25 years ago

• Eddie and Linda Gaudet sent out their “Cinderella horse,” homebred Trap Line, to win the $100,000 Maryland Juvenile Championship and garner a state-bred championship. Trap Line was the first homebred to carry the colors of Schelford North Farm, the couple’s breeding and training operation owned in partnership with builder and developer Charles Hardesty. The gelding was by the unheralded stallion Trip Trap out of one of Eddie Gaudet’s retired claiming mares, Camaria (by Somerset).

Schelford North Farm, in Upper Marlboro, about a 15 minute drive from the couple’s base at Bowie Training Center, had been in operation less than two years. The 96-acre property was an extremely busy place, with more than 200 yearlings and newly turned 2-year-olds, a dozen mares and one stallion.

The farm’s population was due to grow in June, with Linda expecting the couple’s first child. “Eddie, facing the prospect of becoming a father for the first time at age 57, is game for the opportunity: ‘I love children. I think I’ll like it,’? ” reported the Maryland Horse.

• Described by his wife Alice Ford as “the luckiest man in horse racing today,” Eugene Ford, with racing partner Zelma Morrison, reinvested the $25,000 received after the claim of the first horse he owned, buying a filly for $24,000 at the Eastern Fall Yearling sale. The recently turned 3-year-old, Sham Say, was undefeated after seven starts, six in stakes, for earnings of $225,592.

“I can’t imagine what it will be like to go back to ordinary horses, someday,” admitted Ford, who also owned stakes-winning 3-year-old filly Empress Tigere. Ford purchased Sham Say on the advice of his trainer, Bernie Bond, and asked Morrison if she wanted in.

The partners were turning down offers for their Maryland-bred daughter of Oh Say, which prompted Mrs. Ford to note, “We’re fortunate enough, at this stage of life, not to have to think in terms of money, and we don’t.” The offer Ford and Morrison couldn’t refuse finally came, just as the magazine went to press.
C.N. Ray’s Evergreen Farm paid $2 million to purchase Sham Say.