Two young men who attended college after graduating from McDonough School saddled winners on the same day at Timonium. Ross Peddicord and Tim Boyce, both in their 20s, intended to make a career with horses.
Peddicord had a job as an advertising manager of the Horsemen’s Journal and left to go to the track, first as a groom and then a trainer. Four years earlier, the then-21-year-old college student won the Thoroughbred Racing Association’s award for the best magazine article of the year. His reason to quit writing: “I don’t really like to write. I find writing to be a hard and burdensome job. I’d much rather be doing something physical like I am right now.”
Boyce, the 21-year-old son of trainer L. Gittings Boyce, had been attending Johns Hopkins University, majoring in science, when he decided to leave. “Horses and race tracks have always been a big thing with me,” he said. “I figure my life has been like a figure eight. I’ve wandered around on the circles of the eight, but right there in the middle are horses, and it’s always to them and the middle of the eight that I keep returning.”
Both have had long careers in the industry, not as trainers. For many years Boyce was a sales director for Fasig-Tipton and the Texas Thoroughbred Association. Peddicord went back to writing, covering racing for the Baltimore Sun and as a freelancer. Since 2010, he’s been the executive director of the Maryland Horse Industry Board.
Laurel general manager Frank J. Brady surveyed progress on the construction of a $600,000 barn complex on the Maryland track’s backstretch. Five 30-stall concrete-block barns, with underground wiring and a new drainage system, replaced the six oldest barns, which had been torn down. Fifty stalls were lost in the process, bringing the total capacity down to 1,060.
Lord Gaylord, a 4-year-old winning son of Sir Gaylord owned by J. Louis Reynolds, was slated to stand his first season at Mr. and Mrs. J.W.Y. Martin Jr.’s Worthington Farm on a private contract basis.
Lord Gaylord soared to national prominence when his son Lord Avie (from his third crop) earned an Eclipse Award as champion 2-year-old colt of 1980. He stood his entire career at Worthington Farm, where he died a pensioner at age 28 in 1998.
n The executive committee of the Maryland State Fair and Agricultural Society cleared the way for night racing at Timonium. John D. Worthington III, president of the group which controlled the fair and racing at Timonium, disclosed that the committee had accelerated its original plans from 1976 to 1975.
However, editor Snowden Carter noted that position was likely to change. “The board made its statement on night racing early in the [1974] meeting when it was expected that a mutuel handle daily average $550,000 would be attained. But in actual fact the meeting closed with an average of approximately $520,000. Gaining less money to work with than it had anticipated, the board will now vote against the installation of lights.”
