The Thoroughbred Racing Associations’ selection committee named Maryland-bred Twixt the nation’s leading older filly or mare for the first half of the 1974 racing season. The poll was conducted by a committee of racing secretaries, Daily Racing Form experts and members of the National Turf Writers.
Bred by Mr. and Mrs. John B. Merryman and owned in partnership by the Merrymans and Mrs. John M. Franklin, the 5-year-old mare won four of seven starts during the first six months of the year, including Hollywood Park’s Milady Handicap. By Maryland’s leading sire Restless Native, Twixt was trained by the Merrymans’ daughter Katy Voss, who gave as much credit to Nat Johnson, the Merrymans’ assistant trainer who had been working with the family for more than a dozen years.
Halo was purchased by E.P. Taylor to stand at Windfields Farm in Chesapeake City, Md. The superbly-bred stakes-winning son of Hail to Reason out of Cosmah had been sold the previous year by Mrs. Charles Engelhard’s Cragwood Estates to London film producer Irving Allen for $600,000 but Allen refused to accept the horse when he discovered that he was a cribber. Sent back to the track, Halo added two stakes wins in 1974, highlighted by the Grade 1 United Nations Handicap.
Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting was launching a 30-minute fan-oriented weekly television program in the Baltimore and Salisbury areas titled The Starting Gate, with the focus “to provide the average Thoroughbred racing fan with a greater understanding of the sport,” said producer Richard Hoffman. Included would be a 10-minute “Feature of the Week” on a variety of topics, including The Life of a Groom, How an Announcer Calls a Race, and The Workings of a Horse Auction.
C. Oliver Goldsmith sold four-time stakes-winning homebred Leematt to R.J. Sherman of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. The 6-year-old captured the Carter and Toboggan handicaps in New York two years earlier. “We have a whole factory of Leematt’s bloodlines,” Goldsmith explained, including the father, mother (with a full-brother at her side), a sister and three half-sisters at Longwood Farm in Glenwood, Md. The gray sprinter was by Turn to Reason out of Sun Rondeau, by Bull Brier, and named for the Goldsmiths’ longtime employee LeRoy Matthews.
Goldsmith also disclosed that he had five or six mares in foal to Leematt as a result of breeding the horse during the spring in between his racetrack appearances.
Leematt later that year broke a track record at Keystone, officially entered stud the next year and stood in Pennsylvania until his death in the early 1990s. He was one of Pennsylvania’s leading sires, and for years had a stakes named in his honor.
Services to Maryland sires Impressive and Bold Monarch and Virginia stallion Limit to Reason would be part of the prize for the Sadie Hawkins Stakes, one of three new added-money events during Shenandoah racetrack’s summer meet.
Owners of the first three finishers in the Sadie Hawkins will pick one of the three, with the winner getting first choice. The Sadie Hawkins was named for Al Capp’s famous man-chasing cartoon character and modeled after the Matchmaker, a $100,000 event run annually at Atlantic City.
