In American horse racing, the month of May is dominated by the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, the first two legs of the Triple Crown that are known as much for their party scenes as they are for their racing.
The city of San Francisco has a similar event every May, but instead of horses racing 1 ¼ or 1 3/16 miles it features people running and walking 12 kilometers from the skyscrapers near the bay, through the Hayes Valley neighborhood and up the notorious Hayes Street Hill, past the Panhandle and into Golden Gate Park, and ending along the Great Highway within view of the Pacific Ocean.
The Bay to Breakers, which was inaugurated in 1912 as the Cross City Race as a way to lift the city's spirits following the devastating 1906 earthquake, is a race that captures the spirit of San Francisco. Over the years the race has been won by elite runners from all over the world, but unlike races like the Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon that require qualifying times to enter and have an air of exclusivity, the Bay to Breakers is all about inclusivity.
Participants include first-time runners, walkers, parents jogging with their children, and smattering of nudists. Many wear costumes, giving the event a Halloween or Mardi Gras feel. One of the race's best traditions are the people who wear salmon costumes and travel "upstream" by running in the opposite direction.
In effect, the Bay to Breakers is a road race in the front, a costume parade in the middle, and a slowly moving street party in the rear. “It’s one-quarter Mardi Gras, one-quarter Boston Marathon, one quarter Pride and a little bit of Halloween thrown in there, too,” said Kyle Meyers, who owns Silverback, the events company that serves as a manager partner for the Bay to Breakers, when speaking to San Francisco-based public television and radio station KQED. The race and its zaniness are mentioned in a non-sequitur scene in the wonderfully awful film The Room, which is set in San Francisco.
A microcosm of the race is its unique centipede division, which has teams of 13 runners that are tied together by a bungee cord. Some of the centipede teams run at a sub-5:30/mile pace while others treat the event more like a costume competition.
A serious centipede (the LinkedIn team) approaches the finish of the 2010 Bay to Breakers. Photo by Flickr user smil23le. License.
And a not-so-serious centipede in the festival area of the 2023 edition.
But much of the race's reputation comes not from its registered runners and walkers but rather from those on the periphery who use the event as an excuse to party on a Sunday morning. DJs play music along the notorious Hayes Street Hill and bands can be found along the sidelines in the Panhandle and in Golden Gate Park. A lot of the less-serious participants quit at Hayes Street or along the Panhandle and locals join them on the sidewalk or even in the street to dance and drink and sometimes use psychoactive substances. This, understandably, has led to complaints from local residents about noise, vomit, and public urination and circa 2009 the city of San Francisco and race directors began to crackdown on some of the debauchery. These changes as well as the two-year COVID-19 hiatus has led to a decline in the party scene, which has been a relief to some and lamented by others. Still, even though the event has lost some of its craziness, it still stands out compared to other road races in the United States.
This group at the 2023 Bay to Breakers honored the internet-famous dancing pallbearers from Ghana. Photo by Flickr user Tom Hilton. License.
As a somewhat serious but ultimately unremarkable runner and a total square who lives on the other side of the country, it might seem foolish for somebody like me to participate in the Bay to Breakers. A runner with my talent giving an all-out effort in the Bay to Breakers is comparable to somebody going to the Kentucky Derby with a $20 gambling budget and a pledge to abstain from consuming alcohol. Sure, you can do it, but you won't win anything of consequence and you will miss out on the fun. And yet that's exactly what I did this year. But why?
Well, for one, it's sort of a family tradition. My maternal grandfather became interested in running during the running boom of the 1970s and in 1977 ran it with my mother. My mother ran solo the following year as a bandit (unregistered participant) before properly participating with her father and sister in 1987 when I was 22 months old.
When I was 12 years old (1997) I ran on my school’s track team and my mother recommended that we run the Bay to Breakers together. I must admit that as a sprinter who was growing up in a tame suburb that I found the 12-kilometer distance, nudists, and other sensory aspects to be overwhelming, but ultimately I was glad we participated and that my mother encouraged me to run the whole distance when I was tired and wanted to walk. My favorite memory from the 1997 race was the one set of runners carrying a Hale-Bopp comet float and a second set toting an alien spacecraft behind them, a dark-yet-mirthful reference to the then-recent Heaven's Gate suicides.
Another reason why I wanted to run in the Bay to Breakers was to maintain a connection to my home state. In high school I was a mediocre 400-meter runner on my school's track team but by the time I had graduated I was burnt out on running. I did not start running semi-seriously again until I was in my early 30s and living in Maine. While I have enjoyed the races in the East, I found myself wanting to re-experience the festivity of the Bay to Breakers.
So that's what I decided to do. In the winter I booked a trip to California and also convinced my mother to register for the race. Having the Bay to Breakers on my calendar for May 21 inspired me to train regularly through the later winter and early spring in Maine when I often have to pick between running in the cold and wind or coping with the monotony of a treadmill or an indoor track.
I never seriously considered wearing a costume, but I deliberately chose to acknowledge my dual West Coast and East Coast identities by wearing my Bay Meadows Racecourse baseball cap and my neon yellow t-shirt from Back Cove Weekly 5k series in Maine.
We took BART from Millbrae to Embarcadero and then parted ways about 45 minutes before the race to enter our respective corrals. The race begins in the Financial District and during the 7 o'clock hour the sky was foggy and the tops of the tallest skyscrapers could not be seen. One Bay to Breakers tradition is the tossing of tortillas before the start, and I felt like a ninja when one bounced off my head and I snatched it with one hand before flinging it backward and hoping it did not hit an unsuspecting runner behind me. I saw my first bare rear ends as two nude men stood near the front of the "B" corral. There was another man nearby who was still clothed but was wearing a "Bare to Breakers" cap and who was toting a small backpack, so I knew that the cap would be all he was wearing once the race started.
The first group of participants (the seeded and sub-seeded runners with qualifying times and all centipedes) were sent on their way at 8:00, and my group in corral “A” heard the starter's horn at 8:03. I was worried that I would get stuck behind some of the slower centipedes during the first mile, but by the time I had caught up to them there was plenty of space to pass them. A few walking bandits had already made their way onto the course and some were casually strolling two- and three-abreast, and although I was annoyed by the breach in etiquette I was able to navigate around them without much trouble.
I settled into a 7:00/mile pace and was running comfortably when we made the turn onto Hayes Street. Here the skyline opens up and you can also see the steep hill ahead. To make the climb seem even more daunting, I could feel a headwind. The Hayes Street climb begins right around the two-mile marker and I found myself having to find a balance between maintaining a decent pace when going up the 201-foot incline (with an average grade of 5.5% and a maximum grade of 11.5%, the Hayes Street Hill was named one of running’s “sublime climbs” by Runner’s World in 2008) and not exhausting my legs when I still have approximately five miles left to run. I looked at my Garmin watch and kept my heart rate between 183 and 185 and saw at the top of the hill my average pace for the whole race until that point was 7:15/mile, so I felt confident I could beat my loftiest goal time of completing the race in less than 52 minutes as the course was net downhill from there.
During the Hayes incline I passed a woman who was wearing a pink dress and carrying a bouquet and a man who was wearing a faux tuxedo T-Shirt and dragging plastic cups behind him. One spectator yelled "Did you just get married?" and they replied in the affirmative, prompting a hearty "Congratulations!" from the spectator. I also saw the salmon standing on the left sidewalk and I yelled "All right, salmon!" and gave one of them a high five. The Hayes Street party scene had not really started yet as I passed only one DJ playing music outside one of the narrow Victorian-era homes that give the neighborhood its identity.
Apart from a few small hills, the course plateaus at the top of Hayes Street, during a brief stint along Divisadero Street, and past the Panhandle (this park received its name because from above it appears to stick out from the much larger Golden Gate Park) along Fell Street. The number of spectators decreased significantly upon entering Golden Gate Park and the sidewalks had a few walkers, joggers, and cyclists who seemed to have a minimal interest in the race.
The 3 ½-mile stretch through Golden Gate Park is almost exclusively downhill, which made me feel like a speed demon as I ran at a 6:35/mile pace even though it was gravity that was doing a lot of of the work. I passed two of the centipede teams from the Impala Running Club in their matching cat eye masks and tails. I also passed a male runner who was wearing nothing but running shoes and a pink thong, but it was nothing like my 1997 experience when I saw so many nude walkers. One man stood in the middle of the road and held a "FREE HUGS" sign, but I did not see any of us semi-serious runners take him up on the offer. I did give him a high-five, though.
Near the end of the race the course goes by the Golden Gate Park bison paddock where the residents were lounging and grazing contentedly while us masochistic runners were making our final push to the finish line. Upon passing the Dutch-style Murphy Windmill at the southwest edge of the park and making the final turn onto the Great Highway, I began my final kick, using my quarter-miler speed to try to knock off a few seconds off my final time. The MC at the finish line saw me and my florescent yellow shirt coming and yelled "Looking good in the neon!" and I crossed the line with an official net time of 50:48, exactly 15 minutes slower than the race's winner Colin Bennie, the top-finishing American at the 2021 Boston Marathon. I was happy with my time and how fresh I still felt but also a little annoyed with myself for not pushing a little harder in the final mile.
The Bay to Breakers route as tracked by my Garmin watch.
In the finish line festival area I picked up my medal, sampled various Kodiak Cakes products, expressed my sympathies to a woman in a Philadelphia Flyers shirt and a Gritty hat ("I'm sorry your team has had such bad management."), and tried not to freeze from the cold wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean. I was worried that my mother would not be able to find me in the crowd after she finished, but we successfully spotted each other and took a few pictures before slowly walking toward our shuttle back to downtown San Francisco.
The Red Barn, which was built circa 1878, and modern arena at the Stanford Equestrian Center.
What do you think of when somebody says the name “Stanford”? Guidance counselors and high-achieving high school students are likely to associate the name with Stanford University. Those in the technology and business realms might think of the school’s connections to companies like Hewlett-Packard, Genentech, Google, or, less flatteringly, Theranos. The names Jim Plunkett, John Elway, Andrew Luck, Richard Sherman, and Christian McCaffrey might come to the minds of football fans. History and railroad buffs are likely to recall Leland Stanford himself, the California governor, United States Senator, and president of Southern Pacific Railroad. There was a time, however, when the Stanford name was synonymous with horse racing and breeding.
Before Leland Stanford and his wife Jane founded Leland Stanford Junior University following the 1884 death of their 15-year-old son Leland, Jr., their property on the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula was the site of the Palo Alto Stock Farm where the elder Leland bred and raised trotters and thoroughbreds. The Stanford campus is nicknamed “The Farm,” but most people who use that moniker do not know the details of its equestrian origins.
The front entrance to the Red Barn.
A more thorough account of the history of Palo Alto Stock Farm, which operated between 1876 and 1903, can probably be found elsewhere, but I will provide some of the text posted on one of the displays at the Red Barn Equestrian Center site.
Leland Stanford has been viewed simply as a rich man indulging his hobby. But the Stock Farm was, in fact, a giant biological laboratory where he tested his progressive and controversial ideas on horse breeding and training. It also was the site of the photographic experiments he commissioned to prove his theory that, at one point in its steady gate, a trotter had all four feet off the ground. The experiments, conducted by Eadweard Muybridge, gave rise to the idea of the moving picture.
The Stock Farm never turned a profit; Leland Stanford never expected it to. His immediate goal was to develop speed in trotters, horses that pulled sulkies – the latter-day chariots – in the then-popular harness races. In the years preceding the development of the automobile, Stanford thought careful breeding of horses could increase their productivity, thereby boosting the national economy. There were approximately 13 million horses in the United States in the late 1880s.
Despite numerous commitments that kept him away from the farm for long periods, Leland Stanford spent as much time as possible around the stables while at Palo Alto. He often sat on the office porch, a good vantage point close to the home stretch of the mile track, to observe the training of his trotters. Despite ill health, he visited the farm to watch the horses being worked on the day he died.
At the height of the Stock Farm’s success, a writer who had seen the major stock farms of America reported: “It is easy to say that no two or three of them rolled into one would duplicate Palo Alto. Governor Stanford is easily the first [place] trotting-horse breeder in the world.
This statue commemorates Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion" proto-films that proved that horses momentarily have all four legs in the air while trotting or galloping.
The lynchpin in the Stock Farm’s success was the trotting sire Electioneer, whom Stanford purchased for $12,000 in 1876. Electioneer had not distinguished himself at stud at Stony Ford in New York, but he went on to sire nine of the 13 champions bred at the Stock Farm. In addition to Electioneer’s prowess at stud, the trotters bred by Stanford benefited from his novel approach of aggressively training yearlings for speed in what became known as the “Palo Alto System.” Leland Stanford, Sr. died in 1893 and with Stanford University (which admitted its first students in 1891) becoming Jane Stanford’s top priority, the Stock Farm closed in 1903.
The statue of Leland Stanford's prolific sire Electioneer.
While growing up in nearby Sunnyvale I spent numerous weekends either at Stanford University watching football, basketball, and baseball games or attending the races further north along the former Southern Pacific right-of-way at Bay Meadows Racecourse, but I was unaware of the Stanford-horse racing connection until I read Tom Ainslie’s New Complete Guide to Harness Racing when I was living in New Jersey in my early 20s and making semi-regular trips to the harness races at the Meadowlands.
A shed row inside the Red Barn.
Last summer when visiting California to see friends and family I decided to walk around the beautiful and spacious Stanford campus. I entered the visitor center and saw images from Sallie Gardner at the Gallop, one of the proto-films Stanford had commissioned to prove that horses have all four legs off the ground at one point at either the trot or the gallop. I texted a picture of the display to my friend Barbara Livingston, whose equine photography skills are matched only by her passion for racing and equestrian history. She informed me that she had considered making a visit to the Stanford Red Barn Equestrian Center when she passed through the Bay Area in 2016 but could not make it work logistically, but she encouraged me to make my own pilgrimage. I took a lengthy, meandering walk from the visitor center at Cobb Track & Angell Field to the Red Barn, only to see a sign saying the facility was closed to visitors.
Before making my most recent visit to the Bay Area I emailed the barn manager at the Red Barn and asked if it would be possible for me to visit, shamelessly playing the “I used to work in horse racing and I’m a history geek card.” Barn manager Catherine D’Arcey was kind enough to not just offer me an invitation, but also give me a tour of the facilities and introduce me to some of the horses who live on the grounds, which now serves as the home of the Stanford equestrian team.
Visitors to Stanford Red Barn Equestrian Center, which is tucked between fairways on the Stanford Golf Course on the campus’ southwest corner, are greeted by a bronze statue of Electioneer that stands in front of an open arena. To the left is the Red Barn where inside you will find the office D’Arcey shares with Red Barn executive director and the equestrian team’s head coach Vanessa Bartsch. This is the same office Leland Stanford used when visiting the Stock Farm. In addition to horses, the Red Barn is home to two barn owls who, according to D’Arcey, are appreciated for their help with controlling the rodent population. The Red Barn was in disrepair by the early 1980s, but renovation projects undertaken that decade and in the mid-2000s have restored it to its former glory.
The view from what was Leland Stanford's office at the Red Barn.
The other building on the grounds that dates back to the Stock Farm era is a brick structure that was built to replace a wooden barn that was destroyed by a fire in 1888, but the brick barn was repurposed after its coldness and dampness caused the horses sheltered within to contract pneumonia. Opposite this brick building are two statues, one of which honors the top horses who were bred and raised at the site and another commemorates Muybridge’s proto-films. Stanford University's equestrian history is also acknowledged by the name of its Marguerite free shuttle service, with Marguerite being the name of one of Jane Stanford’s gray carriage horses.
This show bridle owned by Leland Stanford is one of the many artifacts inside the brick barn.
I think it is, for lack of a more sophisticated term, totally cool that the Red Barn not only still stands but remains in use. The staff, riders, and horses are helping maintain a legacy that began almost 150 years ago and predates many of racetracks and breeding operations throughout the United States. Stanford might be acclaimed today for its academic reputation, but for as long as the Red Barn Equestrian Center remains in operation Leland Stanford’s passion for horses will never be forgotten.
Cheese, one of the current residents at the Stanford Equestrian Center.
Remembering Northern California Racing's most visible personality
Sam Spear hosting the Golden Gate Report in 2003
Sam Spear, the Northern California horse racing media personality who died Friday at the age of 72, had a longevity that exceeded the Baze-Hollendorfer era of dominance; the careers of locally based horses like Moment to Buy, Brown Bess, Soviet Problem, Event of the Year, Lost in the Fog, Bold Chieftain, and Shared Belief; and Bay Meadows Racecourse and the San Joaquin and Solano county fair race meets.
As the jockeys, trainers, and horses came and went, Sam was there through it all, hosting his replay show (which he created in 1978 and produced and hosted until the end of 2017) on KTSF-26 and radio show on KNBR 680 and working as a media relations consultant for Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields. General sports fans knew him from his guest appearances on KNBR's Murph & Mac Show during which he would talk about racing or maybe complain about how analytics were, in his opinion, ruining baseball. Sam had no connections to the racing industry prior to the late 1970s, but he used his gumption, gregariousness, and grit to become the face of Northern California racing.
Other stories (such as T.D. Thornton’s tribute in the Thoroughbred Daily News) can give you a better synopsis of the intensive work Sam did to make his replay show a success, so instead I will focus on my own relationship with Sam. My father was the person most responsible for my interest in racing, but it was Sam who completed the exacta.
I have memories from my preschool days of my father coming home from the track early and then watch Sam’s replay show to learn the outcomes of the final races on the card. Sam began every show with “A pleasant good evening and welcome once again to the Golden Gate/Summer Fair/Bay Meadows Report” and ended with “And I will see you...at the races! Goooooodniiiiiight everybody!” Sometimes when I would accompany my father to Bay Meadows, we would see Sam walking about, and I would think, “That’s Sam Spear, the man on TV!”
As I progressed through childhood and my early adolescence, my interest in racing waned and my trips to the racetrack with my father became increasingly sporadic, but on one fateful Saturday evening in early 2002 I was flipping through the channels and came across the Golden Gate Report. For whatever reason, I decided to watch and I saw a replay of Danthebluegrassman winning the Golden Gate Derby for trainer Bob Baffert and owner Mike Pegram, and given that horse’s name and connections I thought he was worth following in case he made an impact in the spring at Churchill Downs (he did, but in the Northern Dancer and not in the Kentucky Derby).
In the upcoming weeks and months I found myself tuning into Sam’s show to watch replays of the Golden State Mile and El Camino Real Derby. I got to know the local horses and I enjoyed following the rivalry of sorts between local turf sprint claimers Is It True Mex and Sarigor. I joined my father on trips to Bay Meadows to watch races like the Santa Anita Handicap via simulcast, played a computer game called Horse Racing Fantasy, read Seabiscuit: An American Legend in about three days, and began counting down the weeks until live racing returned to Bay Meadows, which was much more accessible from our home in Sunnyvale than Golden Gate Fields.
These days It’s easy to take streaming live video and replays for granted, but back then I relied on Sam’s replay show (hosted by Sam himself during the Golden Gate and fair seasons and track announcer Tony Calo during the Bay Meadows meets) to watch full replays from the Northern California tracks, stretch runs from the Southern California venues, and the occasional major race in New York, Kentucky, or Florida. I recorded the show for two years, resulting in a pile of VHS tapes that probably annoyed my mother.
During my junior year, my high school hosted a track meet on a rainy Wednesday, and my teammates and I took refuge in a storage shed. Inside was a television set the pole vaulters would use to watch replays of their jumps and evaluate their form. One of the seniors turned on the television so he and a few of his friends could watch the music video show that preceded the Bay Meadows Report. I made a gleeful realization: I can watch the Bay Meadows replays when they come on at 5:30! Everyone else left when the music video show ended, but I remained inside, ignoring my teammates’ races as I contentedly watched the horses compete over sloppy and soft going up the Peninsula in San Mateo.
My racing obsession that was partially fueled by Sam’s show led to me enrolling in the University of Arizona’s Race Track Industry Program in the hope of starting my own career in racing media. I began to interact with Sam when I did freelance work covering stakes races at Golden Gate and Bay Meadows for Bloodhorse.com, but I truly got to know him in 2008 when I landed a customer service position at Bay Meadows as I waited for a media job to become available somewhere. Before and after my shifts and during my lunch breaks I would visit the press box and talk to Sam and the track’s publicity director, Tom Ferrall. Although I was green and my ambition exceeded my writing skills, Sam and Tom did everything they could to make me feel welcome.
Following the conclusion of that final Bay Meadows commercial meet, I moved to the East Coast where I first worked for the Thoroughbred Daily News and then the New York Racing Association. I returned to California in the fall of 2014 to try a new role as a racing office entry clerk and placing judge at Golden Gate. In the spring Golden Gate management launched a podcast series that was to be hosted by Sam and I was invited to participate as a co-host and feature story reporter. Suddenly at the age of 28 I found myself recording a podcast with the man who was more recognizable to me during my early years than Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings.
Tom Ferrall, who had worked as the Golden Gate’s publicist since 1989, retired in the spring of 2015 and I was hired as his replacement. With Sam I shared a fire hazard of an office that was full of dusty programs, charts, media guides, and other detritus. We were an odd but mostly complementary pair. He was the older extrovert who could barely type and was happiest when he could go into raconteur mode. I was the young introvert who enjoyed writing stories and wanted to update the track’s approach on social media but did not particularly enjoy pitching stories to local media outlets. We had our occasional disagreements, but we were always quick to put those aside when we needed to form an alliance in response to meddling by the Stronach Group's West Coast management team.
Sam's antics and habits could be endearing or annoying, depending on my mood and workload. Sam enjoyed listening to jazz and big band music in the early morning and sports talk radio before the races began. He would go on rants about baseball (“I don’t need a computer to tell me that Joe Morgan was a good ballplayer!”) and politics (He would express his displeasure with Ronald Reagan’s policies...during his terms as governor of California). A passionate Notre Dame football fan, Sam's optimism was only briefly replaced by despair following their usual bowl game beatdowns. On more than one occasion he looked at the nomination list for the California Derby and made it clear to everyone in the room that there were hundreds of nominees to the race in 1978. He would talk about how the press box was once packed with reporters from different newspapers and mention names of turf writers whose names I had never heard of before and have since forgotten. He would talk about his friendship with Joe DiMaggio, who would watch the races at Golden Gate and Bay Meadows from the relative privacy of the press box. Sam had perhaps the coolest 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake story because he was at Candlestick Park with DiMaggio when the earthquake struck and he drove DiMaggio back to his home through the darkness of the post-earthquake blackouts after game 3 of the World Series was postponed. He liked to tell jokes (some more politically correct than others) and would frequently begin them by saying, “I got a good one for you, Harry!” with “Harry” being the generic name for whoever was within earshot.
Sam was a holdover from a bygone era when racing could guarantee itself regular and positive coverage just by having the press box supplied with an adequate amount of beer, but even in his final years he could still talk an editor into running a racing story. Although Sam would lament the declining number of press box regulars, he never lost his zeal for racing and the people in the game. Even as his health failed, he continued hosting his Sunday morning radio show until the very end. Northern California racing benefited immensely from Sam’s passion for racing and his job, and it’s sad knowing that we will no longer be seeing him...at the races. Goodnight, Sam.
The preceding blog post was sponsored by Sam Spear Enterprises.
With each passing year, my connection to horse racing becomes weaker and weaker. I can name only a few of the prominent horses who are now in training. Sometimes on major race days I catch myself thinking, “Oh, the Pegasus is today. Maybe I’ll watch it.” With less frequency, I actually watch the race. I no longer look at a calendar and get excited knowing that, say, the Breeders’ Cup is coming up soon.
Although my feelings toward horse racing these days seesaw between indifference and disillusionment, closing day at Saratoga Race Course still evokes strong romantic and melancholic feelings inside me. Because it happens on Labor Day, the end of the Saratoga meet symbolically marks the end of summer, which makes me, a native of California now living in New England, lament the end of the season and dread the approaching winter. And as a former NYRA employee who worked six meets in Saratoga (2010-2014 and 2016), Labor Day causes me to reflect upon my time at the Spa.
I was fortunate to have seen many great horses, jockeys, trainers, races, and moments in Saratoga. Blame nipping Quality Road on the wire in the Whitney, Blind Luck collaring Havre de Grace in the Alabama, the Travers dead heat, H. Allen Jerkens winning his final grade 1 and his final stakes, John Velazquez and Ramón Dominguez setting riding records, Tom Durkin concluding his career, and Arrogate emerging as a dominant force are just a few of those examples. Despite this, I felt ambivalent about Saratoga when I was working there full time. I remember feeling fatigued as I shuffled to the employee parking lot in the darkness at the end of a long Saturday, simultaneously feeling dread and excitement as I thought about having to be at the track early the next day for morning workouts. I remember scrambling to take care of all of my errands and chores on Tuesdays, the lone dark day. I remember struggling to get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, or have a conversation about a topic other than racing.
Even though I was in my mid 20s and seldom stayed out late downtown, during my first summer in Saratoga I was not prepared for the physical toll that comes with working 6-7 days a week and by the midway mark of the meet there were times when I was feeling desperate to return to Belmont Park, sleep in my own apartment on Long Island, and use vacation days to do things that were not related to horse racing. In the following years at Saratoga I learned to take better care of myself physically and mentally, but I always felt a palpable sense of relief when the meet came to an end. I never did figure out how many of my coworkers and colleagues socialized, partied, handicapped, and gambled throughout the meet without succumbing to exhaustion. For me, Saratoga showed that there indeed can be too much of a good thing.
In 2014 I relocated to California to work at Golden Gate Fields. At my mother's house I found my copy of Finished Lines, an anthology of non-fiction writing about horse racing that had been given to me as a Christmas present when I was either 17 or 18. I reread one of the entries, “Getaway Days,” a chapter from Brendan Boyd’s book Racing Days. In "Getaway Days" Boyd wrote about how he became obsessed with racing and how he and his girlfriend decided to become backstretch workers before becoming burnt out and quitting. They then went to Saratoga and “went to the track every day, bet every race, had an ideal four weeks.” But for Boyd the romance was gone.
It was the perfect story, yet something about it had gone strange. Working at the track had depleted the story for me, had forced too much significance on it. Immersion in the betting life wasn’t reversing this process, it was deepening it. It was just too much.
When I left Saratoga I knew it was time to go on to something else, to leave the story alone, to stop enlarging it. I knew that if I didn’t, I risked losing it entirely, draining it of its true meaning, plundering the allegory.
I wasn’t meant to be at the track all the time, I now realized. I was meant to think of myself as someone who could be.
I still think of that passage from time to time and almost always think about it on Labor Day. I find it impossible, to borrow a line from Boyd, to leave the story alone. I seldom regret having left my career in horse racing, but on closing day I find myself missing Saratoga summers. For one day a year, I think of myself as somebody who still could be at the track every day.
Commemorating the life of one of San Francisco's and horse racing's most interesting characters
Harry Aleo in his office on May 23, 2008
Proud San Francisco native and resident, minor league baseball player, World War II combat veteran, realtor and landlord, outspoken and unapologetic Republican, sponsor of homeless individuals, hater of laptops and lattes, packrat, and thoroughbred horse owner are all words and phrases that can be used to describe Harry Aleo.
June 21 marks the 13th anniversary of the death of Harry Aleo at the age of 88. Aleo, who spoke in a gruff baritone voice and whose Stetson hat, wool jacket, and blue jeans made him look like he had been airdropped into modern San Francisco from a cattle ranch in Wyoming, was one of the most fascinating characters I met during my time in the horse racing industry.
Victorina, Harry Aleo, jockey Glen Corbett, and trainer Greg Gilchrist in the winner's circle following the 2006 Ahwatukee Express Stakes at Turf Paradise Coady Photography
Racing fans in North America knew him best as the owner of the 2005 Champion Sprinter Lost in the Fog and graded stakes winners Minutes Away, Victorina, and Smokey Stover. Outside of racing, he was known in the San Francisco neighborhood of Noe Valley as the owner of the infamous office featuring posters, signs, and memorabilia that ranged from generically patriotic (flags and an Uncle Sam statue) to partisan (photos of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon) to cheeky (a Weekly World News front page with the headline ALIENS SETTLE IN SAN FRANCISCO which Aleo had captioned “WE NOW KNOW WHERE YOU LEFT WING LOONIES CAME FROM”). Over the years, Aleo’s displays inspired ire, laughter, eye rolls, and vandalism.
It was Aleo’s office, not his racehorses, that was the main angle of stories in the Noe Valley Voice and Wall Street Journal. Like Bay Meadows, Aleo and his Twin Peaks Properties office were anachronisms that had been slowly surrounded and eventually enveloped by elements of the modern bourgeoisie, and he eagerly expressed his displeasure with these trends. A musical instrument shop, Russo Music, now occupies the storefront. “Harry's problem is that he has survived long enough to become a minority in his own neighborhood,” wrote Larry Gallagher about Aleo in 2006 for SFGate.com.
Harry Aleo's business card
I had the fortune of interviewing Aleo at his office on May 23, 2008, approximately one month before his death. I had graduated from the University of Arizona’s Racetrack Industry Program in December 2007, and while I was waiting for a full-time job in racing media I worked a customer service position at Bay Meadows during its final commercial meet (the San Mateo County Fair conducted the track’s final 10 days of racing that August). I had brief conversations with Aleo when he would pass by my booth in the Bay Meadows grandstand. What I really wanted to do, however, was have a longer conversation with him and see his office with my own eyes. I received that opportunity when the Thoroughbred Owners of California asked me to write a short article about the imminent closure of Bay Meadows and the track’s history for its Owners’ Circle magazine. Who better to interview for the story than somebody who had been attending the races at Bay Meadows since the track's first days in the 1930s?
I rode BART to the 24th Street/Mission station and then walked four-fifths of a mile to Aleo’s office. TWIN PEAKS PROPERTIES/HARRY J. ALEO/REALTOR/EST. 1947 read the sign above the front door and windows in a font that looked like it had been taken off an Old West wanted poster.
The exterior of Twin Peaks Properties on May 23, 2008
Before going in, I took a moment to look at everything on display in the front windows. In addition to the aforementioned photos of Reagan and Nixon, flags, and Uncle Sam statue, there was a “LIBERALS MAKE ME SICK” bumper sticker and a sign reading "IT WILL ALWAYS BE ARMY STREET," an annoyed reference to how the street had been renamed in honor of civil rights activist Cesar Chavez. There were also three additional hand-written signs. One simply stated "ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE." Another one read (complete with a smiley face at the end):
WELCOME TO
LOONEY VALLEY, THE
HEART OF KOOK CITY!
THE HOME OF LAP TOP
LEFT WING LIBERALS.
THIS IS AN ISLAND OF
TRADITIONAL CONSERVATIVE
VALUES IN A SEA OF
THE LATTE SIPPING LIBERAL
LOONIES.
☺
And then there was this sign:
SEPT. 7TH WAS THE
60TH ANNIVERSARY
OF TWIN PEAKS PROPERTIES!
THE OLDEST ORIGINAL OWNER
BUSINESS IN LOONEY VALLEY.
WHEN WE OPENED CABLE CARS
RAN OVER CASTRO ST. THE
FOX AND NOE THEATERS WERE IN
THEIR PRIME. THE GOLDEN GATE
AND BAY BRIDGES WERE ONLY
9 YRS. OLD. HARRY TRUMAN WAS
PRESIDENT. NO STARBUCKS,
NO CELL PHONES, NO LAPTOPS,
NO LATTES. NO LEFT WING
LIBERAL LOONIES! IT WAS
A GREAT CITY!
CONGRATULATIONS ARE IN ORDER!
DON'T ALL RUSH IN AT ONCE!
Due to the passage of time, I do not remember any specifics about the inside, but I do remember that the combination of patriotic and political memorabilia and old random items made Twin Peaks Properties feel like a cross between a conservative political action committee office and an antiques store.
Aleo’s secretary took me to the office in the back where Aleo was at his desk. I had already known a lot about his life due to all of the coverage he received when he was campaigning Lost in the Fog and I needed only a brief quote for my article, but I decided to ask him questions covering his entire life. After all, how often do you get to talk to somebody with connections to Seabiscuit, Joe DiMaggio, Branch Rickey, and General George S. Patton?
I asked Aleo, who had been born in San Francisco in 1919, about his childhood. Aleo said he was born to “a couple of dagoes from Old Italy” before describing what Noe Valley was like back then and how it had changed over the decades.
“It was a much nicer time,” Aleo said of the 1930s. “There was a five-and-ten-cent store across the street. A clothing store, a little grocery store. There were three drug stores in this five-block area. We had two theaters on this block. Five gas stations on five blocks. Figure that one out. And of course, Walgreens comes in, RiteAid comes in, Radio Shack comes in, and they pay a lot more money and out go the little mom and pop stores. They got all the chains because they’re the only ones that can afford to pay the money.”
During his adolescence Aleo attended the races for the first time when he visited Tanforan, which was located in San Bruno approximately 10 miles south of San Francisco and nine miles north of where Bay Meadows would be built later that decade.
“It was exciting as hell,” he recalled. “Crowds of people. Horses come thundering down the stretch and all of that screaming and cheering.”
Aleo was in attendance when Seabiscuit won the 1938 Bay Meadows Handicap in his last of four victorious appearances at the San Mateo track.
“[Seabiscuit] beat a horse named Gosum by about five lengths,” Aleo said of Seabiscuit’s 1938 Bay Meadows Handicap win, exaggerating the actual margin by two lengths. “I’ll never forget that. It was exciting. Thousands of people there, unlike today.”
Racing, however, was not his passion. Baseball was. Aleo played for San Francisco Junior College (now San Francisco City College) and signed a minor-league contract to play third base for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization.
I had read that Aleo pitched to Joe DiMaggio at one point, and I asked Aleo to tell me the story in his own words. “Oh, come on now!” he protested while giving me a dismissive hand wave. “It’s no big deal!” Following a short pause, he cracked a grin and told me that when he was in college he played a pick-up game against professionals who were spending time in San Francisco before their season started. Aleo got DiMaggio, who was already putting up big numbers for the New York Yankees, to pop out on a curveball.
Aleo had his 22nd birthday ruined by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in Patton’s Third Army, seeing combat in France, Luxembourg, and Belgium and participating in the relief of the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge.
He returned to San Francisco after the war and began working part-time for a real estate firm. But Harry had greater ambitions. Six months later, he started his own real estate and insurance brokerage. Sixty years later, Aleo still showed up at the Twin Peaks Properties five days a week.
Aleo and his wife had three daughters before the couple was divorced in the late 1970s. It was around that time when Aleo made his foray into thoroughbred ownership.
“I got an article from a son-in-law—ex-son-in-law, probably the only good thing he ever did— called ‘How to Make Money When Your Horse Loses.’ It’s all about owning horses. How to depreciate them and all of the deductions. That got me into the game. That’s when I bought my first horse. Sonny Shy, right there," Aleo said as he pointed to the winner's circle photo on the wall next to his desk.
From the beginning Aleo teamed with trainer Greg Gilchrist, a third-generation horseman whose training career was delayed by two years spent in Vietnam with the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. The tandem of veterans had their first stakes success on the local racing scene in 1985 when Minutes Away won the Grade 3 Bay Meadows Derby by seven lengths. In the early 2000s they campaigned minor stakes winners Beyond Brilliant, Taraval, and Frisco Belle.
It was Lost in the Fog, a speedy bay colt with an off-center blaze, who brought national recognition to Aleo and allowed him to tour the country as the sprinter won major races at many of the country’s best tracks.
The saga of Lost in the Fog could warrant its own blog post, but I will provide a brief-ish version. Aleo purchased Lost in the Fog privately after bidding on the Florida-bred son of Lost Soldier when he did not meet his reserve at the 2004 OBS March sale of 2-year-olds in training. Lost in the Fog broke his maiden by 7 ½ lengths in his debut in November 2004 at Golden Gate Fields, then set a Turf Paradise 6 ½-furlong track record of 1:13.55 (a record which still stands) when crushing the competition in the Arizona Juvenile in December. To begin his 3-year-old campaign, he rattled off wins in the Ocala Stud Dash and Grade 2 Swale at Gulfstream Park and Grade 3 Bay Shore on Wood Memorial day at Aqueduct Racetrack. He set a six-furlong track record of 1:07.32 when defeating two opponents in the Golden Bear at Golden Gate, displayed his mettle when turning back the promising but ultimately ill-fated Egg Head in the Grade 2 Riva Ridge on the Belmont Stakes undercard, and registered easy victories in the Grade 2 Carry Back at Calder Race Course and Grade 1 King’s Bishop at Saratoga Race Course on Travers day.
Lost in the Fog and Russell Baze winning the 2005 Grade 1 King's Bishop at Saratoga Coglianese Photos
When shooting his documentary about Aleo and Lost in the Fog, filmmaker John Corey caught Aleo as he walked into the paddock, saw the statue of the 1993 Kentucky Derby and Travers winner Sea Hero, and scoffed, “Sea Hero? He wasn’t that great.” Moments before the horses entered the gate for the King’s Bishop, ESPN’s Quint Kessenich stuck a microphone in Aleo’s face, leading to a memorable exchange:
KESSENICH: Harry, what is the price tag on this horse?
ALEO: There is no price tag.
KESSENICH: Why wouldn’t you sell?
ALEO: What?
KESSENICH: Why wouldn’t you sell this horse?
ALEO: Why wouldn’t I sell‽ If I sold him, then I wouldn’t have the horse, now would I?
KESSENICH: What kind of impact has he had on your life?
ALEO: It’s exciting. Thrilling. One of the most important things ever in my life.
KESSENICH: You played minor league baseball. You battled in World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. How does this compare to those lifetime moments?
ALEO: How am I going to compare this great horse, winning eight in a row, with the Battle of the goddamn Bulge? Forget it.
Bay Meadows added a sprint stakes, the Bay Meadows Speed Handicap, to its stakes calendar, to attract Lost in the Fog, who proceeded to extend his winning streak to 10 with a dominating win over four overmatched opponents. The alternative newspaper SF Weekly published a feature story about Lost in the Fog and his appearance at Bay Meadows. In the article, Aleo offered the following explanation for why he steadfastly refused to sell Lost in the Fog, despite the lucrative offers he had received.
“The horse is not for sale. All this excitement and fun I'm having, just to get some money? Then what? Then I've got to start looking for a good horse again? These don't come around once in a million. So I'll run the horse. After a couple years, I'll retire him to stud.
“A lot of people sell 'em right away. Like Smarty Jones. They sold him for $38 million. The guy is older than I am — he's in a goddamn wheelchair. What's he going to do with $38 million that he can't do now, you know what I mean?”
Lost in the Fog disappointed when he finished seventh in the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint in October at Belmont, pressing the pace and leading briefly on the turn before fading in midstretch. Despite the off-the-board performance in his first graded stakes start versus older horses, Lost in the Fog was later awarded the 2005 Eclipse Award for Champion Sprinter.
Following a layoff, Lost in the Fog began his 4-year-old season in April in the Golden Gate Fields Sprint, finishing second by three lengths after being outdueled by Carthage, a solid-but-unspectacular local horse from the barn of Art Sherman. Lost in the Fog seemed to be rounding back into form when he defeated eventual Dubai Golden Shaheen winner Kelly’s Landing with a 1 ¼-length victory in the Grade 3 Aristides in June at Churchill Downs, but something appeared to be wrong when Lost in the Fog was uncharacteristically dull when seventh a month later in the Grade 2 Smile Sprint Handicap at Calder. Aleo and Gilchrist soon learned the reason why the colt had lost his brilliance. Lost in the Fog had two large, inoperable tumors and he was euthanized September 17, 2006, a little less than 12 months after approximately 10,000 spectators had packed Bay Meadows when he won the Bay Meadows Speed Handicap.
For whatever reason, I do not have quotes from my interview with Aleo about Lost in the Fog, other than the quote I used in my Owners’ Circle article: “I know I saw Seabiscuit run [at Bay Meadows]. Noor. Citation. I saw John Henry. Cigar. And my Lost in the Fog was one of the greatest.” I did not use the other quote he gave me: “We don’t need another goddamn development!”
At some point, Aleo’s secretary came into the room carrying a bottle of pomegranate juice. She said, “Harry, I want you to drink some of this.” “Ahh, I don’t want to drink any of that crap!” Aleo protested. Aleo then took a sip, grimaced as if he had tasted rancid milk, and pushed the bottle away.
Despite the death of Lost in the Fog, Aleo’s racing operation remained strong. Smokey Stover won four stakes in 2007, including the Grade 2 Potrero Grande and Grade 3 Bay Meadows Sprint. At the recently concluded Bay Meadows meet, two of Aleo’s fillies had bookended the stakes schedule as the promising 3-year-old sprinter High Resolve won the Princess on opening weekend and the late-blooming 4-year-old Wild Promises won the Mother’s Day Handicap on closing day. Victorina, who had won the 2006 Grade 3 Azalea, was about to make her 5-year-old debut. It seemed as if Aleo was poised to find himself in the winner’s circle following stakes races well into the future, but it was not meant to be. He casually mentioned during the interview that he was ill, and I asked him what the matter was. Pancreatic cancer, he said. I muttered something like, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that” before I awkwardly continued with my questions.
Sixteen days following my visit to Twin Peaks Properties, Victorina won the Washington State Legislators Handicap at Emerald Downs. Thirteen days after that, I was visiting the Golden Gate Fields press box on closing day for the spring meet when I discovered that the track’s publicist, Tom Farrell, was writing Harry Aleo’s obituary, having learned that morning that Aleo had succumbed to the disease that had claimed Lost in the Fog 19 months earlier. I will always be grateful for how Aleo took two hours of his little remaining time to talk to me, a young and green wannabe turf writer.
Aleo’s horses continued to compete through 2009, but he was not there to enjoy their successes. Wild Promises won the 2008 Grade 3 My Charmer in December at Calder and Aleo’s estate won two races at Gulfstream on Sunshine Millions Day one month later, with Wild Promises taking the Filly & Mare Turf and High Resolve capturing the Filly & Mare Sprint. The Aleo colors were carried to victory twice during the final meet at Bay Meadows, with Victorina defeating her younger stablemate High Resolve in an allowance and the otherwise undistinguished Gherig breaking his maiden on the final day of racing at the Peninsula track. Victorina added wins in minor stakes at Golden Gate, Fresno, and Santa Anita to her catalogue page and on December 26, 2009 she became the last horse to carry Aleo’s flame orange silks when she finished fourth in Turf Paradise’s Kachina Handicap.
Aleo’s death was covered by racing trade publications and Bay Area newspapers, with the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com and the Noe Valley Voice running lengthy obituaries. The Voice obituary included numerous tributes from neighbors, a few of which I will share here.
Carol Yenne, who owned the children’s clothing store next to Aleo’s office, talked about how Aleo would sponsor local homeless individuals and one time bought a panhandler a bus ticket to his family’s home. The man reconciled with his family and sent Aleo a postcard to thank him. “Outwardly, [Aleo] could appear to be a hard shell, a curmudgeonly conservative,” Yenne told the Voice. "But he was really an authentic, caring, personable individual.”
Bevan Dufty, the Democratic supervisor of Noe Valley, talked about how he and Aleo worked together, “even though I was gay and there were some things about me that Harry didn't get.” Aleo supported 2002 Dufty’s campaign, going as far as placing one of Dufty’s campaign posters in his window next to a picture of Ronald Reagan. “I was momentarily agasp," Dufty told the Voice. “‘People are going to think I’m a Republican!’”
Others talked about how Aleo would give books and candy to children at local events and how he purchased an abandoned movie theatre and donated the property to the city so they could turn it into a much-needed parking lot.
The article also included quotes from Joel Panzer, who also rented properties in the area. Panzer said he offered to manage Aleo’s properties and mentioned that he could make more money by raising the rents, but Aleo refused to relinquish control or change his rents.
The 2009 Wall Street Journal (paywall) article about Aleo and his office included quotes from Panzer about his desire to create a Noe Valley history museum, which would include a Harry Aleo exhibit. After reading that article as part of my research for this story, I decided to track down Panzer and ask him about the fate of Aleo’s office decorations and if he had any additional anecdotes about Aleo that he would be willing to share.
Panzer, who described himself as a “neighbor, competitor, and friend” of Aleo’s, told me that the museum never came to fruition but he found a different way to share some of the San Francisco history Aleo had squirreled away in his office.
“I saved a lot of his stuff and I had entertained thoughts that I would [put everything together for an exhibit], but I don’t see it happening now,” said Panzer. “Harry’s office was like a little slice of time. For a while I had all of his real estate records for years and years, but it became too cumbersome to keep in my house. So, eventually, I had to get rid of them. If I found a few that were in my immediate neighborhood, I pulled them out and gave them to the people who owned the property now. ‘Do you want to see what your house sold for in 1953?’”
One historical gem of Aleo’s that stood out to Panzer was a newspaper from when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
“He had a bunch of detritus and old papers, and one day he came out and he gave me this folder and said, ‘Look at this.’ It was a copy of the New York Herald that was published on the day Lincoln was assassinated,” said Panzer. “I love history and the front page of the paper was talking about the end of the Civil War and the surrender of the [the Confederacy]. Papers were set with individual pieces of type, and they had the entire front page set and the next thing they know as they are about to run the paper is that Lincoln has been assassinated and the secretary of war has been wounded terribly. So, they strike it and flip it over and print ‘LINCOLN ASSASSINATED.’ He had this in a manila folder in one of his file drawers. So I said, ‘Can I read this?’ And he said, ‘Sure!’ It was fascinating and I did not want anything bad to happen to it, so I took it to a frame store, which was one of his tenants, and I had it framed and I brought it back to him. It disappeared, but it was like, ‘Harry, you got this kind of stuff? What else is in here?’”
Aleo had lived through significant history himself, but Panzer did not know much about Aleo’s participation in World War II until one evening when he hosted Aleo and let his guest thumb through various history books, including a book that compiled British newspaper front pages during the World War I era.
“[The book] had pictures of soldiers in a trench and it’s wintertime,” said Panzer. “You can see the cold and the pain in their faces. Harry was looking through the pages as I was looking for other things to share with him. He stopped and he stared at the page and he said, ‘Now, I can relate to this.’ And he had this look on his face like he was there. I looked at him and said, ‘You were at Bastogne, weren’t you?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, with General Patton.’ So, that was an epiphany for me. Then he told me a story which showed how he looked at life. He was on patrol with a few other guys. They had spent the night in this bombed out farmhouse. They got up and left and they were going down the road, and Harry said, ‘I gotta go back’ because there was a crucifix he had seen on the wall. He went back to get the crucifix and when he got back to his buds, they were dead.”
Panzer said Aleo’s life experiences when he was younger shaped the person who became the outspoken Noe Valley conservative and the thoroughbred owner who refused to sell his brilliantly fast sprinter.
“Harry was a Republican who was [financially] tight, but he believed in paying it forward,” said Panzer. “I told Harry I could get him more rent, but his response was surprising. He said, ‘After I got out of the Army, my wife and I had a damned tough time finding a place to live. If somebody hadn’t cut us a little slack, we never would have gotten a place. So, I’m just trying to do the same thing.’
“He survives poverty, growing up during the Depression. He plays baseball and then the war breaks out. He survives the war and comes home probably penniless. He has a wife and a child and has to find a place to live and build a whole new life. All of his dreams of playing baseball and doing things that are fun and exciting are gone. He starts a business, which is a success. [He gets Lost in the Fog], and then what happens? At the very pinnacle he gets knocked off again.”
Aleo, however, was not one to lament his misfortune. He described himself as “lucky” when speaking to Mary Forney for a 2005 profile in Owners’ Circleduring the height of Lost in the Fog mania. “I got to Paris after the war when they drew two names out of a hat, out of our whole regiment, for a three-day pass,” said Aleo. “Then, when we were in England they drew two names for 48 hours in London, and I was one of them… I win all the time – it’s so funny!”
And I would say Noe Valley and the sport of horse racing were lucky to have had a colorful character like Harry Aleo.
The crowded winner's circle following Lost in the Fog's victory in the 2005 Bay Meadows Speed Handicap, with Lost in the Fog and groom Pascual Garcia in the background Vassar Photography
