Fasig-Tipton’s record-setting December mixed sale saw gross and average rise more than 30 percent.

Walter Reese, who with his wife Cynthia owned and operated Timber Creek Farm in Robbinsville, N.J., led with eight purchases – all weanlings – for $366,000 on behalf of clients Noreen and Al Carpenito. Cynthia Reese noted:”It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. We went there to try to buy one colt for Timber Creek. But Walter and Al talked on the phone, and with the yearling market so much stronger, Al decided to take a chance with some weanlings.”

The sales-topping weanling, a $72,000 Cryptoclearance colt (stakes-placed Bakhoor), was pinhooked the next year for $300,000. Others Reese took home were future stakes winners One Eyed Joker and Love Happy.

• “Once in a lifetime stories abound in racing,” wrote Joe Clancy , spurred on by a note from ex-steeplechase jockey turned trainer and recovering alcoholic J.B. Secor, who credited recently retired multiple stakes winner D. Guilford with keeping him sober.
  Owned by Jewelyne and Harold Montgomery, D. Guilford was a quirky horse with an attitude and a reputation for not doing what people wanted, while Secor was fresh out of a rehabilitation center. Racing in turf sprints, D. Guilford won at least once each season from 2 to 12, 34 wins in all, from 100 starts.
  “Stories like that abound in both steeplechasing and flat racing,” wrote Clancy. “It probably has something to do with the connection between horse and human, and it’s too bad that connection gets lost on so many people.”
  
  
• Althea Richards’ 8-year-old Punch Line was fat and happy in retirement – until 2-year-olds began going past his paddock at his breeder’s farm that March. The gray Two Punch gelding returned to trainer Billy Turner and won four of five starts, including the Grade 2 Forest Hills and Fall Highweight handicaps, to push his career earnings past $950,000.
  
  
• One of the region’s most beloved performers, Weather Vane, fractured an ankle in a Pimlico workout in December. Par Four Racing Stable’s durable daughter of Willard Scott had won 14 stakes, possibly a record for a 24-month period in the Mid-Atlantic, and earned $724,532. Her last win, in the Contrary Rose Stakes, came in mid-December. The 5-year-old mare’s long-term prognosis was good.
  
  She recovered and produced the first of her six foals, a Not For Love filly, in 2000. All of her foals were winners, including stakes winner and stakes producer So Vain.
  
  
• Writers from the Mid-Atlantic starred in newspaper and magazine categories when the Eclipse Awards were announced for material published in 1998. Baltimore Sun racing writer Tom Keyser earned his second award in three years for outstanding newspaper writing, while Dick Jerardi, of the Philadelphia Daily News, received an honorable mention. 
  Washington, D.C., freelance writer Laura Hillenbrand won for outstanding magazine writing for an article on Seabiscuit that appeared in American Heritage. Vinnie Perrone earned an honorable mention for “Expanded gaming: ambush or opportunity?” that ran in Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred.