Dr. A. Edward Verdi Jr., a Brooklyn-born dentist who got into Thoroughbreds due to his children’s interest in horses, was rewarded when 3-year-old filly Kits Eve won Pimlico’s Politely Stakes.

The first stakes winner foaled at the Verdi family’s 150-acre Edmarve Farm in Maryland’s Frederick County, the filly was bred in the name of Edmarve and Mrs. Albert Lowenthal, whose husband bought a half-interest in the mare Kit’s Play (by Ridan) when Verdi and his wife Marge picked her out of the 1970 Keeneland fall sale with Kits Eve in utero for $6,500. 

Kits Eve raced for Marylander Alfred Smith, who bought her as a yearling for $7,000 at the Eastern Fall sale. Said Verdi: “Kits Eve is the first stakes winner we’ve ever bred, and the first stakes winner on the flat ever owned by Mr. Smith. Of course Mr. Smith won lots of stakes with jumpers – his horse Tuscalee earned over $122,000. I only hope Kits Eve does as well.” 

Kits Eve died of forage poisoning later in the year without winning another stakes. But Verdi had found a gem of a producer in Kit’s Play. On the farm the same year was the mare’s yearling daughter by Spring Double, eventual graded stakes winner and Grade 1-placed Kit’s Double. Sold as a 2-year-old for $15,500 at the Timonium May sale, she earned nearly $300,000, sold as a broodmare for $675,000 and produced graded winner Double Wedge. Bred back to Spring Double in 1974, Kit’s Play produced multiple stakes winner and longtime Maryland sire Double Zeus. He was her final foal, as Edmarve lost the 11-year-old mare the following season due to foaling complications.

• Four American-bred jumpers – Maryland-breds Inkslinger and Amarind and Virginia-breds Soothsayer and Tingle Creek – took on the Cheltenham three-day National Hunt meeting in England America had to wait until the last race on the last day for a win, when Soothsayer, a son of *Mystic II, won the Cathcart Challenge Cup. In the first day’s feature, the Two Mile Championship Steeplechase, “looked cut and dried” for Tingle Creek, a multiple stakes winner in the states who, since arriving in England, had won eight of 12, but disliked the soft ground and finished second. Inkslinger and Amarind fell during their runs in the Gold Cup and Two Mile Championship, respectively. 
  
  
• Extreme Tela became the first stakes winner for her sire Exceedingly, dam Telafilly, and breeders Irvin Fisher and Bonita Farm when she won Garden State Park’s Dewdrop Handicap. The 3-year-old filly was from the first crop of Exceedingly, who stood at Bonita, and the first foal produced by her dam.
  Maryland-bred champion Exceedingly was the first horse bred by Helen Jennings, and foaled at her Alder Branch Farm near Centreville, Md. Following her death the previous December, her husband, Capt. Lewis “Boots” Jennings, said he’d continue the operation.