had to jerk it out of his mouth.

“Ed was upset with the horse,” Arthur said. “When you get hurt, usually you’ve made a mistake.”

The incident had broken Arthur’s thumb and he had to wear a cast for some time. That stopped him from training horses.

“I was put in this barn to do the work in there while other things were going on,” Arthur said. “I had time to fool around with this colt that nobody could get close to.”

It took a while, just to get him to face Arthur instead of showing  him his unforgiving nether end.

“Eventually, I got a hold of his halter. he would just wheel around that stall as fast as he could go and I was trying to hold on,” Arthur said.

Finally, the colt would actually let Arthur rub his head. “I became pretty fond of that foal,” Arthur said. “I could actually lead him out to be turned out and bring him back in.”

At the time, Right Dillon was a yearling, but Arthur suggested to Ed that they break him now, rather than in the fall when he was bigger. Ed agreed.

“We worked together and did that, and got him hooked to a cart,” Arthur said. ”I don’t think we ever really drove him much, but at least he knew what the cart was.”

Ed turned the colt out on a farm near Toronto for the summer so that he could be outside. They learned that the farm owner had a boar pig with tusks that had never been removed. Right Dillon started a fight with the pig and didn’t win. He got a big slash in his stomach. Fortunately, it did not open up the stomach, or it could have been serious.

The gash was sewn up and Ed took him back to the farm.

That fall, Ed left Arthur at Mohawk with four or five horses that he wanted to race. Usually he quit racing for the winter, and would start again in the spring.

A month later, Arthur finally got back to the farm. “Of course, I was anxious to see this colt,” Arthur said. “He was out in the paddock.”

So he got a lead shank and brought him in. As Arthur was putting him into a stall, Ed said: “I can’t believe my eyes. Nobody has been able to get close to that horse.

“You’re a real horseman!”

Ed had always said, if you can catch him, you can have him. He told Arthur he would sign the cot’s papers over to him.

Right Dillon was his. It was an emotional moment for Arthur. Still is, when he thinks about it, all these years later.

However, it was only the start of some tough battles in coming years. Right Dillon did not want to race. A stint at Greenwood was really tough. Right Dillon hated to have anything touch his back or his rump. “You didn’t hit him with a whip there at all, or he would just plant his feet, probably,” Arthur said.

Arthur busily worked to train Right Dillon down to get him so that he could race him – with Ed grumbling that he was taking far too long with the colt – and they took a training spin at Garden City Raceway one day.

Arthur blames what happened on himself. “I probably wasn’t paying enough attention and he kicked.”

The colt got his leg over one line.

Arthur had only one line left to control him and Right Dillon was bolting. They approached a fence, but at the fence, Arthur was thrown off, and Right Dillon became a loose horse. “You just don’t want that to happen,” he said.

Right Dillon banged his way back to the barn, made a mess of the neighbour’s trunks with a busted jog cart in tow. He was like the Tazmanian devil run amok.

“Ed was pretty mad.” Arthur said. “I didn’t want to blame the horse. I was kind of blaming myself..”

“That’s it,” Ed said.  “I’m training him from now on.”

That hit hard. At this point, Arthur began to think of going back to university and studying microbiology, a new field that fascinated him. But he didn’t.

The next day, off Ed went with the colt. When he came back in, he declared: “l’ll  never drive this horse again. We’re going to get him castrated in the morning.”

Arthur had always resisted this measure for Right Dillon. So the next morning, he had a talk with his uncle. “We can always castrate the horse later,” Arthur said. “He’s almost ready to race. Let me see if I can get him started.”

Arthur did get him racing, and he earned about $7,000 for him that fall.

But the wonky adventures weren’t over.  As much as Arthur loved Right Dillon, Right Dillon charged on, oblivious.

One night, when they were going to the starting gate, Right Dillon kicked and his hock caught Arthur’s shin bone. Arthur always hooked the race bike close to this colt so that if he tried to kick, the leg would be behind the equipment. But it worked against him this time.

The pain was so intense, Arthur thought he would faint. But he was able to stay together and left with the horse. “I parked him the whole bloody mile, just mad as could be at him,” Arthur said.

He won the race.

Right Dillon never was an invitation-level horse, but just a rung beneath it.

Arthur raced him until he was seven, but he was not making money in races available to him. So Arthur  put him in a claimer, thinking nobody in his right mind would claim him. But Ross Curran did.

Curran was known as Cowboy Curran, with a reputation that he could handle anything. Claiming was his game.

It didn’t take Curran long to castrate Right Dillon – as an older horse. “Lot of good it did him,” Arthur said. He couldn’t race him.

Giving up, Curran put him in a sale in Philadelphia. Arthur went down and bought him for $3,500 and got him back.

However, Right Dillon just wasn’t the same horse any more. “His spirit was gone,” Arthur said.  “If I had a farm at that time, he would have lived on it, but I had no place for him.”

He sold him to a guy from Windsor.

“At various times, you can’t do the right thing for a horse because of economics,” Arthur said. “You’ve got to make the tough decision.”

Ensign Dillon was a star in uncle Ed’s stable and the first foal of Dillon Flicka, born in 1954.  He was a challenge, too. He raced until he was 10 years old. As a 10-year-old he had the first stall in the shedrow at Buffalo Raceway. Spectators would come up and exclaim: “Oh THIS is Ensign Dillon!”

Meanwhile he’d be at the back of the stall with his head down. ”As soon as they got to the door, he’d wheel around on his back legs and come at them with mouth wide open,” Arthur said. “Every time they harnessed him up and went to do the cinch, you had to step aside because he always kicked sideways. Just routine. Just his nature. If you didn’t move, you’d get kicked.”

Arthur took over looking after Ensign Dillon and took him to the paddock. He enjoyed it and this would be the scene: while leading him in, the horse would be on his hind feet, just roaring at the other horses. Get him in his stall  and he’d kick the wall sideways, at the other horses.

“If you pulled him out to go [in a race] , his ears would just go flat against his neck and he’d charge at those horses in front,” Arthur said. “They always said that was the Billy Direct in him. I guess Billy Direct was a real handful.”

Ensign Dillon’s stall had hardwood planks all around and at kick level, they were all dented by his hooves.

There are also a couple of footprints from a time that he kicked the wall when he was a weanling.

“I guess he was a bit of a challenge, but boy, I sure enjoyed it,” Arthur said.

Meanwhile Arthur had been fashioning a good career with his uncle. This nirvana had been going on for four years.  “I had never expected to leave my uncle Ed’s side,” he said. “I really liked him.”

But one year, a couple of guys that had gone to school with Arthur’s older brother wanted to buy a horse. During late summer that year, Ed and Arthur were cooling out horses, going around and around.

He told Ed of this new ownership interest, wondering how they were going to accommodate them.

Said Ed: “Well, there’s nothing like being independent and on your own.”

Ouch.

“That really floored me,” Arthur said. “I know he was getting flak from owners: Why don’t you let Doug drive? If he had a failing, he did things himself he should have had me doing more.”

Years later, another shock. Uncle Ed died after finishing third in a race at Garden City Raceway at age 67. Arthur had been racing there, too.

Ed had been stabled at the opposite corner of the same barn, but Arthur wouldn’t have know anything going on in his stable.

“I heard that he had told people that I had a better stable than him,” Arthur said. .Arthur had three horses in to race that night and as he crossed the bridge from the barn to the racetrack over a road, he met his uncle on the bridge. He said hello to him. But afterwards, it stuck Arthur that Ed looked tired.

Arthur was back out on the track to warm up another hose and just started to turn onto the track and Ed’s race was finished. “And I see this guy fall off the back of his cart,” Arthur said.

“I get around to the top turn, warming up my horse and I realized it was my uncle.”

By the time Arthur got off the track, it was clear that Ed was dead. Arthur cancelled his drives, and he had to break the news to Ed’s wife, who lived for her husband. She died two years later.

The memory is still fresh. It’s never been easy.

But back in that early time when Ed sprung Arthur loose from his stable, when Ed went home to Norwich that year, Arthur stayed on with Right Dillon at Mohawk Raceway. . Things seemed to go from bad to worse. He went into Milton one night for Chinese food and got food poisoning from it. “I was as sick as a dog that morning,” he said,.

But along came smiley Jimmy Holmes to the rescue and said: “I’ve got these guys over in Batavia that have this colt they wanted me to train, and I thought, you should have that colt, so I recommended you to him.”

When Arthur picked the colt up, he didn’t look like much at all. His groom was Steve Condren. It was the first time Arthur met Steve Condren, later a Hall of Famer himself.

Arthur found stalls for new youngsters  at the fairgrounds in Tillsonburg. You could not keep yearlings at the racetrack, that wanted to stable only horses actually racing.

Dominion Bret was one of his new charges, but didn’t seem to be a world beater. “There was a bit of a ravine on the racetrack and there was many a day I just wanted to drive him over into that ravine,” Arthur said. He finally got him racing, and Garden City offered a little stakes series, in which you raced only 5/8ths of a mile. They started in front of the grandstand.

“This colt was really good at leaving, but he wasn’t strong enough to finish,” Arthur said. “But I put him in this thing and he cleaned up, winning them all.”

After he had made good money from that, Arthur had to wonder: “Where am I going to race him now?” He would end up in classes too difficult for him. His legs were bowlegged behind, and if Arthur had been in front with him in a race, drivers behind him would think the horse would fall down at any moment.

Arthur put him in a claimer. “When I put a horse in a claimer, I wanted him claimed,” Arthur said. “And I don’t know why people didn’t know that. But they always get claimed.”

Arthur said his first good horse was Broadway Painter, courtesy of an old friend, Danny Husted, who had a dealership on the main street of Tillsonburg. (The main street of the town was Broadway.)

 

Arthur was a 14-year-old kid, in town with the family on a Saturday night to buy things – and at the time parents let their kids run loose – and  he saw Husted standing in a doorway. Husted called him over.

“Danny liked to bullshit with the kids,” Arthur said. “It was his entertainment.”

“Who are you?” Husted asked Arthur.

Arthur told him. Husted got right into the heart of the matter: he asked him what was he going to do with his life?

“I’m going into the horse racing business,” Arthur said.  Arthur may not have ever voiced that intent before. “He more or less told me I was crazy,” Arthur said.

But Husted had been a real enthusiast for racing. The first year Arthur worked for his uncle, they had put together what they called a syndicate, with six owners on two horses. Arthur was allowed to have a share. So was Husted.

When Arthur went on his own, he got stalls at the Tillsonburg fairgrounds.

The second year Arthur was there, Husted had gone to a horse sale in Ohio and bought a yearling colt all on his own for $1,300. Husted was also instrumental in getting Arthur moved out of the barn he was in the previous year to a more private barn, with only him in there.

Husted stabled the colt at Tillsonburg, too and eventually “wanted to make sure I was on the job,” Arthur said. So he gave him Broadway Painter to train.

“Boy what a nice horse he was,” Arthur said. “He staked him at Saratoga, which got me to Saratoga the first time, ever. I always loved going back there.”

Broadway Painter became a pretty good conditioned horse that flirted with stakes races.

Then Husted got Arthur to buy Tarboro.  Arthur didn’t think he could buy this horse because he was by Tar Heel, the dominant sire at the time. A couple of guys in the background were to chip in on him. They would make sure Arthur’s share was covered.

So Arthur bought him for $15,000. Wrote the cheque. But he never did get any money from the other guys, and scraped to find that $5,000 somewhere.

Tarboro was a pretty good horse.  Whenever he ran up against the best colt at the time, champion and later Hall of Famer Armbro Nesbit, he couldn’t beat him and finished second to him a lot. After his 3-year-old season in the fall, Arthur sold him very well. “That was a good experience,” he said.

Looking for the next top horse, Arthur eyed Castleton, a farm he always liked. And he liked their sire, Good Time, a 1949 Horse of the Year in the United States, because of his connection to Right Dillon, who had been a son of Good Time’s son Right Time. (Castleton  had actually bred Dillon Flicka to Good Time one year for free, because they thought the foal would be a credit to the sire. But she didn’t get in foal.}

Next best thing would be to buy a son of Good Time.  His final crop was at the sales and there were two colts offered.

Arthur particularly liked one colt but thought it was out of his price range. A client, Dr. Dick Dolby of Tillsonburg, part of an ownership group, encouraged Arthur to buy him.

So he bought Candid Camera. With Arthur in the bike, Candid Camera won an elimination of the 1977 Confederation Cup at Flamboro Downs in a dead heat with River Captain. Then he came back in the final to finish a scant half-length behind  favourite Governor Skipper, the dominant pacer on the continent that year.

 

 

“He was a typical Good Time,” Arthur said of Candid Camera. “He was really good gaited.”

Arthur eventually developed a reputation for having an eye for a yearling that would turn into a high-class horse.

”Looking back on it, probably a lot of it was intuition,” he said., “You’ve really got to pay attention to intuitive things.

“There is a bigger force guiding you in a lot of cases, he said.

It’s an instantaneous look, rather than trying to inspect everything about them. Arthur had many other tools for selecting yearlings, too.

When he bought one of his first horses, he looked to Almahurst Farm which had a great reputation at the time. Probably at the same sale in which Dr. George Boyce had bought Super Wave, Arthur had a colt picked out called Larry Almahurst.  “I wasn’t sure of my credentials initially,” Arthur said. “So I had Dr. Boyce look at him and he thought it was a great choice.”

But after Arthur bought this colt, he felt a “terrible sinking feeling.” Turns out that horse was never sound. His knees bothered him and were suspect from the beginning. Arthur couldn’t get him to train fast enough to get anywhere close to racing.

Eventually, he thought he would just stick the horse’s head behind the starting gate. “And boy, when I did that, two or three times, working him that way, he was ready to race,” Arthur said. “He just caught fire behind the starting gate.”

Arthur qualified him, and put him in a claimer. And he was claimed.  Eventually the horse became claimer of the year in his jurisdiction.

The second or third year he was in the business, along came Gambit Almahurst. Bill Masterson, who knew Arthur’s brother in college, had horses with Arthur. At the Lexington sale, he spotted and liked this Almahurst filly. He called Masterson, who urged him to buy her. And Arthur won his first Grand Circuit race (the Countess Adios) with her at Greenwood, defeating highly regarded Armbro Penny.

This put Arthur up against Joe O’Brien, who was driving Armbro Penny. O’Brien had the nickname of Jigglin’ Joe, because of the way he used his hands and the lines. “We’re neck in neck in the stretch and I’m paying more attention to what Joe is doing with his lines,” Arthur said. “I beat him by a nose or a head. This was my introduction to Joe. I always spent time talking to him over the years. “

Arthur honed his eye by making sure that whenever  good horses came around Ontario during Grand Circuit week, he had a good look at them. Of all the champions he had seen, there were a pair of colts a year apart in age that were standouts: Jilly and Jekyll.

And Justin Passing was by the same sire: Bye and Large. Most of the Bye and Larges were huge, more of an Adios type, blocky, like a quarter horse. Jilly and Jekyll were tall, rangy horses and so was Justin Passing. The memory of those good colts pushed Arthur to buy Justin Passing for $24,000. He had a partner in the colt, Norm Brooks, a farmer from  Kerwood, Ont for whom he had trained a couple of homebreds.

But the day after the sale, Arthur had Justin Passing taken out of the stall at the Red Mile to give him some grass. A trainer’s nightmare: Brooks approached and said: “You know, I don’t think I’m going to be in. I’m going to look for a little better horse next year.”

Suddenly, Arthur had a financing problem. But some clients  took a third of Justin Passing and saved the day.

At the time, Arthur didn’t have much money to spend. He had just bought a farm near Norwich for $100,000 with plans to build a half -mile track and a new barn. The track would cost $125,000, and the barn $150,000.

Farms eat up a lot of money. Arthur needed good horses to pay for it. If there was one thing he learned from his uncle, it was that debt could spur you on.

“I’ve never been afraid to bite off as much as my creditors could lend me,” Arthur said once. “I remember my uncle telling me the key to success was to get into debt. You never know how hard you can work until you are in debt.”

Fortunately, Justin Passing was really talented. Arthur calls him “a perfect horse.”  He won the Confederation Cup at Flamboro Downs.

 

 

And later, Arthur wanted to show him off and put him in a time trail in Lexington. He stripped down any equipment that he wore. Justin Passing was going to do this time trial while pacing free-legged, with an open bridle. “I don’t even think I did the cinch up too tight,” Arthur said.

Time trials, now out of fashion, were a challenge: you had to have a clock in your head while doing it. If you pushed the horse too much early, “you pay for it pretty quick near the wire,” Arthur said.

Coming to the wire, Arthur thought he just didn’t have enough left, but he finished out the time trial with slick enough speed.  And Justin Passing had set a world record of 1:53.1 for a three-year-old free-legged pacer. It was something that made Arthur proud.

As a 2-year-old, Justin Passing had impressed Arthur in races towards the fall. Thinking about it later, he might have raced Justin Passing a little more, but he was following his uncle Ed’s schedule, where he quit with them in the fall and brought them back the next spring. In one of his last races at two, Arthur got him out three-wide and the colt just stormed home.  “He just showed me something,” Arthur said.

When Arthur brought him back in the spring, he cleaned up in a stakes series  at Mohawk Raceway.

So Arthur took him to a stakes race in Lexington. And sent a groom down with him.

“But I think [the groom] was probably bragging about him somewhat,” Arthur said. “I don’t know what happened. Somebody gave him something before the race. When I got him, he wasn’t himself. He got to the backstretch and he just folded up. I had to take him off the track.”

Arthur had a veterinarian, Dr. Steel – a U.S. veterinarian popular on the Grand Circuit – take a look at the colt. Justin Passing’s heart was racing. Said the vet: “I really can’t give him anything because I don’t know what he’s been given.”

When Arthur returned with the horse, he took him to Guelph and had him checked out. One vet told him he was 95 per cent certain that Justin Passing had been given a foreign substance. But now he was concerned. “What do I do now?” he thought. “Do I have to hire security?”

He changed grooms. “You are better off just keeping a low profile,” Arthur said. And he stopped feeding him peppermints.

Justin Passing could pace with the best, but Arthur is still surprised that he staked the colt to as many races as he did. Obviously, Justin Passing had to race against Niatross, the superhorse of the time. “He was going to take the bulk of the money.”

Arthur staked Justin Passing enough to keep him busy.

Still, he always thought that in certain race circumstances, Justin Passing had a chance of defeating Niatross.

“But all the races against him, I never got to draw inside of him.” Arthur said. “I always drew outside. That’s a no brainer. You couldn’t leave and beat him out of there. And if you did , maybe you’d be parked aways.

“But I always thought if I could just slip in behind him, and get out in the stretch, I’d have a chance. But it never happened.”

Stabled beside each other in the Syracuse paddock one time, Arthur overheard media interviewing Niatross’ trainer, Clint Galbraith. And they asked about the star’s  weight.

Justin Passing was somewhat small compared to Niatross. Galbraith said his horse weighed  1,200 pounds.

“And I’m thinking, I knew what Justin Passing weighed because I had him at Guelph and they weighed him and he weighed almost 1,200 pounds,” Arthur said. He believes Niatross weighed at least 1,500.

Arthur’s greatest pick of all was Cam Fella, a son of Most Happy Fella, who ended his career by winning 28 consecutive races, and setting an earnings record of $2,041,367 as he swept  Horse of the Year honours in 1982 and 1983 in Canada and the United States.

Cam Fella was in the wings while Arthur had been in Lexington for the Tattersalls yearling sale. At the time, you could go to inspect yearlings at horse farms in the area. He was at Walnut Hall Farm for coffee and sausage biscuits. And along came the yearlings for inspection. Out came Cam Fella.

“I really liked him when it was his turn,” Arthur said., “I noted that he was smaller than most colts, but I thought he had potential to grow.

“When looking at yearlings, you had to visualize what they might look like when they were fully grown.” Arthur said. Others might prefer a yearling that looked mature: they would cost more. Arthur picked his way through a yearling’s potential to grow.

This was September, which meant these yearlings were mostly a year and a half old.  Walnut Hall was selling him as an agent for a small breeder. And he didn’t have the advantage of being raised in Kentucky

Arthur thinks he may have had a second look at Cam Fella before the sale.

In his catalogue, Arthur made a note, valuing him at $50,000. That amount would have exceeded what he could pay. Arthur had to wait until the last day of the sale to bid on him, since Walnut Hall yearlings brought up the end.

Bidding happened in the evening after a card of racing through the afternoon. The colts and fillies that raced could add value to the yearlings selling at night.

Cam Fella was slated to sell as the first horse in Walnut Hall’s consignment, because he was selling as an agent for the breeder.

“Not an ideal place,” Arthur said.

Arthur had dinner with his wife Linda and a group from Tillsonburg, but all the time, he was keeping an eye on the clock. “I was not going to miss the first horse in the sale,” he said.

Before he had finished his dinner, Arthur left the table and bought Cam Fella for $19,000. He was pleasantly surprised at quietly being able to slip in and get this colt for a bargain price.

There were reasons for the price. It turns out that Cam Fella was a ridgling with only one testicle and his placement in the sale certainly affected his price – even though he was very well bred, with a pedigree that boasted sire Most Happy Fella out off a Bret Hanover mare.

Arthur had been in Lexington for two weeks at this point and as he was paying for Cam Fella – they were planning to drive home with the sale being over for Arthur – he bumped into Keith Waples, also settling up beside him.

“I said to him: ‘’I just bought a ridgling and I had never had one previously.”

Waples replied that his Albert Albert was a ridgling and “It didn’t bother him much.” Albert Albert was a very successful racehorse with a good career at stud.

Back at the farm, Cam Fella was part of his training process, along with other yearlings. Arthur had him checked to see if his one testicle was trapped in its canal, requiring surgery. But that was not the case. “I am aware that these yearlings are still growing and developing so we provide the best nutrition that we know of.”

In February, Arthur took a look in Cam Fella’s stall and said: “Are you ever going to grow?”

He was still on the small side. But he trained very well. “He had a flawless square gait.”

However, by mid-April, his positive attitude changed. He was a little reluctant to do his work.

And here is one spot where Arthur’s experience made all the difference. He turned Cam Fella out for  two weeks in April and another two in May to get him through a growth spurt. Since he had paddocks available on his farm, it was an easy decision to make.

“He had been growing later than other colts,” Arthur said. “And I probably gave him extra time between starts. Every two or three weeks was his schedule.” He brought Cam Fella along very slowly at two. Finally, he had grown into himself, was small no longer. He raced only 11 times, broke stride a few times, and then ended the season with a flourish while winning lln the Valedictory Pacing Series at Greenwood – against older horses.

Others noticed Cam Fella, even in the very early days. When racing one night, Bill Wellwood wanted to know if Arthur would sell Cam Fella. “I told him that he was a ridgling,” Arthur said. “I probably gave him a price he didn’t like.”

But Wellwood went to the judges, explaining that he should be listed as a ridgling on the program. This dashed Arthur’s hopes. He had been trying to come up with a son of Most Happy Fella that could replace him as a stud at Blue Chip Farms, since Most Happy Fella was aging. And the farm would be hungry for a replacement. “I never thought Cam Fella as a ridgling had a chance,” he said.

Nobody had known that Albert Albert was a ridgling, but now that was no longer the case with Cam Fella.

(Arthur also had a Most Happy Fella called Phi Slammer Jammer, that he thought would be a candidate for Blue Chip after he won in Lexington and became the fastest son of Most Happy Fella, taking a record of 1:55. Phi Slammer Jammer, named after an undefeated Texas basketball team, was at his best as a 3-year-old. But he really couldn’t defeat the best horses, so he never fulfilled that wish. Owned in part by Norm Brooks, Phi Slammer Jammer was a $100,000 purchase.)

Norm Clements kept bugging Arthur, wanting to buy Cam Fella. “I finally gave him a price that I thought would get rid of him,” Arthur said. $140,000.

But Clements agreed to pay it.

“And I was stuck,” Arthur said.

“I had tears in my eyes when I handed him over.”

Arthur had to sell. He told himself that maybe in time, he wouldn’t have to sell horses he didn’t want to, but he had mortgages to pay . Selling Cam Fella at two was “a pretty quick turnaround for a fair bit of money. “

“If I were a rich man, I would have kept him,” Arthur said once. “I never saw the bottom of this colt. He has a quick brush of speed but I never asked much of him.”

The sale made his bank manager “smile more than usual,” Arthur said.

It also helped Arthur, too. He sold Ivan Hanover early in the year to New York interests who had wanted a horse that could fit the invitationals at The Meadowlands.

Ivan Hanover had had a pretty good 2-year-old season. Arthur raced him in stakes and he sold him for more money than Cam Fella. Maybe $160,000 or so.

In all, Arthur is proud of the fact that he produced three horses that raced in Meadowlands invitationals.  Sameness was another.

And another: JC’s  Suprimo.

A man called Joseph Capouto asked Arthur to buy him a yearling that could race in the invitations at The Meadowlands. Funds were unlimited, but Arthur thought it still had to make good business sense. Arthur  went to the Lexington sale to find one, but horses were selling just a bit too well. The horses Arthur had picked out were going for too much money.

“It’s tough, paying a lot of money for a horse,” he said. “It puts him so far behind before you can make a profit. It puts a lot of pressure on them as well. A lot of them don’t survive it.”

So off Arthur went to Harrisburg, where he snapped up JCs Suprimo, a son of No Nukes,  for $65,000.

Arthur trained him down as a yearling to the point where he was almost racing, and then stopped. He told Capuoto that if he kept going with the horse, he’s going to hurt himself.” Arthur planned to turn him out until the next year. He maybe wasn’t mature enough to race at two, but he became a top aged  horse.

He could tell: “Their attitude changes a little,” Arthur said. “You keep going with them, you’re going to have a broken bone somewhere.”

Eventually, the next year, Arthur suggested he send the horse to Doug McIntosh, who was training in Florida, where the owner was. And he ended up racing in the invitational at The Meadowlands.

Meanwhile, Husted was still on the scene. He had spotted a dispersal ale and pressed Arthur to go to the sale, but he had a conflict and couldn’t go. Late in the day, Arthur got a call from him. Husted had bought a weanling colt. He wanted Arthur to meet a guy with a truck at a certain crossroads  and pick him up. So Arthur did.

“I get this colt and he looks like he hadn’t been fed in a while and he had a pot belly, so full of parasites and whatever,” Arthur said. He threw him in a paddock with a couple of colts he was raising at the farm, and worked to get him healthy. After about six weeks, Arthur looked at the colt in the paddock and called up Husted.

“You’ve got to give me a share of that horse,” he said.

The colt was Mystery Skipper, a son of Senor Skipper.

In early training days, he would put hopples on the youngsters and get them pacing. But with Mystery Skipper, it was a struggle. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with them,’ Arthur said. “But he could trot. Pretty good. So I quit fooling with him with the hopples and trained him on the trot.

“You can’t fight with horses if they don’t want something,” Arthur said.

The pace is the faster gait and more natural, said Arthur. If you breed a trotter to a pacer, you will get a pacer.

Eventually Arthur got Mystery Skipper going at a pretty good clip on the trot  – and he’d switch over to the pace. The solution? Arthur put great big long hopples on him. He could trot in them and eventually, he would start pacing. That got him used to the hopples. After that, Arthur would shorten them up a bit.

“He was always like that,” Arthur said. “He would go to the starting gate trotting. I always had to have long hopples on him to allow him to do that.”

Mystery Skipper didn’t start really early in the year, It was one of the first years of Ontario Sires Stakes if not the first. The final went for $105,000 and Mystery Skipper won it handily.

As a 3-year-old Mystery Skipper was unbeatable.

Although Mystery Skipper was an Ontario Sired Stake colt, Husted wanted to enter him in the Prix d’Ete in Montreal against Grand Circuit colts. Arthur wasn’t enthused.

So he raced him rather conservatively. “Anyway, I got interfered with in the stretch coming for home,” he said. “ Otherwise  I would have blown by them.”

He actually got shoved aside in the stretch and finished third.

“That was a pretty good awakening to me,” Arthur said. Mystery Skipper could match strides with the best.

At the time, they also had races that pitted top Quebec-sired colts against top Ontario-sired colts. Mystery Skipper won by eight lengths at Blue Bonnets. “If I had to do that over again, I probably would have eased him up,” Arthur aid. “I was just letting him do his thing, I guess.”

The contest was never held again after that.

But as a 4-year-old, Mystery Skipper had to go. Arthur didn’t keep older horses. He raced only 2 and 3-year-olds. He would have to be sold. The colt didn’t have a great start in the season. “I can’t account for that really,” Arthur said.  But before he went to post for a Graduate Pacing Series start, Arthur was offered a substantial amount of money for him. He agreed to sell. He won a Graduate race and the final.

But he had to race the colt. They weren’t going to buy him before he had. John Campbell drove him in the race and won. “It was tough to let go,” Arthur said. “But it was time.

“But boy, was he ever a special horse.”

As a 3-year-old, Mystery Skipper had set a Sires stake record of 1:55 3/5 at Kawartha Downs and he lowered the mark to 1:55 at another OSS in Windsor.

River Captain, who raced the same year as Justin Passing, came into Arthur’s life and along with him came an owner, Frank Nakagawa, who thoroughly amused Arthur.

Arthur had seen the slight Japanese man and his wife, Kimmie, (she always walked a few steps behind, following tradition) come to the shedrow at Greenwood. They had horses across the way with another trainer. Arthur saw them and could see they loved their horses. They would make a big deal over them. When they left, the stable folk would mock them, probably in a racist fashion. Arthur was aghast.

Some time after that, Arthur was at the Lexington sale and Mac Cuddy approached him with a conundrum, The Nakagawas had purchased River Captain for $50,000 but their trainer had told them he was lame and wasn’t any good. Several trainers told him he was a wobbler.

Cuddy realized that Arthur had liked River Captain, a Cuddy farm colt. But the Nakagawas wanted their money back., “Would you mind taking the horse and checking him out for me?” Cuddy asked him.

Arthur knew exactly what the problem was. “When that horse walks, he’s so long-bodied that he kind of looks a little awkward,” he said. When Arthur looked at him, he asked the handlers to step him up and run with him a bit.

“He just hit a smooth pace,” Arthur said.

Arthur was happy  to get the horse and he was also happy to get Frank Nakagawa.

Nakagawa owned Hooks restaurant in London, Ont, a very popular eatery. Horsemen gathered there. So did Cuddy.

When River Captain was a 3-year-old, Nakagawa came to Arthur and said: “Stanley Dancer wants my horse.”

Dancer trained for Cuddy. And he had a big splashy Grand Circuit reputation.

Nakagawa was thrilled that somebody like Stanley Dancer would want his horse. And what he could do with him if the colt was in his stable.

Arthur was annoyed. “If you’re taking him, take the other two as well,” he said. Nakagawa also had a really nice trotting filly that Arthur was training for him. “She was going to be really something,” he said.

As it turned out, Dancer turned River Captain over to another trainer who took his castoffs. And the trotting filly, with another trainer, broke a main bone in her back and was finished.

River Captain eventually got loose at a farm and ran into a manure spreader. He couldn’t race after that.

But in a cooler moment, Arthur thought Nakagawa really didn’t deserve this fate. So he went to see him at his restaurant and they patched things up. The next year, Arthur bought him Albavic Rainbow for a reasonable price at the Harrisburg sale. Arthur liked the yearlings that came from that Tanny Rainbow Farm and thought they had a really good operation. He also got Vestalba Rainbow from them.

Vestalba Rainbow was the same age as Justin Passing and raced with him. He did well, setting a track record at Ocean Downs in Maryland sires stake races.  He cleaned up in Maryland.

Arthur travelled with Nakagawa, feeling responsible for him and the horse. At one point, travelling to Newark , N.J. to a race, they were about to board the plane together when Arthur suddenly thought of something to had to check with at the farm. Off he scuttled to a pay phone, and made his call, but when he returned, the plane door had closed. He couldn’t get onto the plane. Nakagawa was on the plane by himself.

Arthur found a flight to Kennedy Airport in New York and then hopped on a helicopter to Newark. When Nakagawa got off the plane, Arthur was waiting for him. “I don’t think he ever found out that I was never on the plane,,” Arthur said.

Nakagawa was always a source of entertainment. Arthur was fond of him.

Nakagawa had come from Japan as a teenager and graduated from a chef’s school in Chicago. He was hired on Canadian Pacific Railway going up and down the Vancouver coast. He was up in the arctic filming shots of Canada when World War II broke out – not something that would help his case – but he had connections with Premier Mitch Hepburn.

The government took everything Nakagawa had but because of his connection with Hepburn, he was sent to worked on his farm in St. Thomas, Ont., providing him free labour.

After the war, Nakagawa’s first job was to sell coal door to door in London. He opened a restaurant, and he was the only worker in the place. He was the waiter, the cook and running around like a one-armed …..” he told Arthur.

Once on a trip to the Arctic, flying with Frank Conachie, who had an important role in the founding of Wardair, their plane crashed.

“He said we were really in a bad way, but we were all right,” Arthur said. They pitched a tent, and when they got up in the morning, they saw a moose standing right in front of their door. They shot the moose, and Nakagawa, being a chef, knew how to prepare him for dinner.

“He could eat, goodness gracious,” Arthur said. A slight man, Nakagawa decided to honour a bet that he could eat a 30-pound ham. He did, a bit at a time.

And Nakagawa wasted little time when he ate. Once when Arthur went to dinner with Nakagawa, his client would be finished the meal and Arthur would only be three-quarters of the way though.

Once when they attended the Harrisburg sales, Nakagawa said they may as well go back to the hotel because there was nothing going on in the afternoon. Back at the hotel, Nakagawa said: “Let’s get something to eat.”

Nakagawa ordered cherry stone clams as an appetizer for them both. Instead of dessert, Nakagawa ordered more cheery stone clams.

And it was standard for Nakagawa to claim that it was his birthday, so that he would get a free birthday cake. Even when it wasn’t.

“It was always his birthday,” Arthur said.

Arthur really liked him and when Nakagawa fell ill, he felt he must visit him. When he stood at the door, Nakagawa’s wife Kimmie  went to see him, but returned, saying Nakagawa didn’t want to see Arthur. He didn’t want him to see him in the state he was in.

Bo Knows Jate was another Arthur star which raced in the early to mid 1990s, retiring in 1996. He piled up wins in many free for alls at Ontario tracks, and was named aged pacing horse of 1994. He retired with earnings of $921,603. He was a great colt from day one. Arthur said he was never in a race where he wasn’t a threat to win. He was always sound, never sick, except for one bout of colic.

 

Bo Knows Jate was from the first crop of Jate Lobell. Arthur was enthused about Jate Lobell’s first crop because of what he had cone on the track: winner of 30 of 40 starts, pacing in 1:51 2/5, third richest standardbred of all time, winner of the North America Cup and Confederation Cup. As a 2-yar-old, not only was he the champion of his age, but he was second in overall horse of the year balloting to Forrest Skipper.

Arthur had wanted to buy Jate Lobell when he came up for auction as a yearling. He had been a great looking yearling and sold reasonably. At the time, Arthur had an order to buy a trotter. “I should have just switched” he said.

Arthur looked at all of the Jate Lobell yearlings. He bought Kingsbridge (later winner of a Breeders’ Crown for Roger Mayotte) for $38,000. But Bo Know Jate was really the colt that he wanted. He had looked at him early. And then he told the farm workers to put him back in the stall as if he wasn’t interested, “In my mind, I had to protect what I was interested in to some degree,” he said.

When he came into the ring, Arthur thought he could buy him for $40,000. But the bidding didn’t stop at $40,000. An opposing bid was $47,000.  Arthur bid $50,000 to shut the other bidder down. It worked.

He had to reach to come up with that kind of money, but he had a partner in Gary Moggach that he knew would back him up. “But boy, if I had to bid again, I wouldn’t have been able to,” he said.

He felt euphoric after the hammer went down, and the colt was his. “I said to myself: “I just bought a $100,000 horse for half price.”

Arthur had been standing beside Bob Brady, the general manager of Kentuckiana and chatting with him  while the bidding was going on. When the sale slip came to Arthur, Brody said: “I didn’t know you were bidding on that horse.”

You could bid by blinking your eye with a spotter.

Auctions can be tricky,. One time at Harrisburg, Arthur was standing in a crowd, buying a horse, standing about six deep from the ring. Then he realized that a man right in front of him was bidding on the horse, too. Arthur always went to the spotter, to make sure it was his bid. The spotter would nod, because the other guy was bidding right along.

The horse was sold to Arthur. The man in front of him thought he had bought it. That situation actually saved Arthur some money. The underbidder was really surprised when the runners brought the slip for him to sign, but they brought it up to Arthur instead.

When Arthur got the colts home, he turned Bo Knows Jate and Kingsbridge out together in the same paddock. When he broke yearlings, that was part of the routine. Turn them out first, then work on them after they had burned off their extra energy. It helped settle them down for learning their lessons.

Bo knows Jate was mature for his age. “I always felt I could have raced him in March and it wouldn’t have hurt him,” Arthur said. “Everybody always thought he was a small horse.”

When they raced at Freehold in New Jersey, part of the pre-race routine was to weigh horses  and the weight showed on the program. Bo Knows Jate weighed almost 1,200 pounds. He was all muscle.

On the racetrack, Bo Knows Jate had a quirk. He was scared to death of hub rails. Arthur had him at a  stakes race in Montreal and coming off the top turn, Bo Know Jate went sideways off the hub rail and finished way out on the track. Arthur had to re-qualify him after that.

Also in a race in Kentucky, probably the Blue Grass, going up the backstretch, Bo Knows Jate was locked on one line to keep him half-way close to the rest of the field on the outside. “I thought he’s not going to have any energy in the stretch,” Arthur said. “He was just fighting me the whole way up the backstretch.”

The colt would settle on a turn and follow a horse well. And he was able to get around the turn in a normal fashion and set off for him. “He still had enough left to win the race,” Arthur said. “Which kind of surprised me at the time.

Fortunately at about that time, hub rails began to be phased out.

Bo Knows Jate really had early speed, but Arthur was afraid to go to the front with him because of the hub rail. “I thought he would just burn himself up  rather than to rate him on top,” Arthur  said. So he usually raced him from behind.

Arthur says he didn’t know how fast he could go, if he ever asked him that first eighth of a mile or quarter. “He was like a quarter horse for that distance,” he said. “I thought it was funny the way his legs don’t break off, the way he was covering ground and making speed.”

Arthur developed Diamond River which raced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was a trotter that could have made a top invitational trotter. He dominated at three. He raced the colt’s dam, and was proud to have foaled him, raised him, trained him and driven him.

Arthur had trained Diamond River down as a 2-year-old and had him at Mohawk to school him off the gate before qualifying. But Diamond River was hard to control in the paddock. “He was roaring and rearing up and so on, feeling his oats with all the other horses around. “

Arthur decided he was going to have to get him castrated, but feared that might delay his start at racing, although other trainers had been able to get horses back quickly. Because of all this, Diamond River got to the races later than the rest. At three, he came into his power.

Most memorable was his victory in the Canadian Breeders Championship. There was some concern because this was a series, with eliminations week by week, and Diamond River raced better with more time between races. But he had raced well in the first two eliminations with good trips. Unfortunately, he drew the rail in the final. “It’s hard to get away from the rail,” Arthur said.

So Diamond River got away in the middle of the pack. All of the rest of his opponents seem to have gotten away in the middle of the pack, too. “They were lined up on the outside of me and they stayed that way,” Arthur said. “I couldn’t get out all the way to the backstretch. I think thought I had a little opening coming into the stretch, but it closed up.”

He tried to slip up the inside, but that didn’t work. He had to back up and that took a lot of effort.

“It was a lot of work to get him across the back of the guy in front of me,” Arthur said., “His head was probably over his shoulders [of the driver ahead of him].”

He got a tiny little opening close to the finish but driver Tony Kerwood was sitting to his outside and “he was bound he was going to keep me in there.”

Arthur threaded a very slim needle with Diamond River. “I felt something on my wheel, but I got him clear and just the last few strides, he shot for home and won by a head.”

Kerwood made an objection, but the judges disallowed it. “I think one wheel went over the horse’s foot,“ Arthur said. But fortunately, Kerwood’s horse had not gone off stride. And perhaps the fact that Diamond River was a heavy favourite also played a role in his number staying up.

 

Diamond River raced in another stakes series for older horses that he won early the next year. Arthur was offered a lot of money for him and he was sold.

“If I had my way, I wanted to turn him out and bring him back,” Arthur said. “I thought he could have made an invitational trotter.”

About this time, Arthur tried something new with feed. He had become disappointed with the western oats he was getting, and started feeding his horses a bit of corn. That seemed to go well. Eventually he quite feeding oats altogether and fed corn instead. That made sense to him. Corn is full of carbohydrates for energy. The energy level wouldn’t be nearly so high in oats, which had a lot of fibre.

Afterwards Master Feeds came out with a high-energy feed that “as far as I was concerned was loaded with corn,” Arthur said. A Master Feeds employee who used to visit Arthur’s farm quite often had shown an interest in what Arthur was doing and encouraged him.

Arthur had a scale in his feed room. He fed Diamond River 30 pounds of corn in a day at one point. He was eating that much.

Shoeing was another skill that set Arthur apart from many. Uncle Ed has also shod his own horses in the early days. Arthur used to spend a lot of time in the blacksmith’s shop with his uncle. “I was the one that always took the horse to the blacksmith shop in the afternoon,” he said. “ I started paying attention to how he holds his tools and his profile, so when I had my own stable, I decided – and I didn’t have a blacksmith – to shoe my own horses. “

A  trainer next to him wanted him to shoe his horse, too. “Sure,” Arthur said. “I’ve experimented.”

So why not?

So many times Arthur has corrected a horse that showed nothing by paying attention to their shoeing. He once dealt with a friend’s horse that was afraid of the turns . Arthur got him so that he wasn’t interfering with himself. He got him racing. His neck was Rock the Clock. He raced enough that he was worth $30,000 to $40,000.

When he was young, he knew of a guy that shod horses out of his shop. Than man owned a gas station. Arthur would get him to make shoes for him. “I was in there one time and he was shoeing a heavy horse,” After said. “That was something to see.”

He also became aware of Jerry Bergeron, who shod horses at the fairgrounds in Norwich. Humble beginnings, but Bergeron was a master at shoeing. He was renowned as an expert with horse shoes and “he deserved it,” Arthur said.

“He was unbelievable,” Arthur said. “I learned a lot from him. I had trouble getting  my mind around some of his methods. One was a trotter that was interfering. I thought we’ve got to tip the foot outside and go wider.”

But no. Bergeron said you had to tip the foot the other way. “I couldn’t figure that out,” Arthur said.  “But he couldn’t be wrong.”

Eventually he figured out how it worked. When you tip the foot wide, the horse actually takes a longer stride. It would just exacerbate the problem. Tip them the other way and he takes a short stride and then there is room for the front foot to just clear the back foot.

“To be well balanced, they’ve got to be close,” Arthur said. “That was an important lesson to me.”

When The Meadowlands opened  in New Jersey in 1976, Arthur had horses there. And he tried to find a blacksmith. But the blacksmiths there “didn’t know the first thing about it,” Arthur said.

And they were charging twice what they did back home in Ontario. So Arthur shod his own horses while he was there. “I couldn’t see taking them to one of these guys,” he said. “Yet they were busy.”

Arthur escaped New Jersey after he heard stories about muggings and shooting and holdups on the radio. “I’m saying I’ve got to get out of here.”

He returned to Canada, minus the clients he had in New Jersey.

His daughters, Christine and Ellen, were very young while he was at The Meadowlands. Arthur also heard an interview of George Sholty, a  top reinsman and trainer in the United States, and  a Hall of Famer, who drove horses like Romeo Hanover, Sonsam, Gentle Stroke, Conifer and he trained Forida Pro and Ideal Society.  He retired with 2,934 wins.

Sholty had been receiving an induction award. But interviewers also asked his daughter what it was like to have a father that had accomplished so much.

She said: “Well, I never really knew my father.”

So Arthur said: “That’s not going to be me.” When his kids started arriving, Arthur stopped racing in the United States and concentrated on Ontario, so that he was home more, also for wife Linda.

What went with him, always, was the formula for foot oil from his uncle Ed. It was four different oils mixed together. “we’d paint their feet from top to bottom, sole and everything,” Arthur said. “Every time they set foot on the racetrack, and then [the foot] would be packed with blue clay.”

However, it was a bit of a challenge to find the ingredients.  One was crude oil. How to find crude oil? You could get linseed oil and pine tar. Arthur used to get a year’s supply of crude oil at an oil well just outside of Woodstock.

Finding the blue clay was another job. “A lot of the time when they were doing road construction and tearing the bank apart, there would be a bank of blue clay that they got into,” Arthur said. “And a couple of times, even on the 401, I’d stop with bags, and load them up. On the road to Sarnia, there was a great source along there.”

In time, he found out that there was a tile yard in Norwich where they were still making clay tile for draining. And in there, they had blue clay they sold to potters by the bag. “Boy was that a find,” he said.

So over the years, no quarter cracks in Arthur horses.  This method kept their feet sound and growing. This was important because they had to be shod every three weeks, and you had to have something to shave off for the shoe. Otherwise, pretty soon the foot wouldn’t hold a shoe.

Arthur also flirted with interval training, easier with thoroughbreds than standardbreds. So was a client Arthur loved: Joe Parisi. There were people starting to give seminars on interval training but Arthur was already doing a lot of it before they even mentioned it. Arthur began to speak about it at seminars. An advantage: “I was able to sort out yearlings that could race at two and ones that couldn’t by doing some of this stuff with them. “Arthur said. “The ones that couldn’t do it, they just aren’t going to go on and be racehorses. The other ones love it.”

Arthur had a history of sound decisions. At a U.S. sale, he was corralled by clients from New York, and they did have an influence on what horses were bought. “They had their eye on this trotting filly that was a full sister to this world champion and they wanted to buy her.”

Arthur wasn’t that impressed with her. But they bought her for $350,000.

Meanwhile, Arthur bought No. One Hanover, one that he liked for a lot less money: $40,000. She became a stakes winner.

Arthur trained the pricey filly in Florida, but she couldn’t get around the turns. She wasn’t able to do it because her conformation didn’t allow it.

“So they decided I was the problem and gave her to another trainer,” Arthur said. “Then eventually, next I heard, they had given her back to Hanover for a credit.”

Sameness was a blessing. Arthur owned him in partnership with Norm Brooks, In the fall of 1982, Arthur had purchased him for $27,000 at the Tattersalls sale. He was a son of Striking Image, a good sire but not in the high echelon.

The ultimate thing is to be able to sell a horse as a potential stud. “That’s where the money is,” Arthur said. “And so you had to have them good at the end of the year, rather than at the beginning.”

Arthur had that in mind with Sameness,  because his sire was getting long in the tooth at Castleton and the farm just might get interested in the son. Arthur had him staked in Lexington.

Arthur asked that Sameness be kept at Castleton Farm, instead of going into the racetrack. They had a paddock beside the office. One of his employees jogged him there every day. George Sholty was training for Castleton at the time. None of the folk around could help but notice this colt. He was a nice looking colt.

Sameness won the stakes over a horse that had been cleaning up and that had been the heavy favourite. “I won the race, and I beat him easy,” Arthur said. “Won by about five lengths.”

In the middle of the summer, Wellwood had come along again – apparently he considered it always a good idea to snag an Arthur trainee – and wanted to buy him.

Arthur told him: “You know, I think I could make $500,000 with this colt.”

Wellwood went away and told everybody who would listen: “[Arthur] has really lost it now.”

Buyers returned after this Lexington race and once again, Arthur said: “You know, I’ve been telling people all year that I think I can make $500,000 with this colt. “

So Castleton, who had originally sold Sameness to Arthur as a yearling, bought him back a year later as a 2-year-old for $500,000. At the time, it was the most cash money ever paid for a 2-year-old on record.

“That was my plan coming into fruition,” Arthur said.

And always, there was Danny Husted. One year he wanted to buy a good filly. He already had her picked out. An Abercrombie filly, Amber Cub.

Amber Cub trained down well and Arthur got her pretty well don to racing speeds, but she couldn’t finish. “She couldn’t breathe properly,” Arthur said. “We paid $35,000 for this filly and we were just starting to expect making money with her.”

But they realized she was not going to race. They had to make a broodmare of her, if they could. “That was a pretty big disappointment,” Arthur said.

But Amber Cub became a great broodmare. One hitch: she always got in foal late, a problem breeding a mare back. So you can miss a year.

They bred her to Bo Knows Jate eventually at a time when she was aging. In the middle of June, she foaled a colt.

“This foal, just arrived, laying out in the straw, I said to myself: ‘There is nothing wrong with a June foal if he’s looking like this.’”

The colt was later named The Mighty Po Po. He became a top Ontario Sires Stake colt and aged horse.

“He was a fast horse,” Arthur said, “I think he did take me to my fastest win time: 1:51 and a piece.”

He had such speed, Arthur could sit last with him, and in the stretch, zip by everybody. “And he’d still be gaining speed at the wire,” Arthur said. “Unbelievable. He was a thrill to drive.”

The Mighty Po Po came a final quarter one time in 25 1/5 at Woodbine to win one night

When Arthur sold the farm and had dispersed all of his broodmares, he couldn’t sell Amber Cub because she couldn’t breathe right. He kept her in a stall next to a big door, so she had lots of fresh air. She had a foal that year. She had foaled the year before.  Arthur tried to save money on vet fees by skipping the ultrasound (to see how close to ovulation they were ) but because she had June foals all the time, Arthur figures he could estimate pretty well on his own, just by counting the days.  She was to be sent to Mac Lilley’s farm to be bred to Bo Knows Jate.

Daughter Ellen was 17 at the time, so Arthur gave her the job of trucking this mare down to Dutton to be bred. She had to drive a three-quarter ton truck with a three-horse trailer behind it and gooseneck hitch.

“She was always pretty good for anything with tractors and I thought boy if she accomplished this, it would be good for her ego,” he said.

All day long he fretted and fretted. Finally Ellen drove in. Everything went well. The mare got in foal, a bonus.

His daughters all went through a period where they got up and fed the horses before school in the morning. Arthur told them: “I’m not going to get you up. You have to get yourself up.’ So it was a pretty good lesson.”

Skiing also proved to be a tie that binds. He took his family on Christmas break ski holidays. He had not grown up near a ski hill nor did he ski. But he had a friend in college that lived in Collingwood that got Arthur skiing one time. His sister lived in Ottawa and they would go to Camp Fortune in Quebec, – with Arthur in tow – and  Arthur got some of the bug that way, too. He really didn’t start skiing until he was in his twenties. Now he has skied from New Mexico to Jasper and most spots in between over the years. And he’s thankful he did it with his children and family.

Sking was on his mind one time at Pompano Park in Florida when Arthur had Phi Slammer Jammer in his first start back after a layoff. He had him sold after that race, since he was a 4-year-old and it was time to move on.

In the race, Arthur  had just rounded the last turn, and was easing his colt off the guy ahead of him to charge for home. He expected to win.

But the horse in front of Arthur suddenly fell, right in his path.

Arthur was able to somehow get his horse clear of the fallen horse, but up Arthur went into the air. He landed on his back on the track.

A second later, a horse landed right beside him. Whompf. So close to where he was laying, with his back to Arthur. The steel cart had been sliced off like a knife had done it, cutting the arch right off the shafts.

He had a ski trip arranged in Colorado with  friends afterwards. But as Arthur lay on his back, he  thought: “There goes my ski trip.” He emerged with a sprained knee.

“In another life, I always said I wanted to be a ski bum,” Arthur said.

In the life he did have, Arthur was a trainer with a capital T for as long as he could be. A master at his trade. So many of the notes he played were the high C. He belongs in the Hall of Fame, if anybody does: a Canadian who always found a way to bring out the best in animals that spoke to him through long lines.